Gangsterland: A Novel (4 page)

“That’ll be fine,” Sal said.

“You start having a problem, just get on the walkie-talkie and the driver will pull over,” the worker said.

They had all the angles worked out, which made Sal think maybe this wasn’t the first time the Family had smuggled a man out of town this way, which gave him an odd bit of relief.

“This is where we part ways,” Fat Monte said.

“How long we know each other?” Sal asked.

“Couple concurrent sentences,” Fat Monte said, being funny now, which gave Sal pause. Fat Monte wasn’t exactly known for his quick wit.

“Ten years for robbery,” Sal said. “Another fifteen for assault.”

“That’s about right,” Fat Monte said. “Listen, I need your phone and your piece.”

It was polite enough, not an order, which made Sal willing to hand them over. Fat Monte threw the phone onto the ground and then crushed it under his shoe, but didn’t bother to pocket the .38.

“You ever come back to Chicago,” Fat Monte said, “I’ll have to kill you and your entire family, and I don’t want to do that.” Fat Monte clapped Sal once on the shoulder and then walked back toward the Corolla.

It wasn’t five minutes later, after he had found a reasonably comfortable way to sit wedged up against a wall of meat, that Sal heard the two quick gunshots.

CHAPTER ONE

D
avid Cohen
. Sal Cupertine rolled that name around in his mouth.
David Cohen.
When he was a kid, he hated his own name, probably because every kid on the block had an uncle named Sal. But as he got older, he started to like it, started to see how it conveyed a sense of power and menace, two things he liked, at least in the abstract.

David
was biblical, which had its own worth. Sal wasn’t a religious man, never had been, and he certainly couldn’t be if he killed people for a living. Residual guilt and remorse he could deal with, but trying to reason with an entire
other
life, one that started after death? Sal couldn’t be bothered with that shit.

Cohen.
Well. That was something else all together. Sal had known a fair amount of Jews in his life, and the Family always got along with the Kosher Nostra that moved ecstasy and counterfeit paper around the college campuses; those guys were mostly Israeli and Russian Jews, the days of Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky pretty much a thing of the past once they figured they could get rich by owning Hollywood and the banks. The Israelis and Russians in Chicago were young and respectful
since they viewed the Family like something mystical they’d seen only on television and in the movies.

All those guys were named Yaakov or Boris or Vitaly or Zvika, and they had thick accents and wore vests and big watches and drove Range Rovers, so everyone knew they weren’t your local Rosenblatts and Levys. With real business, though, they were ruthless. They’d send a message by killing a guy’s dog and girlfriend; fuck him up emotionally for the rest of his life without ever actually putting hands on him. Someone owes you money, you break their spirit and they will pay you forever, they said, and though he hated to admit it, Sal saw the wisdom in it. The problem was that the only way the Family had stayed in business for so long was that they didn’t hurt innocent civilians or pets. You kill a guy’s kids or dog, that’s the sort of shit that ends up in the newspaper and actually gets investigated. Kill some shitbag, it’s just a dead shitbag. Kill four federal agents, and your entire world could change.

But
David Cohen
? That wasn’t a tough guy. That was a guy who fixed your glasses. That was your lawyer.

“David Cohen,” Sal said, but it didn’t sound quite right and probably wouldn’t for another two weeks, or at least until he got his jaw unwired.

Six months he’d been gone, and during that time no one had addressed him directly or looked him in the eye. Seven days he’d spent in and out of refrigerated meat trucks while they figured out what to do with him before they finally dumped him in Las Vegas.

Or at least he was pretty sure it was Las Vegas.

The local newspaper, the
Review-Journal
, had a columnist named Harvey B. Curran who spent half his time writing gossip about all the “wiseguys” in town and the other half writing
gossip about the people who were taking bribes from the “wiseguys” in order to further whatever their aims. And there was the fact that Oscar Goodman was probably going to run for mayor, every night on the local news another feature about how he’d revitalize the city and bring back that Rat Pack vibe, no one even giving a shit that he was the mouthpiece for fucking Mount Olympus—Lansky, Leonetti, the whole Scarfo family.

Everything was all out in the open. Except, of course, for Sal. Six months he’d been in the same house, not allowed to walk out the front door, only out back, only at night. Not that he’d been up for any travel, not with the litany of surgeries he’d gone through: a new nose and chin, a bunch of teeth ripped out and replaced with permanent implants. They’d lasered off his tattoos, shaved his head, got him to start wearing glasses. And the last thing, he hoped, was this new jaw. Even the surgeries had been done in secret—driven in the back of a windowless van in the middle of the night and hustled into a doctor’s office, Sal shot up full of anesthesia and then waking up back in the house. It was at the point now where he didn’t even bother taking the pain medication. Every part of his body hurt, and all the Percocets in the world weren’t going to make it any better, not while he was being held captive in an elegant two-story house with a saltwater pool, indoor hot tub and sauna, full gym, and a good five hundred cable channels pumped into every room in the joint.

And now this: David Cohen.

Sal was doing curls in the gym when Slim Joe, the kid who lived with him, came in and handed over a stuffed manila envelope.

“What’s this?” Sal asked.

“Bennie told me to give it to you,” Slim Joe said. “I didn’t ask
any fucking questions.” Slim Joe didn’t ask about shit. Which was probably good. But Sal could set the house on fire and Slim Joe wouldn’t bother to ask why, he’d just sit there and watch it burn, particularly if Sal told him that it was being done on Bennie’s order. Bennie was Bennie Savone, a name which didn’t mean much to Sal when he was living in Chicago but which apparently carried weight in Las Vegas . . . enough so that he showed up in Curran’s gossip column fairly regularly. He ran a strip club in town called the Wild Horse, but what the column always alluded to was his marriage into a religious Jewish family, the Kales, who weren’t involved in any wiseguy business. Unless you counted Bennie’s father-in-law, since he was the rabbi at Temple Beth Israel.

