Gangster Nation. Tod Goldberg

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СКАЧАТЬ studying his face too closely, especially now when it felt like his face was collapsing; his jaw a fucking mess, the skin around his left eye starting to droop, and a fair amount of nasal problems were plaguing him of late, too, leaving him stuffed up half the time. There wasn’t a decent doctor he could see. Hard to get a new specialist and explain why you have titanium rods to elongate your jaw, plus a new chin and nose, and no medical records.

      There was only so much his beard and a pair of glasses could hide, particularly since half the congregation were doctors of some kind. Maybe he could fake Bell’s palsy at a temple in Oklahoma, but it wasn’t going to go unnoticed in Summerlin.

      “I’m not trying to be rude,” Jordan said, “but you ever think about getting Botox?” He made a circle in the air with his index finger, pointing, generally, to David’s whole head. “Just a cosmetic type thing?”

      “No,” David said. If another question about his appearance were proposed, there was a chance the next time anyone saw Jordan Rosen, it would be his photo on the news when he was reported missing.

      “I ask,” he said, still pointing, “because my wife, she had that problem with her eyelid. Started to hang over her left eye?” David remembered. She looked like a retired boxer. “She got it lasered and then botox froze the nerve, I guess. Something like that might help your eye. You know, if you care about such things.”

      “Talmud says all paths are crooked.”

      Jordan put up his hands. “Fair enough,” he said. “But don’t you ever think about getting married, Rabbi Cohen?”

      That was now three personal questions Jordan Rosen had asked him. It was three more than David felt comfortable answering, though the marriage one was getting to be so common as to be impersonal.

      “I may well have to at some point,” David said. It was, in fact, among his worst fears. Because Sal Cupertine was married. His wife, Jennifer, and son, William, were still in Chicago, Sal keeping watch on Jennifer’s movements in whatever way he could, even looking at her credit report online a few months back. She was racking up debt on her cards. Five grand on the Chase card. Another seven on the Citibank. A month behind on her Amex. Even the fucking Discover card was maxed out. Three and a half years since he’d seen his wife and kid and the closest he could come to them was this: peeping on their lives like some kind of pervert. He’d been able to get her money once, but since then it had become too difficult. The problem with embarrassing the FBI, turning on the Family, and pissing off the Gangster 2-6 was that it didn’t exactly make life easier.

      “It changes your perspective,” Jordan said. “Sometimes, I hardly recognize myself, truth be told. Maybe it’s what Naomi needs.”

      This was how it often went with the Jews: They’d come in with a problem and ask questions they’d answer themselves, as if all they needed was for David to witness the process in order to make it divine. Jordan took a deep breath, then peered around the office, as if he were seeing it for the first time even though he had spent a fair amount of time in it over the years, first meeting with Rabbi Kales and now with David. “You should get some pictures in here,” Jordan said after a while. “Something personal.”

      “You want to know a man, read his books.”

      “That in the Talmud?”

      “No,” David said. “I made that one up myself.” Though, in fact, he hadn’t. He read it somewhere. Emerson or Whitman or maybe it was George Washington? Used to be people thought Sal Cupertine had a photographic memory, hence all that Rain Man shit, but the truth was more complex than that, David understood now. It wasn’t that he remembered every single detail of every single experience with 100 percent accuracy. He retained a lot, but that didn’t mean everything got filed with the correct headings. The last couple years—at least since all the plastic surgery—he’d felt like things weren’t quite as accurate as they’d once been. Maybe getting discount anesthesia wasn’t great on the cerebral cortex.

      “Rabbi Kales always had a lot of tchotchkes, is all.” He stepped over to the shelf where David kept his doctored diploma from Hebrew Union in a frame on a stand.

      “He still has them,” David said. Rabbi Kales lived in an apartment in an “Active Senior Living” complex off Charleston now, on the second floor with a view of the courtyard between the two sides of the facility—the “active living” portion, which was three stories and held about seventy-five people who needed only to have someone cook their meals or remind them to take their pills—and the “assisted living” side, which held another hundred people on a rotating basis, seeing as it was reserved for those sliding into death, mostly in full dementia or straight-up hospice care. David thinking that if he needed to be assisted in order to live, he’d fix that quick.

      “Sarah bumped into him at Smith’s a while back.” Jordan pulled out another book, read the back for a few seconds. “Said he was confused as hell.”

      “Some days he’s good,” David said, “some days, not.” That was the problem with Rabbi Kales—he wasn’t getting actual dementia fast enough. He could pretend pretty well when he needed to, but then pride would take over. David reminded him periodically that if he wanted to stay aboveground, he needed to spend a bit more time out in the world acting inconsistent, particularly once his son-in-law, Bennie, was free. Rabbi Kales couldn’t drive anymore—that was part of the plan, couldn’t very well have him diagnosed as having early onset dementia and also let him keep his license—so his daughter, Rachel, either drove him places or paid for a Town Car.

      “He still makes it to services fairly regularly.” David hadn’t seen Jordan at services since his youngest, Tricia, went off to college at Berkeley last fall. She used to come, help out with the little ones, tutor, that sort of thing. She also worked down at the Bagel Café, too, telling David she liked making her own money. David missed seeing her around. He also missed the fact that she was a shitty waitress and occasionally got his order wrong, which meant he was periodically able to wolf down a piece of bacon or sausage on the down low.

      “Well, tell him I said hello,” Jordan said. He turned the book in his hand back over, looked at the cover, then held it up. “You mind if I borrow this one?”

      It was a collection of notable transcripts from the Nuremberg trials. Not exactly light reading.

      “Be my guest,” David said.

      Jordan tucked the book under one arm, then took his wallet out and thumbed through his cash, pulled out two hundreds and two fifties and set them on the coffee table. “Appreciate the counsel, Rabbi. Come by the car wash this week,” he said. “Donny Osmond is signing autographs.”

      Now Naomi and Michael were exchanging a series of vows that David was pretty sure were cribbed from a pop song. The three of them stood under a chuppah in the Rosens’ backyard . . . if you could call anything with an acre of grass with an outdoor wine bar surrounding a private lake a yard. The Rosens lived in the Vineyards at Summerlin, a few doors down from Bennie Savone and his family, in an exclusive development that was supposed to evoke the Italian countryside except with German cars and Mexican domestic staff. David had never been to Italy, never even made it to the Venetian on the Strip to ride in a gondola, on account of the facial recognition cameras all the casinos had—they weren’t looking for average bad guys, by and large, but Bennie told him it was a no-go zone—but he couldn’t help wondering if there were housing developments being built on the Amalfi Coast modeled after Las Vegas, Italians living in peach-colored tract homes with brown lawns.

      David viewed weddings as sacred affairs and took his role seriously—of all the vows he’d taken in his own СКАЧАТЬ