Читать книгу Gangster Nation - Tod Goldberg - Страница 9

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Lovely ceremony, Rabbi,” Bennie Savone said. He was standing at the bottom of his lawn, eating from a bag of sunflower seeds and watching Sophie, the youngest of his two daughters, pedal boat around the lake. He wore a polo shirt and shorts, no shoes, a court-mandated ankle bracelet. Technically, David could visit Bennie whenever he wanted, since house arrest allowed for visits from clergy, but Bennie didn’t want to take that chance. He’d done six months inside on a Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice beef related to the vicious beating of a patron at the Wild Horse by two of his bouncers, still had another five months of home detention, and didn’t want to give the feds any reason to start looking at his associates. But he’d sent a message through Rabbi Kales.

“I expected to see your wife at the ceremony,” David said.

Bennie said, “Rachel and Sarah aren’t currently speaking.”

“Since when?”

“I don’t know,” Bennie said. “Rachel doesn’t tell me shit these days.” He offered Rabbi Cohen the bag of sunflower seeds, but David demurred. “My guess is that Sarah told Rachel something she didn’t want to hear, like maybe she didn’t want some criminal’s wife at her daughter’s blessed day.”

“There were plenty of criminals there,” David said.

“Maybe she just doesn’t like me,” Bennie said, which was probably true, too. She had good reason.

Bennie had been picked up in 1999 and charged with conspiracy, which meant the feds had free rein to find whatever shit they could uncover, though the only thing that stuck was the obstruction charge on the beating, which wasn’t even a federal charge. Bennie kept his books clean, paid his taxes, made sure his boys at the club paid theirs, made sure the girls did, too. Not that they were running an entirely legal enterprise, only that Bennie wasn’t dumb enough to make it obvious. Bennie’s lawyer, Vincent Zangari, got him a quickie plea deal just in case the dentist died before they could get to trial, which would have been bad, since then Bennie would be looking at an accessory charge on a murder, which was a mandatory twelve-year RICO sentence. As it was, the fucker was paralyzed and breathing through a hole in his neck, which made him a pretty convincing witness, even if he couldn’t talk.

Bennie called in some favors from the judicial bench, made sure he wasn’t going to be doing time in some ass factory, ended up getting six months in the minimum-security wing up at Warm Springs in Carson City—which was like doing time at a Radisson: shitty, but not torture—followed by six months home detention.

And that calmed shit down.

For a while, anyway.

Then the owner of Panthers Gentleman’s Club—a local named Vic Acosta, doing front work for some low-level Miami boys—skipped town after getting indicted on tax evasion a few months ago and the feds seized his club. The IRS was owed fifteen million, which they weren’t gonna get selling the building, so they figured they’d recoup it on the pole. They brought in the U.S. Marshals to run the joint, which wasn’t great for business, even after they dropped the price of lap dances from twenty dollars to ten. When that didn’t work, they got a food license, started to move steak and lobster in addition to tits and ass, tried to cater to gentlemen, as if gentlemen still came to Las Vegas. Still nothing. So they tried an Italian buffet, started giving the girls health benefits, since they were now federal employees, figuring they’d get some high-class girls that way, not realizing conventioneers didn’t want a high-class girl. Their last big move was a billboard on the Strip advertising Actually Legal Girls.

That got the national media interested, everyone from 20/20 to the Today show to the National Enquirer coming to town to do stories on how tax dollars were paying the hourly wages of lap dancers, which eventually dovetailed into tales of how antiquated the Italian American Mafia had become. While the Chinese Triads were training teenagers to hack half the world, the Mafia was still running protection schemes for a couple grand a month. While the Russian Mob was counterfeiting credit cards and stealing a million dollars a week from gas and oil companies overseas, the Mafia was running sex rings and blackmail scams. The Mexican Cartels owned an entire fucking country . . . and the Mafia was breaking city councilmen’s legs for unpaid debts on the Super Bowl. And who was scared of the Mafia anymore, anyway, when kids on the block had automatic weapons? People got shot in the head just for waking up and going to school.

Then they made it personal: Talking about how Al Capone had morphed into that Teflon pussy John Gotti. How Joseph “The Animal” Barboza, who ate the faces of his enemies, gave way to the likes of Sammy the Bull, who only stopped snitching long enough to write a tell-all book and flirt with Diane Sawyer on TV, all while still under witness protection. Or how Whitey Bulger had skipped Boston with the FBI’s assistance—not that he was real Mafia, just a dumb Irish thug, not that it mattered to Al Roker, that giggling fuck—long before Sal Cupertine, the Chicago Family enforcer known as the Rain Man—Matt Lauer acting up, too, the fuck: “I see that, I think of Dustin Hoffman, don’t you, Al? Not threatening in the least”—got away with killing three FBI agents and a CI, and then got shipped out of the city in a truck full of frozen meat. And now this fuckwit Vic Acosta, who lost his club to the government and didn’t even have the good sense to burn it down first.

David caught it all one morning while he sat at his kitchen table, eating his oatmeal, the one food that didn’t hurt his jaw. His old face flashed on the screen for ten seconds, the first time David had seen it in a couple years, along with some grainy video of him ordering a tuna sandwich inside a Subway in Chicago. David thinking how nice it would be to eat a sandwich without it sending white hot pain into his nasal cavity and out his ears, thinking, Shit, I hope Jennifer doesn’t see this. Thinking, Shit, I hope my mother doesn’t see this. Even if he hadn’t seen his mother in fifteen years.

