Gangster Nation Page 3

  They were sitting in David’s office at Temple Beth Israel. He’d rearranged it since taking over from Rabbi Cy Kales, moving out the two sofas that faced each other in favor of four uncomfortable chairs surrounding a narrow coffee table. He didn’t want people staying longer than they had to.

  “Talmud says it is acceptable,” David told him, “if the baby isn’t viable, or if it’s making your daughter want to harm herself.” This was, admittedly, a pretty modern interpretation. “In either case, it’s not a choice you get to make for her.”

  “What if she’s not in her right mind?”

  “Is that the situation?”

  “Seems like it,” Jordan said. “When I was her age, you know what I was doing?” he asked. “Nothing. I was doing nothing. That’s how it should be. Make no important life decisions until you’re at least twenty-five. That’s what my father told me. Makes sense to me now. At the time, it was just a free pass to screw up without any real ramifications. It was liberating.” Jordan squeezed his thumb and index finger over his slim mustache, thinking. Then: “What about killing the kid who knocked her up? What’s the ruling on that?”

  “Is he threatening your life?”

  “In a way.”

  Jordan Rosen was in his late fifties and had amassed a decent fortune developing gas station mini-marts around the city, all of them called Manic Al’s. His latest venture was a carwash over on Fort Apache and Sahara that catered to the Summerlin country club set. Leather sofas. Recessed lighting. A wine bar. A cigar lounge. Seven pretty girls in knock-off Chanel suits running the front of the house like they were FBI, everything handled via earpieces, cuff mics, and disinterested stares.

  Friday afternoons, Rosen brought out minor Las Vegas celebrities for meet and greets, so guys coming to pick up their Bentleys might run into Danny Gans or Charo or even Ralph Lamb, the cowboy sheriff who supposedly roughed up Johnny Roselli back in the day. It was one of those famous stories David heard growing up in Chicago, but which, when he thought about it now, seemed like it was probably made up. Good for tourism, shitty for reality. Because it turned out, what the fuck did it matter? Mob was still in Las Vegas and Ralph Lamb was still swinging his dick, fifty years later, eating free lunches for maybe smacking a guy who spent his days producing movies and counting cards. Real tough guys, both of them.

  Jordan calling the car wash Manic Al’s wouldn’t fly in Summerlin, so he opted for the Millionaire Detail Club, started running commercials on KNPR, pulling in those sensitive types who listened to classical music and shopped organic but still wanted to feel like a boss, then priced everything at a markup: The most basic wash was $35.99. The Platinum Care Package ran five bills and included a blacked-out, supposedly bulletproof Suburban that would shuttle you back and forth to your home or office while your ride was getting cleaned. The Diamond Experience? Rosen didn’t bother to advertise a price on that, nor explain what it entailed. You felt the need to ask, it wasn’t for you.

  David didn’t get it. It was all just water and soap. And yet there was always a line of cars waiting to get washed.

  “What does your wife think?” David asked.

  “Sarah’s losing her mind with glee. She’s been preparing to be called Nana her entire life. Throw in planning a wedding and she might combust.” Jordan stopped rubbing his mustache, but left his thumb in his rather pronounced Cupid’s bow, then pointed at David. “Can I ask you a personal question, Rabbi Cohen?”

  “If you feel you have to.”

  “Growing up, what did your parents want you to be?”

  “My own man,” David said. That was what his mother wanted, at any rate, back when David was still her son Sal, back before he started doing hits in Chicago for the Family, back before he became the Rain Man, when she’d still acknowledge him. What his dad wanted? Sal didn’t know. He’d been dead since Sal was ten, so what he remembered about him now, almost thirty years later, were small things: How he’d pay Sal a quarter for a hug. How he read the comics in the Sun-Times first thing every morning. How he always had scabs on his knuckles.

