“My own man,” David said. That was what his mother wanted, at any rate, back when David was still her son Sal, back before he started doing hits in Chicago for the Family, back before he became the Rain Man, when she’d still acknowledge him. What his dad wanted? Sal didn’t know. He’d been dead since Sal was ten, so what he remembered about him now, almost thirty years later, were small things: How he’d pay Sal a quarter for a hug. How he read the comics in the Sun-Times first thing every morning. How he always had scabs on his knuckles.
Sometimes, Sal thought about the sound his father’s body made hitting the ground in front of the IBM Building, about how when someone gets thrown out of a fifty-two-story building, they’ve got a long time to make noise, and his father did. Screamed for a good five seconds. And then it was a liquid crunch, a spray of blood, and nothing. Sal Cupertine never did anyone like that. It wasn’t fucking human.
Rabbi David Cohen tried not to think about those things too often. He was about keeping his rage in check these days. Every morning, he wrapped tefillin on his strong arm, to remind himself of this. As a Reform Jew, it wasn’t needed, but David had adopted it anyway, thought the imagery was good, and it served a higher purpose. David couldn’t always be dialed to ten, or else he’d have nowhere to go when he really needed to be angry. Six or seven, that was his sweet spot.
“I imagined Naomi would be a vet. She always had hamsters and silkworms and whatnot,” Jordan said. “Made me sponsor a puma adoption at that gypsy zoo over on Rancho. Have you been there?”
“I don’t believe in zoos,” David said.
“She didn’t either. That’s why I had to sponsor the puma. She wanted to bust it out. Place is a dump. Anyway. I don’t know. I guess that’s just me imagining a life for her.” He stood up, cracked his neck—an annoying habit that David had noticed over the course of the last few years—then walked over to one of the three bookshelves in the office. They were six feet tall and crammed full of books on Jewish philosophy, Jewish thought, even a bit of poetry and self-help, titles like Understanding the Mishna, Understanding You. “You read all of these?”
“Most of them,” David said.
He pulled out a book of poetry, flipped it open. David didn’t like people touching his books, much less reading what he wrote in the margins. “Truth is,” he said, “I don’t really know Naomi anymore.” He closed the book, slipped it back into its slot, upside down, pulled out another. “Maybe a kid will put us into each other’s orbit again, you know? I guess that would be a side benefit.”
“Do you know the boy?”
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s the Solomon kid. The oldest.”
“Robert and Janice’s son?”
“No, the other Solomons. The yenta and the ear, nose, and throat guy.”
“Oh. Scott and Claudia?”
“Good family, I guess. It could be worse. Few years ago, Naomi was dating a Vietnamese kid. Father dealt cards at the Orleans. One of those pinkie-ring guys who smoked funny? You know, like he held his cigarette with the wrong fingers? Anyway. Kid’s name was Binh but he called himself DJ Bomb Squad. Had it painted on his car, left stickers on light poles, even had T-shirts. I’m of the opinion it put Naomi’s grandfather into the grave prematurely.” He snapped closed the book in his hand and put it away, right side up, then flipped over the poetry book, too. “It was fine with me,” he added eventually. “I sort of liked DJ Bomb Squad. He was enterprising. I knew what I was getting with that kid.”
“What happened?”
“Who knows. One day, he’s everything, next day, Sarah tells me never to mention DJ Bomb Squad again. I almost felt sorry for him. He probably never saw it coming.” He paused for a second, stared directly at Rabbi Cohen, which made him slightly uncomfortable. It wasn’t that he didn’t like eye contact—though that was true—it was more that he didn’t like people 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