Gangsterland: A Novel

by Tod Goldberg

  Bennie pointed at his watch. “I’ve got an hour,” he said, and started walking toward the main temple. “Either keep up and learn something, or fly back to Chicago where everything is candy canes and pillow fights.”

  Religious places freaked Rabbi David Cohen out. He knew intellectually that a church or a synagogue was just a place, just dirt and wood and cement and glass. He knew that the priests or rabbis or whatever were just men (and, occasionally, women) that had once been kids, had once watched Daffy Duck cartoons and The Brady Bunch and saw Spot, Dick, and Jane run and then, at some later point, decided they wanted to devote themselves to a book. Still, there was something about religious places that made David aware of how different his own life was, how if any of the people in the building (save, in this case, for Bennie and Rabbi Kales) knew what he was, they’d throw holy water on him and try to cast his demons out. He was a bad guy, he knew that. Was he evil? No, David didn’t believe he was. Fucked up? For sure. He watched enough of those shows on the Discovery Channel to understand that maybe his brain didn’t work like other people’s brains, though David also had to consider that people who celebrated the purported holy day of Easter by eating marshmallow baby birds were just as twisted.

  So as he followed Bennie and Rabbi Kales through the temple and they told him bits of information that was probably very important, he had to do his very best to concentrate, what with all the stained-glass windows, Hebrew letters on walls, memorial candles for dead Jews, notices about Shabbat and daily services and holiday services and the upcoming Hanukkah celebration. Weird thing was, it was the first time in his life that he’d been in a place like this and actually knew what everything meant. Not that he could read Hebrew, though he had a sinking feeling that soon that would not be the case. Some things had become so familiar to him from his reading that he kept getting a strange sense of déjà vu.

  “There are one hundred thousand Jews in Las Vegas,” Rabbi Kales said as they turned down a long hallway toward the temple’s administrative offices. “And six hundred Jews move here each month, which, as you can imagine, has created a need for more and better facilities. We built the cemetery and mortuary here in 1990, and we’ll have the Barer Academy built by next fall, ready for all grades. The Learning Center should open at the same time. The next phase will be the Performing Arts Annex, though that may be a few years down the line, depending upon funding.”

  “How many of them die every year?” David asked. The preschool kids grossed the joint a cool two million dollars, though someone probably had to teach them something, and feed them, and that preschool looked like it cost more than a few bucks, too. But funerals? That was another kind of beast. When Carlo Lupino died a few years back—and granted he was old-school Chicago Family, so there was a whole production—David remembered hearing it ran over seventy-five thousand dollars once you factored in food, flowers, embalming, the casket, the service, all that. Even a simple service was going to run ten, fifteen, maybe twenty-five Gs. There was cash in the body business, David knew that firsthand; burying them, however, that’s where the real money was.

  “What did you say?” Bennie rubbed that spot on his neck again, that spot that looked like someone had garroted him. Rabbi Kales looked pale.

  “He asked how many,” Rabbi Kales said. He actually sounded rattled for the first time.

  “Yeah,” David said, “that’s what I asked.”

  “Depends,” Bennie said. He wasn’t rattled in the least. He seemed fairly giddy. “Good year? Usually between 750 and 900. Of course, we don’t bury all of them. Some get shipped back to Boca Raton or Seattle or Palm Springs. Some get buried across town at the old Jewish cemetery, though I don’t see that happening much in the future. Anyway, we’ve had a lot more lately.”

  “Lately?” David said.

  “Next year is already looking good,” Bennie said.

  Rabbi Kales pushed on past Bennie and made a show of fumbling in his pockets for something. David took this to mean he didn’t want to hear whatever was coming next.

  “How is this week looking?” David asked.

  Bennie shrugged. “Who is to say?”

  “It’s okay,” David said, getting it now, or thinking, maybe, getting part of it. “I’m a rabbi. We have the privilege of confidentiality.”

  “Thanksgiving is usually a slow week,” Bennie said. “But the first of the month tends to be a busy time.”