  Sometimes, Sal thought about the sound his father’s body made hitting the ground in front of the IBM Building, about how when someone gets thrown out of a fifty-two-story building, they’ve got a long time to make noise, and his father did. Screamed for a good five seconds. And then it was a liquid crunch, a spray of blood, and nothing. Sal Cupertine never did anyone like that. It wasn’t fucking human.

  Rabbi David Cohen tried not to think about those things too often. He was about keeping his rage in check these days. Every morning, he wrapped tefillin on his strong arm, to remind himself of this. As a Reform Jew, it wasn’t needed, but David had adopted it anyway, thought the imagery was good, and it served a higher purpose. David couldn’t always be dialed to ten, or else he’d have nowhere to go when he really needed to be angry. Six or seven, that was his sweet spot.

  “I imagined Naomi would be a vet. She always had hamsters and silkworms and whatnot,” Jordan said. “Made me sponsor a puma adoption at that gypsy zoo over on Rancho. Have you been there?”

  “I don’t believe in zoos,” David said.

  “She didn’t either. That’s why I had to sponsor the puma. She wanted to bust it out. Place is a dump. Anyway. I don’t know. I guess that’s just me imagining a life for her.” He stood up, cracked his neck—an annoying habit that David had noticed over the course of the last few years—then walked over to one of the three bookshelves in the office. They were six feet tall and crammed full of books on Jewish philosophy, Jewish thought, even a bit of poetry and self-help, titles like Understanding the Mishna, Understanding You. “You read all of these?”

  “Most of them,” David said.

  He pulled out a book of poetry, flipped it open. David didn’t like people touching his books, much less reading what he wrote in the margins. “Truth is,” he said, “I don’t really know Naomi anymore.” He closed the book, slipped it back into its slot, upside down, pulled out another. “Maybe a kid will put us into each other’s orbit again, you know? I guess that would be a side benefit.”

  “Do you know the boy?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s the Solomon kid. The oldest.”

  “Robert and Janice’s son?”

  “No, the other Solomons. The yenta and the ear, nose, and throat guy.”

  “Oh. Scott and Claudia?”

  “Good family, I guess. It could be worse. Few years ago, Naomi was dating a Vietnamese kid. Father dealt cards at the Orleans. One of those pinkie-ring guys who smoked funny? You know, like he held his cigarette with the wrong fingers? Anyway. Kid’s name was Binh but he called himself DJ Bomb Squad. Had it painted on his car, left stickers on light poles, even had T-shirts. I’m of the opinion it put Naomi’s grandfather into the grave prematurely.” He snapped closed the book in his hand and put it away, right side up, then flipped over the poetry book, too. “It was fine with me,” he added eventually. “I sort of liked DJ Bomb Squad. He was enterprising. I knew what I was getting with that kid.”

  “What happened?”

  “Who knows. One day, he’s everything, next day, Sarah tells me never to mention DJ Bomb Squad again. I almost felt sorry for him. He probably never saw it coming.” He paused for a second, stared directly at Rabbi Cohen, which made him slightly uncomfortable. It wasn’t that he didn’t like eye contact—though that was true—it was more that he didn’t like people studying his face too closely, especially now when it felt like his face was collapsing; his jaw a fucking mess, the skin around his left eye starting to droop, and a fair amount of nasal problems were plaguing him of late, too, leaving him stuffed up half the time. There wasn’t a decent doctor he could see. Hard to get a new specialist and explain why you have titanium rods to elongate your jaw, plus a new chin and nose, and no medical records.

  There was only so much his beard and a pair of glasses could hide, particula
rly since half the congregation were doctors of some kind. Maybe he could fake Bell’s palsy at a temple in Oklahoma, but it wasn’t going to go unnoticed in Summerlin.

  “I’m not trying to be rude,” Jordan said, “but you ever think about getting Botox?” He made a circle in the air with his index finger, pointing, generally, to David’s whole head. “Just a cosmetic type thing?”

  “No,” David said. If another question about his appearance were proposed, there was a chance the next time anyone saw Jordan Rosen, it would be his photo on the news when he was reported missing.

