To be fair, David had poisoned Rabbi Siegel to get him to go along with the security plan for the local temples. But he would have died, eventually.
“Live long enough,” David said, “that’s the curse.”
“The sorrow of this world,” Esther said, and then she just kind of drifted off. She was in her sixties now. Her husband, Paul, had been hit by a city bus years earlier and she’d worked at the Temple ever since, not even drawing a salary, since she lived comfortably off of a settlement that she was not at liberty to discuss.
“Well,” David said, “I’m back now.” He tried to smile, and, to his surprise, his face reacted with the proper action. “Can you please give me ninety minutes of privacy, Esther? I’d like some time to read the Torah. When Mrs. Savone comes in, please do let me know. So I can thank her.”
“Of course, Rabbi,” she said. She pointed at the mountain of cards. “Do you want me to start writing thank-you notes for you?”
There must have been three hundred cards.
“No,” David said, “I’m happy to do it.”
Esther made it to the door and then turned around, David just a few steps behind her. “I like your new face, Rabbi,” she said. “You’re still you.”
“Thank you, Esther. I was worried.”
“But if you don’t mind me saying so,” she said, “you have a much nicer smile now.”
David closed the door behind her, then fired up the computer. Four months he’d been in the hospital, he’d been completely off the internet, Bennie of the opinion that bringing him a laptop was only inviting trouble. He was probably right, but the end result was that all David knew about the world was filtered through the journalism of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which was like looking at humanity through the eyes of Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn, since they bought all the advertising and therefore controlled most of the coverage, the result being that you believed a holy war was about to take place on the streets of Las Vegas, that the Krispy Kreme on Spring Mountain was an Al-Qaeda training ground, and that United Airlines might be a front for Bin Laden. There wasn’t a conspiracy theory one of their dumb-fuck op-ed writers didn’t chase down to the root and then leave dangling. Could David Cassidy be leaving his live show to fight the mujahideen? Maybe!
Harvey B. Curran spent his eight hundred words, twice a week, tying everything to organized crime, but with Bennie Savone keeping a low profile, and the casino magnets trying to portray Las Vegas as a place to bring the family even though 9/11 was plotted during lap dances all over town, he’d been forced to focus lately on the arrival of Eastern European and Russian gangsters. They’d been buying up restaurants and nightclubs off the strip, blackmailing Metro cops, and disappearing more people than fucking David Copperfield. Hard to charge someone with murder when no one could find a body.
What David needed to know, however, was more specific. He went to Google and did the one thing he’d avoided doing for the last four years: He typed in his name. Well. His other name. Sal Cupertine.
The first pages that came up were what he expected.
There were the stories in the Chicago Tribune detailing the murders at the Parker House, followed by the feature stories on corruption in the FBI, most of which had been given to the paper by Sal himself, pretending to be Jeff Hopper. There were various updates based on news stories and TV appearances. There’d been a rerun of America’s Most Wanted again, and that triggered what Fresno newscasters called “an amusing story” about the guy who portrayed Sal in the reenactments getting spotted at a local bar where the episode was airing. It was an amusing story, David had to admit. The guy got a free Michelob for his troubles and a nice plug for his appearance in a traveling show of Death of a Salesman at the Saroyan Theatre in Fresno.
When all of Ronnie Cupertine’s family showed up last December, cut into little pieces, in a parking lot in Portland, killed with a gun tied to Matthew Drew, Sal’s name popped up everywhere, the supposition being that his disappearance was somehow tied to these murders. The supposition was probably correct, just not for the reasons they could imagine.
The story in the Chicago Reader was the one he did not expect. It was an essay written by a woman named Stacy Elliott, who apparently worked with Jennifer at the Museum of Modern Photography. It was called “The Hit Man’s Wife in My Cubicle.”
David didn’t need to read it to know how it was going to end, the writer finding some epiphany while staring out the window at a floating paper bag. But he kept scrolling, not sure what he was looking for, until he found it: staring out at him from his computer screen were Jennifer and William.
It was a photo he’d taken on Christmas morning, 1997. Jennifer in bed, hair in a ponytail, wearing an old T-shirt from the neighborhood—Bruno’s Fine Meats—William snuggled beside her, Where the Wild Things Are open between them, the room filled with pale light. David remembered it had snowed the night before, but that morning, the air was misty, giving everything the glow of a memory. They had a rule in the house about pictures—nothing that had to be developed outside the home, owing to the fact that Sal was the most wanted hit man on the planet—but they also were normal parents, or tried to be. So they had a Polaroid and Jennifer had her darkroom in the basement. On Christmas, Sal took stacks of Polaroids, even put a few into the mail for his mother, Arlene, in Arizona, long after they stopped speaking, because he still wanted her to see William growing up, Sal perpetually snarled up about such things.
But that photo, it had gone on the refrigerator moments later, and Sal would see it every day, until he surely took it for granted, until he stopped seeing it altogether. And now he had to wonder: did he remember the photo, or did he remember the moment? The photo must have migrated from the refrigerator to Jennifer’s desk . . . and then into the hands of someone at the Chicago Reader. And now, it was online, theoretically available to billions of people, anyone who wanted to know what Sal Cupertine’s wife and kid looked like. A singular moment in his life, and now David had to share it with the world?
