And all Eli had wanted was information.
The Fianzo Family had long controlled the Red Hook docks, where they were beneficiaries of a cut of anything unloaded there. Saul was startled to learn this included the Colicchio imports—olive oil and wine, the finest cheeses, things that were forbidden during the war and remained prohibitively expensive to import via legitimate channels after the war was over. The docks also gave the Fianzo Family easy access to shipping channels, allowing them to get anyone or anything they wanted in or out of New York. After World War I, the Fianzos had been quietly renowned for their gunrunning operation. The docks allowed them to conceal crates of army surplus artillery on their way to somewhere else. The docks allowed them to spirit Lorenzo Fianzo, Tommy Sr.’s brother, back to Sicily when the Bureau of Investigation caught on. The docks gave the Fianzos steady income, as the unions designed to protect the longshoremen became incubators for corruption and extortion.
Eli Leibovich wanted control of those docks.
Saul started paying more attention to his and Joey’s monthly meetings with Tommy Fianzo. On his way into the building he would count the men he saw posted casually around—two smoking outside the front, one standing in front of Tommy’s office door. Once he got home he would scribble down every detail he could remember. Different men in front this week but same guard in front of T.F.’s door. Office window has clear view west but obstructed by stack of shipping crates to the southwest. If occasionally a flicker of guilt arose—Joey’s face, offering Saul wisdom, a job, his daughter’s hand in marriage; or Sofia, wide-eyed and beaming on the day Julia was born; or Julia herself, the warm, savage heart of her, exploding across the living room to hug Saul when he got home—Saul tamped it down, reminding himself that the Fianzos were villains for the Colicchio Family too. I’m helping them. He can almost convince himself.
Of course, Saul’s new side job doesn’t just put him at risk. It risks destabilizing the peace Joey Colicchio has upheld since 1930. It risks starting a lethal turf war between Eli Leibovich and the Sicilian Families. It risks the very lives of everyone Saul loves.
Each month, Eli Leibovich receives Saul’s scraps of information warmly, invites him for supper. At first, Saul declined; it felt unsafe, it felt disloyal. But curiosity and Eli’s genuine charm won out. Eli’s mother, who now lives in her own wing of Eli’s sprawling apartment, hugged Saul the first time she met him. A beautiful boy, she called him, and Saul blanched and felt his heart and his stomach switch places; such was the power of being hugged by a mother who shares some inarticulable spirit with his own mother.
How simple family seems, from the outside. How desperate Saul becomes about the state of his own.
* * *
—
At home, Saul has started picking fights. Small ones, about Sofia’s work hours. Julia’s puzzles and playing cards, crusted in sugar or snot, abandoned on the living room rug. Why can’t we eat together like a normal family? he asks one evening, sharp and dismayed. Julia, reading at the table as she balances steamed carrot slices on her fork, and Sofia, who has just run in, late again, look at Saul in surprise. Sorry, they say, which is unusual, because both of them are fighters, and Saul wonders what is so unstable about him that he has surprised them into apology. I made chicken, he says, by way of explanation. It gets cold.
* * *
—
Tonight, when Saul reaches the pay phone, he very consciously stands up straight and strides into the stall and pulls the sliding door shut behind him. The booth smells like hot trash and concrete. Saul pulls out his handkerchief and wipes the earpiece of the phone before sliding his dimes into the slot and dialing.
“Eli Leibovich,” Eli says as he answers.
“It’s me,” says Saul.
“Saul! Right on time. Any news?”
“Nothing much this month. I’m sorry. You know, I’m not even sure they have plans for expansion right now.” Saul can feel his usefulness ebbing. There is little he can pass along to Eli, other than the small details he can catalogue as he walks up the stairs to the Fianzo office and then back down.
“Everyone has plans for expansion, Saul,” says Eli. “It’s human nature.” And then, “Tell you what: meet me for a drink this evening.”
Saul is due at home. Sofia will notice if he’s gone, and she might mention it to Rosa, or Joey. She might mention it to Antonia, who might mention it to Paolo, whose friendship with Saul has deteriorated over the last year along with his mental health and his own marriage. Paolo, who wanted so much more than his desk job.
“Saul?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t this evening,” says Saul. “My family.”
“Your family,” Eli repeats. “And how are they, your family?”
Saul doesn’t like talking about his family with Eli. He compartmentalizes. “They’re well,” he says.
Eli can sense his reticence. “Call anytime,” he says. Eli’s warmth is a weapon. The kinder his voice, the more severe the consequences.
Saul hangs up, sweating.
Everyone has plans for expansion, says Eli, over and over again in Saul’s head as Saul walks home. It’s human nature.
Is it? Saul wonders. All he wants is to shrink into the places in his life where he feels at home. All he wants is for those places to coexist.
* * *
—
When Robbie starts school, Antonia decides if she is ever going to go back to school herself she is going to have to take it into her own hands. So she hatches a plan: Monday and Wednesday mornings, after she has dropped Robbie off and Paolo has left for work, Antonia packs herself a snack and a notebook and a sweater, for it is always freezing in the library, and sneaks furtively out of her apartment and down the street, as if someone might stop her.
She still has no money for extracurriculars but the memory of reading Antigone in high school has come back to her like a long-lost friend and she has begun reading the classics section systematically. She sits curled into a chair like a snail into its shell in one of the vast, echoing stone reading rooms on the third floor and from nine in the morning to twelve noon, Antonia loses herself in the drama and heartache of another time entirely. Aeschylus and Euripides. Aristotle and Ovid.
Soon, Antonia finds Metamorphoses, a greasy, dog-eared copy that she becomes in thrall to almost immediately. Where teenage Antonia held on to stories of principle, of the great unfairnesses perpetrated by those in power, mamma Antonia prays to stories of evolution, stories that promise that no one is born into their final shape. She mouths words to herself, tasting them as they bounce along the tongue. She wonders if she herself has the capacity for change.
When she walks home in the early afternoon, Antonia is buoyant, the combined joy of exercising her brain and the adrenaline of keeping a new secret propelling her along. Of course, she knows in some way that this is a stopgap, something she made up to pass the time, to distract herself. She can see the concrete ways that the people around her have changed: Sofia, with her job; Lina, who has now built such a loyal clientele that she often sits with visiting women from dawn to dusk. Even Frankie, once small enough to balance with Antonia on one chair like a teddy bear, has begun saving money to move out of her parents’ home. She cuts neighborhood ladies’ hair and they forget she is only sixteen; her self-assurance is so contagious. Her face so poised.
It’s just us, thinks Antonia. She and Paolo and Robbie. It’s just us who are standing still.
* * *
—
The phone rings as Saul is finishing breakfast. Sofia is already gone, having kissed Julia’s forehead and whispered to Saul, my mamma can take her to school, and then rather than kissing Saul, too, brandishing the bottoms of her shoes in a wave before disappearing in a cloud of Soir de Paris. Saul picks up the phone.
It is Joey. He is brief, but he asks Saul for a meeting.
* * *