Gangsterland: A Novel (12 page)

“All this,” David said to Rabbi Kales as they walked across the lot toward Bennie, “and you couldn’t afford a sandbox?”

“If you’re paying a thousand dollars per week for preschool,” Rabbi Kales said, “I’m afraid a sandbox isn’t sufficient.”

“A thousand dollars per week? For how many weeks?”

“It depends,” Rabbi Kales said. “Most do it for at least six months. Many do it for nine months, like a traditional school year. You can do the math.”

There must have been sixty kids on the playground. A couple million. And no blood.

“How many years?”

“Usually two,” Rabbi Kales said.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” David said.

“When the private school opens next fall,” Rabbi Kales said, “it will be more.”

“How much more?”

“The high school students will cost thirty-five thousand dollars per year, maybe more. The younger children will be less than that, but not by much.”

“And people will pay that?”

“People will line up to pay that,” Rabbi Kales said. “And those that can’t afford it will be offered loans.”

“And what happens if they can’t pay back the loans?”

“We’ll put a lien on their property, that sort of thing,” he said. “But I suspect that won’t be a problem.”

“Everybody defaults,” David said. “Trust me on this.”

“Well, then it will be your problem to solve,” Rabbi Kales said.

Bennie then waved them over, though he was still on his phone. In the time David had been in Las Vegas, he’d gotten the sense that Bennie was a pretty busy guy. He had the Wild Horse, which he went to most nights, and then he had his other
business interests, which David didn’t know too much about. David knew what Bennie had told him about his involvement in the construction game—he’d put good money on those land graders belonging to Savone Construction—and the union shit, which probably took a lot of time and energy; he just didn’t have a sense of how the Savone family soldiers went about making their nut or how Bennie collected. Slim Joe shook down pimps, which didn’t sound like a great way to make a long-term nut if he was already thinking about getting into the hot-dog-and-pie game.

Back home, even though he was just a gun and therefore not expected to be pulling jobs, he knew, for instance, that Fat Monte’s main job was the low-grade heroin distribution, the shit they gave to college kids and Canadians. So he had his whole operation, and he kept his take and kicked the rest upstairs. Or a fool they called Lemonhead, because he was always sucking on Lemonheads, he was in the offtrack betting they ran out of a couple of different restaurants. Perfectly legal, except that Lemonhead ran the side game, running the crazy bets and parlays, along with a little bit of girl business, too.

In Las Vegas, though, with so much stuff actually legal, David couldn’t see Bennie collecting much on that. When you can jack someone for their toddler’s tuition, maybe it didn’t matter.

“That was your daughter,” Bennie said to Rabbi Kales. “She wants to know what you want for Thanksgiving and whether or not we should invite over the new rabbi, since apparently it took Tricia Rosen all of five minutes to let her parents know they met.”

“Perfect,” Rabbi Kales said.

“Perfect?” David said.

“It’s important that you don’t just show up one day,” Rabbi Kales said. “But if you’re here for a few weeks, showing up periodically, people will get used to you. Won’t be a big deal when you start doing actual work.”

“You think Curran saw us?” Bennie said.

“He was sitting at his usual table,” Rabbi Kales said.

“Good,” Bennie said.

“Wait a minute,” David said. “The columnist was in the restaurant?”

“Every Monday,” Bennie said.

“Then why do you go there?” David asked. None of this lined up, David thinking that whatever amount of money Bennie paid to get him to Las Vegas would have been better spent on decent legal counsel.

“So that he sees us sitting there,” Bennie said. “I thought they said you were smart.”

“It’s not how we did shit in Chicago, is all I’m saying,” David said.

“And yet here you are,” Bennie said.

David needed to stop looking for evidence that anything in Las Vegas was like it was in Chicago. He didn’t want to be like one of those guys from New York who could see things only as a compare-contrast with New York.

“I just,” David said quietly, “I don’t want to wake up and find a bunch of U.S. Marshals on my front lawn because you want to keep up appearances.”

“The only way for you to avoid the marshals will be to keep up appearances,” Rabbi Kales said. “No one is looking for you here, David. That’s what you need to understand.”

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.”