Tod Goldberg - Gangsterland

“How much?” David said.

“A big one,” Jerry said. “A very significant mitzvah .”

“No,” David said. “How much would the temple be compensated?”

“Oh,” Jerry said. He seemed honestly surprised. “It depends on your service.”

“So we wouldn’t be getting paid for getting you the. . what did you call it? The tissue? Just for our actual removal of things. Am I understanding you?”

“Right, right,” Jerry said. “That’s the law.”

“How much do you get?”

“I do all right,” he said. “I’d like to do better, which is why we’re having this conversation.”

“If I’m to explain this to Rabbi Kales,” David said, “I need to explain to him how this might return to the temple in some positive light, you understand.”

“I see,” Jerry said. “You’re talking about getting press for this?”

“No,” David said. “No press. Never.”

“Right,” Jerry said. “Say we’re talking about some corneas. We have an excess of good corneas here in the United States, but I can sell them to companies in China, India, places like that, really help people all over the world. I don’t know if that’s what you’re talking about.”

It wasn’t. But it was interesting. “How much do you make on a deal like that?” David asked.

“I get maybe fifteen or twenty thousand for them,” he said. “Not all pure profit, of course.”

“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.