Gangsterland: A Novel (11 page)

“And do you know that?”

“Of course not,” Rabbi Kales said. “Nobody does. Not definitively.”

“I thought all the Jews rolled to Israel,” David said. “And the Mount of Olives opens up. Isn’t that what Ezekiel said?”

“That’s when the Moshiach returns,” Rabbi Kales said. “It’s one of the thirteen principles of our faith. But no one knows. How can they? Even the prophets, they just speak prophecy.” Rabbi Kales made a tsking sound. “Everyone so concerned about what’s next. No one cares what they’re doing now. There’s no present anymore.”

“So it’s a racket,” David said. You want to run a racket, you’ve gotta give people the hope that there is a tangible result in the end—money, sex, a free futon, TV, trip to Tahoe, whatever. God, it seemed, was the biggest racket of all. You sell people the afterlife, you sell them resurrection from the pine boxes they’re buried in down in Palm Springs, you’re not gonna be around when they find out if you were right or not. In David’s books, the Orthodox Jews were always talking about how everyday items could be cloaked in radiance, how a wet towel in the bathroom suddenly bore messages.

“Yes,” Rabbi Kales said, “I suppose you could look at it that way.” David stole a look in his direction, saw that the Rabbi was staring out the window, but still with his hand on the Talmud, his thumb moving over the edges of the pages.

“Tell me something,” David said. “What does Bennie have on you?”

“He loves my daughter,” Rabbi Kales said.

“Bullshit,” David said.

“I believe that’s honestly true,” Rabbi Kales said.

“No,” David said, “I meant bullshit on that being all he has on you. Guy like you doesn’t just fall into a racket. Don’t try to play me like that. At least show me that respect.”

Rabbi Kales tapped on his window. “You see all this land out here? All these houses? When I was your age, this was actual desert. Just thirty, thirty-five years ago. No buildings. No people, maybe a few living off the grid, as they say now, but then, just living. I could come out here and walk and think and imagine what my life might be like without worrying about getting run over by someone driving the equivalent of an aircraft carrier. Coyotes, rabbits, desert squirrels, field mice, all of them gone now. For what? Who is going to live in all of these houses? Has anyone given any thought to this?” Rabbi Kales paused, then tapped his window again. “You see those mountains?”

“The Red Rocks?” David said.

“Yes,” Rabbi Kales said. “When I first arrived from New York—this was 1965—you could actually see their real color. What you see now, that’s a product of the air quality we now have, all that carbon monoxide, because all of these houses and buildings and casinos have changed the way the shadows fall, changed the way light works. Just in the last ten years, it’s all changed. Everything has become diffuse right before my eyes.”

“Could just be your eyes,” David said, finding that parlance again, the way he used to talk to the old-timers in the Family, give them a little hell as a backward way of showing respect. David was learning that dealing with retired Family members and religious figures wasn’t all that different: They both wanted you to solve your own problems and be a man and listen to the stories of how things used to be, the past always a pristine vision of a golden age, the present always a bag of shit, the
future a vast, unknowable wasteland. Sometimes being a man meant showing that you were bold enough to tease a little, confident that your intention was clear—that you were a person who knew the score, whatever that score might be.

“Could be that, I suppose,” Rabbi Kales said. He pondered that for a minute, though the thing of it was, David already had similar thoughts about the mountains, too. Here, everything was the color of old, rusted blood; the mountains jagged and ripped, at night they sat against the sky like pieces of broken glass. “My son-in-law,” Rabbi Kales continued, “offered me an opportunity to fill that desert with my faith, to see my dream come true, to provide education and culture to my people. He offered me an opportunity to create a place of understanding and faith. With opportunity comes sacrifice.” He shrugged, like this was nothing, starting up a temple funded, apparently, by the Mafia. “We have big plans for Temple Beth Israel.”

“Bullshit,” David said again.

“I have made mistakes in my life,” Rabbi Kales said. It came out with such finality that David didn’t feel he could question what those mistakes were, though he sensed that if Bennie were his chief benefactor, it must have been bad. “My son-in-law offered me a chance to start with a fresh ledger. So maybe we aren’t that different.”

