“There’s a part of the Midrash that says, essentially, we are all allowed to find enjoyment in the company of others.” He’d found that if he simply dropped the Midrash into conversation, rejoined with the word “essentially,” and then paraphrased Neil Young or Bruce Springsteen, people left him feeling like they’d learned something. It was true that he knew a few things from the Midrash, had even read a great deal of it, but in dealing with an eighteen-year-old girl just learning the joys of a filmed gangbang, he didn’t feel the need to reach too deep. “Is a dream a lie if it doesn’t come true, Shoshana? Of course not. It’s something far, far worse. Do you understand?”
He let go of the girl’s hands then and passed her the handkerchief from the breast pocket of his sport coat. She wiped her eyes, blew her nose, and smiled wanly at David, though now he couldn’t even look her in the eye. “Thank you so much, Rabbi Cohen. I think I see that path now.” She slid out of the booth, not even bothering to return his hanky.
Bennie, unfortunately, took her spot. “Fuck’s wrong with her?”
“Confused about love,” David said.
Bennie nodded. “Who isn’t?”
It was weird. Over the course of their rather unconventional business relationship, Bennie Savone had found it necessary to use David as his father confessor too, even though he knew that Rabbi David Cohen was previously Sal Cupertine; that before he was a fake rabbi, he was a Chicago “associate” who’d accidentally killed three undercover Donnie Brasco motherfuckers on the same botched contract; and that, barring a sudden religious experience the likes of which only happened in prison movies, David’s moral center was still pretty opaque. Still, David reasoned that Bennie needed to talk to someone, particularly since the one person Bennie could depend on previously had been the guy David replaced three years ago, Rabbi Ronald Kales, who also happened to be Bennie’s father-in-law … or was until that unfortunate “boating accident” on Lake Mead claimed his life.
David knew that Bennie’s decision not to fish out of the same shallow, polluted pond of local and loyal Italian women or coke-whore strippers most of his friends and coworkers had, opting instead to get connected with the real Las Vegas money—the Summerlin Jews—was still a source of some lingering organizational shame; an issue David was certainly intimate with.
“Yes, well,” David said, “she’s still young.”
“My daughter tells me Shoshana likes black guys.”
Sometimes David tried to imagine what his life would be like if he were still in Chicago, if he’d somehow had a different kind of upbringing, so that now he was selling real estate on the North Shore or running a sports bar or deli or was just a fucking Culligan man, his ends meeting, his life happy. Would he still end up on Tuesday mornings gossiping about whom eighteen-year-old girls were or were not fucking?
“I have to prepare for a talk at the Senior Center this afternoon,” David said, “so I’m afraid I don’t have much time to chat. Can we get down to business?”
“Of course, rabbi. I’d hate to get in the way of your busy schedule of dick and ribbon cuttings.” Bennie reached into his attaché, pulled out a manila envelope, and slid it across the table. “You got a funeral on Thursday and one coming up next week too. Maybe two. Have to see how that one shakes out. Got a very sick relative. Could go anytime.”
David just nodded. The holidays tended to be Bennie’s busy season with murder, and now that they were flying bodies (or at least parts of them) in on private jets periodically from Chicago or driving them up from Los Angeles, David expected the news. Plus, David sort of marveled at Bennie’s ingenuity; the guy seemed like a dumb crook from the outside, but on the inside he had a real aptitude for business. Stan and Alta Goldblatt might have been big donors, but Bennie Savone, with his Jewish wife and three Jewish children, was like fucking UNICEF to Temple Beth Israel. He single-handedly financed the building of Summerlin’s first Jewish mortuary and cemetery behind the temple’s expansive campus on Hillpointe, championed the new high school that was breaking ground in the spring, and, of course, regularly met with the esteemed rabbi over at the Bagel Café to discuss the livelihood of the Jewish faith (or whatever the fuck that shit-rag mob columnist John L. Smith in the
Review-Journal
said in one of his weekly innuendo-fests; if David ever had the desire to start killing people again, he’d start with that hack). David imagined that Bennie’s long-range foresight could help a lot of Fortune 500 companies—it’s not like any other mobsters had the fucking chutzpah to bury their enemies and war dead in a cemetery, or the willingness to put all the pieces in place years before they’d even see them in action. That Bennie earned most of his living from strip clubs didn’t bother anyone at the temple. That’s where everyone did business anyway.
