Gangster Nation. Tod Goldberg

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СКАЧАТЬ all my money.” He rubbed at the scar on his neck, from where he’d had his thyroid removed. It made him look hard core, like his throat had been slit and he’d lived, which, David supposed, was true, but it was actually a nervous habit Bennie had, the only one David had noticed, other than his propensity to pace. He was quiet for about a minute, thinking. David sensed his idea was taking root.

      Bennie Savone wasn’t a boss like Ronnie Cupertine was a boss, didn’t run a crew of a hundred-plus guys, wasn’t moving all the opiates in five states, plus back and forth into Canada, didn’t have a Mexican street gang on his payroll, wasn’t running multilevel rackets and gambling businesses, basically didn’t get down like Chicago at all. He ran his strip club, he ran Temple Beth Israel (kind of), had his construction outfit, took a little juice on some books, but was largely an independent contractor providing an indispensable service with the funeral and burial business, which made him unique. Didn’t answer to Chicago, New York, or Florida, never mind any of those Dixie Mafia or LA pussies. Bennie Savone had his own thing and, yeah, when an outfit came to do business in Las Vegas, even though it was an open city, they tended to come through Bennie first, not the other way around. But there wasn’t the structure of the Family in Chicago. No underboss. No capos. None of that Godfather shit. It was all a series of firewalls. There was Bennie. There was David. There used to be Rabbi Kales, but he’d been put on the farm. There was Ruben, handling the funeral business, and then there was Bennie’s crew, not that David ever saw them. Oh, he saw the construction workers hitting nails on the temple’s campus, but those were mostly Mexican laborers and actual employees of Savone Construction Partners, not guys running jobs.

      “If I were you,” David said, “I’d take the dentist out. You already did your time on him. If he dies now, you’re done. He’s off the books. And then I’d give his family money anyway.”

      “You would?”

      “Some appropriate amount.”

      Bennie cocked his head. “He’s in a care facility in Omaha.”

      “I could make a road trip,” David said.

      “No,” Bennie said, “you couldn’t.”

      “You afraid I’ll run?”

      “No,” Bennie said. “You got nowhere to go.” He fished through his bag of seeds, but it was just husks and salt, so he dumped the remnants into the grass, tossed the empty bag into the water, watched it float there. “You know someone in Chicago calls themselves Peaches?”

      “No. I don’t know anybody named Peaches.”

      “What’s with you guys and the names and shit?”

      “I don’t know,” David said. “Tradition, I guess.”

      “I’m hearing some words about him being the new number two out there,” Bennie said. This was what Bennie really wanted to talk about, though it was all connected. Every problem they had stemmed from the same tree. “And that he’s putting people in the ground.”

      “Like who?”

      “Mothers and fathers and wives and kids and sisters and shit,” Bennie said. “Going into nursing homes and hotshotting old-timers. Taking motherfuckers out on the street in Boca. Staging car accidents. All kinds of shit. I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t.”

      David tried to think of anyone who might be calling themselves Peaches, but it didn’t ring any bells. But then it occurred to him that the order of succession was probably pretty jacked up in Chicago these days. The only close blood relative Ronnie had in the game was . . . well, Sal Cupertine. And Sal’s son. Ronnie’s own son, James, was slow. “He from out of town?”

      “Personally? Sounds to me like Russians,” Bennie said.

      David used to not give a shit about the Russians. He didn’t like the way they operated in Chicago, in an ethical sense, killing families and pets, or all the purported ex-KGB fucks in Suburbans running counterfeit schemes and protection rackets out in Skokie, or that high-stakes poker shit they started to get in on for a while around the colleges, juicing twenty-year-olds for their student loan money, or even those old-school Chi-West Ukrainians with their goofy sweaters and allegiance to a bleak series of gray streets, stabbing Puerto Ricans for looking at them wrong. No, these days, because of the stories of his congregation, he thought about shit that had gone down in 1917. All that Pale of Settlement mishegoss. Pogroms and show trials and Cossacks chasing down toddlers with dogs. That shit pissed him off like it happened yesterday, because, in effect, it had. Three years ago, he was blissfully unenlightened. Now, could be he went to work and Gordon Simon would be waiting for him, wanting to talk about his nightmares, how he’d seen his little sister Lizi being killed on the streets of Odessa in his dreams again, set on fire, her ashes left to blow in the wind.

      “Ronnie wouldn’t be in business with Russians,” David said.

      “You think I’m working with the Triads because I enjoy their company?” David supposed not. “Global economy, Rabbi. Get used to it. That provincial shit is twentieth-century thinking. We’re twenty-first-century gangsters now.”

      “You know the story of the Jews of the Roman ghetto?”

      “Let me guess,” Bennie said, “they suffered and then died?”

      “No,” David said, “they were the one people who never knelt before Caligula. Fifteen hundred years of Holy Roman emperors and what the Jews did was never change, never paid homage to the ruling assholes. They set themselves on fire before they’d let someone baptize them.”

      “So, yeah, they suffered and then they died, like I said.”

      “They died pure of belief, souls intact.”

      “You saying you want us to go back to selling whiskey in olive oil bottles and stealing cigarettes?”

      “No,” David said. “What I’m saying is, root pulls are some shit from the old times. Burn the graves and salt the earth. All that.” He thought about it for a second. Thought about what it might mean for Jennifer and William. Thought about getting on a fucking bus, getting to Chicago in a few days, breaking into his house in the night, taking his family, running to . . . where? Wasn’t that always the question? “I don’t see it with the Russians. They wouldn’t kill for the Family. And they’d be no one’s number two. They got too much invested in Europe to have word get out that they’re doing dog work for Cosa Nostra, you know? Because Ronnie’s just gonna flip them to the FBI eventually and the story will be that the Russians tried to muscle the Mafia out of Chicago and lost. And then it’s a war. No one wants that.”

      “What about the Indians? Native Americans,” Bennie said. “Whatever the fuck they’re called now. Fuck if I know. If you people made it easy and went by normal names, I wouldn’t need to DNA-test my information with you. Give me a motherfucker named Scott every now and then.”

      Across the way, the string band was playing “Unforgettable” and David could see some of the old folks were already taking to the dance floor, the bride and groom not even back from taking pictures yet. Put on Nat King Cole and old Jews slow-danced. He saw it at every wedding and bar or bat mitzvah he went to.

      Doing business with the Russians and Chinese didn’t make sense to David. If some shit went down, they could just run back to their own countries. Working with the Gangster 2-6 back in Chicago made sense—the only place they had to flee to was their block or back to prison, two places they СКАЧАТЬ