“You don’t know what I’ve left behind,” David said, “so don’t try to tell me we’re the same.”

“Why don’t you tell me something,” the Rabbi said. “Who are you?”

David hesitated. He wasn’t supposed to speak that name. His own name. “I can’t say,” he said.

“I’m your rabbi,” Rabbi Kales said. “We have the privilege of confidentiality. Nothing you tell me can be repeated, legally.”

“Really? Even if we’re not in the temple?”

“Where I am is the temple,” Rabbi Kales said. “That’s the law.” And there it was, again, that sense of radiance. Bennie, man, that guy was onto something. If Rabbi Kales was a rabbi, and if David Cohen was a rabbi, there was an awful lot of wiggle room in that. Here was a hustle that David was finally beginning to see. “So why don’t you at least tell me what you’ve done to end up here?”

“Killed some people,” he said, nonchalant, like back at home, talking to the boys.

“Some?”

“That’s my job. I kill people. And then I killed the wrong people, and here I am.”

“What made them wrong?”

“They were feds.”

“Oh, yes,” Rabbi Kale said. “I read about this. In Chicago?”

“You read about this?”

“Harvey B. Curran wrote about it in the
R-J
,” Rabbi Kales said. “I think he said you were found dead. Dismembered and burnt, as I recall.”

That sounded about right. Poor Chema or that retard Neal, maybe both of them, dead just for knowing his name, knowing where he was last seen. Jennifer, she’d know it wasn’t true. Maybe Ronnie would give her some kind of hint, nothing concrete, because nothing was ever concrete anymore; everything was about conditions and consensus, everything done to protect the brand, the Family now like a McDonald’s franchise. “What else did that cocksucker have to say?”

This brought a smile to Rabbi Kales. He was an odd man. Holy, sure, but whatever he was mixed up in with Bennie was another side of his game that didn’t add up yet; no matter what
his “mistakes” were, whatever skin they were cutting, he had to have some take in it beyond the spectral. “Only that it was the sort of screw-up that would have all the families watching their backs for the next decade or so.”

“I made a mistake,” David said. “I snapped.”

“How does a professional killer snap?” Rabbi Kales asked. Again with the calmness. The man was like a glass of warm milk.

It was a good question, David had to admit. “It’s like anything else,” David said. “Bad day, I guess.” Though, of course, it was much more than that, but he needed to get Jennifer out of his head. He needed to get William out of his head. He’d been so sharp on this for the last several months, and then he meets this rabbi and all he can think about is what’s been left behind. “Fact is, Rabbi, one day, something bad was going to happen one way or the other. This mess probably saved my life. Too high profile to actually kill me for it, you know?”

Rabbi Kales processed this information for a few moments and then said, “You cost Benjamin quite a bit.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means what I said,” Rabbi Kales said. “He paid a great deal of money for you.”

“He bought me?”

“There was some understanding that you had special skills,” the rabbi said. “The amount of reading you’ve done, the amount you recall, is astonishing. Do you know that?”

“I have a lot of free time,” David said.

“You’re smart,” Rabbi Kales said again. “If you actually believed anything you were reading, I have every faith you could be an excellent rabbi.”

“Why don’t you think I believe?”

“If you did,” he said, “you wouldn’t have threatened to kill me in the Bagel Café.”

David turned left from Alta onto Palmer Lane and came through the ornate front entrance to his neighborhood, the Lakes at Summerlin Greens. Normally—or at least for the last week, since he’d been given freedom to drive himself—David went back and forth through the rear gate, since there was never anyone there, no gardeners, no kids on their bikes, no old ladies in terry cloth walking their golden retrievers, still feeling like he needed to keep a low profile. Now, David decided to bring Rabbi Kales in through the front door, show him how he was living, suddenly feeling like he needed to let the rabbi know he wasn’t some kind of beast who went around threatening to kill people over breakfast. Not every day, anyway.