“Fine,” David said. “Anything else?”
“Yeah, my wife wants to know what your Hanukkah plans are this year.”
“I’ll be staying home,” David replied, though the truth was that at least half the time would be spent at the temple making sure the young rabbi he’d entrusted with most of the social activities didn’t burn the fucking place down, literally. That kid was a menace around an open flame.
“You know you got an open invitation,” Bennie said. “Come over all eight nights. Spin the fucking dreidel. Eat fucking pancakes. Listen to Neil Diamond sing ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.’ You like Neil Diamond, right, rabbi?”
What David really wanted, more than anything, was to get up from the booth, climb into his Range Rover, and drive it into a brick wall, just to feel something authentic again, even if it was pain. Because this shit with Bennie? This was an existential suffering he could do without. “The Jewish Sina-tra,” David said.
Shoshana brought David his bagel and coffee and discreetly set his hanky back down on the table. He looked up at her and she seemed … happy. Like she’d had a tremendous weight lifted from her shoulders and could now go on living her life in perfect happiness, her every orifice filled with big black cock. David felt something shift in his bowels; something he thought might be his conscience picking up enema speed.
“Listen,” David said quietly after Shoshana left, “I gotta get out of here. A vacation. Something. I’m about to lose my mind. Promise me, after Christmas, you’ll look at this situation. It’s been fifteen years, Benjamin.” He said Bennie’s full first name just to piss him off a little. “You realize I haven’t even left the
city limits
since 9/11?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Bennie said, “sure. Talk to me again after the holidays. We’ll see what we can do. Don’t want you getting soft … Sally.”
Rabbi David Cohen looked out the window again and wondered how it was he was the only fucking person who
happened
in Vegas and now had to fucking
stay
in Vegas. Put his old mug shot on a tourist brochure, then see how many people kept visiting.
When David first came to Las Vegas in 1993—back when he was still Sal Cupertine—he couldn’t get over how wide open the desert was, how at night, if you weren’t on the Strip or downtown, the sky seemed to stretch for miles unimpeded. At dusk, Red Rock Canyon would glow golden with strands of dying sunlight and he’d imagine what his wife Jennifer would have made of the vision. She was always taking art classes at the community college in Chicago, though never with much success, but he thought then that if she were with him in Las Vegas and had tried to paint the sunset, well, he’d pretend to love her interpretation. Used to be pretending was hard work. He was only thirty-five when he got to this place, but still felt seventeen, which meant he wasn’t scared of anyone and didn’t give a damn if he hurt people’s feelings. It was a good skill set for his previous line of work, but David had long ago concluded it was shit on his interpersonal relationships. And the irony, of course, was that now all he ever did anymore was pretend while listening to people’s problems. David was inclined to believe that his adopted religion was right about heaven and hell being a place on earth.
It was 4 o’clock on Wednesday and David was already late for a meeting at the temple about next year’s Jewish Book Fair, but he couldn’t seem to shake the feeling that the previous morning’s conversation with Shoshana and the one directly following it with Bennie had somehow clarified a few things that had been gnawing at his mind the last several weeks. So instead of attending the meeting, he drove his temple-purchased Range Rover the four blocks from his temple-purchased home on the fifteenth hole at TPC over to Bruce Trent Park, where he wandered among the stalls being set up for the farmer’s market and tried to line up his priorities.
He stopped and smelled some apples, made idle talk about funnel cakes with the Mexican girl fixing them over what looked like a Bunson burner, watched children fling themselves over and under the monkey bars. If he closed his eyes and just focused on what he could hear and smell, it was almost like he was back in Chicago, though by now the sounds and smells tended to mostly remind him of his first days in Las Vegas when he spent all of his time foolishly searching for things that reminded him of home. It had grown increasingly difficult for David to even conjure
that
memory accurately since the landscape, both mental and physical, had changed so drastically in the intervening years. Where there used to be open vistas, the Howard Hughes Corporation had built the master planned community of Summerlin, filling in the desert with thousands of houses, absurd traffic circles instead of stop signs, acres of green grass, and the commerce such development demanded: looming casinos that eroded his favorite mountain views, Target after Target, a Starbucks every thirty paces, and shopping centers anchored on one corner by a Smith’s and on the other by some bar that was just a video poker machine with a roof.