First couple years after he dropped out of high school, he was deep in the life, and she was still in Chicago, going by her maiden name, Arlene Rigliano, because she’d given up the Family. He’d bump into her on the street, she’d act like he didn’t exist, and he was so hard, he didn’t want to believe he’d ever been someone’s kid, so what did it matter?

Except one time. He and Jennifer were in Target, buying mouthwash and cereal and greeting cards, that real-life stuff, and suddenly his mother came around the bend in the paper towel aisle. It was just the two of them there under those bright white lights—Jennifer still lingering in the vitamin row, adding up how much they’d spent; Target an indulgence for them in those days, they were so broke, they had to keep track of every dime, bouncing checks not the kind of thing Sal Cupertine wanted to get nicked for—Sal done up in a leather duster like he was in a western, Arlene white haired, wearing high-waisted pants, pushing a cart filled with laundry detergent, ice cream, cottage cheese, Diet Pepsi, the opposite of how Sal remembered her. When his dad was alive, his mother was always in designer jeans and ribbed turtlenecks, coral lipstick, perfect hair, a glass of wine or a Marlboro red in her hand. Then his dad got thrown off a building. Maybe it would have been different if they both hadn’t seen it happen from Billy Cupertine’s convertible, waiting for him to come back down from an errand he had to run, be gone two seconds, that’s what he said, and then fifteen minutes later he came back down all right. After that Sal’s mother couldn’t even put a comb through her hair for a few years, barely made it out of bed, started to take up with men who drove TR7s. By then, Sal was under Ronnie’s sway.

“Look at you,” she said, stopped there at the end of the aisle, right next to a display of Bounty, the contempt in her voice metallic. “A real professional.”

“That’s right,” Sal said. He was twenty-six. He didn’t know shit. Wouldn’t for years. His mother was just the lady who didn’t want him to be in the Family. If he had a time machine, man, he’d use it to punch himself in the gut.

“They murdered your father,” she said.

“Someone was going to,” he said.

“If only they’d waited a few years,” she said, “you could have done it.”

A boy and girl came running into the aisle, chasing a blue ball that came bouncing past, stopped, looked at Sal, and ran in the other direction. He had that effect.

She tilted her head to the right, tried to look around Sal, saw Jennifer back there. “She looks well.”

“She is.”

“You have any kids?”

“Not yet.”

“Don’t,” she said, then she just turned around, left her cart where it was, and walked out. Sal played that scene in his head a hundred times, a thousand times, all the different things he should have said, though never once did he tell Jennifer about it. His mother lived in Arizona now, remarried, that was the story, which meant she was close by, could be in Las Vegas, even, dumping quarters into the slots at Treasure Island.

Then his face on the TV melted away into a shot of a U.S. Marshal in a shirt and a tie, sitting in his office at Panthers, talking about the perils of running a strip club. The Mafia in Las Vegas a big fucking joke.

David didn’t think it was funny. As it was, every time some hump in New York or Chicago or Miami got busted doing some gangster shit, they’d drag Sal Cupertine back into the news for a few days, sure to mention that the FBI was offering a $500,000 reward for his capture now that they admitted he wasn’t dead. David conveniently got a head cold whenever that happened, kept his face away from the public, since Las Vegas was filled with bounty hunters, professional and amateur, the town the last stop for fugitives. Every other week America’s Most Wanted would feature some pedophile asshole who was last spotted on camera inside the ice cream parlor at the Frontier, or would note that some white supremacist militia wacko was apprehended in the parking lot of the Fashion Show Mall, the trunk of his car filled with ropes and handcuffs and diapers and brass knuckles and The Anarchist’s Cookbook. It was only a matter of time before John Walsh spent thirty minutes talking about Sal Cupertine and then what? Jennifer would see that, for sure. His mom, too. And everyone else, everywhere. David would have to fake shingles for a month.

Everyone thought Las Vegas was the kind of place you could hide in, that you could fuck up all you wanted. But the truth, David had learned, was that Las Vegas was a small, mostly conservative town and more isolated than a Hawaiian island. Five miles out of the city limits, going in any direction, sat the wild desert, hundreds of miles and several hours from the next big city, which meant you saw the same people everywhere . . . provided you didn’t go to the Strip, which David never did, and neither did any other local, unless they were going to their jobs, but even then, you saw your neighbor, one blackjack table over, everyone in everyone’s business, and all of it now getting captured on camera, the video processed and stored on a hard drive somewhere, waiting for a subpoena. Casinos used to be a place you could fuck off in, not worry about being an asshole, and maybe that was still true, but now, all the while, you were also being mined for your data, David reading about how all these big gaming companies were tracking your every move: how much you spent, how long you stayed in one place, your betting patterns, your body language, did you smile when the cocktail girl walked by, even how long you sat in the toilet, since they had a camera on you walking in and a camera on you walking out.

Being home wasn’t much different.

If someone strange showed up in your Summerlin or Henderson or Green Valley neighborhood, didn’t go to your church or your temple, didn’t wave hello in the morning, never got Nevada plates on their car, let their pit bull shit on your lawn, watered their own lawn with a hose instead of sprinklers, never finished their backyard, then you could bet the Mormons on the street would make a fuss, put in a call to the HOA. If you kept fucking up, the HOA would eventually call the cops, the cops would bring in the sheriff, sheriff would bring in the marshals, next thing, there would be a standoff, shots fired, and a body being wheeled out of your community draped with a white sheet, and it turns out you’ve got a grow house on the block, not Cartel level, but enough to fill Centennial High School and Bishop Gorman High School with narcotic-quality weed.