The front entrance had a blooming fountain surrounded by five-foot-tall white rose bushes in the middle of a half circle paved with replica Spanish brick, which was like driving over a dry creek bed. Ingenious. It was the one thing David and Slim Joe really agreed on: that if given the chance, they’d find the guy who designed the entrance and drag him over the bricks a few times, let him know that what looked nice wasn’t user-friendly.

He turned right on Trevino Way, then left on Nicklaus Street, then turned onto his own street, Snead Place.

David pulled through his own front gate and up his driveway. “I’m just going to run in, take my pill, and then I’ll be right out,” David said after he’d parked, not that he needed a pill for the pain, though he now thought about finding one of the Xanax he’d been given a few months ago. “Unless you want to come in.”

“No,” Rabbi Kales said. “It’s bad enough seeing you in Rabbi Gottlieb’s car. I step foot in his house, and I’m morally complicit in his death.”

“This is his house?”

“It was, yes,” Rabbi Kales said.

“I’m sleeping in his bed? Using his bathroom?”

“And living with the man who killed him,” Rabbi Kales said. “I don’t suppose Benjamin mentioned these details to you?”

“No, he skipped all that,” David said. Slim Joe didn’t seem like the killing type. Plus, Bennie said Rabbi Gottlieb had gone into Lake Mead. Guess he was pushed. “Truth is, I don’t need a pill. I just had to get out of that deli. That place was making me nuts. But now I come to find out I’m sleeping in a dead man’s bed. Next thing you’re gonna tell me I’m wearing his clothes.”

“He wasn’t quite as flashy as you. He dressed for the people, not himself. You’ll do the same.”

David didn’t know about that. What he did know was that he wasn’t going to spend another night in Rabbi Gottlieb’s bed. You sleep in a murdered man’s bed, that’s inviting doom. David didn’t believe in much, even Rabbi Kales could tell that, though what he did believe in was that you didn’t go around courting cosmic reparations. David didn’t even bother turning the car around—he just backed up all the way down the driveway.

“Tell me how to get to the temple,” David said.

Temple Beth Israel was only a few miles away, just on the other side of the Summerlin Parkway, on a mostly barren stretch of Hillpointe Road . . . which meant it was a few blocks away from hundreds of houses and gated colonies that looked suspiciously like the very one David lived in. For a people that spent forty
years lost in a desert, David found it more than a little dubious that they’d parked themselves in a place where it could happen just as easily, the replication of precisely manicured lawns, pastel and cream homes, and gold Lexuses a desert in itself.

The temple took up an entire square block and was abutted on either side by expanses of open field that, at that very moment, were being graded and watered. On one side was a sign that read
FUTURE HOME OF THE NEW BARER ACADEMY: NOW ENROLLING K
–12! and on the other was a sign that proclaimed it the
FUTURE HOME OF THE TEMPLE BETH ISRAEL COMMUNITY PARK & LEARNING CENTER
. Across the street was the Temple Beth Israel Cemetery and the Kales Mortuary & Home of Peace, which gave David his first bit of understanding regarding where the good Rabbi’s shake was coming from.

David pulled into the temple’s parking lot and saw that Bennie was already there, pacing back and forth in front of a playground filled with young children—they couldn’t have been more than five years old—while he talked on his cell phone. Though David could tell that the temple was fairly expansive just from its width on the street, he wasn’t expecting to see that the place was more like a campus of buildings in the back. There was a sign pointing to the
DOROTHY COPELAND CHILDREN’S CENTER
, which was a one-story building just adjacent to the playground, and another sign pointing toward the
TIKVAH PRESCHOOL
. Both were modern glass-and-steel buildings that looked to David more like the FBI office in Chicago than any place he ever went to school. The playground itself was like something from the model-home signs he saw all over Summerlin: a jungle gym that resembled a Navy SEAL training regiment, complete with rope jumps, tunnels, pools of percolating water, monkey bars over a padded blacktop, and a pegboard for climbing.