“All this,” David said to Rabbi Kales as they walked across the lot toward Bennie, “and you couldn’t afford a sandbox?”
“If you’re paying a thousand dollars per week for preschool,” Rabbi Kales said, “I’m afraid a sandbox isn’t sufficient.”
“A thousand dollars per week? For how many weeks?”
“It depends,” Rabbi Kales said. “Most do it for at least six months. Many do it for nine months, like a traditional school year. You can do the math.”
There must have been sixty kids on the playground. A couple million. And no blood.
“How many years?”
“Usually two,” Rabbi Kales said.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” David said.
“When the private school opens next fall,” Rabbi Kales said, “it will be more.”
“How much more?”
“The high school students will cost thirty-five thousand dollars per year, maybe more. The younger children will be less than that, but not by much.”
“And people will pay that?”
“People will line up to pay that,” Rabbi Kales said. “And those that can’t afford it will be offered loans.”
“And what happens if they can’t pay back the loans?”
“We’ll put a lien on their property, that sort of thing,” he said. “But I suspect that won’t be a problem.”
“Everybody defaults,” David said. “Trust me on this.”
“Well, then it will be your problem to solve,” Rabbi Kales said.
Bennie then waved them over, though he was still on his phone. In the time David had been in Las Vegas, he’d gotten the sense that Bennie was a pretty busy guy. He had the Wild Horse, which he went to most nights, and then he had his other business interests, which David didn’t know too much about. David knew what Bennie had told him about his involvement in the construction game — he’d put good money on those land graders belonging to Savone Construction — and the union shit, which probably took a lot of time and energy; he just didn’t have a sense of how the Savone family soldiers went about making their nut or how Bennie collected. Slim Joe shook down pimps, which didn’t sound like a great way to make a long-term nut if he was already thinking about getting into the hot-dog-and-pie game.
Back home, even though he was just a gun and therefore not expected to be pulling jobs, he knew, for instance, that Fat Monte’s main job was the low-grade heroin distribution, the shit they gave to college kids and Canadians. So he had his whole operation, and he kept his take and kicked the rest upstairs. Or a fool they called Lemonhead, because he was always sucking on Lemonheads, he was in the offtrack betting they ran out of a couple of different restaurants. Perfectly legal, except that Lemonhead ran the side game, running the crazy bets and parlays, along with a little bit of girl business, too.
In Las Vegas, though, with so much stuff actually legal, David couldn’t see Bennie collecting much on that. When you can jack someone for their toddler’s tuition, maybe it didn’t matter.
“That was your daughter,” Bennie said to Rabbi Kales. “She wants to know what you want for Thanksgiving and whether or not we should invite over the new rabbi, since apparently it took Tricia Rosen all of five minutes to let her parents know they met.”
“Perfect,” Rabbi Kales said.
“Perfect?” David said.
“It’s important that you don’t just show up one day,” Rabbi Kales said. “But if you’re here for a few weeks, showing up periodically, people will get used to you. Won’t be a big deal when you start doing actual work.”
“You think Curran saw us?” Bennie said.
“He was sitting at his usual table,” Rabbi Kales said.
“Good,” Bennie said.
“Wait a minute,” David said. “The columnist was in the restaurant?”
“Every Monday,” Bennie said.
“Then why do you go there?” David asked. None of this lined up, David thinking that whatever amount of money Bennie paid to get him to Las Vegas would have been better spent on decent legal counsel.
“So that he sees us sitting there,” Bennie said. “I thought they said you were smart.”
“It’s not how we did shit in Chicago, is all I’m saying,” David said.
“And yet here you are,” Bennie said.
David needed to stop looking for evidence that anything in Las Vegas was like it was in Chicago. He didn’t want to be like one of those guys from New York who could see things only as a compare-contrast with New York.
“I just,” David said quietly, “I don’t want to wake up and find a bunch of U.S. Marshals on my front lawn because you want to keep up appearances.”
“The only way for you to avoid the marshals will be to keep up appearances,” Rabbi Kales said. “No one is looking for you here, David. That’s what you need to understand.”
Bennie pointed at his watch. “I’ve got an hour,” he said, and started walking toward the main temple. “Either keep up and learn something, or fly back to Chicago where everything is candy canes and pillow fights.”
Religious places freaked Rabbi David Cohen out. He knew intellectually that a church or a synagogue was just a place, just dirt and wood and cement and glass. He knew that the priests or rabbis or whatever were just men (and, occasionally, women) that had once been kids, had once watched Daffy Duck cartoons and The Brady Bunch and saw Spot, Dick, and Jane run and then, at some later point, decided they wanted to devote themselves to a book. Still, there was something about religious places that made David aware of how different his own life was, how if any of the people in the building (save, in this case, for Bennie and Rabbi Kales) knew what he was, they’d throw holy water on him and try to cast his demons out. He was a bad guy, he knew that. Was he evil? No, David didn’t believe he was. Fucked up? For sure. He watched enough of those shows on the Discovery Channel to understand that maybe his brain didn’t work like other people’s brains, though David also had to consider that people who celebrated the purported holy day of Easter by eating marshmallow baby birds were just as twisted.
So as he followed Bennie and Rabbi Kales through the temple and they told him bits of information that was probably very important, he had to do his very best to concentrate, what with all the stained-glass windows, Hebrew letters on walls, memorial candles for dead Jews, notices about Shabbat and daily services and holiday services and the upcoming Hanukkah celebration. Weird thing was, it was the first time in his life that he’d been in a place like this and actually knew what everything meant. Not that he could read Hebrew, though he had a sinking feeling that soon that would not be the case. Some things had become so familiar to him from his reading that he kept getting a strange sense of déjà vu.
“There are one hundred thousand Jews in Las Vegas,” Rabbi Kales said as they turned down a long hallway toward the temple’s administrative offices. “And six hundred Jews move here each month, which, as you can imagine, has created a need for more and better facilities. We built the cemetery and mortuary here in 1990, and we’ll have the Barer Academy built by next fall, ready for all grades. The Learning Center should open at the same time. The next phase will be the Performing Arts Annex, though that may be a few years down the line, depending upon funding.”