  “Here?”

  “Everywhere,” Bennie said. “We’ve got a few wealthy clients who’ve found that they prefer our cemetery services to those in their own hometowns.”

  “These clients,” David said. “They live in Chicago?”

  “Some of them. Some of them live in New York. Some of them live in Los Angeles. We’ve got some new clients in Cleveland. Detroit just opened up a few opportunities.”

  “And they’re all . . . Jews?”

  “They are when they get in the ground,” Bennie said.

  “Who presides over these funerals?”

  “Why you do, Rabbi Cohen.”

  The Jews, they were pretty specific about their funerals. No embalming. No open caskets. No waiting around, either. The Jews wanted you in the ground within twenty-four hours, bad to wait more than three days. They also advocated simple pine boxes; they were big on their people returning to the earth and doing so as quickly as possible.

  Bennie Savone. The guy was a genius. What better place to bury war dead than a cemetery? Feds would need an act of God to get a court to agree to start disinterring bodies in a Jewish cemetery. Even if they did, what would they find and how would they find it? They could pile a couple bodies into one coffin, and who would ever know?

  “Who knows this?” David asked.

  “It’s a small circle,” Bennie said. “The three of us. My guy Ruben, who you’ll meet, who works on the bodies across the street.”

  “Slim Joe?”

  “He knows you,” Bennie said. “But not for much longer. I didn’t like that shit he said today.”

  “You got my place bugged?”

  “Number one, it’s not your place,” Bennie said. “Number two, I did it for your own safety. You want that dumb fuck turning state’s on you?”

  It made sense. All of it. Why Bennie was willing to buy him from the Family. His new face. The reading . . . all the reading . . . and now this more direct revelation.

  “What’s my take?” David asked.

  “You’ll be provided for,” Bennie said.

  “What’s my take?” David said again.

  “Depending upon how effective you are,” Bennie said, “twenty, twenty-five percent.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of a lot,” Bennie said. “Plus, I see you doing some additional work around town, starting with your friend Slim Joe. You comfortable doing that?”

  “Who gets the other seventy-five?” David said, not bothering to answer Bennie’s question.

  “This place look cheap to you?”

  How much would it take for him to get back to Chicago? How much would it take for David to get back to Jennifer and William? To buy the kind of freedom he wanted, he’d need more than just a few hundred thousand dollars. How much would he need to get Sal Cupertine back? He’d need millions. “I want an accounting,” David said.

  “Now you’re a businessman?” Bennie said.

  “I guess I am,” David said.

  “Fine,” Bennie said. He looked at his watch. “Any more demands? I’ve gotta pick up my wife and take her to the doctor.”

  “No,” David said, and then he added, “not at this time.”

  “Great,” Bennie said. He took an exaggerated look over both of his shoulders and then reached into his sport coat and pulled out a nine and handed it to David. “Don’t make a mess unless you want to clean it up.”

  “When do you want it done?”

  “Yesterday,” Bennie said, “but give the kid his Thanksgiving. Give his mother her last good memory, then we’ll maybe do her, to
o. Last thing I need is for her to start yapping.”

  “Root pulls aren’t my thing,” David said.

  “She’s my cousin,” Bennie said. “So don’t think it hurts you more than it hurts me, okay? Anyway, if you’re lucky, she’ll be back on a plane by Sunday and you won’t need to deal with it. You make the call. You think she knows about you, we’ll make it look like an accident. You any good with poisons?”

  “No,” David said. The idea of killing Slim Joe’s mother didn’t appeal to him in the least, but he understood the message that was being relayed: No one was off-limits when it came to this proposition.

  “I’ll figure something out,” Bennie said.