Thus, David recognized the need to be prepared. He wasn’t going to be caught slipping again, like when that agent showed up. The national news had already rolled into Las Vegas just to talk shit in light of the Panthers debacle, and eventually some enterprising reporter would realize Panthers was only two blocks from the Wild Horse, whose owner, they’d learn, was Bennie Savone, also a reputed wiseguy, who was arrested on some RICO shit that didn’t stick . . . was currently doing time on the beating of a Nebraska-based dentist . . . and then that reporter and a cameraman would be knocking on the door of the temple to get some background color for their story . . . and, well, that would not do.

Even on a night like tonight, behind the walls of the Vineyards, whose security was tight—Bennie couldn’t live in a place where anyone could walk up to him on the golf course and kill him—David had his butterfly knife in his pocket. If the FBI showed up with an assault team tonight, he recognized he couldn’t kill them all. But if it was just one or two guys, well, he could knife one guy, take his gun, and kill the other guy. He’d done that before. Average room filled with average people, there weren’t many who’d stick around after seeing someone bleed out through the neck or get a knife in the ear—which was a bad way to kill a person, since it was hard to get a knife out of someone’s head—or hear someone screaming when they got their eyes slit in two, which wasn’t fatal, but it was some horror movie shit, the kind of thing David was prepared to do if he needed to get out of a crowded room, fast.

He kept a Glock cut into the passenger seat of his Range Rover, easy enough to get to when he was driving, since he never rode with anyone, and not easily found in a cursory flashlight search if he got pulled over, not that Rabbi David Cohen ever got pulled over in Summerlin, but he didn’t keep it on his person out in public. Couldn’t very well be golfing with a city councilman and have his Glock fall out of his bag. Even if everyone in Nevada pretended to have a gun, that whole Wild West ethos a thing in Nevada, David was of the opinion that rabbis couldn’t be Wyatt Earping motherfuckers on the street. Anyway, David knew that most people had no real idea how to use a gun—even cops were scared of killing somebody—unless they were on a shooting range, fitted with noise-suppressing headgear, protective goggles, and ceramic vests. It wasn’t like TV, where everyone was a trained assassin waiting for the right moment to show their disregard for human life.

But David was. That was a difference that mattered.

“I saw that the weathergirl from Channel Thirteen made the show,” Bennie said now. “Jordan still sleeping with her?”

“I don’t know,” David said. “He doesn’t confess to me.”

“Any other notables I gotta worry about?”

“The guy from Channel Eight who believes in aliens was in the back, drinking White Russians.”

“That Kenny Rogers–looking guy?”

“Yeah,” David said.

“Like there’s not enough bad shit in the real world? You gotta go searching for worse things in space? Makes no sense to me.”

“It’s entertainment,” David said.

“That’s what worries me.”

David never worried about the local media surprising him, since they came out to the temple somewhat regularly for events—the Kugel Bake Off for Social Justice, the Jewish Book Festival, the annual Hanukkah Carnival and Menorah Lighting event—and besides, they never seemed to be sure whose side they were on when it came to organized crime, only that Mob business was good for everyone’s bottom line.

One day, Harvey B. Curran, the Review-Journal’s Mob gossip columnist, would be insinuating that more trouble was about to come down on local wiseguys, that the feds were massed outside the gates of the Vineyards, had put recording devices into the neighborhood cats, were buying houses in the Scotch 80s, had moles in the gaming board, were running anthropologists around Lake Mead as the water receded, pulling out dead bodies, running DNA, capturing plates out front of Piero’s, strong-arming UPS drivers, bribing maids, everyone about a week away from a major indictment, the whole city about to be tossed up. Nothing anyone could confirm or deny.

The next day, Curran would be going on about what assholes the corporate casino billionaires were, how life was better when the Mob ran the Strip, since at least you knew where you stood with those guys.

The day after that, there’d be a half-page ad for happy hour at the Wild Horse, some nineteen-year-old blond jerking off a bottle of champagne. By Sunday, there’d be a color photo of Mayor Oscar Goodman in the same space, pimping at a fund-raiser for the Mob museum he wanted the city to build smack on the spot where Estes Kefauver held hearings on Cosa Nostra back in the day, David wondering if they’d be building museums for the Crips and Bloods and Mexican Mafia, too. Maybe toss one up for the Skinheads. Come with a prison tattoo, get a free tour. He thought maybe he’d write a letter to the editor, get on the record about how stupid this idea was, that the Jews didn’t support celebrating the Mob, any mob.

But before he could put pen to paper, the Mercury, one of those shit-rag weekly papers, would do an investigative piece, send a girl into a strip club and have her report back on the dark shit she’d witnessed, the local Mob so fucking stupid that they didn’t even run background checks on their dancers. The Mercury would get photos of known felons counting stacks of cash in the break room, guns out, like they were waiting for someone to tell them to go to the fucking mattresses, and David would think: Build a museum and bury these dumb fucks in the foundation. Start fresh.

It wasn’t, David understood, the right frame of mind to have in this situation.

“You get a copy of the guest list?” Bennie asked.

“I will,” David said.

“Get the photos, too,” Bennie said, like this was David’s first gig.

