Gangsterland: A Novel (31 page)

Rachel looked over her shoulder. “Everyone comes here,” she said.

“Looks like he’ll be mayor,” David said, trying to make conversation, but also trying to figure out just how connected the Savones were.

“It will be good for the city,” she said. “He was on the board at Beth Shalom for years, so he knows what it’s like to work with intractable ideologues.”

So that answered that.

“What has my husband told you about me?” Rachel was still smiling, but David could see that something had hardened inside of her, that she’d moved on to the part of the conversation she’d been dreading, too. He found that to be somewhat of a relief. For once, even ground.

“Nothing, really,” David said.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I find that hard to believe. He spends more time with you than he does with anyone, except for his lawyer.”

“What we talk about is . . .,” David began, but Rachel waved him off.

“I know, I know,” she said. “It’s confidential.”

“Actually,” David said, “it’s mostly business related. Your husband has been very good to the temple. I really can’t thank him enough.” These were sentences David had practiced a thousand times in preparation for anyone asking about his relationship with Bennie Savone. “We’ve also had many interesting talks about his faith, which, as I’m sure you know, is a constant challenge.”

Rachel shook her head and laughed again. “Rabbi,” she said, “I appreciate that you’re trying to be polite, but you don’t need to be. I know who my husband is.”

“He’s said you’re unhappy,” David said.

“Understatement of the year,” she said, “and we’re only in January, so maybe I should include last year, too.”

“And that you’re not well, physically.”

This time Rachel didn’t laugh. “I’m glad he’s aware of these
things. I’m glad he can talk to you. It would be nice if he could talk to me.”

“He’s a complicated person,” David said, because he didn’t know what else to say.

“He’s not complicated,” she said, “he’s a liar. There’s a difference, if you don’t mind me saying, Rabbi.”

Thankfully, their waiter arrived and dropped off their lunch. David ordered the chicken Marsala on Rachel’s recommendation, though now he realized he probably wasn’t going to get a chance to enjoy it since Rachel was already dabbing at her eyes in a futile attempt to save her makeup from the tears. He took his handkerchief out of his breast pocket—the advantage of wearing a nice suit every day, David now realized, was that you were forced to be a gentleman around crying women, even if you didn’t want to be—and slid it across the table.

“Thank you,” she said. “Look at me. Crying in the middle of a restaurant.”

“The Talmud tells us that even when the gates of heaven are shut to prayer, they are open to tears,” David said.

“I’m going to leave him,” she said.

David looked around the restaurant, tried to figure out if there was any way Bennie might have bugged it. The guy behind the bar pouring wine into tiny tasting glasses, maybe he was wired up. Maybe the waiter. Maybe Oscar Goodman, walking out right then, was headed off to report directly to Bennie.

“I’m sorry,” David said. “Did you say were considering leaving Mr. Savone?”

“Not considering it, doing it,” she said. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you. My father, he won’t listen, tells me to just suffer through it. I can’t talk to my girlfriends about it. I can’t talk to anyone, really, except for you.” She reached across the table
and took David’s hand. Everyone always wanted to touch his hand, as if whatever wisdom he might have could be delivered through the sweat of his palm, which, in this case, might have been closer to the truth, since David was certain he was sweating like a Baptist preacher. “I’m not a young woman anymore, Rabbi. Don’t I deserve to be happy? Don’t I deserve to be loved by someone capable of love?”

“You’re still a young woman,” David said.

“I’m thirty-nine,” she said. “I’ll be forty in six months. That will make it official.”

“I think you need to consider all of your options here,” he said.

“That’s what I’m doing,” she said. She covered his hand with both her hands now, making a minifurnace that was heating his entire body.

David examined the table for something sharp, but the waiter had taken the steak knives from the table. He didn’t know what he was looking to cut, anyway, other than maybe his own arm off at the wrist. At this point, he could probably do the job with a spoon.

“You have to consider your children,” David said, figuring that was a good place to start, a good way station for Rachel while he figured out what he was going to do with this information.

“They wouldn’t miss him,” Rachel said. “Sophie might, I guess, but Jean knows what kind of man her father is. Thirteen going on forty-five, that one. I’m not going to wait another ten years for Sophie to get the picture, Rabbi. I can’t do that.”

David flipped through his mental Rolodex looking for some kind of Talmudic interpretation of divorce that would make Rachel realize the error of her ways. Not that the Talmud forbade divorce—the Jews were pretty forthright on it, much to David’s
surprise, allowing that a life in a bad marriage was no life at all and that a divorce, while not a great option, was nonetheless an inevitable one. And this wasn’t even a modern interpretation.

Still. This was not acceptable.

“Have you thought about marriage counseling?”

“He’s not the marriage counseling type,” she said.

“Yet you think he’s the divorce court type.” Rachel flinched in her seat, and David realized he had slipped into his old voice, that his cadence was off. Shit. Still, it gave him an opening to remove his hand from her grip. He cleared his throat. Took a sip of wine. Grabbed a waiter, asked for a knife. Cut a piece of chicken, dipped it in the Marsala sauce, put it in his mouth, chewed as deliberately as he could . . . and all the while, Rachel stared at him in something like muted wonder.

“Maybe I can’t divorce him,” Rachel said, her voice sounding resigned. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t leave him.”

“Do you think you’ll just run off? You think you can do that?” He cut another piece of chicken, swirled some pasta onto his fork, swallowed it all down without even chewing. There was that voice again. “How will you survive?” Dammit. “Financially. How will you survive financially if you just run off? That’s something to consider.” Another bite of chicken. A gulp of wine.

“Well,” she said, “eventually I’ll inherit the funeral home from my father.” She sat back from the table and exhaled. “It’s not a business I’m interested in, but it’s not like there’s ever a down season, if my father is to be believed.”

