Gangsterland: A Novel (21 page)

“Of course,” David said, thinking:
Yeah, maybe only 99 percent profit.
“And this is legal?”

“You think I’m going to present an illegal idea to you, Rabbi?”

That Jerry didn’t come talk to David at the temple, instead waited out on the street like he was selling watches out of his briefcase, raised David’s bullshit detector, but he liked this guy’s gumption. Las Vegas was the only place he’d ever been where everyone was squeezing you. There was a tip jar at the cleaners he used down on Rainbow, like you should give an extra buck because they got the starch right; a tip jar at the automated car wash, presumably so the robots would feel appreciated; and at the Borders on Decatur, where he’d sometimes go to hide out during the day, he’d see people hand the girl with the pierced nose at the info counter a few bucks for showing them where to find the self-help books.

But he could actually appreciate a business like Jerry’s—it was called LifeCore—which aimed to help others. Thing was, the more Jerry talked, the less David believed him to be all about the altruism. Like how he hadn’t answered his yes-or-no question with a yes or a no.

And if he was on the take? So what. The whole town was on the take, even people like Rabbi Kales, all done under the cover of escapism of some kind.

One day the
Review-Journal
would run a big piece on how a mob museum would be a great way to lure nongambling families and history buffs to the Strip, better than
Star Trek: The Experience
at the Hilton or the septic water park next to the Sahara, and then the next day Harvey B. Curran would have a blind hit piece about how he heard New York families were muscling into the monorail project and if it were thirty years ago, there would be blood on the streets and the streets would
be better for it. A week later, there’d be a splashy feature on how Steve Wynn was saving the arts by bringing rare Cézannes, Monets, and van Goghs to the Bellagio for the world to see, people seeming to forget every piece was bought on the backs of a generation of assholes losing on rigged games of chance.

Never mind the locals he saw every day at Smith’s, buying their groceries with an attitude, dressed in sweat suits, gold chains, those hard stares, like they were going to intimidate a box of Cheerios into giving up the money it owed. And the tourists. Somewhere along Interstate 15 they stopped being accountants and file clerks and started being tough guys in shiny shirts. David wouldn’t be surprised if in fifteen or twenty years, after he was long gone, the city built a roller coaster on top of the temple’s cemetery and renamed it Gangsterland.

Maybe Jerry Ford was trying to play David for a rube.

Maybe he didn’t think someone like Rabbi David Cohen would want to find a way in, rather just see the good of it. Which made David think he should probably at least act slightly concerned about how all this was going down. Last thing he wanted was for this shyster to think he was a shyster, too. But that’s what made this all interesting to David: Something about David’s mere appearance made Jerry think he could approach him about this business deal. And maybe it was just a business deal. Maybe David was reading it all wrong, but he didn’t think so. Jerry Ford had probably been marking him for a week or two, just waiting to pounce with this little shell game. Maybe even saw him with Slim Joe once or twice in the neighborhood, probably wondering why the new rabbi was consorting with a thug.

“Why aren’t you standing outside a hospital right now?” David asked.

“You know how many people die in Las Vegas every day?” Jerry asked. “Hospitals don’t have the time for these tissue donations. Lungs, hearts, kidneys, they do the big jobs, and even still, they subcontract that work out most of the time to organ banks. So say Mrs. Rosenthal passes on, she’s a tissue donor, we come get her, bring her to your shop, if you pardon the term, and your guy handles the process. I assume you’ve got a guy who’s qualified for that?”

David had no idea. Bennie had yet to introduce him to the funeral home staff, figuring it was better to keep him away until the last possible moment, make sure he was, as Bennie said, as “Jew’d up as possible” before he started interacting with the staff.

“Yes,” David said.

“Might be good for business overall, steering more funerals up here to Summerlin,” Jerry said. “Not that what you do is a business of course.”

“Of course,” David said.

