Tod Goldberg - Gangsterland

Not that it looked like Dr. Kirsch was long for this world.

David snapped on his rubber gloves and leaned over Dr. Kirsch, tried to figure out what exactly he was breathing from, since he didn’t have a mouth or much of a nose anymore, and decided just to cover what was left of his face with both hands until the twitching stopped. He could shoot him again, but he didn’t want to have to dig a slug out of his head. Thirty seconds, tops. If that. The guy was probably already comatose.

David pressed his hands over the gaping maw in the center of Dr. Kirsch’s face, but all that seemed to do was help staunch the flow of blood, which was the exact opposite of the point. The other problem was that Dr. Kirsch seemed to be coming to. His eyes fluttered open, and his arms started swinging wildly. David didn’t know if it was adrenaline or actual fight, if the doctor was even aware of what was happening. If he knew that he didn’t have a face.

“Stop moving,” David said quietly. “Just let go.”

Dr. Kirsch focused on David then, another unintended outcome, and then he tried to scratch at David’s face, swiping at him with both hands, until David decided fuck it , sat on his chest, pinned his arms down with his knees, grabbed his throat, found a thick gold chain there, which was helpful, and strangled him, face-to-face, eye-to-eye, just like he’d done that Donnie Brasco fuck in Chicago. That guy who wasn’t Jeff Hopper, the guy who’d started this whole problem, except that Dr. Kirsch was harder to kill.

David stood there for a moment and collected himself. He had a plan, and it had gone slightly astray, but, all things considered, it was a minor inconvenience. Dr. Kirsch was dead. Time to move to phase two. There needed to be an order to things, or else he’d end up tracking blood all over the city.

The bullet that took off most of Dr. Kirsch’s face kept going and lodged in the wall, so David dug it out with his butterfly knife and put it in his pocket. It made the scene look authentic; even the dumbest fucks were smart now about not leaving slugs and shell casings around, those forensics shows acting like Mr. Rogers for a generation of crooks.

He stepped back over to Kirsch’s body and jabbed his knife into the doctor’s rear pants pocket and cut his wallet out from the fabric, never once touching the actual body, cut his car keys and cell phone from his front pocket; that would all melt easily enough. The doctor didn’t wear any rings, didn’t even wear a watch, just that thick gold chain that was now garroted into his throat, so he sliced that away, too. . and that’s when David noticed the pendant on one end.

David should have known what he’d see when he looked down, yet he was still taken by surprise. Two Hebrew letters, and , crusted in diamonds, forming the symbol , the edict to live, the edict to be ethical, the edict of power: Am Yisrael chai . The people of Israel live.

It hadn’t even occurred to David that Dr. Kirsch was Jewish. A year ago, it wouldn’t have mattered. A couple of months, even, it wouldn’t have registered. But now, these were his people, the chai a part of his daily life, as much as the omertà used to be. That was the thing: Omertà was a made-up code to keep crooks quiet, a false loyalty born out of movies, dumb fucks like Slim Joe adopting it as a religion in place of something with actual meaning. Maybe most Jews didn’t believe even half of their religion, but he hadn’t met one who didn’t understand the struggle to survive, faith or no faith.

Dr. Kirsch had to die. But it all boiled back to that day at the Parker House, that hotel room, those four guys Sal Cupertine had to kill. Wasn’t he a different person now, Sal only a thing of his past? And Sal had to kill those men. There’d been no other way. He’d come across false witnesses, and he’d done what he had to do. Even God considered that entrapment. What was it the Torah said? Then you should do to him as he plotted to do to his brother, and you shall thus abolish evil from among you.

David stuffed Dr. Kirsch’s wallet, keys, and necklace into his pockets. It was 7:07 p.m. He was running two minutes behind schedule, yet Rabbi David Cohen suddenly found himself muttering Hebrew— Yit’gadal v’yit’kadash sh’mei raba —the Burial Kaddish slipping from his mouth with what had become his usual ease, though David knew Dr. Kirsch would never actually be buried. At least not most of him.

After cleaning himself up, David walked up Eastern to Flamingo and then back onto the campus of Desert Springs Hospital, where he’d been dropped off earlier that evening, to hail a cab. The walk gave him an opportunity to get his adrenaline in check. Normally, he liked a meal after killing someone, but his night was still a work in progress, albeit one with a strict timeline.

The entrance to the emergency room came up on David’s right. There were a few people standing outside talking on cell phones or smoking, and through the sliding doors David could see that the waiting room was packed with people. In the last two months, David had visited the hospital at least once each week in his official capacity, sometimes two or three times in a day if there was someone particularly wealthy or particularly ailing that Bennie wanted him to see. The last time, he’d gone with Rabbi Kales. One of the members of their temple, Bert Feinstein, had suffered a stroke while playing craps at the Mirage and was taken to Desert Springs already in a coma. The family had asked for Rabbi Kales to come when it appeared the last hours were upon them, and Rabbi Kales had asked David to come, too.

“I guess I need the practice,” David said.

Rabbi Kales didn’t respond at first, he just stood in the doorway to David’s office and stared at him, incredulous. “Then you should stay here,” Rabbi Kales finally said, his voice hardly above a whisper, and stalked he out of David’s office.

David caught up to him in the parking lot. It was just after noon, and the kids were all outside on the playground, laughing, shouting. “Wait,” David said. “I’ll take you.”

“Don’t bother,” Rabbi Kales said. “I forget that you pretend to have no soul.”

David paused. Rabbi Kales knew the right words for every occasion, the bastard, so David looked for his own right words, settling on, “I’m sorry.” David tried to remember the last time he had actually apologized to anyone.

“This is not someone who has done wrong,” Rabbi Kales said. “This is someone’s father, someone’s husband, someone’s friend. They are looking to us for comfort. If you cannot provide that, if you cannot treat the death of a man honestly, for the first time in your life, then stay here.”

“I can do this,” David said.

“Then get your yarmulke and your Torah.”

They were met in the hospital lobby by Bert’s granddaughter Elissa. David had seen her at the temple plenty of times, since she came after school and worked as a tutor for the younger kids. But seeing her at the hospital, David was struck by how little she looked like the young woman he remembered. She’d been crying, so her eyes were puffy, aging her in the bad hospital light.

Bert’s room was crowded with people — Bert’s wife, Lois, who’d once made David eat a cookie made of applesauce and coconut and something he presumed was straight lard; Elissa’s parents, Jack and Rochelle, as well as her aunt and uncle, Margaret and Carl, and their two teenage sons whose names David couldn’t remember, since they showed up at temple only on the rarest of occasions — all of whom turned and gazed upon Rabbi Kales with a mixture of melancholy and relief.