Not that Bennie had mentioned any of this to Sal. In fact, Sal still wasn’t entirely sure how he’d ended up hiding out with the Savone family, since the Family in Chicago wasn’t in business with them prior. It wasn’t his place to know or to ask, but the way Bennie treated him—respectful, but also clearly as a subordinate—indicated to Sal that whatever deal had been made was not a short-term arrangement. That, and all the surgeries to change his face.

Sal took the envelope into his bedroom and emptied its contents out onto his bed. There was a birth certificate, a social security card, college transcripts from Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, even old utility bills, all in the name of David Cohen. And affixed to a copy of a rental agreement for the very house he was already staying in—an agreement that was drafted that very same day between himself and the temple—was a Post-it note written in Bennie’s careful cursive:
This is you. Commit it to memory, Rain Man. All of it.

Rain Man. He hadn’t heard that name since Chicago.

There was more: a family tree that showed David Cohen’s genetic history, all the way back to Poland in the 1800s; a weathered gold-leafed copy of the Talmud; a yarmulke.

“David Cohen,” he said again.

Sal Cupertine got up from his bed and walked into his bathroom. It was the nicest bathroom he’d ever had: travertine floors, a sunken Jacuzzi tub, two sinks, a stand-up shower with a rainfall shower head and built-in seating area. At first, Sal couldn’t figure out a pressing need for the seating area, unless you took a lot of showers with other people, which then made him miss his wife, Jennifer, so acutely he felt sick. He covered the seating area with shampoo bottles and soaps and towels, whatever he could find, really, so that it was now just a shelf. At the far end of the bathroom was a walk-in closet roughly the size of the bedroom he and Jennifer shared in their house in Chicago. It was so big, in fact, that it had a closet of its own: a cedar-lined coat closet that was kept cooler than the rest of the house by a separate air-conditioning unit. The closet was filled with designer clothes: a dozen suits, dress shirts, slacks, sweaters, shoes . . . all still with the price tags on them. One pair of shoes was marked down from seven hundred dollars to five hundred, or about what Sal would reasonably expect to spend on shoes for an entire year.

The whole house, really, was beyond what Sal could ever have afforded, though it was certainly within the grasp of someone like his cousin Ronnie.

Or maybe someone like Rabbi David Cohen.

The truth was, for the last six months Sal had been trying to figure out a way to escape. He didn’t know where he planned to escape to, exactly, since he knew that going back to Chicago would be murder—either at the hands of the cops or at the
hands of the Family. Fat Monte made that clear enough. No one had said anything to him about what went down in Chicago with the Donnie Brascos, but Sal knew for certain that if the Family let him live, they had a higher purpose for him or, more likely, managed to get something in exchange for him from the Savones, since killing the feds had to have caused a big problem, the kind of problem that would ripple through all the families, would cause innocent (or relatively innocent) men to get strung up on other charges, just so the
Tribune
and
Sun-Times
would have something positive to report.

Besides, if he showed back up in Chicago, he’d have, at most, only an hour to get in and out before someone caught wind of his presence. Between the snitches, the cops (even the crooked cops would turn his ass in—that went without saying), and the feds, never mind average Joe Q. Publics out there looking to pick up a reward, the odds of him getting dimed were high. Still, he entertained ideas of snatching Jennifer and William in the middle of the night and riding off for Canada . . . but then he was always struck with a question he simply did not have an answer for:
And then what?

It was a question that paralyzed him with its simplicity. Ronnie had promised to get his family out in due time, a promise Sal realized was empty almost as soon as the meat truck took off that night, but he still woke up each morning and searched the bed for Jennifer. Sal had managed to survive fifteen years in the game by keeping strict habits. Even the smallest ones were not easily broken.

Sal leaned down and turned on the Jacuzzi and watched for a few moments while the tub filled with water, the jets sputtering to life.
A year
, he thought. A year of being Rabbi David Cohen, and he’d have some money, some connections, a way to get out
of this mess. He’d already done six months, after all. What was another year? Maybe he could get Jennifer and William to Las Vegas, though he knew the feds would be watching them for a good long time, just in case he tried to make contact. So maybe two years. Yes. Two years. Two years and he’d make his move.

So the Rabbi David Cohen went back into the bedroom, picked up all the paperwork he’d been given, and set it all on a chair next to the Jacuzzi. He then stripped out of his clothes and got into the tub, let the jets pound away at his back and neck until he began to understand that Sal Cupertine—all the things he’d done, all the people he’d loved—was, for the foreseeable future, dead.

And then he began reading.

It took three more weeks, but by the time David Cohen was due to have his jaw unwired, Bennie deemed it safe for him to go out the front door of his own house. It was two weeks before Thanksgiving, and David had spent the previous weeks reading and reading and reading, every day some new rabbinical text dropped off at the house with specific instructions of what should be read. David appreciated the attention to detail that was going into his cover, but he couldn’t help but think it was all a bit overboard. Was anyone going to walk up to him in the grocery store and demand to know his opinions on different parts of the Midrash? Or when he was putting some guy out, was he supposed to stop and educate the fucker on what it meant to be a veteran of history and the whole idea of noblesse oblige? It seemed excessive. The readings all came with corresponding quizzes—ten or fifteen questions written in florid cursive that David was to complete and return. He didn’t bother
to cheat. He just answered the questions and hoped whoever was grading him took into consideration that he’d only barely passed high school, though that had more to do with falling for Jennifer in senior year than anything else.