  “I ask,” he said, still pointing, “because my wife, she had that problem with her eyelid. Started to hang over her left eye?” David remembered. She looked like a retired boxer. “She got it lasered and then botox froze the nerve, I guess. Something like that might help your eye. You know, if you care about such things.”

  “Talmud says all paths are crooked.”

  Jordan put up his hands. “Fair enough,” he said. “But don’t you ever think about getting married, Rabbi Cohen?”

  That was now three personal questions Jordan Rosen had asked him. It was three more than David felt comfortable answering, though the marriage one was getting to be so common as to be impersonal.

  “I may well have to at some point,” David said. It was, in fact, among his worst fears. Because Sal Cupertine was married. His wife, Jennifer, and son, William, were still in Chicago, Sal keeping watch on Jennifer’s movements in whatever way he could, even looking at her credit report online a few months back. She was racking up debt on her cards. Five grand on the Chase card. Another seven on the Citibank. A month behind on her Amex. Even the fucking Discover card was maxed out. Three and a half years since he’d seen his wife and kid and the closest he could come to them was this: peeping on their lives like some kind of pervert. He’d been able to get her money once, but since then it had become too difficult. The problem with embarrassing the FBI, turning on the Family, and pissing off the Gangster 2-6 was that it didn’t exactly make life easier.

  “It changes your perspective,” Jordan said. “Sometimes, I hardly recognize myself, truth be told. Maybe it’s what Naomi needs.”

  This was how it often went with the Jews: They’d come in with a problem and ask questions they’d answer themselves, as if all they needed was for David to witness the process in order to make it divine. Jordan took a deep breath, then peered around the office, as if he were seeing it for the first time even though he had spent a fair amount of time in it over the years, first meeting with Rabbi Kales and now with David. “You should get some pictures in here,” Jordan said after a while. “Something personal.”

  “You want to know a man, read his books.”

  “That in the Talmud?”

  “No,” David said. “I made that one up myself.” Though, in fact, he hadn’t. He read it somewhere. Emerson or Whitman or maybe it was George Washington? Used to be people thought Sal Cupertine had a photographic memory, hence all that Rain Man shit, but the truth was more complex than that, David understood now. It wasn’t that he remembered every single detail of every single experience with 100 percent accuracy. He retained a lot, but that didn’t mean everything got filed with the correct headings. The last couple years—at least since all the plastic surgery—he’d felt like things weren’t quite as accurate as they’d once been. Maybe getting discount anesthesia wasn’t great on the cerebral cortex.

  “Rabbi Kales always had a lot of tchotchkes, is all.” He stepped over to the shelf where David kept his doctored diploma from Hebrew Union in a frame on a stand.

  “He still has them,” David said. Rabbi Kales lived in an apartment in an “Active Senior Living” complex off Charleston now, on the second floor with a view of the courtyard between the two sides of the facility—the “active living” portion, which was three stories and held about seventy-five people who needed only to have someone cook their meals or remind them to take their pills—and the “assisted living” side, which held another hundred people on a rotating basis, seeing as it was reserved for those sliding into death, mostly in full dementia or straight-up hospice care. David thinking that if he needed to be assisted in order to live, he’d fix that quick.

  “Sarah bumped into him at Smith’s a while back.” Jordan pulled out another book, read the back for a few seconds. “Said he was confused as hell.”

  “Some days he’s good,” David said, “some days, not.” That was the problem with Rabbi Kales—he wasn’t getting actual dementia fast enough. He could pretend pretty well when he needed to, but then pride would take over. David reminded him periodically that if he wanted to stay aboveground, he needed to spend a bit more time out in the world acting inconsistent, particularly once his son-in-law, Bennie, was free. Rabbi Kales couldn’t drive anymore—that was part of the plan, couldn’t very well have him diagnosed as having early onset dementia and also let him keep his license—so his daughter, Rachel, either drove him places or paid for a Town Car.