“I will,” David said. The temple had provided the wedding planner and the photographer, which made procuring these things no problem. David was the middleman on everything these days, which meant paperwork and spreadsheets and calls on Saturday nights with questions about chevron vs. amphitheater seating arrangements for the ceremony and did he have a preference in terms of a wireless mic or a handheld? David was most comfortable not speaking at all, though you couldn’t be a rabbi and stay silent. He couldn’t avoid people taking his picture, but he could mitigate, when possible, how clear he looked. Lately he’d become one of those guys who could wear a hat. Initially he’d adopted the look so he wouldn’t have to worry about cameras catching his face, but now he sort of liked it, though you couldn’t exactly rock a fedora while officiating a wedding.

“Let Rachel pick out the nice ones to give to Naomi,” Bennie said. “She’s got an eye for that sort of thing.” David didn’t particularly like spending time with Rachel Savone. Not that he disliked her, merely that she knew he wasn’t what he seemed, had figured out he’d had plastic surgery, had even confided in him that she was thinking of leaving her husband. But that hadn’t worked out. Not yet, anyway. “I don’t want Rosen getting any of this shit before we go over it, got it? He’ll have you on a fucking poster in his car wash if we’re not careful.”

“I don’t think you need to worry about Rosen,” David said. “Not for a little while, anyway. He’s not looking for trouble. Not if he’s inviting his mistress to his daughter’s wedding.”

“Rosen is always about thirty minutes from going balls up.” He pointed at the wedding reception going on across the way. “I paid for more of that than he did. Two months I’ve been waiting for some word on this project we’ve got cooking up on Craig Road. Supposed to be getting funding from the Japs or something.” He shook his head. “Fucking money pit, is what it is. Best thing that could happen is if the city decided the ground was polluted and could only be zoned for a nuclear dump. Get a government contract, write our own ticket.” He paused, thinking. “You ever drive out that way?”

“No.”

“See what I’m saying? I should have just made the motherfucker pay me.”

“He would have called the cops,” David said.

“You’d think so,” Bennie said. “But they don’t. This town? People would rather be in business with me than risk embarrassment. Isn’t that something?”

A helicopter swept up in the air from the Vineyards’ helipad a block away, behind the clubhouse, climbed a few hundred feet, then flew up and over the wedding party and spun back toward downtown. That was one thing the Mob didn’t have: air support.

“Who’s that asshole?”

“Probably the mayor,” David said. “He showed up to the reception.”

“How’s he looking?”

“Had on a nice tie,” David said.

“How much you think Spilotro and Scarfo paid him over the years?”

Tony Spilotro, a Chicago Outfit guy—the Family’s rivals—and Nicky Scarfo, the boss of Philadelphia, were two of Goodman’s clients, back when he was a lawyer, but then so were all the Vegas hoods. “Not enough,” David said. Spilotro was dead and Scarfo was doing fed time in Atlanta, scheduled to get out when he was 133 years old, no chance of parole. That RICO shit was no joke. “If he was any good, they wouldn’t have needed his services so often.”

When the helicopter disappeared, Bennie turned his attention back to his daughter Sophie. There were four houses surrounding the lake, each with its own private dock where they kept electric boats, dinghies, and more bright yellow pedal boats like the one Sophie was tooling around in. Sophie was seven and a little chubby now, unfortunately growing into a body that more closely resembled her father’s than her mother’s. “Goodman still going to Beth Shalom?”

“That’s the word.”

“You talk to him?”

“No. He just shook some hands. Couple minutes, in and out. Guess Manic Al gave him some cash on his election campaign.”

“That’s my fucking money,” Bennie said.

“Maybe you’ll get your own exhibit in the museum.”

“Worst secret organization on the planet,” Bennie said. “I find myself wondering why anyone is surprised when someone snitches. But you know, I figure running a city is worse than being in the game. Mayor can’t kill anyone and he has to work with those Waste Management fucks. I’ve got it easy.”

David considered that. In Chicago, the Family had run the garbage business since the turn of the twentieth century. Back then people didn’t want to pay, they had to dig a pit and burn their garbage. Now it was just taken out of their property taxes. Government got their bite, the Family got theirs, everyone happy. Fact was, when the mayor was in a room, David left it. If there was one person in the city who could smell a gangster, it was probably that guy.

“I’ll have Rabbi Kales give him a call around Hanukkah, maybe he’ll be in a generous mood,” David said, “give us a donation for the birthright trips.”

Bennie shook his head. “Rabbi Kales should be in a nursing home.” He paused. “Or whatever comes next.”

“He’s fine for now.”

“He pissed on my sofa the other night. The leather one? You know, in the den? Just sat there and pissed himself. Good thing Sophie was asleep and Jean was off doing whatever the fuck fifteen-year-old girls do.” Across the way, Naomi and Michael and their wedding party gathered along the Rosens’ dock for a photo, everyone looking sharp in their rented clothes. “Omerta has shit on the secret lives of teenage girls.”

“Maybe ask more questions,” David said, “before it’s too late.”

“You assume I want the answers.” He pointed at Sophie. “That one still tells me everything, snitches on her sister every ten minutes. Benedict Arnold thinks she’s hard to trust.”

David tried to imagine what his own son, William, looked like these days. He and Sophie were about the same age. William’s seventh birthday was only a few weeks away.

David could remember being seven.