But now David was grateful. He hadn’t seen his wife or son since the day he left Chicago. And though his memory was supposedly flawless, he’d begun to lose threads of their appearance. Did Jennifer have a mole on her right cheek or her left? Where was that little birthmark William had that looked like dried honey? Under his right ear? Or his left? And other details in their room, captured in the flat expanse of the photo, began to pull him through time. The clock on the bedside table—an old-school alarm clock, the kind you wound—belonged to Sal’s father. It didn’t work. But he kept it on his nightstand. At once a talisman and a reminder. You never know when your last day might be coming, so get up, get moving, stay frosty. Where was that clock now?
Gone, he supposed, with the rest of the house. Burned to the ground by whoever this Peaches motherfucker was. He’d killed Ronnie’s family, he’d burned Sal’s house down, he’d pushed Jennifer and William into protective custody, and for what? To get Sal to appear? So he could have sole control of The Family?
When David sent Ruben to drop off Ronnie’s wife and kids’ bodies in public, it was to let Peaches know Sal Cupertine wasn’t to be played, that he made his own rules. But now, what did it matter? All David wanted was Jennifer and William. He could give a fuck about The Family. All The Family had ever done was try to ruin his life, from the very moment he saw his father hit the pavement. The Talmud teaches that one Jew is equal to the entire world, that each has the chance to change the world, for better or worse, and for a long time David thought that meant his happiness was the most important thing, that his desires could not be superseded. But then every day he sat in this office, listening to the problems of his congregants, and it became clear to him that the Talmud didn’t mean we are each in control of all the worlds, only our own, and that if we are to serve our Maker with joy in our hearts, as the sages taught, then that world had better be worth it. So David had begun to build margins around his world, right up until the day some fucking coked-up MMA fighter punched him in the face.
Sitting in that hospital for all those months, realizing he could die and his wife and son would never know, that he’d be buried under a different name and might never be found . . . it began to chafe against all he’d learned as a rabbi. Rabbi Kales once told him that there was no postwar for him, that he would always be chased, for the rest of his life, and that he must settle that in his mind, and for a time David thought he’d be content knowing that his son wouldn’t have that life. But now he knew William was in protective custody, and that part of his life would never stop being true: someone would want to make their bones by killing him. That’s just how it was. As long as William was a Cupertine, there was no postwar for him, either.
David hit the print icon and seconds later, he was holding Jennifer and William in his hands for the first time in years.
This.
This was his postwar.
Not in Chicago.
Not in Las Vegas.
Not in a fucking grave beside one another. He knew that for sure.
Somewhere else.
There was a knock on his door and then Esther opened it a crack. “I’m sorry, Rabbi, I know you said you need some quiet time, but Karen Weiss is here and she’s in quite a state. Her dog, Lefty, was run over. Is it possible to speak with her for just a few minutes?”
David folded the printout in half and slid it into his breast pocket, under his knife.
“Of course,” Rabbi David Cohen said. “Let the world in.”
RACHEL SAVONE SHOWED UP AFTER TWO. SHE CAUGHT DAVID AS HE WAS walking back from the Performing Arts Center, where he’d done a large funeral for Ace Lampkin, who’d played with Artie Shaw back in the day, and so half the funeral was old men with clarinets and trombones and stand-up basses working through big-band classics and sobbing. It had been one of the most glorious funerals David had ever presided over, the shared mourning of a bassline something he’d never heard but would remember ever more. The Lampkin family rabbi flew in to do the graveside, so David was done for the day when Rachel pulled up beside him in her convertible Mercedes.
“Do you want a ride?” she asked.
David looked up and down the street. Armed off-duty cops were in front of all the buildings the Temple owned. Plus, they had plainclothes guys cruising in rented Town Cars, what with the siege going on in Israel. Each cop had eyes on David now; David could practically here them radioing each other: Godfather on the move from PAC, headed south back to base. Someone had been too slow to stop David from getting lit up the last time he walked these streets, even if the “official” story was that he tripped at the Performing Arts Center. Sergeant Behen had been right there, had seen everything go down, and though David didn’t blame him—how could he?—Behen blamed himself for letting that MMA fighter sucker-punch him, knocking him down the stairs, nearly killing him. Behen resigned, then retired from LVPD, convinced that he was too slow for the job now. He ended up moving to his fishing spot in San Felipe, then sent David a long letter apologizing profusely for not doing the one thing he was paid to do: protect and serve. David wrote him back this afternoon, just five words: It was my own fault.
“It’s nice to walk,” David said. “It’s been a long time.”
“Then I’ll walk with you,” she said.
She parked her car on the street but didn’t bother to put the top up. If someone was dumb enough to rob Rachel Savone, well, they had their fate coming, David supposed, since the Temple’s security guards were all armed and itching to fuck someone up, just like all Vegas cops, ever. Rachel popped the trunk and dropped her phone inside.
