Tod Goldberg - Gangsterland

“Shut the fuck up.”

“Your father,” Rabbi Kales said, “was thrown off the IBM Building. Do you know the circumstances that required he be thrown from the building? Because I would be happy to tell you, Rabbi Cohen.”

“I told you to shut the fuck up.”

“I heard you,” Rabbi Kales said. “We’ve all got secrets, Rabbi Cohen. Just know that I’m aware of all of yours.”

“You think it’s that easy? That you can just say shit like that to me and suddenly your daughter is off the hook? If she ratted out Bennie, she’s just a couple moves away from figuring out that her father is piece of shit, too.”

“She is already aware of that.”

“I don’t think she’s aware of the fact that you’re burying murder victims in the cemetery she thinks she’s inheriting,” David said. “Or that everything here is a fucking grift.”

“How is it you think she ended up marrying Bennie Savone, David? You think the daughter of a rabbi is going to just marry Bennie Savone? Do you really think everything you see here is by happy accident? That Benjamin lucked into this arrangement?”

David figured that Bennie had something on Rabbi Kales, figured that there was some weight that Rabbi Kales bore for the opportunity to have his own temple. Rabbi Kales had told him that day after their meeting at the Bagel Café that he’d made mistakes with his life. That Bennie had given him a tremendous opportunity. David had just assumed that Bennie had something on Rabbi Kales, when, maybe, it was the other way around. Bennie clearly adored his wife and kids. Or adored them as much as Bennie Savone was able to adore anything.

So that was the pact. Rabbi Kales knew that Bennie loved his daughter, held that over his head, and made a deal. Bennie got to marry the woman he loved; Rabbi Kales got his own temple, his own people. He couldn’t have imagined what Bennie would do next. Who could? And it was why Rabbi Kales wouldn’t just let Rachel divorce Bennie, wouldn’t let her just walk away, even when he knew it was the best thing she could ever do with her life. And why he wouldn’t just call the cops and tell them he was getting shaken down by the mob. In return, Bennie couldn’t do anything at the temple without going through Rabbi Kales, which is why it became important for there to be someone like David at all.

A mob boss who had to answer to a rabbi.

What an elegant fucking con, David thought, both sides ripping the other off.

In the short run, David answered to Bennie. Bennie hadn’t said anything definitive about taking Rabbi Kales out, but David wasn’t stupid. He knew it was coming, some day, and probably someday soon. And the thing of it was, Rabbi Kales wasn’t stupid, either.

“It doesn’t matter to me,” David said. “All that matters to me is what Bennie tells me to do.”

“That’s not true,” Rabbi Kales said.

“If it was Rachel who went to the feds on this,” David said, perfectly calmly, “I’ll kill both of you. Because what matters to me is one day getting the fuck out of this place and back to my family. And I can only do that with your cooperation, Rabbi Kales. And I count Rachel’s cooperation as your cooperation.”

Rabbi Kales smiled at David then. “Bennie was right about you,” he said.

“Yeah, in what way?”

“He said you had a singular focus.”

“I pay attention,” David said. Except once. And that’s what had brought him here, on this night, in front of this man, this man who was probably fairly decent, a man who spent 90 percent of his time in service to something larger than himself. The other 10 percent was given over to the management of a criminal enterprise, the benefit of which gave every member of his temple hope that their own lives weren’t meaningless. Rabbi Kales had essentially sold his daughter to Bennie Savone so that he could build an empire for the Jews in Summerlin.

What was the cosmic algebra on that? If you did a little bad for a greater good and the only people who got hurt were people who decided to get involved with a bunch of gangsters, wasn’t that a net positive? Because, surely, Rachel Kales, at twenty-two, had fallen in love with the wrong person. A choice was made. And then her father had bartered with a criminal for what he wanted out of the deal, and, in the long run, the members of Temple Beth Israel were content.

The way David saw it, the only person with a viable complaint at this point was David himself, now that he understood all the people he was doing business with were shysters, which, he realized, was like a boxer complaining about how often he got hit. Except it hadn’t been David’s choice to be in the ring with Bennie Savone and Rabbi Kales. He thought for a long time that it had been his choice to be Sal Cupertine, a man who killed people for a living, but really that was a choice Ronnie made for him. This was a different sort of madness he was involved in now.

Jennifer had chosen to be the kind of woman who married a hit man, the kind of woman who has a child with a hit man, the kind of woman who, one day, knew that she’d be alone because she’d married a hit man. Those were the choices they’d made together, if not explicitly, at least tacitly. So Rabbi Kales could threaten him all he wanted. It didn’t matter. David was who he was, and his wife knew. His father’s death, that was something he’d figure out on his own, because he doubted Rabbi Kales knew all the reasons. . but when it came right down to it, the reason was simple enough: Someone in the Family wanted him dead.

And that person was probably Ronnie Cupertine.

It was a truth David had tried to keep from confronting directly for a long time, but in the last few weeks it had come easier and easier for him to accept. Ronnie had also most likely wanted him dead, too, and then had to find a work-around when he got the jump on the FBI motherfuckers. There was no way Ronnie thought he’d get out of that meeting alive once he realized who the players were, four against one, impossible odds even for Sal Cupertine.

Ronnie never played to lose anything, so he was probably sitting in his house waiting for a phone call that said Sal was dead, only to get a call from Sal himself. No wonder he sounded so surprised. Ronnie wasn’t used to failure and had to find a work-around that wouldn’t end with Sal killing everyone in Chicago.

But the rub on that deal was that Sal Cupertine was alive, well, and prospering. It was the prospering that was beginning to bother David. That he’d been set up to succeed. It just didn’t make sense. It wasn’t how Ronnie did business.

Rabbi Kales’s cell phone rang, and the old man — because that what he was, David saw, an old man standing outside a place of worship chain-smoking filterless Camels — took it from his pocket and examined the screen. “It’s Benjamin’s lawyer,” Rabbi Kales said.

“Give it to me,” David said.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Rabbi Kales said.

“I wasn’t asking,” David said.

“When you’re at Temple Beth Israel,” Rabbi Kales said, “you work for me, Rabbi Cohen.” He answered the phone and turned his back to David. Rabbi Kales still had a full head of silver hair that he kept cut short in the back, so you could see three or four inches of neck between his hair and his collar. David could shoot Rabbi Kales in that spot, and he’d be dead before he hit the ground, his hair still perfectly coiffed while he waited for the Moshiach to come stomping back to collect all the Jews and bring them to the Mount of Olives.

With five pounds of pressure exerted on the trigger of his gun, David could end Rabbi Kales right here. That was it. Five pounds of pressure. Less pressure than it would take to slap the man. David could feel his gun pressing against the small of his back, beneath his now ever-present suit jacket. He could draw his gun in a second, second and a half if he really needed to take some time with it. At point-blank range, the bullet would take just a fraction of a second to pierce that spot between Rabbi Kales’s head and neck. And for what? The hubris of wanting to give his community a place to gather and of not realizing the consequences of his actions?