Walking to school with Fat Monte, that poor dead fucker, sneaking into Cubs games, Monte lifting pocketbooks from ladies’ purses, the two of them getting loaded on Carnation Frozen Malt cups in the bleachers, snapping those wooden spoons into shanks, playing at being tough guys. Which got David wondering: Who was William playing with? Did he have any friends? If Jennifer was smart, she was keeping him far away from his cousins, away from any of the kids of the old crew. David hoped William wasn’t playing video games with one of Sugar Lopiparno’s dumb-fuck sons, like the one who had to get his stomach pumped after he ate a handful of pennies.

Did William remember his father at all? Because it was getting harder and harder for David to accurately recall his son. He could remember experiences—his first birthday, chocolate frosting and yellow cake all over everything; Christmas, ripping up wrapping paper and throwing it everywhere, not giving a shit about the presents; Jennifer giving him haircuts by putting a bowl on his head—but they’d known each other for only a few years. Hard to make any kind of permanent memories. In a year, maybe less, William could walk by him on the street unnoticed.

Sophie pedaled out into the middle of the lake, right in the line of the photo shoot, so Bennie cupped a hand around his mouth, shouted, “That’s too far, Soph,” then waved her in with two fingers. He dug some shells from between his bottom lip and teeth, crouched down on one knee, wiped his fingers on the grass, motioned David down, too. “Everything going okay with the Chinamen?”

“No problems,” David said.

“Ruben said they’ve been coming in pretty steady.”

Ruben Topaz was Bennie’s guy at the Kales Mortuary and Home of Peace, the temple’s funeral home, and the only other person on the planet Bennie trusted to handle his business while he was away. Ruben didn’t know the truth about David, though he probably had some suspicions.

“Yeah,” David said. “Some kind of hostile takeover going on. Can’t last much longer.” They’d put ten guys down in the last few months. Unless they were importing new guys from China, David couldn’t conceive of a way for them to keep pace and keep ahead of the law, too. You disappear one guy, maybe their families and friends keep quiet, because that’s the life, but you start getting toward a dozen missing gangsters, someone is going to say something, and either the cops pick up a lead on a wire or someone walks into a station and starts telling stories.

“It can always last longer.” Bennie shrugged. They weren’t his men. “How’s the back end?”

“Slow,” David said. He’d been moving body parts to Jerry Ford, who ran a tissue and organ donation shop called LifeCore for a few years now. It was a good partnership. The funeral home provided him with product, Jerry provided the funeral home with money, and in between there weren’t a lot of questions. Still, even Jerry Ford had some simple standards. “Their lungs are shit and there’s too many livers Jerry says he can’t use, so, mostly, he’s taking some bones, skin, a few corneas. But these Triad fuckers have a real thing about hot pokers into the eyes.”

“Language, Rabbi,” Bennie said.

He was pretty good about controlling his vernacular until he got around Bennie, then all the old ways would come right back to the surface. Bennie Savone was the kind of guy Sal Cupertine had known his whole life. It was easy to drift. “My point is,” David said, “our return hasn’t been what it could be. Least not on these. Unavoidable, I suppose.”

“Now would be one of those opportunities to say you’re sorry.”

“I’m not sorry,” David said.

It was his fault, however. David had fucked up their supply line with many of the traditional families when he wouldn’t let his cousin Ronnie muscle in on their operations after Bennie got pinched, not that Bennie knew the whole story. David hadn’t told him how he’d killed that FBI agent, Jeff Hopper, who’d shown up at the temple. Didn’t tell him he’d pretended to be Hopper when he dimed out the whole Family to the Chicago Tribune. Didn’t even tell him how he’d worked the game perfectly, getting Hopper’s head to a Dumpster in Chicago a few weeks later, right after the story hit the streets. All he’d said was that Ronnie had tried to buy in after Bennie was arrested and that David—well, Sal—had threatened to kill him if he didn’t keep to his own business, that his Vegas card was pulled.

Not that it mattered. They were triple fucked. Once Sal’s faked death was talked about on Good Morning America, no families east of the Mississippi would touch work that went through any part of Chicago, and likewise, Bennie wasn’t keen on having any direct or indirect communication with the Family, not while he was in county jail working on his own beef. And since the Family had vouched for Bennie’s burial service to Detroit and Cleveland after Bennie bought Sal from Ronnie, everyone now considered Bennie to be Chicago-affiliated. A fucking mess all around.

“Every now and then,” Bennie said, “saying you’re sorry even when you’re not is a thing you should do. Makes you seem human. People like the sentiment.”

“Guys the Chinese are sending,” David said, like Bennie hadn’t even spoken, “are young. Street kids.”

“And?” Bennie said. “You get birth certificates before you did a job?”

“I’m just saying,” David said, “teenagers got parents who give a shit.”

On top of that, David just wasn’t comfortable with a bunch of Chinese guys who were obviously not Jews sitting on the tables. Bennie knew the Triads from the Wild Horse, where they moved girls in and out over the years, Bennie and the Triads’ guy in San Francisco having done business since the late ’80s, escort shit, laundering chips, even pills back in the day, though Bennie was out of that now. Drugs, you depended on addicts and criminals not smart enough to get off their own block to do business.

