Gangster Nation. Tod Goldberg

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СКАЧАТЬ he said, after a while. He picked his drink back up, tossed it back. “I wouldn’t be happy paying workmen’s comp insurance for a thousand employees. I don’t need that.”

      “You wouldn’t be doing that with us,” Peaches said. “And Howard Hughes won’t be showing up to buy you out. We’re looking at a capital infusion and then you can name your involvement. Because Mr. Cupertine, I’m looking around? And I don’t see your next foray.”

      “I don’t need a next one,” he said.

      “And yet,” Peaches said, “you can’t stop your soldiers from knocking over liquor stores.”

      Ronnie smiled then. “I’m almost entirely legal now.”

      “Which only means you’re still a crook,” Peaches said. “War is coming. Isn’t gonna be guys in suits shooting each other on the streets. It’s gonna be some sixteen-year-old in a lowered Honda Civic shooting an AK out his window at you and your kids while you’re walking into Wrigley. You want to survive? You gotta move rural. That’s the next wave. That’s where the money’s going. And you want to beat the Cartels, you get out of that junk bullshit and get into pills. Oxy. Klonopin. Ambien. No one gets shot picking up a prescription from CVS. And tribes, we’ve got our clinics, our own doctors, our old folks’ homes, our own health insurance. There’s a lot of us, yeah? And we’ve got our own land and our own cops. What we don’t have is someone like you. The boss of bosses.”

      Ronnie said, “Why haven’t I met you before?”

      “I don’t get invited to social functions.”

      “I bet,” Ronnie said. “Where you from?”

      “You don’t know?”

      “I want it on tape,” Ronnie said. Wasn’t he a smart motherfucker.

      “Wisconsin,” Peaches said. “Been down here a few years. Did a couple years in West Texas, living with some cousins. Did a spot in Joliet.”

      “How long?”

      “A year.”

      “On what?”

      “Assault with a deadly weapon.” He’d put a guy’s head through a television.

      “A year is fast.”

      “I know how to behave,” Peaches said. “Plus, it happened on reservation land.”

      Ronnie flipped through a stack of twenties. “How you know all this about fibers and DNA? You watch CSI or something?”

      “No,” Peaches said, “I read books. Take criminology classes at a couple community colleges. This stuff, it’s all out in the open. You just gotta know where to look.”

      “I pay people for that,” Ronnie said.

      “Not enough,” Peaches said. “FBI could be on those cameras in five minutes. Take a sixteen-year-old probably half that time.”

      “No one knows I’m down here,” Ronnie said. Peaches handed Ronnie one of the mailers. He opened it up, looked inside. It was filled with papers. “What’s this?”

      “Every piece of property you own and every piece of property you’ve hidden in the last three decades. Including that one that burned down the other day.”

      “The fuck you talking about?”

      “In Florida.”

      “Donte,” Ronnie said, though he kept his eyes on Peaches.

      The door opened up and there was that big motherfucker with the Kevlar, gun in his hand, and then behind him two other guys now. So here it was.

      “Tell the boys upstairs to give me three minutes off camera,” Ronnie said.

      “Okay,” Donte said. He looked at Peaches, then back at Ronnie. “You all right alone?”

      Ronnie stared at Peaches for a few seconds. “Yeah,” he said. “I think I’m fine.” When Donte left, Ronnie put a finger up. “Don’t speak,” he said. He looked up at the cameras. When the red light went off on all of them, he said, “All right. You’ve got three minutes. I don’t like what I hear, you’re leaving in a bag.”

      “I had a problem solved for you,” Peaches said. “An impediment to us having any kind of fruitful association.”

      “For me? An entire fucking block of residential properties burned down,” Ronnie said. Peaches hadn’t seen that. Mike really had a sheet now.

      “That wasn’t the intention.”

      “I got cops picking bones out of the ashes down there. It’s gonna cost me all the insurance money just to keep people quiet. So tell me, what fucking problem did you solve?”

      “A transportation problem,” Peaches said. He tore open the second mailer, dumped out Frank Fishmann’s eyes, ears, tongue, and the skin that once covered his face. “Let’s have a conversation about Sal Cupertine.”

      1

      August 2001

      That Rabbi David Cohen wasn’t Jewish had ceased, over time, to be a problem. He hardly thought of it anymore. Not when he was at the Bagel Café grabbing a nosh with Phyllis Rosencrantz to go over the Teen Fashion Show for the Homeless, not when he was shaking Abe Seigel down for a donation to the Tikvah scholarship over a bucket of balls at the TPC driving range, nor even when he was doing Shabbat services on a Saturday morning at Temple Beth Israel.

      It didn’t cross his mind when he was burying some motherfucker shipped in from Los Angeles or San Francisco or Seattle, like the low-level Chinese Triad gangsters they’d been getting lately. The last one—David thought he was maybe nineteen—went into eternity under the gravestone of Howard Katz, loving husband of Jill. Or at least some of him went into eternity. Katz didn’t have much of a face left and David had his long bones extracted for transplant, then disposed of his organs, so basically he performed a service over metacarpals and phalanges in a bag of skin. Same day, David also put Morris Brinkman down, and that was fine, too. Eighty-seven years old, always crinkling butterscotch wrappers during minyan, the kind of man who still called black guys schvartzes? His time was up. Long up.

      Hell, not even brises really got to David. That was all the mohel’s show, anyway, and a RICO-level scam in its own right. Schlomo Meir did the cuttings at every synagogue in town, a fucking monopoly on the foreskin business, but David didn’t see any way to move in on that. There were training courses and accreditations involved, most Reform mohels these days were nurses or EMTs, no one really wanting some shaky-hand from the Old Country wielding the knife on their son. Since David was about the only person in the room who wasn’t queasy around a blade and a little blood, it was actually a fairly pleasant affair. He could zone out for a few minutes, not worry about a tactical team kicking down the door.

      No, the only time the Jewish thing crept up on David was on a day like today, the last Sunday of August, presiding over the quickie wedding of Michael Solomon to Naomi Rosen. They were too young, in David’s opinion, Naomi only twenty-two, Michael a few months younger, both just out of UNLV with degrees in golf resort management, which was a thing, apparently. СКАЧАТЬ