The sun was starting to come up, David’s favorite time of the day in Las Vegas. It was the only time when the place looked clean. He needed to get back to his house, shower, and then get over to the temple. Today was going to be a busy day with the Hanukkah celebration, and, according to Bennie, he was going to officiate his first funeral, maybe two. The whole week was a mess of meetings, and services, and God knows what. Then, after Hanukkah, Bennie told him there might be an influx of body work, that some shit was going down in Reno that could end up lucrative for them. But Jerry had opened up some ideas for David, maybe a way to keep something on the side, even, work his way back to Chicago a little faster. He’d need time to ponder that.

“I’m sorry,” David said to interrupt Jerry’s monologue. Jerry was talking about how hip bones were the new wave, what with all the hip replacements being performed now that people were living longer. “My point here was that I think Rabbi Kales would be interested in knowing what you intended to donate back to the temple.” David couldn’t quite understand how he’d managed to put those words together in that way, how he was actually starting to talk like a straight guy. Small steps for mankind and all that.

“Oh. I guess I didn’t understand . . .” Jerry stammered for a moment, tried to take in what David was telling him. “What would a good percentage be?”

“Ten percent,” David said. “Fifteen. Maybe even twenty.” This kind of talk felt normal. Shaking people down was second nature to David. He knew if he talked to Jerry in his own voice, he could get fifty out of him. Maybe sixty. Hell, he could probably get seventy.

“Fifteen percent,” Jerry said. “Like a tip, basically?”

“People tip twenty percent now,” David said.

“
Machers
tip twenty percent,” Jerry said.

“And you’re a
macher
, aren’t you?” David slipped Jerry’s card into the pocket of his sweatpants, where he thought he might start keeping a switchblade, just in case. “I’ll talk to Rabbi Kales,” he said.

“All I can ask, Rabbi Cohen,” Jerry said. They shook hands again, and David was surprised to feel sweat on Jerry’s palm.

“Tell me something,” David said, not yet letting go, his smile wide and friendly, or at least trying to be, his jaw still not quite right in his opinion. “How did you know my name?”

“Oh, right.” Jerry tried to pull his hand away, so David covered up their grasp with his other hand. He’d seen Rabbi Kales
do a similar move when he wanted to keep someone from ending a conversation before Rabbi Kales was ready. “It was in the HOA newsletter. It’s a big deal when a rabbi moves in. Good for home values.”

It was just after noon, and Temple Beth Israel was filled with kids, all of them screaming or crying or running, or all those things at once, the temple’s Children’s Hanukkah Party in full swing. The entire playground had been turned into a carnival area, with face-painting stations, booths filled with cooking food—latkes, hot dogs, burgers and fries, funnel cakes, because it was David’s understanding that you couldn’t have a carnival without funnel cakes—a guy making balloon art, a ten-foot-tall inflatable dreidel that the kids could get inside of and make spin, and, surrounding the perimeter of the playground, the parents, including Bennie and his wife, Rachel, sipping coffee and ignoring their children entirely, letting the teenagers who’d volunteered to take the brunt of the abuse.

David stood on a small stage in the middle of it all, trying not to feel sick while Rabbi Kales made a speech welcoming everyone to the annual party. David had lived his entire life lurking in the background, a shadow, the person in the room no one wanted to speak to, and now here he was front and center, minutes away from being formally introduced by Rabbi Kales.

After, David feared the adults would want to talk, make polite conversation, something David had never done in his entire life. What if he got something wrong? What if he said something that was completely contradictory to the Jewish faith? Rabbi Kales had told him not to worry, that if anyone questioned anything he ever said, all he needed to do was tell them that it was
from the Talmud and he’d be covered, because no mere quasi-practicing Jew (which is what the temple was mainly comprised of, what Rabbi Kales called “pork-eating Jews”) ever cracked open the Talmud. Besides, Rabbi Kales told him, it was all about interpretation. He could have an interpretation that was different than any other rabbi in the world. That was the nice thing about being a Reform rabbi, Rabbi Kales said, they were open to the idea that maybe another rabbi had a different slant to the same set of beliefs.

