Gangster Nation. Tod Goldberg

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СКАЧАТЬ he could knife one guy, take his gun, and kill the other guy. He’d done that before. Average room filled with average people, there weren’t many who’d stick around after seeing someone bleed out through the neck or get a knife in the ear—which was a bad way to kill a person, since it was hard to get a knife out of someone’s head—or hear someone screaming when they got their eyes slit in two, which wasn’t fatal, but it was some horror movie shit, the kind of thing David was prepared to do if he needed to get out of a crowded room, fast.

      He kept a Glock cut into the passenger seat of his Range Rover, easy enough to get to when he was driving, since he never rode with anyone, and not easily found in a cursory flashlight search if he got pulled over, not that Rabbi David Cohen ever got pulled over in Summerlin, but he didn’t keep it on his person out in public. Couldn’t very well be golfing with a city councilman and have his Glock fall out of his bag. Even if everyone in Nevada pretended to have a gun, that whole Wild West ethos a thing in Nevada, David was of the opinion that rabbis couldn’t be Wyatt Earping motherfuckers on the street. Anyway, David knew that most people had no real idea how to use a gun—even cops were scared of killing somebody—unless they were on a shooting range, fitted with noise-suppressing headgear, protective goggles, and ceramic vests. It wasn’t like TV, where everyone was a trained assassin waiting for the right moment to show their disregard for human life.

      But David was. That was a difference that mattered.

      “I saw that the weathergirl from Channel Thirteen made the show,” Bennie said now. “Jordan still sleeping with her?”

      “I don’t know,” David said. “He doesn’t confess to me.”

      “Any other notables I gotta worry about?”

      “The guy from Channel Eight who believes in aliens was in the back, drinking White Russians.”

      “That Kenny Rogers–looking guy?”

      “Yeah,” David said.

      “Like there’s not enough bad shit in the real world? You gotta go searching for worse things in space? Makes no sense to me.”

      “It’s entertainment,” David said.

      “That’s what worries me.”

      David never worried about the local media surprising him, since they came out to the temple somewhat regularly for events—the Kugel Bake Off for Social Justice, the Jewish Book Festival, the annual Hanukkah Carnival and Menorah Lighting event—and besides, they never seemed to be sure whose side they were on when it came to organized crime, only that Mob business was good for everyone’s bottom line.

      One day, Harvey B. Curran, the Review-Journal’s Mob gossip columnist, would be insinuating that more trouble was about to come down on local wiseguys, that the feds were massed outside the gates of the Vineyards, had put recording devices into the neighborhood cats, were buying houses in the Scotch 80s, had moles in the gaming board, were running anthropologists around Lake Mead as the water receded, pulling out dead bodies, running DNA, capturing plates out front of Piero’s, strong-arming UPS drivers, bribing maids, everyone about a week away from a major indictment, the whole city about to be tossed up. Nothing anyone could confirm or deny.

      The next day, Curran would be going on about what assholes the corporate casino billionaires were, how life was better when the Mob ran the Strip, since at least you knew where you stood with those guys.

      The day after that, there’d be a half-page ad for happy hour at the Wild Horse, some nineteen-year-old blond jerking off a bottle of champagne. By Sunday, there’d be a color photo of Mayor Oscar Goodman in the same space, pimping at a fund-raiser for the Mob museum he wanted the city to build smack on the spot where Estes Kefauver held hearings on Cosa Nostra back in the day, David wondering if they’d be building museums for the Crips and Bloods and Mexican Mafia, too. Maybe toss one up for the Skinheads. Come with a prison tattoo, get a free tour. He thought maybe he’d write a letter to the editor, get on the record about how stupid this idea was, that the Jews didn’t support celebrating the Mob, any mob.

      But before he could put pen to paper, the Mercury, one of those shit-rag weekly papers, would do an investigative piece, send a girl into a strip club and have her report back on the dark shit she’d witnessed, the local Mob so fucking stupid that they didn’t even run background checks on their dancers. The Mercury would get photos of known felons counting stacks of cash in the break room, guns out, like they were waiting for someone to tell them to go to the fucking mattresses, and David would think: Build a museum and bury these dumb fucks in the foundation. Start fresh.

      It wasn’t, David understood, the right frame of mind to have in this situation.

      “You get a copy of the guest list?” Bennie asked.

      “I will,” David said.

      “Get the photos, too,” Bennie said, like this was David’s first gig.

      “I will,” David said. The temple had provided the wedding planner and the photographer, which made procuring these things no problem. David was the middleman on everything these days, which meant paperwork and spreadsheets and calls on Saturday nights with questions about chevron vs. amphitheater seating arrangements for the ceremony and did he have a preference in terms of a wireless mic or a handheld? David was most comfortable not speaking at all, though you couldn’t be a rabbi and stay silent. He couldn’t avoid people taking his picture, but he could mitigate, when possible, how clear he looked. Lately he’d become one of those guys who could wear a hat. Initially he’d adopted the look so he wouldn’t have to worry about cameras catching his face, but now he sort of liked it, though you couldn’t exactly rock a fedora while officiating a wedding.

      “Let Rachel pick out the nice ones to give to Naomi,” Bennie said. “She’s got an eye for that sort of thing.” David didn’t particularly like spending time with Rachel Savone. Not that he disliked her, merely that she knew he wasn’t what he seemed, had figured out he’d had plastic surgery, had even confided in him that she was thinking of leaving her husband. But that hadn’t worked out. Not yet, anyway. “I don’t want Rosen getting any of this shit before we go over it, got it? He’ll have you on a fucking poster in his car wash if we’re not careful.”

      “I don’t think you need to worry about Rosen,” David said. “Not for a little while, anyway. He’s not looking for trouble. Not if he’s inviting his mistress to his daughter’s wedding.”

      “Rosen is always about thirty minutes from going balls up.” He pointed at the wedding reception going on across the way. “I paid for more of that than he did. Two months I’ve been waiting for some word on this project we’ve got cooking up on Craig Road. Supposed to be getting funding from the Japs or something.” He shook his head. “Fucking money pit, is what it is. Best thing that could happen is if the city decided the ground was polluted and could only be zoned for a nuclear dump. Get a government contract, write our own ticket.” He paused, thinking. “You ever drive out that way?”

      “No.”

      “See what I’m saying? I should have just made the motherfucker pay me.”

      “He would have called the cops,” David said.

      “You’d think so,” Bennie said. “But they don’t. This town? People would rather be in business with me than risk embarrassment. Isn’t that something?”

      A helicopter swept up in the air from the Vineyards’ helipad a block away, behind the clubhouse, climbed a few hundred feet, СКАЧАТЬ