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his cup against the prison bars. So when David sensed that Shoshana had come to the basic conclusion of the issue—that she’d liked it, that she wondered what was wrong with her, but that she wanted to do it again, and with more guys—he reached across the table and took both of her hands in his.
    “There’s a part of the Midrash that says, essentially, we are all allowed to find enjoyment in the company of others,” David said. He’d found that if he simply dropped the Midrash into conversation, rejoined with the word “essentially,” and then paraphrased Neil Young or Bruce Springsteen, people left him feeling like they’d learned something. It was true that he knew a few things from the Midrash, had even read a great deal of it, but, in dealing with an eighteen-year-old girl just learning the joys of a filmed gangbang, he didn’t feel the need to reach too deep. “Is a dream a lie if it doesn’t come true, Shoshana? Of course not. It’s something far, far worse. Do you understand?”

    He let go of the girl’s hands then and handed her the handkerchief from the breast pocket of his sport coat. She wiped her eyes, blew her nose, and smiled wanly at David, though now he couldn’t even look her in the eye. “Thank you so much, Rabbi Cohen. I think I see that path now,” she said and slid out of the booth, not even bothering to return his hanky to him.
    Bennie, unfortunately, took her spot. “Fuck’s wrong with her?”
    “Confused about love,” David said.
    Bennie nodded. “Who isn’t?”
    It was weird. Over the course of their rather unconventional business relationship, Bennie Savone had found it necessary to use David as his father confessor, too, even though he knew that Rabbi David Cohen was previously Sal Cupertine; that before he was a fake rabbi, he was a Chicago “associate” who’d accidentally killed three undercover Donnie Brasco motherfuckers on the same botched contract, and that, barring a sudden religious experience the likes of which only happened in prison movies, David’s moral center was still pretty opaque. Still, David reasoned that Bennie needed to talk to someone, particularly since the one person Bennie could depend on previously had been the rabbi David replaced three years ago, Rabbi Ronald Kales, who also happened to be Bennie’s father-in-law . . . or was, until that unfortunate “boating accident” on Lake Meade claimed his life.
    David knew that Bennie’s decision not to fish out of the same shallow, polluted pond of local and loyal Italian women or coke-whore strippers most of his friends and co-workers had, opting instead to get connected with the real
Las Vegas money—the Summerlin Jews—was still a source of some lingering organizational shame; an issue David was certainly intimate with.
    “Yes, well,” David said. “She’s still young.”
    “My daughter tells me Shoshana likes black guys,” Bennie says.
    Sometimes David tried to imagine what his life would be like if he were still in Chicago, but he’d somehow had a different kind of upbringing, so that now he was selling real estate on the North Shore or running a sports bar or deli or was just a fucking Culligan Man, his ends meeting, his life happy. Would he still end up on Tuesday mornings gossiping about whom eighteen-year-old girls were or were not fucking?
    “I have to prepare for a talk at the Senior Center this afternoon,” David said, “so I’m afraid I don’t have much time to chat. Can we get down to business?”
    “Of course, Rabbi,” Bennie said. “I’d hate to get in the way of your busy schedule of dick and ribbon cuttings.” Bennie reached into his attaché and pulled out a manila envelope and slid it across the table. “You got a funeral on Thursday and one coming up next week, too. Maybe two. Have to see how that one shakes out. Got a very sick relative. Could go anytime.”
    David just nodded. The holidays tended to be Bennie’s busy season with murder, and now that