  Rabbi Kales found what he was looking for then—his key chain—and unlocked a wooden door just a few feet from the main office entrance, which was glass embossed with a huge Star of David. David could see a middle-aged woman sitting behind a reception desk. She had a phone to her ear and was absently flipping the pages of a magazine. She looked up when Rabbi Kales opened the office door wide and sunlight flooded into the hallway, along with a plume of dust. She gave David a vague half smile, which made sense when Rabbi Kales said, “This was Rabbi Gottlieb’s office. It will be your office now. You’ll bring your books in here.” He stood in the doorway while he said this, only the side of his face visible to David. “We’ll meet each morning at seven for your lessons. I can’t have you working with the children until you are up to speed, you understand.” He turned then and regarded David. “You do understand, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” David said. For the first time in seven months, he understood everything.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Paid administrative leave. Special Agent Jeff Hopper thought about those three words as he walked across the parking lot outside of the Chicago field office. Taken separate from each other, they didn’t mean much. Put them together, at least in FBI parlance, and they meant that you’d flamed out in spectacular fashion, not worthy of actual firing, as the FBI didn’t like to fire full agents unless they did something that might get them arrested. It was easier to put them on paid administrative leave and reassign them into oblivion—the Anchorage, Alaska, field office, or, worse, San Juan, Puerto Rico—after two or three years’ worth of investigation into their actions (or, occasionally, inactions). The idea was that the time on paid administrative leave and the weight of the investigation would cause the agent to quit and find other work. The FBI even offered kind letters of recommendation when agents on paid administrative leave were interviewing for private sector jobs. Hopper knew this all too well: As senior special agent, he’d once been the guy writing the letters.

  He wasn’t surprised by the timing—the day after Thanksgiving—since that’s when he liked to discipline agents, too. Do it before Thanksgiving, you’re asking for the agent to do something crazy. Do it too close to Christmas, same deal. But the day after Thanksgiving is a dead period, everyone so stuffed with cholesterol and saturated fat and tryptophan that it’s impossible to get too worked up about anything. What surprised Special Agent Jeff Hopper—now on paid administrative leave—was how quickly the FBI had acted. It usually took a good three or four weeks for agents to go over wiretaps on low-impact surveillance subjects, like Jennifer Cupertine, though Jeff realized now that they had probably hot-buttoned any mention of Sal Cupertine.

  Jeff thought Senior Special Agent Biglione, a man he’d known for the better part of five years, a man he’d gone fishing with the previous winter, a man who once confided in Jeff that what he really wanted to do with his life was become a pastry chef, took far too much joy playing the tape of Hopper telling Jennifer Cupertine that her husband was alive. “Is that your voice?” Biglione asked him when the tape concluded.

  “You know it is,” Jeff said.

  “This is unacceptable behavior,” Biglione said. “You’re aware of that, I would imagine?”

  “Just give me the form,” Jeff said.

  It took less than fifteen minutes, including the time it took the woman from Human Resources to give her speech about how he’d retain his full benefits but that he’d need to surrender his gun, his company laptop, his company cell phone, and his keys.

  Jeff got into his Ford Explorer and tried to stifle a laugh. He was certain that someone, somewhere, was watching him (particularly since the parking lot was circled with cameras), and it just wouldn’t look right for him to be caught on film giggling after being put on paid administrative leave. All things being equal, this was the best possible turn of events for Jeff—he’d spent most of Thanksgiving copying the rest of the relevant materials from the files—and he could now look for Sal Cupertine without the burden of being an FBI agent. He’d find Sal Cupertine—and then what?

  He didn’t even want revenge. He had no intention of killing Cupertine if he found him, though he had the sense that Cupertine wasn’t the kind of guy who would throw up his hands and say, “You got me!” if and when the time came. He simply wanted justice and to clear his name, not that he thought he could clear his name with the FBI—that ship had sailed, hit an iceberg, and sunk to the bottom of the ocean—but with Cupertine himself. The idea that Cupertine thought Jeff was a fool, was so stupid as to leave his own name on the bill, and that he surely thought he’d killed Jeff—either by shooting him in the face or choking the life out of him, face-to-face, Cupertine’s own saliva on the man’s forehead—enraged Jeff, kept him awake for three months, and wasn’t letting him rest even now.

