Tod Goldberg - Gangsterland

David didn’t have a wallet anymore. For the first time in his life, he was now a money clip guy, because he’d given Chema his wallet to give to Jennifer and then never felt right getting another. His mind turned over the connections: the dead feds, Chema, Fat Monte, all that shit, right down to Bennie’s kid asking for money and Bennie asking David for it. It was some kind of Talmudic parable. What had he read? The treasures which my fathers laid by are for this world, mine are for eternity.

David peeled a five from his fold and handed it to Sophie. “I heard him say three bad words yesterday,” David said.

Sophie squealed in delight and then immediately went back to her dolls. Bennie watched her for a few moments, a smile etched into his face like granite. “A real shakedown artist,” he said.

“It’s in the genes,” David said.

“On her mother’s side,” Bennie said. “Speaking of which. This housekeeping. You up for a spring cleaning if it comes to that?”

It wasn’t a question of whether he was up to do his job — he’d do it. The issue here was scale. What Bennie was alluding to, apparently, involved closing the circle even closer. . which would likely mean the end of Rabbi Kales. Maybe not now. Maybe not next month. But at some point. That would have ramifications beyond the usual, since Rabbi Kales was Bennie’s father-in-law. Bennie also had something on the old man, that much was certain, though Rabbi Kales had never been as candid with David as that day after their first meeting at the Bagel Café, at least not about matters concerning anything other than the Jewish faith, and Bennie hadn’t betrayed any secrets, either.

The issue with Rabbi Kales knowing the truth about David and about the money being pushed through the temple in all its illegal forms wasn’t that he was likely to suddenly be investigated by the feds and break. No, the issue David had gleaned over the last two months had more to do with something far more common: Rabbi Kales felt profoundly guilty. He was beginning to take stock of his life, and that made a man do stupid things. And now here Bennie was floating out a series of potential problems that vaguely included Rabbi Kales, too, probably just to see how the good Rabbi David Cohen would act, even in front of a kid. David wasn’t sure how much Bennie intuited about Rabbi Kales’s emotional state, though he wouldn’t be surprised if Bennie had the temple bugged, too.

For fuck’s sake , David thought. That was probably true. Bennie probably knew the entire temple’s secrets, though David couldn’t imagine Bennie had the time to sit around like the FBI, monitoring a wire for the slightest hint of something illegal.

“Whatever mess needs to be cleaned,” David said, “I can clean it.”

Bennie sighed. “All this crap,” he said, “you’re the only guy I trust right now. You’re the only guy who can do what needs to be done.”

Bennie reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out two envelopes and placed them on David’s desk. One had the logo from Jerry Ford’s company on it — LifeCore — and the other was plain white. David slit open the envelope from LifeCore and saw that it contained a check for seven thousand dollars, payable directly to the temple’s performing arts fund, along with an official letter from Jerry Ford thanking the temple for its dedication to the arts.

“Something wrong?” Bennie said.

“You tell me,” David said. He showed Bennie the check and the letter.

“Tax write-off for the business,” Bennie said. “Last year, the Wild Horse donated ten grand to outfit the entire Little League. All legal in this town. Isn’t that the rub, Rabbi? Twenty years from now, there won’t be any need for people like us. Everything will be on the level.”

David opened up the other envelope. Inside was a photocopy of a driver’s license for a man named Larry Kirsch. He had a Las Vegas address, and his fortieth birthday was coming up in April.

“I need you to clean that up,” Bennie said.

“Who is he?” David asked, which was stupid. He never asked that question. But this didn’t seem like some random job, since he was the first person Bennie had asked him to kill since Slim Joe, and in light of the shit going down at the club, he knew Bennie was trying to keep his criminal activity on the down-low.

“He built your face,” Bennie said.

“I thought you said that guy had an accident.”

“That was the guy who did your jaw,” Bennie said. “Make it look like a house fire or a cougar attack or something. Last thing we need is another ring on the chain. Know what I’m saying?”

He did know what he was saying. If there was someone who needed to be killed and it was just some civilian, someone like this doctor, that made it a murder, not a mob hit, and that meant you couldn’t have some monkey do the job, because they’d invariably fuck it up.

“Just tell me when,” David said.

“Soon. You do it before Valentine’s, maybe I can surprise Rachel with a cruise or something.” Bennie tipped his head back and closed his eyes, kept them closed while he talked. “I’m sleeping four hours, if I’m lucky, what with Rachel being up half the night. She doesn’t sleep, I don’t sleep.”

“She still not well?” David didn’t know how to properly address this issue, nor did he want to, but it seemed like Bennie wanted to talk about a whole host of things today. The strange thing was that more and more, Bennie was coming into his office for conversations that started first as business and then spiraled into whatever was going on at home. “She still got that problem?” he finally continued.

“Yeah,” Bennie said. “Two beautiful daughters, I’m not complaining, right? I just thought, down the line, maybe we’d try for one more, see if we could get someone I could throw a football with. Doctor’s telling us no. And then there’s the pain. You can’t just take a Tylenol for what she’s going through, so she’s stoned on Ativan half the time.”

“He who bears his portion of the burden will live to enjoy the last hour of consolation,” David said.

Bennie whipped forward, his eyes open now.

“It’s from the Talmud,” David said. “Moses.”

“I know what it’s from,” Bennie said. “My father-in-law likes that one. You believe that crap now?”

“No,” David said. “It’s something I read that stuck with me. I’ve got all kinds of quotes at the ready.”

That was true, mostly.

What was also true was that David kept finding himself with these tiny earthquakes of epiphany, particularly when he read about the sanctity of life. He wasn’t particularly well-read in his former life — mostly Sports Illustrated and whatever paperback he picked up at the grocery store to flip through while he waited on a job, though he was particular enough to know that he hated Tom Clancy and anything about the Mafia, so he stayed away from those true crime books, too, since he was also somewhat worried he’d find something he did in one of them — and thus the mere process of digesting all these religious texts was filling his brain with whole new pathways of thought.

He wasn’t sentimental about most things, and he’d been good about keeping Jennifer and William on the back burner as much as possible; but every now and then he’d read something in the Talmud or the Midrash that he’d immediately be able to apply to his own issues, and suddenly he’d have a way to deal with what he’d previously thought was a problem only he’d ever had. Which, he also recognized, was ludicrous.

“She wants to take you to lunch,” Bennie said.

“Who?”

“Rachel. You listening to me, Rabbi?”

“I don’t think that’s a great idea,” David said.