He had a pretty good feeling that was going to be true.

“Some of you may have noticed a new face here at Temple Beth Israel,” Rabbi Kales said. David searched the playground for a soft landing place and instead found Bennie Savone, who at some point had moved directly in front of the stage, along with his wife. She was smiling at him with genuine warmth, and it occurred to David that she thought he was an actual rabbi, like her father was an actual rabbi. They’d met in passing only twice—she’d come to the temple to pick up her daughter while he and Rabbi Kales were in conversation, so she just stuck her head into his office and said hello, told him if he needed anything not to be afraid to call, that sort of thing, which struck David as extremely polite for a woman married to such a fucking prick—and somehow his mere countenance had been enough for her to believe.

David thought maybe that was the thing. People wanted to believe that you were who you said you were.

Rachel had an expensive haircut, nice makeup, white angora sweater, simple gold jewelry, a significant diamond on her wedding ring—maybe two, two and half carats—but it was nicely inset, not like his cousin Ronnie’s wife, who had a diamond so big it could send SOS signals on sunny days. Rachel didn’t
wear gaudy hoop earrings or huge clusters of ice on every appendage. The Orthodox, they were big on the idea of
tzniut
, keeping modest in dress, particularly the women, which meant they all dressed as though they’d just escaped from Russia with the Cossacks hot on their tail. Rachel wasn’t that modest, comparatively, though up against the other women he saw in Las Vegas, particularly the ones he could see staring at him now from behind their Starbucks cups and huge bug-eye black sunglasses, she looked like a nun.

David focused on Rachel, tried to imagine that she was rooting for him, thought about how disappointed she’d be if he started vomiting, and that seemed to soothe him a bit, until the sound of Rabbi Kales voice once again pierced through the roaring of blood rushing to his ears. He was talking about how the Maccabean warriors took it upon themselves to live or die nobly, some fairy tale about, when you got right down to it, how noble it was to be a killer, provided you happened to be killing people for your freedom to believe in something. It was the same bullshit the Family tried to press on the new meat. Problem was, as time wore on, you started to realize you were just part of the same bureaucracy found in any business. The only thing noble about it, as it related to the Family, was at least you knew your friends were more likely to stab you in the chest than in the back.

Rabbi Kales paused in the middle of his speech and turned to look at David. David smiled, still feeling like if he moved too quickly or even opened his mouth more than a crack he might hurl. The rabbi looked pained for a brief moment, just a flash, really, probably not long enough for anyone to notice, and then he cleared his throat and started in again.

“No one can replace Rabbi Gottlieb,” Rabbi Kales said, “not in our hearts, nor in mere presence, and we all wear the tragedy
of his passing each day here at Temple Beth Israel, particularly today, on the first holy night of Hanukkah, when we celebrate the onset of a true miracle. I think you will come to find Rabbi Cohen to be a kind and faithful servant of the Torah.” David saw the adults in the audience nod, almost imperceptibly, and David understood that the rabbi was proving David’s very point: He was telling them what to believe, and because they believed
in
Rabbi Kales, they believed what he said. “Like all of us, Rabbi Cohen is still learning that life looks somewhat different here in Las Vegas.” The audience laughed, since no one was actually from Las Vegas, at least not according to the statistics David read in the paper. Even Bennie chuckled, though probably for entirely different reasons. “So please do keep in mind that Rabbi Cohen is still in training, both as a rabbi and as a Las Vegan, which means I don’t want to hear of anyone inviting him to any poker games for at least another six months, and he is never allowed anywhere near the Strip when the rodeo comes to town, and that’s an order!” More laughing, the rabbi putting on a nice little nightclub patter now, full of inside jokes, bringing the room back up. It was a holiday, after all. “Especially not in the company of my son-in-law.” And the house came down, as much as a house can come down when it’s also filled with a bunch of sticky six-year-olds, wealthy Jews, and a Mafia boss who happened to own the Wild Horse strip club and was inexplicably married to the rabbi’s daughter.