“Cruel? Cruel? When have I ever been anything but your finest acolyte, Rabbi? When have I not tried to listen to your advice? I respected you more than any living man. And now you think I am cruel? What a fucking country, right, Rabbi? I’m cruel. But you spent your entire life killing people, and what do we do? We are going to protect you. Where else does that happen?”
“The Mafia,” David said. “The church.”
Kristy pounded her fist on the table. Diners turned and looked. “Goddamn you, Rabbi Cohen,” she hissed. “I fought so hard to live this year. I listened to every word you said. I believed in you. And for what? For you to con me. Do you know what a fool I feel like? Do you know how it feels to know you think I am so feeble and weak? I have fought to live in order to be shamed by you, you fucking asshole. I should fucking kill you. I should put one right between your fucking eyes in the middle of this shitty restaurant. You’ve soiled this place. You’ve soiled it for every Jew who ever ate here, because it will always be the place where the fake-ass rabbi was arrested.”
David took out his wallet, pulled a C-note, dropped it on the check. Set his wallet down in front of Kristy. Stood up. “You’re right,” he said. He emptied out his pockets. Phone. Other phone. His butterfly knife. His father’s brass knuckles. A syringe of morphine. Set them all on the table. Turned his pockets inside out. “I want you to know, I would never hurt you, Kristy. Never.”
“You have hurt me.”
David considered the Bagel Café. “Can I give you a piece of advice?”
“You can try,” Kristy said.
“When you figure everything out,” David said, “don’t ask why. Forty years, I’ve been asking why, and I’ve never been satisfied. The Torah tells us to distance ourselves from falsehood, and you know? It’s right. Get too deep in this shit, you’ll trust nothing. Everything will seem like a sham. It’s no way to live.”
“I’m an FBI agent, Rabbi,” Kristy said.
“What’s the difference? Neither of us exists without the other.” David pointed out the window. “So I’m going to get into that hearse outside. I’m going to turn left on Buffalo and then head toward the freeway. Pull me over before I get on the freeway, and I promise to stop. Shoot at me if you have to. Put on a good show. But do it before I get on the freeway. Because if you let me get on the freeway, I’ll kill every last one of you motherfuckers.”
A loud sob came from the bakery, followed by the sound of a woman wailing. All of the Bagel Café turned to see the slumped figure of Rabbi Cy Kales, a black-and-white cookie in his hand, thus missing the moment Special Agent Kristy Levine, all five feet three inches and 120 pounds of her, snapped a handcuff around the Rain Man’s right wrist, kicked his legs out from under him, and slammed him face first into the table, breaking his jaw, pulverizing his cheekbones, ripping apart his sinus cavity, and collapsing his orbital bones into splinters.
Again.
THIRTY
JUNE 2002
LOS ANGELES, CA
SAL CUPERTINE HAD ALWAYS WANTED TO GO TO LOS ANGELES. HE FIGURED one day he’d pack up the family and take a road trip across the country, hit up Disneyland, see the Hollywood sign—not that he gave a shit about Hollywood, but he liked seeing things from history, even if they were just letters on a hill—maybe catch a Dodgers game. Eventually, they’d end up on the Santa Monica Pier at sunset. Maybe Jennifer and William would ride the Ferris wheel while he looked on from the ground, Sal not great with heights ever since . . . well, never mind that. Afterward, they’d walk along the shoreline, pants rolled up, shoes in their hands, their feet wet with saltwater foam.
It was a such a simple dream that Sal wasn’t sure if he’d ever mentioned it to Jennifer. Didn’t everyone want to get to California? Didn’t everyone want to watch the sun dip into the Pacific? Wasn’t that an ideal of American life? One day, when the time was right, you went west and you found your fortune or your fame or just a sliver of happiness.
One thing Sal hadn’t counted on, however, was that they’d be dead when he finally made it happen.
If it was a clear day, and if the sun was just right in the sky, and if his eyes were working properly—three big ifs—the hit man formerly known as Sal Cupertine could look out his window from his secure room on the sixth floor of the UCLA Medical Center and make out the iridescence of the Pacific in the distance and imagine it was happening. Today, however, the clouds hadn’t burned off yet and his eyes felt jabbed by hot pokers. In sunglasses all he could really make out were the college students pouring from campus, ants in search of sugar. Jennifer would have loved this place.
A knock at the door. Special Agent Kristy Levine, along with a U.S. Marshal, stood in the doorway. “Ready?” Kristy asked.
“You ever go swimming in the Pacific?” he asked.
“I don’t swim in anything that doesn’t have sides,” Kristy said. “Hands, please.”
He put his arms out and the Marshal wrapped a Kevlar vest around his torso, snapped the Velcro straps tight around his shoulders and flanks. “That too tight, Rabbi?” the Marshal asked. He was named Jim. For the last month, they’d gone through this ritual every other day for the mile-long car trip to the Federal Building.
“Fine,” Sal said. He buttoned up a blue oxford shirt over the vest and then a sports coat. The Marshal cuffed him.
“That too tight, Rabbi?” he asked again, and Sal saw Kristy roll her eyes.
“It’s fine, Jim,” Sal said.
Jim took him by the arm, and they headed to the freight elevator at the very rear of the floor, zigzagging down the long hallways, passing the Neurology & Neurosurgery unit and the Neuroscience/Trauma Intensive Care unit, where he’d spent his first few weeks, before moving through custodial offices and finally arriving at the bank of elevators, where another U.S. Marshal waited.
“How you doing this morning, Rabbi?” the Marshal asked. His name was Sadler. A South Carolina Jew, of all things.
“Fine, thank you, Sadler,” Sal said. “You read that book I told you about?”
“Yes, I did,” he said. “Very illuminating. I didn’t know anything about the Warsaw Rebellion. Makes you think, yeah?”
“Helped me,” Sal said.
“Thank you, Rabbi,” Sadler said.
The three of them got into the elevator and Jim hit the button for the loading dock. When the doors opened, there was a black Suburban idling by the loading bay, another U.S. Marshal standing with an AR-15, ready to open the back door. Sal slid all the way in, Kristy right beside him. In the front seat sat two more U.S. Marshals.
“Where to, Rabbi?” the driver said.
“How about some place with a good porterhouse?” Sal said.
“Aye, aye, Rabbi,” the driver said.
“Let’s get moving,” Kristy said.
Sal saw the driver meet Kristy’s gaze in the rearview. “Sorry, Special Agent Levine; we’re all on the same team here.”
That wasn’t actually true. Sal was snitching out half of Chicago, but only those who actively tried to kill him. He was keeping a few things to himself. He wasn’t giving up Gray Beard and Marvin, and he was doing everything in his power to excuse Rachel Savone from everything plausible. The world believed Sal Cupertine died in custody. His wife and son were also dead, but that story had definition now: someone had come to their safe house on Loon Lake and murdered an FBI agent, first, and then left with his wife and son. Sal knew what this meant, that they were buried somewhere, that they’d probably done unspeakable things to them . . . whoever they were. Sal had some ideas. Native Mob. The Family. And then: anyone who held a grudge against the Rain Man for twenty years of murder.
Imagining it was impossible. It was his own infinite punishment.
