Tod Goldberg - Gangsterland

Which is why he was now listening to Claudia Levine’s tantalizing story of. . what? Shit. He didn’t know what she was saying, but he knew he needed a way to cut her off. Problem was, he’d found that he really couldn’t fake his way with New York transplants: They were more Jewish than the average temple member, which required David to stay as focused as possible. It was exhausting.

“So I say to Martin — you know Martin Copeland, don’t you, Rabbi?” Claudia said, and David realized that he’d done the one thing he was trying not to do: He’d let his mind wander.

“Martin Copeland,” David said. He put a finger up to his lips — this was something Rabbi Kales did frequently, and it immediately impressed David with how it made the rabbi look contemplative and, at the same time, passively judgmental, as if all the world in front of him was not quite up to snuff — and left it there for a moment while he attempted to pick up the thread of conversation.

He did know Martin Copeland. He’d provided the seed money for the Dorothy Copeland Children’s Center, gave the temple a check for two hundred thousand dollars to see his dead wife’s name on a wall. Bennie said he’d been setting numbers in town for a generation, but now he didn’t know where he was half the time. “He’s a quart low,” Bennie told him, “but had more oil than all of us to start with.” David met with him a week earlier to talk about the deep moral questions that were now plaguing him, particularly if all his years working in the gaming industry was a shanda , even if it wasn’t mentioned directly in the Torah. Martin was concerned that maybe Bugsy Siegel had set them all on a bad path, that maybe Siegel was a golem , and now that we were only a year away from the turn of the millennium, there was a real chance it was all a terrible omen for the destruction of the Jewish people. Bennie told David to listen to and agree with every word Copeland said, make sure he wasn’t planning on changing his will in any way, since as it stood, the temple was in for a cool million. “He starts giving any hints that he’s spending more than his living expenses or looking to donate to Gamblers Anonymous or something,” Bennie said, “drown him in the toilet if you have to.”

“Yes, yes, Martin Copeland,” David said, finally. “I fear, Claudia, that Mr. Copeland is not a person you should be going to for advice.” Not that David knew what the hell she was talking about.

“He said you’d say that,” Claudia said.

David tented his hands and leaned back in his chair, stole a glance out the window, and saw that Jerry Ford was standing on the sidewalk talking to Bennie Savone, their kids running around on the sidewalk together. Which was fine, generally. David had made the executive decision to let Bennie know all about the deal he’d made with Jerry, and Bennie didn’t care provided he got his beak wet. So they’d gone about it legally, getting the morgue staff trained to harvest tissue, even got all the proper forms, which they then doctored for use with those “clients” whose bodies could still be harvested, which wasn’t many of them. So many amateurs out there , David thought. No honor in their work.

The mortuary hadn’t received its first official payment yet — Jerry said his company paid on a net-sixty after processing the tissue, which sounded reasonable to David, even if he wasn’t exactly sure what it meant — though already Jerry had made a nice donation to temple, a check for five grand last week, a promise for another five grand this week, which indicated to David that whatever net-sixty meant, it was going to be a nice payday.

Still, David didn’t like seeing Bennie and Jerry together on a public street, where anyone could snap a photo of them, particularly since that shit over at the club with the tourist getting stomped half to death was becoming a larger problem than Bennie could have imagined.

He’d followed David’s advice and gave up his bouncers, even offered to pay for the victim’s health care, which seemed to appease Metro, but word was that the feds were taking a hard look at the Wild Horse now, seeing as how both the bouncers were called “mob associates” in the Review-Journal over and over again. And the offer to pick up the medical costs didn’t exactly appease the family of the guy, who were now getting ready to sue the Wild Horse for, Bennie told him, “fifty-cocksucking-trillion-billion-dollars.”

Then one of the weekly papers did an exposé about how half the strip clubs in town were fronts for organized crime, explained in precise detail how the families had moved from the casino business into the legal skin business, it being more profitable to sell lap dances and overpriced Cristal than to illegally pimp out girls for sex. The house charged patrons twenty bucks just to walk in the door, then took 20 percent from every girl’s cash take, plus another 40 percent from the credit card charges; the girls then had to tip out the bartenders, bouncers, the DJ, the house mom, bathroom attendants, and anyone else who happened to work the room. . and then those people had to tip the house 20 percent on their take, too, plus 40 percent on their credit card tips. And then there was just the normal grift: charging twenty-dollar lap dances at a hundred a pop, charging a grand for a bottle of fifty-dollar Champagne, and if the customer complained to management, maybe management responded to the complaint with a hammer to the knees. If the person was smart, maybe they’d go home and dispute the charges at a safe distance from Bennie’s boys, but then who was smart at 3 a.m. in a strip club staring at a couple grand on their corporate American Express?

Credit cards. It made David’s head spin thinking about how Visa and MasterCard were bankrolling a big portion of Bennie’s crew.

Cash was another matter. A strip club was the easiest place on earth to wash hard cash, particularly when you could generate paperwork that said Champagne was legitimately billed at five hundred dollars a bottle. It was no fun to wash money twenty bucks at a time, but it was the easiest way to move it around in the mob.

He’d done it again. Claudia was still staring at him, waiting for his rabbinical ruling on. . something. . and he was zoned out, thinking business, making her wait. “Yes, well,” he said. He looked around his office for something to pull from, some bit of arcane wisdom that might solve whatever issue this woman was having, while not actually displaying to her that he had no idea what she was talking about. His eyes settled on a book of poetry about Jews that Rabbi Gottlieb had left. He retrieved the book from the shelf and paced the office for a moment in silent contemplation. “Yes,” he repeated. “Are you familiar with Longfellow, Claudia?”

“The only Longfellow I know well is the song Neil Diamond has about him,” she said. “We played it at our wedding, even.”

David sat down on the edge of his desk, only a foot from Claudia, close enough that he could smell the chemical reaction between her nauseating perfume and her hair spray, and he flipped through the pages of the book of poetry with what he hoped looked like solemn appreciation before settling back on the one poem he’d actually read. The key was to make it look like divine inspiration.

David tapped his index finger on his nose, trying to get the pose right. “In his poem ‘The Jewish Cemetery at Newport,’ Longfellow calls our people trampled and beaten as the sand, but unshaken as the continent.” David hoped Claudia never managed to stumble on the poem, since he was taking a lot of liberties with the line in terms of context — though context, Rabbi Kales had told him, was rarely important when making a point. He set the book back down on his desk and leaned toward Claudia. “That’s very powerful, isn’t it?”