Bennie Savone wasn’t putting his livelihood in the hands of people who were still wrapped up in what public housing development they represented, and upper management in the Triads didn’t get down like that, either. They were a cash-and-influence business stateside. That was Bennie’s game, too . . . though David was beginning to wonder how much of either was enough. David was in the game to earn a living, initially, and then he was in the game because he couldn’t get out of it even if he wanted to, but he didn’t want to, not until he fucked everything up, and now? Well, now he was in the game for good. Bennie, on the other hand, had enough money that he could live comfortably out of it all . . . if it wasn’t for the fact that he knew where all the bodies were buried, literally, and that meant someone would come for him if he tried to walk away. Which is probably part of why he bought David in the first place, in addition to his desire to run this long con.

“Our options are limited right now. I get out, we can be pickier.” Bennie paused, working through something. “You trust them? The Chinese?”

“I don’t trust anybody,” David said. “But I’m not working with the living ones.”

Bennie nodded. “Ford asking any questions?”

“Never,” David said.

“That’s good,” Bennie said, still working in his mind. The thing about Bennie Savone: He liked people to think he was stupid, liked people to underestimate him. Because he wasn’t stupid and he shouldn’t be underestimated, and that gave him an advantage in everything, self-awareness not exactly a trait of most crooks. David hadn’t taken him seriously to start with, seeing as he was used to working for Ronnie, who was a good businessman, but didn’t see the bigger picture like Bennie did. Bennie liked the slow bleed. “Any collection problems?”

“Everything is smooth,” David said. “First-quarter tuition comes in next week.” Temple Beth Israel had a preschool, the Tikvah, and a K–12 operation rolling now, the Barer Academy, six hundred students, the temple minting money every day, never mind that they were also loaning tuition money out to families who couldn’t afford the full out of pocket, charging 12 percent interest, which was a shitty vig in David’s opinion, but it would be bad PR to be charging more than Citibank did. Though if you were late, that number jumped to 23 percent, which was better, but still six points less than Visa.

If someone missed two payments, the temple would start getting liens right away, none of that Fair Debt Reporting crap, the temple got every family to sign contracts allowing property liens, never mind the public shame aspect. Worst-case scenario, David figured if someone had to accidentally get electrocuted at home to get their life insurance to pay the debt, well, then he’d go and fuck with their pool light. It hadn’t come to that, thankfully, because the nice thing was that everyone was rich as fuck these days.

“How the donations looking?”

“We’ll get our bump a little early,” David said. “Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur hit in mid-September.” David knew that Bennie had no concept of how the Jewish calendar worked, and the fact was David didn’t get it either. Rabbi Kales had tried to explain the lunar calendar, the concept that there were no hours in a day, only light and the absence of light. David just couldn’t get the reasoning behind it, when science had it all pretty much settled. Rabbi Kales told him, eventually, that if he had a problem with it, he should take it up with Maimonides.

“Shit, that’s another six, eight weeks.”

“There a problem?”

“Some liquidity issues, that’s all,” Bennie said, a touch too dismissively. He yanked a handful of grass out by the root, smelled it, tossed it into the water. “That dentist fucker? His family has me in civil court. They already got two million from the insurance company and now they’re trying to get another five out of me. Pay for his long-term care, lost wages, everything. Fucker could live fifty years or he could die in his sleep tonight.”

“I’d write the check,” David said.

“You got an extra five million sitting around?”

In fact, David had about two hundred grand in cash squirreled away in safe deposit boxes around the city, and that was just what he’d been able to skim. He didn’t dare keep the money in his house, since Bennie had closed-circuit cameras hidden all over the fucking property, plus if trouble came down and his house was surrounded, last thing he wanted was for the cash to go to the feds. That money belonged to his wife and kid. Anyway, nice thing about Las Vegas, everyone kept cash in safe deposit boxes. Monday morning, 9:00, there was a line of strippers, bouncers, bartenders, dealers, and pit bosses making their deposits from the weekend and none of them were putting it into their checking accounts, and no one thought any different about it.

David figured he needed closer to a million, cash, before he could make his move. Get his wife and kid, fly to South America, wherever Butch and Sundance ended up; that seemed nice, until the army showed up. But he wouldn’t get there if Bennie kept getting nicked. Or if Bennie kept running the business himself, since he controlled the flow of cash. It was a double-edged sword David hadn’t quite figured how to grasp. Bennie had assured him from the start that he’d be getting paid handsomely, had shown him the ledgers, but didn’t let him hold his own money.

“I pay,” Bennie continued, “every pervert who got punched in the mouth at my club is gonna come after me. I’ll be in court the rest of my life.” He picked a seed from his teeth, then flicked it out from under his fingernail.

“They don’t want to be embarrassed, you said so yourself,” David said. “First guy who sues you, get a picture of him in the newspaper, have a girl from the club tell Curran that she remembered the guy shooting his load on her, and believe me, they’ll be happy to settle for next to nothing. Maybe you have to cut a couple checks. Two, three grand and they get to tell their buddies they beat the Mob, big deal.”

“Look at you,” Bennie said, “spending all my money.” He rubbed at the scar on his neck, from where he’d had his thyroid removed. It made him look hard core, like his throat had been slit and he’d lived, which, David supposed, was true, but it was actually a nervous habit Bennie had, the only one David had noticed, other than his propensity to pace. He was quiet for about a minute, thinking. David sensed his idea was taking root.

