“I don’t think you need to worry about Rosen,” David said. “Not for a little while, anyway. He’s not looking for trouble. Not if he’s inviting his mistress to his daughter’s wedding.”
“Rosen is always about thirty minutes from going balls up.” He pointed at the wedding reception going on across the way. “I paid for more of that than he did. Two months I’ve been waiting for some word on this project we’ve got cooking up on Craig Road. Supposed to be getting funding from the Japs or something.” He shook his head. “Fucking money pit, is what it is. Best thing that could happen is if the city decided the ground was polluted and could only be zoned for a nuclear dump. Get a government contract, write our own ticket.” He paused, thinking. “You ever drive out that way?”
“No.”
“See what I’m saying? I should have just made the motherfucker pay me.”
“He would have called the cops,” David said.
“You’d think so,” Bennie said. “But they don’t. This town? People would rather be in business with me than risk embarrassment. Isn’t that something?”
A helicopter swept up in the air from the Vineyards’ helipad a block away, behind the clubhouse, climbed a few hundred feet, then flew up and over the wedding party and spun back toward downtown. That was one thing the Mob didn’t have: air support.
“Who’s that asshole?”
“Probably the mayor,” David said. “He showed up to the reception.”
“How’s he looking?”
“Had on a nice tie,” David said.
“How much you think Spilotro and Scarfo paid him over the years?”
Tony Spilotro, a Chicago Outfit guy—the Family’s rivals—and Nicky Scarfo, the boss of Philadelphia, were two of Goodman’s clients, back when he was a lawyer, but then so were all the Vegas hoods. “Not enough,” David said. Spilotro was dead and Scarfo was doing fed time in Atlanta, scheduled to get out when he was 133 years old, no chance of parole. That RICO shit was no joke. “If he was any good, they wouldn’t have needed his services so often.”
When the helicopter disappeared, Bennie turned his attention back to his daughter Sophie. There were four houses surrounding the lake, each with its own private dock where they kept electric boats, dinghies, and more bright yellow pedal boats like the one Sophie was tooling around in. Sophie was seven and a little chubby now, unfortunately growing into a body that more closely resembled her father’s than her mother’s. “Goodman still going to Beth Shalom?”
“That’s the word.”
“You talk to him?”
“No. He just shook some hands. Couple minutes, in and out. Guess Manic Al gave him some cash on his election campaign.”
“That’s my fucking money,” Bennie said.
“Maybe you’ll get your own exhibit in the museum.”
“Worst secret organization on the planet,” Bennie said. “I find myself wondering why anyone is surprised when someone snitches. But you know, I figure running a city is worse than being in the game. Mayor can’t kill anyone and he has to work with those Waste Management fucks. I’ve got it easy.”
David considered that. In Chicago, the Family had run the garbage business since the turn of the twentieth century. Back then people didn’t want to pay, they had to dig a pit and burn their garbage. Now it was just taken out of their property taxes. Government got their bite, the Family got theirs, everyone happy. Fact was, when the mayor was in a room, David left it. If there was one person in the city who could smell a gangster, it was probably that guy.
“I’ll have Rabbi Kales give him a call around Hanukkah, maybe he’ll be in a generous mood,” David said, “give us a donation for the birthright trips.”
Bennie shook his head. “Rabbi Kales should be in a nursing home.” He paused. “Or whatever comes next.”
“He’s fine for now.”
“He pissed on my sofa the other night. The leather one? You know, in the den? Just sat there and pissed himself. Good thing Sophie was asleep and Jean was off doing whatever the fuck fifteen-year-old girls do.” Across the way, Naomi and Michael and their wedding party gathered along the Rosens’ dock for a photo, everyone looking sharp in their rented clothes. “Omerta has shit on the secret lives of teenage girls.”
“Maybe ask more questions,” David said, “before it’s too late.”
“You assume I want the answers.” He pointed at Sophie. “That one still tells me everything, snitches on her sister every ten minutes. Benedict Arnold thinks she’s hard to trust.”
David tried to imagine what his own son, William, looked like these days. He and Sophie were about the same age. William’s seventh birthday was only a few weeks away.
David could remember being seven.
Walking to school with Fat Monte, that poor dead fucker, sneaking into Cubs games, Monte lifting pocketbooks from ladies’ purses, the two of them getting loaded on Carnation Frozen Malt cups in the bleachers, snapping those wooden spoons into shanks, playing at being tough guys. Which got David wondering: Who was William playing with? Did he have any friends? If Jennifer was smart, she was keeping him far away from his cousins, away from any of the kids of the old crew. David hoped William wasn’t playing video games with one of Sugar Lopiparno’s dumb-fuck sons, like the one who had to get his stomach pumped after he ate a handful of pennies.
Did William remember his father at all? Because it was getting harder and harder for David to accurately recall his son. He could remember experiences—his first birthday, chocolate frosting and yellow cake all over everything; Christmas, ripping up wrapping paper and throwing it everywhere, not giving a shit about the presents; Jennifer giving him haircuts by putting a bowl on his head—but they’d known each other for only a few years. Hard to make any kind of permanent memories. In a year, maybe less, William could walk by him on the street unnoticed.
Sophie pedaled out into the middle of the lake, right in the line of the photo shoot, so Bennie cupped a hand around his mouth, shouted, “That’s too far, Soph,” then waved her in with two fingers. He dug some shells from between his bottom lip and teeth, crouched down on one knee, wiped his fingers on the grass, motioned David down, too. “Everything going okay with the Chinamen?”
“No problems,” David said.
“Ruben said they’ve been coming in pretty steady.”
Ruben Topaz was Bennie’s guy at the Kales Mortuary and Home of Peace, the temple’s funeral home, and the only other person on the planet Bennie trusted to handle his business while he was away. Ruben didn’t know the truth about David, though he probably had some suspicions.
“Yeah,” David said. “Some kind of hostile takeover going on. Can’t last much longer.” They’d put ten guys down in the last few months. Unless they were importing new guys from China, David couldn’t conceive of a way for them to keep pace and keep ahead of the law, too. You disappear one guy, maybe their families and friends keep quiet, because that’s the life, but you start getting toward a dozen missing gangsters, someone is going to say something, and either the cops pick up a lead on a wire or someone walks into a station and starts telling stories.
“It can always last longer.” Bennie shrugged. They weren’t his men. “How’s the back end?”
“Slow,” David said. He’d been moving body parts to Jerry Ford, who ran a tissue and organ donation shop called LifeCore for a few years now. It was a good partnership. The funeral home provided him with product, Jerry provided the funeral