Tod Goldberg - Gangsterland

“Sure you do,” Bennie said. “Some gangster walks into Harvard and asks where the toilet is, they’re gonna take him down the service elevator and show him where the janitors piss. Same thing in Europe. Say you walk into, I don’t know, The Hague. Do you know what The Hague is?” David told him he didn’t. “It’s where they have trials for war crimes. The courtroom of the world, basically. It’s in the Netherlands. You know what happens if you and me walk in there right now? They throw us against the wall and frisk us, ask us if we’re fucking Cosa Nostra, like either of us even speaks Italian, throw us in a cell with a bunch of guys with towels on their heads.”

“What are we doing in the Netherlands?” David asked.

“Forget the Netherlands. The point is this: You ever see any Jews getting shown to the service elevator or on trial for war crimes? You ever see anyone named David Cohen getting jacked up on RICO charges?”

“The difference is,” David said, “they got half the world trying to kill them all the time.”

“Exactly,” Bennie said. “You mess with one Jew, you’re messing with all of them.”

David thought about this, thought about how he was seriously concerned about his own cousin pulling his card over the shooting. . which was a valid concern, considering he was pretty sure Fat Monte had killed his cousin Neal that same night, just to close the circle of information. Even the Kosher Nostra were all about family, literal family and cultural family. David couldn’t think of a single instance of one of those guys getting lit up.

“So,” David said, “you want me to be your guy on the inside with the Jews?”

Bennie started to smile, but then stopped himself, rubbed at that spot on his neck. He was a strange cat. There was something cunning about him, about the way he never came at you directly with information, instead let you come up with questions. “You really able to remember shit like they say?” Bennie asked.

“I guess so,” David said. Up ahead, David could see the looming casinos of the Strip, including one that looked like a giant syringe.

Bennie got off the freeway on Rancho and turned left, wound around a few streets, and then pulled into a parking lot beside a sprawling park. There was an RV in front with two black guys sitting on plastic chaise lounges on the blacktop, smoking cigarettes and roasting hot dogs over a tiny barbecue. The RV had a painting of the sun setting over a mountain lake across its entire back end. It had a personalized Arizona license plate that said RAMBLER, and the license plate frame said RALPH & LINDA’S WAGON.

“These guys, they’re gonna get that shit out of your mouth.”

“They doctors?” David asked.

“The guy who did your surgery had an accident,” Bennie said.

“I’ll wait for him to heal,” David said.

“It wasn’t that kind of accident,” Bennie said, and he pointed at one of the black guys — he was maybe fifty-five, had a thick gray beard, and wore frameless glasses—“He used to be a doctor. He knows what he’s doing.”

“When was he a doctor? Vietnam?”

“He’s someone we go to when we can’t use our Blue Cross,” Bennie said. “All he needs to do is snip a couple tension wires.”

“That are in my mouth,” David said.

“Your choice, Rabbi. Either he does it or maybe we go back to your place and have Slim Joe do it. He has pretty steady hands when he’s not on the meth.”

David didn’t think Slim Joe was on meth. The kid was too lazy to cook. But he got the point, so he stepped out of the Mercedes.

“Which one of you is the doctor?” David asked. He wanted to make sure at least Bennie knew who was who.

“That would be me,” Gray Beard said. He didn’t bother to look up or even to stop turning his dog over the open flame.

“This is the guy I was telling you about,” Bennie said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet — took five bills out and handed them to Gray Beard, who then handed the money to the other man, who counted the money, nodded twice, and slipped it into his sock. “How long is this gonna take?”

Gray Beard stood up and walked over to David. “Smile big,” he said, and David did. Gray Beard peered into his mouth and shook his head once, almost imperceptibly. “Who did this work?”

“Dr. Crane,” Bennie said.

Gray Beard took a hold of David’s chin and moved it from side to side. “That hurt?”

“Yeah,” David said.

“Less or more than it did a month ago?”

“Less,” David said.

“That’s good, at least,” he said. David didn’t like that at least part. “You get titanium rods in there?”

David had no idea, so he just shrugged, but Bennie said, “Yeah, for the elongation.”

“I’m going to stick my finger in your mouth,” Gray Beard said to David, not asking, just letting him know it was about to happen. The finger smelled like a combination of cigarette smoke and deli mustard, tasted like that, too, and for a moment David thought he might vomit, which would be a particularly difficult proposition in his current position. “Just breathe through your nose,” Gray Beard said quietly. He began to poke around toward the back of David’s mouth, pressing alternately on the gums on the top and bottom of his mouth. “That hurt? You just nod your head.”

David nodded his head.

“Dr. Crane, he tied the wires too high up around the bicuspids and molars so that your gums would grow over the wires,” Gray Beard said. “He was old-school that way. He wanted people to really hate their doctors.” Gray Beard took his fingers out of David’s mouth and then disappeared into the RV for a moment, returning with a small compact mirror, which he handed to David. “Take a look at your gums,” he said. “You’re about eighty percent infected.”

His gums were dark red and, he could see, had grown around the wires holding his jaw together. He’d noticed this before but figured that’s just how it was done. Bennie came over and looked, too.

“So, what are you saying?” Bennie asked.

“This is going to be bloody,” Gray Beard said. “Another hundred, I’ll shoot your friend up with enough Novocain that he won’t feel a thing. Two hundred, I’ll put him under.”

“Just get this shit out of my mouth,” David said.

“You don’t want to be numb?” Gray Beard said.

“I just want this shit out of my mouth,” David said.

“We’re talking two hours of me cutting and pulling wires out of your soft tissue,” Gray Beard said. “He even wired up your wisdom teeth. That’s going to be a real bitch. I’m being real candid with you.”

“Just get this shit out of my mouth,” David said.

Gray Beard looked at Bennie, presumably for approval, and Bennie threw his hands up. “Whatever he wants,” Bennie said.

“Give me and my assistant here a couple minutes to get everything sterilized,” Gray Beard said.

Gray Beard and his assistant went inside the RV then, leaving Bennie and David alone. David thinking that if they brought out their needles and shit to be sterilized on the barbecue that he’d just pull the wires out himself, infection be damned.

“I would have paid another hundred,” Bennie said.

“I appreciate that,” David said, and he did. “But I’m not letting that motherfucker shoot me up with anything.”

“I think his assistant does that,” Bennie said.

“Even worse,” David said.

Bennie smiled then. An actual, genuine smile. “I’m going to make this worth it for you,” Bennie said. “Five, ten years from now? When you and me are running this city? We’re gonna sit somewhere and laugh about this.”

Ten years from now , David thought, I’ll be on a beach somewhere with my wife and kid. And you’ll probably be dead, and I’ll probably have killed you . It was a good thought. A thought that made David smile, though with his jaw wired shut, he was pretty sure no one could really tell what emotion he was trying to convey. And that was good, too.