Bennie Savone wasn’t a boss like Ronnie Cupertine was a boss, didn’t run a crew of a hundred-plus guys, wasn’t moving all the opiates in five states, plus back and forth into Canada, didn’t have a Mexican street gang on his payroll, wasn’t running multilevel rackets and gambling businesses, basically didn’t get down like Chicago at all. He ran his strip club, he ran Temple Beth Israel (kind of), had his construction outfit, took a little juice on some books, but was largely an independent contractor providing an indispensable service with the funeral and burial business, which made him unique. Didn’t answer to Chicago, New York, or Florida, never mind any of those Dixie Mafia or LA pussies. Bennie Savone had his own thing and, yeah, when an outfit came to do business in Las Vegas, even though it was an open city, they tended to come through Bennie first, not the other way around. But there wasn’t the structure of the Family in Chicago. No underboss. No capos. None of that Godfather shit. It was all a series of firewalls. There was Bennie. There was David. There used to be Rabbi Kales, but he’d been put on the farm. There was Ruben, handling the funeral business, and then there was Bennie’s crew, not that David ever saw them. Oh, he saw the construction workers hitting nails on the temple’s campus, but those were mostly Mexican laborers and actual employees of Savone Construction Partners, not guys running jobs.

“If I were you,” David said, “I’d take the dentist out. You already did your time on him. If he dies now, you’re done. He’s off the books. And then I’d give his family money anyway.”

“You would?”

“Some appropriate amount.”

Bennie cocked his head. “He’s in a care facility in Omaha.”

“I could make a road trip,” David said.

“No,” Bennie said, “you couldn’t.”

“You afraid I’ll run?”

“No,” Bennie said. “You got nowhere to go.” He fished through his bag of seeds, but it was just husks and salt, so he dumped the remnants into the grass, tossed the empty bag into the water, watched it float there. “You know someone in Chicago calls themselves Peaches?”

“No. I don’t know anybody named Peaches.”

“What’s with you guys and the names and shit?”

“I don’t know,” David said. “Tradition, I guess.”

“I’m hearing some words about him being the new number two out there,” Bennie said. This was what Bennie really wanted to talk about, though it was all connected. Every problem they had stemmed from the same tree. “And that he’s putting people in the ground.”

“Like who?”

“Mothers and fathers and wives and kids and sisters and shit,” Bennie said. “Going into nursing homes and hotshotting old-timers. Taking motherfuckers out on the street in Boca. Staging car accidents. All kinds of shit. I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t.”

David tried to think of anyone who might be calling themselves Peaches, but it didn’t ring any bells. But then it occurred to him that the order of succession was probably pretty jacked up in Chicago these days. The only close blood relative Ronnie had in the game was . . . well, Sal Cupertine. And Sal’s son. Ronnie’s own son, James, was slow. “He from out of town?”

“Personally? Sounds to me like Russians,” Bennie said.

David used to not give a shit about the Russians. He didn’t like the way they operated in Chicago, in an ethical sense, killing families and pets, or all the purported ex-KGB fucks in Suburbans running counterfeit schemes and protection rackets out in Skokie, or that high-stakes poker shit they started to get in on for a while around the colleges, juicing twenty-year-olds for their student loan money, or even those old-school Chi-West Ukrainians with their goofy sweaters and allegiance to a bleak series of gray streets, stabbing Puerto Ricans for looking at them wrong. No, these days, because of the stories of his congregation, he thought about shit that had gone down in 1917. All that Pale of Settlement mishegoss. Pogroms and show trials and Cossacks chasing down toddlers with dogs. That shit pissed him off like it happened yesterday, because, in effect, it had. Three years ago, he was blissfully unenlightened. Now, could be he went to work and Gordon Simon would be waiting for him, wanting to talk about his nightmares, how he’d seen his little sister Lizi being killed on the streets of Odessa in his dreams again, set on fire, her ashes left to blow in the wind.

“Ronnie wouldn’t be in business with Russians,” David said.

“You think I’m working with the Triads because I enjoy their company?” David supposed not. “Global economy, Rabbi. Get used to it. That provincial shit is twentieth-century thinking. We’re twenty-first-century gangsters now.”

“You know the story of the Jews of the Roman ghetto?”

“Let me guess,” Bennie said, “they suffered and then died?”

“No,” David said, “they were the one people who never knelt before Caligula. Fifteen hundred years of Holy Roman emperors and what the Jews did was never change, never paid homage to the ruling assholes. They set themselves on fire before they’d let someone baptize them.”

“So, yeah, they suffered and then they died, like I said.”

“They died pure of belief, souls intact.”

“You saying you want us to go back to selling whiskey in olive oil bottles and stealing cigarettes?”

“No,” David said. “What I’m saying is, root pulls are some shit from the old times. Burn the graves and salt the earth. All that.” He thought about it for a second. Thought about what it might mean for Jennifer and William. Thought about getting on a fucking bus, getting to Chicago in a few days, breaking into his house in the night, taking his family, running to . . . where? Wasn’t that always the question? “I don’t see it with the Russians. They wouldn’t kill for the Family. And they’d be no one’s number two. They got too much invested in Europe to have word get out that they’re doing dog work for Cosa Nostra, you know? Because Ronnie’s just gonna flip them to the FBI eventually and the story will be that the Russians tried to muscle the Mafia out of Chicago and lost. And then it’s a war. No one wants that.”

“What about the Indians? Native Americans,” Bennie said. “Whatever the fuck they’re called now. Fuck if I know. If you people made it easy and went by normal names, I wouldn’t need to DNA-test my information with you. Give me a motherfucker named Scott every now and then.”