  “He still makes it to services fairly regularly.” David hadn’t seen Jordan at services since his youngest, Tricia, went off to college at Berkeley last fall. She used to come, help out with the little ones, tutor, that sort of thing. She also worked down at the Bagel Café, too, telling David she liked making her own money. David missed seeing her around. He also missed the fact that she was a shitty waitress and occasionally got his order wrong, which meant he was periodically able to wolf down a piece of bacon or sausage on the down low.

  “Well, tell him I said hello,” Jordan said. He turned the book in his hand back over, looked at the cover, then held it up. “You mind if I borrow this one?”

  It was a collection of notable transcripts from the Nuremberg trials. Not exactly light reading.

  “Be my guest,” David said.

  Jordan tucked the book under one arm, then took his wallet out and thumbed through his cash, pulled out two hundreds and two fifties and set them on the coffee table. “Appreciate the counsel, Rabbi. Come by the car wash this week,” he said. “Donny Osmond is signing autographs.”

  Now Naomi and Michael were exchanging a series of vows that David was pretty sure were cribbed from a pop song. The three of them stood under a chuppah in the Rosens’ backyard . . . if you could call anything with an acre of grass with an outdoor wine bar surrounding a private lake a yard. The Rosens lived in the Vineyards at Summerlin, a few doors down from Bennie Savone and his family, in an exclusive development that was supposed to evoke the Italian countryside except with German cars and Mexican domestic staff. David had never been to Italy, never even made it to the Venetian on the Strip to ride in a gondola, on account of the facial recognition cameras all the casinos had—they weren’t looking for average bad guys, by and large, but Bennie told him it was a no-go zone—but he couldn’t help wondering if there were housing developments being built on the Amalfi Coast modeled after Las Vegas, Italians living in peach-colored tract homes with brown lawns.

  David viewed weddings as sacred affairs and took his role seriously—of all the vows he’d taken in his own life, it was the only one that had actually stuck—and if Naomi and Michael wanted to seal their love by quoting Kid Rock in front of a few hundred of their closest friends and family members, who was he to judge? Those were just words. A vow was something you believed in, and that didn’t require spoken words. Besides, it was David’s job to give them the true blessing, the sense that what they were doing had some continuity with history, so even though they weren’t particularly faithful Jews, and they exchanged bullshit vows, at least David was doing his part.

  Which was the problem.

  There was going to come a time, pretty soon if David had his way, when Rabbi David Cohen would be replaced again by Sal Cupertine, and by no fault of their own, Naomi and Michael’s marriage would be a sham: David’s blessings upon them little more than a minor fraud perpetuated by a professional Mob killer, this oth
erwise mild summer day a footnote in a series of criminal acts, and no matter how much David wanted Naomi and Michael to have a good life, free of the shit and violence and deception he’d been party to since he was ten years old . . . man, one day? There they would be, right in it, forever.

  David could see the Dateline episode already: Keith Morrison sitting across from Naomi and Michael, asking them if they’d ever noticed anything . . . odd . . . about Rabbi David Cohen, a man they’d trusted to bless their union, bless their unborn child. Hadn’t he seemed . . . different? Though, of course, it wasn’t as if Naomi’s father would want anyone poking too far into his life, what with his business relationship with Bennie. A couple years earlier, Jordan had become infatuated with a dancer at Bennie’s club, the Wild Horse, and ended up owing a hundred thousand dollars, plus an increasing vig, for lap dances and VIP-room hand jobs, which wasn’t exactly a check he could write without his wife noticing. So now Bennie was a silent partner in some of Jordan’s real estate holdings out on what used to be the butthole end of North Las Vegas, down on Craig Road, but which was suddenly a hot property. Trilogy and a dozen other developers were talking about building their own master-planned communities out there, 2002 promising to be the year that everyone moved into supermax prison complexes in the desert, replete with open-concept floor plans, travertine floors, and armed rent-a-cops patrolling 24/7.

  So . . . maybe it wouldn’t be Naomi and Michael on camera.

  Maybe it would be Rochelle and Lee.

  Andrea and Brent.