“Rabbi Kales is a long way from being dead,” David said, though he wasn’t entirely sure that was true. Was it possible that Bennie didn’t know this salient bit of information concerning the funeral home? David didn’t imagine Rachel would want to be the owner of a funeral home that was laundering
money . . . and bodies . . . for the Mafia. And then there was the new tissue business . . . and whatever else David and Bennie could dream up. More importantly, it was the cash cow that was going to get David back to Chicago, back to Jennifer and William, back to Sal Cupertine.

Oh
, he thought,
this will not do
.

“Of course, of course,” she said. “But you know he’s been slipping, mentally, for a while now. I’m sure he hides it well when he’s at work, but, Rabbi, there’s a reason you’re here now, obviously.”

“Obviously,” David said.

“My point is, my father is not going to be able to run the business for much longer regardless,” she said. “I’ll need to get power of attorney, so if need be, I can step in to handle his affairs. I don’t want to, but if my husband won’t support his children, what choice would I have?”

That Rachel wasn’t aware her father was not running the funeral home, even now, was a concern. If she began digging—or had a lawyer start digging—that would not be good. David didn’t like the idea that he might need to kill Bennie’s wife. He also didn’t like the idea of going to prison.

“Let me think for a moment,” he said.

“Of course, of course,” Rachel said.

David had learned that if you really wanted to get people to listen to you, it was important to pretend that you needed a moment to listen to God before coming up with a proper answer to something. David did this by closing his eyes and breathing slowly. Except when he closed his eyes, he wasn’t talking to God as much as he was trying to figure out how not to choke the life from the person sitting in front of him.

In this case, he was trying to decide if it would be better, all
things considered, to simply follow Rachel out to the parking lot, and as she was walking up to her car, shoot her once in the back of the head. Except he didn’t have a gun on him. Just that knife, which was now in the car. He could stab her in the throat with a fork, but that felt too personal, and, generally, people tended to notice a person geysering blood from her neck in the middle of a crowded parking lot.

And, he didn’t kill women. It seemed like an irredeemable trait, even among a series of what would normally be highly irredeemable traits. Yeah, the Russians and the Kosher Nostra in Chicago did it, but they did it for reasons completely unlike this one. This was an issue of preservation, not to collect a debt, which, actually, sounded like a better reason on the face of things. But, still. He had to take that option off the table. What else was there?

Reason, he supposed. He could attempt to reason with Rachel. Or maybe he could lead her to see the folly of her ways by pointing out how fucked she was if she even thought she could walk out on Bennie Savone.

“It was my understanding,” David said, his eyes still closed, “that your husband helped your father purchase the funeral home. Is that correct?”

“That was years ago,” she said. “That debt has been paid, I’m sure.” David couldn’t tell if there was any sarcasm in Rachel’s response or if he was looking for . . . something, anything, to get an idea of what Bennie had on Rabbi Kales.

He opened his eyes and tried to be as soothing as possible, tried to make Rachel change her mind based solely on answering simple questions. It was a tactic he learned from some old hard knocks in the Family when they tried to get information out of people before whacking them. “Are you certain?”

Rachel exhaled deeply, again. “I guess I’m not,” she said. “Bennie isn’t exactly forthcoming with these sorts of matters.” She paused. “I guess I could ask my father, but he’s already advised me that I’m being foolish, for any number of reasons, even considering this. But you understand, don’t you, Rabbi Cohen? I have a right to be in a marriage that I find fulfilling, don’t I?”

“Of course,” he said. “Let me ask you a question. Do you think any of this has to do with your recent medical problems?”

“No,” she said . . . too quickly in David’s opinion.

“Because I know how going through the change of life can make one start to reevaluate one’s choices from a place that is more emotional than reasonable.”

“How do you know that, Rabbi? Do you have a lot of experience going through the ‘change of life,’ as you put it?”

“Talmud tells us to look not at the pitcher but at what it contains,” David said.

“It contains bullshit and recrimination and lies,” Rachel said. She flagged down a waiter and asked for another bottle of wine, this time a Chianti. “Rabbi, I’d be curious what you know about your body betraying you. Do you know I’m going to need a hysterectomy? Do you know that? Don’t you think that I’d like my loving husband around when I was going through that? Doesn’t that sound reasonable to you?”

“Lower your voice,” David said. This time, he used his old voice intentionally.

The waiter came by and refilled Rachel’s glass and then left the bottle in the center of the table. Rachel picked it up and examined the label. “Last good thing that came out of Italy,” she said quietly. “Do you know where I went to get married?”

“No,” David said.

“Florence,” she said. “This was 1982. I was twenty-two, and Bennie, he was a big shot, thirty years old, money falling out of his pockets, that’s what I thought, anyway. But you know, when you’re young, someone with a thousand dollars seems rich. I wanted to get married at Temple Isaiah when it was still down on Oakey, but because Bennie wasn’t Jewish, they made a real stink about it. My father was a rabbi there, so he didn’t care, obviously, but the board wouldn’t let it happen for political reasons, which is just a fancy way of saying they didn’t want to have Bennie’s family showing up in photos inside the temple, not when one of their members was about to run for the Senate. So Bennie says,
Fuck them
. He said that to me. I remember it clear as day. He said,
Fuck them
. So he flew my family, all of my friends, all of his friends and family, plus anyone who was a member of Isaiah that wanted to come, flew everyone to Florence, and I got married at the Great Synagogue of Florence.”

“That sounds like a good time,” David said.

“It was,” she said. “But it took me until recently to realize he didn’t do it out of a sense of justice, or even to make me happy. He did it out of spite. Maybe I should have seen that back then, but what do you know when you’re twenty-two?”

“You think you know everything,” David said.