Tod Goldberg - Gangsterland

Something else Jennifer Cupertine said started to bother Jeff, so before she went inside, he said, “Mrs. Cupertine, just one more question.”

“What’s that, Agent Hopper?”

“How did you pay off your house?”

Jennifer Cupertine smiled. “Don’t you know?”

“If I did, I wouldn’t be asking.”

“Cousin Ronnie paid it off,” she said. “An early birthday present for William.”

For the first week, Rabbi David Cohen still couldn’t open his mouth more than half an inch, just enough room to shove in a fork and do some good chewing. Soft foods mostly. Potato salad, pasta. On the Monday before Thanksgiving, as he brushed his teeth with the fancy electric toothbrush he’d picked up after Gray Beard had finished his wire excavation, David realized his mouth had regained nearly full mobility.

His jaw still hurt at the joints, which made long conversations somewhat painful, not that he and Slim Joe were having long and involved chats. David had learned that Slim Joe’s main job was working the door at the Wild Horse, a job he’d gone back to after David was allowed out the front door, and that he was nominally in charge of shaking down the pimps who brought their girls in to work the club. It was a small percentage of the two hundred or so girls who worked on a weekend night, enough to keep him in Nike tracksuits and gold chains. His other job, David had gleaned, was to provide a bit of de facto security for David. The closed-circuit TVs were in Slim Joe’s closet, along with an armory to put up a good long siege if that came to pass.

David had also learned that Slim Joe had two big ambitions: He wanted to open up a cart on the Strip serving all kinds of different hot dogs, as well as slices of homemade pies that he envisioned his mother would be in charge of fixing. It would be open from midnight to 5 a.m. when all the drunks and tweaks were fiending and when the dancers got off shift. “I’d do it real classy,” Slim Joe told him. “None of that taco truck shit where you don’t know what kind of cheese you’re getting. I’d be cutting fresh cheeses, too, deli-style. It’ll be off the hook.”

“You need a permit for that,” David said. “You really want the state looking into you?”

“On the real?”

“What’s your other idea?”

“Bennie had me take some classes over at CCSN,” Slim Joe said. “Computers and shit. I had this idea of making a website where people would just, like, put up their thoughts every day. Like two sentences about what was on their mind. Call it Expressions, but with a z .”

“Why don’t you just call it Snitches?”

“Don’t be a bitch,” Slim Joe said, like they were friends.

David told Slim Joe that if he ever called him a bitch again, he and his mother would be selling hot dogs and pies in the middle of the desert from the trunk of a burnt-out Cadillac. It was the first time he’d threatened Slim Joe, the first time in six months he’d threatened anyone, and it made him feel great.

Like he was back in the game.

But all the books he’d been reading were having some kind of residual effect on David, because his elation was short-circuited by the honest look of hurt on Slim Joe’s face. And then he thought about something he read in the Talmud: Hold no man responsible for what he says in his grief. Because the truth was, he didn’t give a shit if Slim Joe called him a bitch or anything else. Those were just words, and it’s not as if Slim Joe even knew what he was saying; the kid was practically illiterate. David was just mad about. . everything. The whole nut of his life had been cracked open.

“Look,” David told him, “there’s nothing more boring than hearing someone else’s dreams, right? But these are good ideas. You should save some money and do it.”

“Really?” Slim Joe perked right back up, like a dog that’s chased a ball into the street, only to get hit, but still wants to get that fucking ball. “I ain’t told no one about this shit because I don’t want no one biting my game. So you think, on the real, that it could work?”

“On the real,” David said, and then he went back upstairs for the rest of the night. He just couldn’t listen to anything more about anything.

David spit out his toothpaste, wiped off his face, and went into his closet to pick out a suit. He was supposed to meet Bennie in thirty minutes at something called the Bagel Café. “Bring all of your fancy Jew books with you,” Bennie told him. “You’re gonna meet someone important.”

David had no idea who that might be, though the idea of bringing all his books with him set up a bit of a practical dilemma. The nice thing about Christians is that they had just one book, the Bible, and inside of it were all the secrets of life. The Jews, however, had the Bible, and the Torah, which was really just the five books of Moses from the Bible, and the Talmud, which ran six thousand pages, or what David thought of as his sleeping pill.

And then there was the Midrash, which was like someone went through the Bible, Torah, and Talmud and filled in the empty parts, or explained what everything meant, or what they thought everything meant, since some of it was pretty clear to David and, yet, there was an explanation that was completely contrary to his understanding. Finally, there were the stacks and stacks of books on “Jewish thought” that had been dumped off at the house over the weeks, which were like reading a combination of someone’s diary filled with their thoughts on all of the other books combined.

All this for a fucking cover? David thought it would have been a lot easier to say he was a butcher.

David picked out a gray Hugo Boss suit and put it on with a white shirt and a blue tie and those five-hundred-dollar black Cole Haan dress shoes, found a handkerchief and put it in his breast pocket, and then called downstairs to Slim Joe to help him with his books.

“You look like a pimp, dog,” Slim Joe said when he saw David, and then, quickly, he added, “that’s a good thing, yo. Just on the real.”

All this time, Slim Joe had treated him like nothing. Didn’t fear him. Didn’t respect him. Didn’t dis respect him, either, but generally regarded him as nothing but a warm body he was tasked to bring food to and help change bandages for early on in the process. But since David threatened him twelve hours earlier, the kid was now acting deferential, maybe even a bit scared, which struck David as funny since he looked less menacing than he ever had. His words, though, still carried weight. He liked that.

“You think so?” David said. “I don’t look like a pussy?”

“Never, dog,” he said. He examined all the books stacked up on David’s dresser. “You need to take all these?”

“That’s what Bennie said.”

“Sometimes, I think he just says things to say things, you feel me?”

“He’s the boss,” David said.

“Is he your boss?”

Slim Joe had never asked him a single organizational question; it was as if he’d been strictly informed to steer clear of any such talk, which seemed like a reasonable possibility, which made his sudden boldness questionable.

“Just put the books in the car,” David said.

Back home, David drove a 1993 Lincoln Town Car his cousin Ronnie got for him. When he had to do a job for the Family, someone would show up with a car for him to use, something that could be torched or cleaned and resold. When he had a freelance job, he’d take the bus over to O’Hare or Midway and steal a car from long-term parking. Weird thing was that he always had his license with him, even on the jobs he did freelance, on the odd chance he was pulled over for speeding or running a stop sign — not that he’d gotten a ticket since he was a teenager. Having a valid identification was a good way to avoid ancillary problems.