“I have a job,” says Saul. Deep in his chest, some small hope or want begins to stir. Some unmentionable dissatisfaction yawns open.
“I’m offering you your culture back,” says Eli. “Do you have a job and a full heart? A job and a sense of connection to where you come from? We take vacations, here. We have a summer house in the Hudson Valley. We come together for food, for birth, for death.” Eli puffs at his cigar and blows two perfect smoke rings into the air of the study. “I’m offering you a fresh start,” he says. “I’m offering you a family.”
“I appreciate that,” says Saul. “I know my situation isn’t—traditional. But I have a job, and I have a family now.”
Eli stands. Outside, the sun has stationed directly over Manhattan. Prospect Park is dressed in velvet light. “I understand that you feel some loyalty to the family of your wife, of your child. I respect that. I don’t want to interfere with that. I just want you.” Eli looks at Saul warmly, kindly. “I won’t ask you to do anything that interferes with Joey’s business. I wouldn’t do that. It’s the Fianzo Family I’m after. I shouldn’t tell you that, but I trust you. I can tell I trust you. I can tell you’re exactly what I need.” Saul says nothing, but he wants very badly to trust Eli Leibovich in return. “It’s getting late,” Eli says, suddenly. “You should be getting back,” he says. “Your wife isn’t much for cooking, is she? Your daughter, she’ll be getting hungry? And your work—it’s consuming, lately. You aren’t treated like family there. And you aren’t sure how you fit into it all.”
Saul is still silent. He remembers that when he was a child the Hitler youth often blackened his eyes, knocked his new hat into the gutter; once, held him down and smeared bacon rinds across his lips and called him pig, pig, Unnütze Esser. Useless eater. He was hungry; after they left, he licked the bacon from his face. It tasted of salt and his own blood from where his lips had pressed viciously against his teeth. After these encounters his mother would press him to her, wipe his face, squeeze him like she wanted to put him back inside her own body.
Saul pictures Tommy Fianzo Jr. looking at him like he is dirt. He pictures Sofia, sneaking out before he wakes up; Julia, spreading dirt from her shoes over his living room floor, unaware the way only a child can be willfully, infuriatingly unaware. He knows that his job is built on a bloodstained foundation, on the disappearance of Antonia’s father, on the misery of the very people it sustains. And for a black hole moment, a sucking shaking earth-shattering instant, Saul wonders what he means when he says he has a family.
“Saul, when you decide you want to come home, give me a call.”
Before he can blink, Saul finds himself standing in the late afternoon breeze. Cars zoom past him, hoping to beat rush hour. A thousand strangers going to a thousand different homes. And do you have jobs? Saul wonders, the incomprehensible diversity of lives around him, buzzing. And do you have families?
* * *
—
Saul calls Eli the next day and tells him he’ll take the job. As he hangs up he feels elation bubble up within him. He turns out of the phone booth and faces the street and shouts, “HA!” surprising himself and a dusty family of pigeons.
Saul is making his own choices. He is making his own home. He finally feels like he is moving.
Of course, Saul cannot open the door and also control what comes in. So he exposes himself to the wide world of possibility. So danger scents him out, and, hungry, begins to stalk.
BOOK FIVE
1947–1948
Saul spends the fall of 1947 living a breathless double life. He is a father to Julia, an employee and a son to Joey. He is a husband to Sofia. And every other Thursday at nine in the evening, when he stands on an otherwise unremarkable street corner in South Brooklyn and calls Eli, he is a traitor.
Eli is warm toward Saul, and kind, and speaks in a subtle cadence Saul would never have associated with home until home was taken from him. He speaks like the men at temple, bobbing their heads and asking after each other’s families; in the next breath, arguing loudly. He speaks like the butcher with the best prices, the baker with the best rugelach, the super who used to change lightbulbs that were too high for Saul’s mother to reach. When Eli laughs, Saul feels a bit of himself return, a small shred of soul he hadn’t known was missing, and doesn’t know how he lived without.
Taking Eli’s offer had felt like medicine to Saul, who had become viscerally aware of everything he had given up or lost along the way to adulthood and who couldn’t, no matter how he searched, find his way to a world in which he belonged completely. He assumed that everyone around him belonged completely to their worlds; that they felt no sadness, no shadow life they could have lived moving alongside them, and never a sense of homelessness inside their own homes, inside their own skins. His own world felt scarce in comparison.