Across the way, the string band was playing “Unforgettable” and David could see some of the old folks were already taking to the dance floor, the bride and groom not even back from taking pictures yet. Put on Nat King Cole and old Jews slow-danced. He saw it at every wedding and bar or bat mitzvah he went to.

Doing business with the Russians and Chinese didn’t make sense to David. If some shit went down, they could just run back to their own countries. Working with the Gangster 2-6 back in Chicago made sense—the only place they had to flee to was their block or back to prison, two places they could be taken out if the need arose. David didn’t see himself flying to Beijing to kill a motherfucker. But Ronnie was never going to have someone from the 2-6 at his shoulder.

Chicago had controlled the street gangs for decades. It was never equal footing. Hard to see the boys falling in line with that. They’d just call Detroit, muscle up. Align with Memphis if they had to.

The Native gangs, that was different. They owned property. Casinos. Farmland. Had their own cops. Made better sense.

“Could be,” David said.

“You been in contact with anyone out there?” Bennie asked.

“No,” David said, which was true, save for getting his wife some money after all this shit with Hopper went down, but nothing since. But now he was thinking about it. Because this news? It was out of the ordinary. And out of the ordinary meant Ronnie was making some kind of move. He’d survived David tipping off the press about his operations, but he was weak now. He really only had two moves left, if shit got untenable: Kill Sal, or give him up to the authorities, hope he got a plea deal out of it.

“Haven’t tried to get in touch with your wife?”

“I don’t have a wife.”

“Say you did. Would you be talking to her on the down low?”

“Never,” David said, which was a lie. If he thought he could, he would. But he wasn’t about to put Jennifer and William in jeopardy. One consensual phone call with Jennifer and she could be looking at time; feds might even try to put fifteen accessory-to-murder charges on her if they were feeling particularly litigious.

“Comes to it,” Bennie said, “you may need to go underground for a bit. We gotta stay nimble, understand?”

“You put me in another meat truck,” David said, “you better be next to me.”

Bennie then cupped his hand around his mouth, shouted at his kid, “Come on in, Soph, let’s get you some dinner.” The wedding party on the dock turned and looked, the bride and groom giving a big enthusiastic wave to Bennie, Bennie waving right back. Best day of their lives, all right. “You better get back to your duties, Rabbi,” Bennie said eventually. “Looks like the bride and groom are about to make their big entrance.”

“‘The vineyards of Israel have ceased to exist,” Rabbi David Cohen said, “‘but eternal law enjoins the children of Israel to celebrate the vintage.’”

“An empire of clean cars for the both of them,” Bennie said.

David tried to laugh, just to make Bennie feel good, but he couldn’t get his mouth to quite work in that direction, so what came out sounded like someone getting stabbed in the throat.

“Christ, Rabbi, maybe don’t try that again, at least not in public.”

“Listen,” David said. “I need to see someone about my face.”

“I’m working on that,” Bennie said.

“Work faster,” David said. Bennie couldn’t respond, since Sophie was climbing from the pedal boat. She had on a bright yellow one-piece swimsuit and David could see she was burned on her shoulders and neck, too. She practically glowed. There’d be blisters by the morning.

David watched Bennie and Sophie walk off, until they faded into the shadows the Red Rocks had cut across the expanse of the Savones’ lawn. David’s night vision was turning to shit. All this and he needed glasses, too? A few minutes later, Bennie and Sophie reappeared, as if by magic, walking up the red brick steps into the house. In the Talmud, they hung witches who practiced magic. Time came, Bennie Savone probably wouldn’t get off much easier than that.

I just need to make it through September, David thought. He’d have enough money then to start working his plan, because when Bennie got off house arrest and could look closer at the books, David wasn’t sure how much he could pinch. David had maybe four months to get his face fixed, make his nut, get word to Jennifer, secure passports good enough to get him, his wife, and his kid into and out of some small airports, good enough to get them into Mexico, at least, where he could throw around some cash and it wouldn’t matter what their passports looked like, and then . . . Argentina? Maybe. There were Jews in Argentina.

If he wanted to live with his wife and son, it would have to be somewhere foreign. The FBI wasn’t just going to forget about the Mafia. They hadn’t for the last seventy years, anyway. Didn’t stop during WWI, didn’t stop during WWII, Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq. They never stopped coming . . . but also never fully completed the job, because the feds needed job security, too. Good to leave a few loose ends, so you could round them up into a ball every few years and then start again. But they didn’t give up on people who killed their men. Sal Cupertine would be on their to-do list until they had his head in a noose.

Pain shot up into David’s right eye and he realized he was gritting his teeth, which had become a bad habit. He let his mouth open half an inch, exhaled, waited for the pain to subside.

It didn’t.

It just lingered there, his face throbbing.

The sun would be completely down in an hour or so. There would be toasts. Rabbi David Cohen would dance the hora, would pose for photos, would engage the congregants of Temple Beth Israel with talk of next month’s High Holy Days, would touch women on their elbow, men on their shoulder, would chastise the old and the young for eschewing yarmulkes on a wedding day. Rabbi David Cohen would leave the wedding at an appropriate hour, would drive the five miles back to his guard-gated house inside the Lakes at Summerlin Greens, would strip off his suit, stuff his yarmulke into a drawer, go to his in-home gym and work the heavy bag for an hour, until he felt like Sal Cupertine again, made sure he knew who the fuck he still was.