Gangster Nation. Tod Goldberg

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СКАЧАТЬ out the whole Family to the Chicago Tribune. Didn’t even tell him how he’d worked the game perfectly, getting Hopper’s head to a Dumpster in Chicago a few weeks later, right after the story hit the streets. All he’d said was that Ronnie had tried to buy in after Bennie was arrested and that David—well, Sal—had threatened to kill him if he didn’t keep to his own business, that his Vegas card was pulled.

      Not that it mattered. They were triple fucked. Once Sal’s faked death was talked about on Good Morning America, no families east of the Mississippi would touch work that went through any part of Chicago, and likewise, Bennie wasn’t keen on having any direct or indirect communication with the Family, not while he was in county jail working on his own beef. And since the Family had vouched for Bennie’s burial service to Detroit and Cleveland after Bennie bought Sal from Ronnie, everyone now considered Bennie to be Chicago-affiliated. A fucking mess all around.

      “Every now and then,” Bennie said, “saying you’re sorry even when you’re not is a thing you should do. Makes you seem human. People like the sentiment.”

      “Guys the Chinese are sending,” David said, like Bennie hadn’t even spoken, “are young. Street kids.”

      “And?” Bennie said. “You get birth certificates before you did a job?”

      “I’m just saying,” David said, “teenagers got parents who give a shit.”

      On top of that, David just wasn’t comfortable with a bunch of Chinese guys who were obviously not Jews sitting on the tables. Bennie knew the Triads from the Wild Horse, where they moved girls in and out over the years, Bennie and the Triads’ guy in San Francisco having done business since the late ’80s, escort shit, laundering chips, even pills back in the day, though Bennie was out of that now. Drugs, you depended on addicts and criminals not smart enough to get off their own block to do business.

      Bennie Savone wasn’t putting his livelihood in the hands of people who were still wrapped up in what public housing development they represented, and upper management in the Triads didn’t get down like that, either. They were a cash-and-influence business stateside. That was Bennie’s game, too . . . though David was beginning to wonder how much of either was enough. David was in the game to earn a living, initially, and then he was in the game because he couldn’t get out of it even if he wanted to, but he didn’t want to, not until he fucked everything up, and now? Well, now he was in the game for good. Bennie, on the other hand, had enough money that he could live comfortably out of it all . . . if it wasn’t for the fact that he knew where all the bodies were buried, literally, and that meant someone would come for him if he tried to walk away. Which is probably part of why he bought David in the first place, in addition to his desire to run this long con.

      “Our options are limited right now. I get out, we can be pickier.” Bennie paused, working through something. “You trust them? The Chinese?”

      “I don’t trust anybody,” David said. “But I’m not working with the living ones.”

      Bennie nodded. “Ford asking any questions?”

      “Never,” David said.

      “That’s good,” Bennie said, still working in his mind. The thing about Bennie Savone: He liked people to think he was stupid, liked people to underestimate him. Because he wasn’t stupid and he shouldn’t be underestimated, and that gave him an advantage in everything, self-awareness not exactly a trait of most crooks. David hadn’t taken him seriously to start with, seeing as he was used to working for Ronnie, who was a good businessman, but didn’t see the bigger picture like Bennie did. Bennie liked the slow bleed. “Any collection problems?”

      “Everything is smooth,” David said. “First-quarter tuition comes in next week.” Temple Beth Israel had a preschool, the Tikvah, and a K–12 operation rolling now, the Barer Academy, six hundred students, the temple minting money every day, never mind that they were also loaning tuition money out to families who couldn’t afford the full out of pocket, charging 12 percent interest, which was a shitty vig in David’s opinion, but it would be bad PR to be charging more than Citibank did. Though if you were late, that number jumped to 23 percent, which was better, but still six points less than Visa.

      If someone missed two payments, the temple would start getting liens right away, none of that Fair Debt Reporting crap, the temple got every family to sign contracts allowing property liens, never mind the public shame aspect. Worst-case scenario, David figured if someone had to accidentally get electrocuted at home to get their life insurance to pay the debt, well, then he’d go and fuck with their pool light. It hadn’t come to that, thankfully, because the nice thing was that everyone was rich as fuck these days.

      “How the donations looking?”

      “We’ll get our bump a little early,” David said. “Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur hit in mid-September.” David knew that Bennie had no concept of how the Jewish calendar worked, and the fact was David didn’t get it either. Rabbi Kales had tried to explain the lunar calendar, the concept that there were no hours in a day, only light and the absence of light. David just couldn’t get the reasoning behind it, when science had it all pretty much settled. Rabbi Kales told him, eventually, that if he had a problem with it, he should take it up with Maimonides.

      “Shit, that’s another six, eight weeks.”

      “There a problem?”

      “Some liquidity issues, that’s all,” Bennie said, a touch too dismissively. He yanked a handful of grass out by the root, smelled it, tossed it into the water. “That dentist fucker? His family has me in civil court. They already got two million from the insurance company and now they’re trying to get another five out of me. Pay for his long-term care, lost wages, everything. Fucker could live fifty years or he could die in his sleep tonight.”

      “I’d write the check,” David said.

      “You got an extra five million sitting around?”

      In fact, David had about two hundred grand in cash squirreled away in safe deposit boxes around the city, and that was just what he’d been able to skim. He didn’t dare keep the money in his house, since Bennie had closed-circuit cameras hidden all over the fucking property, plus if trouble came down and his house was surrounded, last thing he wanted was for the cash to go to the feds. That money belonged to his wife and kid. Anyway, nice thing about Las Vegas, everyone kept cash in safe deposit boxes. Monday morning, 9:00, there was a line of strippers, bouncers, bartenders, dealers, and pit bosses making their deposits from the weekend and none of them were putting it into their checking accounts, and no one thought any different about it.

      David figured he needed closer to a million, cash, before he could make his move. Get his wife and kid, fly to South America, wherever Butch and Sundance ended up; that seemed nice, until the army showed up. But he wouldn’t get there if Bennie kept getting nicked. Or if Bennie kept running the business himself, since he controlled the flow of cash. It was a double-edged sword David hadn’t quite figured how to grasp. Bennie had assured him from the start that he’d be getting paid handsomely, had shown him the ledgers, but didn’t let him hold his own money.

      “I pay,” Bennie continued, “every pervert who got punched in the mouth at my club is gonna come after me. I’ll be in court the rest of my life.” He picked a seed from his teeth, then flicked it out from under his fingernail.

      “They don’t want to be embarrassed, you said so yourself,” David said. “First guy who sues you, get a picture of him in the newspaper, have a girl from the club tell Curran that she remembered the guy shooting his load on her, and believe me, they’ll СКАЧАТЬ