  Not that the FBI gave a shit. They had their body. They had their continuing investigation into the Family. No one other than Jeff was losing sleep.

  Jeff pulled out onto Roosevelt and glanced over to the berm where he used to spend his lunches. There was so much to do, so many things to get started on, but the first thing was that he needed to get home and sweep out all the bugs. Probably sweep the car, too. Might as well yank the phone from the wall and do everything on the cell . . . though, he’d need to get one of those, too. He had a gun, that wasn’t a problem. He had some money saved up, about twenty grand.

  It wasn’t until Jeff Hopper turned down Morgan Street and saw the university dusted in the first significant snow of the season, saw the few students who were walking into the library on a holiday weekend, that he realized Matthew Drew had probably been fired.

  Matthew Drew lived on the seventh floor of an apartment building in the Medical District, just a few miles from the FBI offices and down the street from the university, but it took Jeff an hour to figure that out. The FBI was good about hiding the addresses of their agents, so Jeff had to go about things the old-fashioned way: He had to try to remember the name of Matthew’s wife. He thought it was . . . Sarah? Gina? Something like that. He spent thirty minutes outside on a campus pay phone, freezing his ass off, calling 411 and asking for different women’s names with the last name Drew. He’d then ask for the addresses, hoping to find one that was within a few miles of the offices, since he recalled that Matthew was able to get back and forth to the office within thirty minutes. He had two good leads—Trina Drew, that sounded right, and Nancy Drew, which couldn’t be possible, but the operator said someone with that name did in fact live in greater Chicago, and as an FBI agent he almost had to check that one out—before he decided to ask for information on Nina Drew and came up with an address just blocks away. That had to be it, he decided, and sure enough when he got to the apartment building and scrolled through the names on the security keypad he found it to be the home of both Matthew and Nina Drew.

  He tapped in 713 and waited beside the intercom. There was a camera pointed directly at the door, which probably meant all the tenants had closed-circuit access. It was amazing to Jeff that things that were spy technology ten or fifteen years earlier were now regular amenities at middle-class apartment complexes. It also meant Matthew could decide whether or not he wanted to answer the door.

  “Yes?” It was a young woman’s voice on the intercom. Nina, presumably.

  “Yes, uh,”
Jeff said, “this is Special Agent Hopper. I’m here to see, um, Agent Drew?”

  “You should have been here yesterday then,” she said. That answered that. “Come on up,” she said, and then front door buzzed open.

  Jeff spent the elevator ride trying to think of what he’d say to Matthew’s wife, and yet, when he knocked on their door and a young woman opened it, he found he had absolutely nothing to say. Part of this was because he still hadn’t settled on the exact words of his apology, and part of this owed to the fact that the young woman who opened the door looked very young. Eighteen, no older. Even though it was freezing outside, she had on only a white V-neck T-shirt and pink shorts, no socks or shoes. “Are you Nina?” Jeff said.

  “Yeah,” she said, “come on in. Matt is in the shower.”

  Jeff stepped into the apartment and looked around. There was a leather sofa pushed against one wall, a coffee table in front of it stacked with textbooks—Introduction to Western Civilizations, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction, a thesaurus—and two dirty plates. On the other side of the room was a papasan chair covered in magazines, a treadmill with dry cleaning, still in the bag, hanging from the hand bars, and a muted television, which sat on the floor. There was a VCR perched precariously atop the television and a Nintendo system on the floor beside it, along with a stack of games. On the TV was an old Harrison Ford movie, though Jeff couldn’t tell which one. He was either chasing someone or being chased, but with the sound off, it was impossible to tell.

  There was a small galley kitchen and then two bedrooms separated by what Jeff presumed was the bathroom. He could hear a shower coming from the general vicinity. There was no evidence of any children.

  “So,” Jeff said, “you’re Matthew’s . . . wife?”

  “Yuck, no,” Nina said. She plopped herself down on the leather sofa and picked up the Western Civilizations book. “I’m his sister.”