But something about today seemed to cloak everything in radiance. Orthodox Jews tended to talk about such things as if they were moments of vast spiritual enlightenment, though David tended to think the Orthodox Jews were a little on the fruity side of things—always dropping Ezekiel’s vision of the Valley of Bones like that guy wasn’t a fucking whack job of the first order—so it was a good thing Temple Beth Israel was reform, which meant David just had to know some of that hocus-pocus shit, but didn’t have to talk about it too much and certainly didn’t have to dress in that stupid black getup. Still, his mind felt clear today, and whether it was a religious experience or just the settling of some internal debts didn’t particularly vex David, because the result was the same, chiefly that he knew he needed to get the fuck out of Las Vegas before he killed himself and took twenty or thirty motherfuckers with him in the process.
That his life had become a suffocation of ironies didn’t bother him. No, it was the realization that in just three weeks he’d turn fifty and yet he constantly waited for his front door to be kicked in by U.S. Marshals, that he wasn’t some dumb punk anymore who could just live in blindness while other people controlled his exterior life, and, well, he missed his wife more and more with each passing moment.
The Savone family had been good to him, he couldn’t deny that—they’d set him up in this life when they could have scattered him over the Midwest one tendon at a time, even had Rabbi Kales privately tutor him for two years before he started this long con, first as an assistant at the temple’s Children’s Center (where he actually had responsibilities for the first time in his life), and then, steadily, they pushed him up through the temple’s ranks until, when it became clear that Rabbi Kales’s old age and inability to shut the fuck up had become a liability, he ascended to the top spot.
He had a beautiful home. A beautiful car. If he needed a woman, Bennie took care of that too. The problem was that the world around him was changing: Locally, only Bennie knew he was a fake, all the other players having gone down in a fit of meshugass over at the Wild Horse strip club that left a tourist dead and another one without the ability to speak. Eventually, Bennie would end up getting busted on some RICO shit (or, praise be, Bennie’s wife Rachel would get a fucking slit of conscience and/or retrospect and would roll on that fat fuck) and then one morning David would wake up and the U.S. Marshals would shove a big hook in his mouth and dangle him all over the press, the big fish that got away finally on the line.
And then there was the paralyzing issue of technology: When the Savone family moved him out of Chicago after the fuck-up, he had to leave everything behind, including his wife Jennifer and his infant son William. At first, it was easy to keep them out of his mind—it was either forget them or get the death penalty, which would probably be meted out by about fifteen cops in a very small cell. But as time went on and his life became a mundane series of mornings spent holding babies’ bloody dicks, brunch meetings filled with whiny plasticized rich bitches who couldn’t decide which charity should get the glory of their attention, afternoons spent in pink and yellow polo shirts as he golfed with men who would have fucking spit on him in Chicago, and nights spent alone in his Ethan Allen–showroom living room, flipping channels, jerking off to Cinemax, thinking about disappearing, just getting the fuck out, moving to Mexico, or Canada, or even Los Angeles, he began paving roads toward Jennifer and William.
It was so easy: He just typed their names into Google and came up with William’s MySpace page. William was seventeen now and if his pictures were any judge, was in desperate need of some guidance. Every single photo, his pants were half-way down his ass, he was throwing some fucking gang sign that actually spelled out
MOB
, and he had a Yankees cap—a fucking Yankees cap!—turned sideways on his head, which made him look like a retard, though not unlike half the kids David saw Saturdays at the temple. He only saw Jennifer in the background of a few shots and it broke his heart to see how old she’d become, how her straight blond hair was now silver, how her body had grown frumpy. Time and pressure had turned her into an old woman while he was busy fucking strippers and running a goddamned Jewish empire in the middle of the desert.