With the end of the war, though, came the end of that job. And soon Saul found himself immersed in what anyone would call the scrap work of paid goons. Now his levelheaded stare, his impeccable work ethic, and his ability to close the door behind his face and fit in anywhere, while answering no questions, are all qualities that make him an intimidating and efficient errand runner.

There are moments, small ones, mere slivers of seconds, when Saul wonders how he ended up in his life. When he imagines being eight, spread prone on the floor of a house his mother was cleaning, reading a comic or staring out the window into the filtered, old-fashioned European sunlight, or walking along the River Spree, tossing bread crusts to ducks. It is impossible for him to reconcile the world through the eyes of himself as a boy with the world he lives in now. Impossible, that his mother is gone and that he lives in America and that he is married into a family that feels like home, some days, and like a prison, others. And in those moments of impossibility Saul considers the steps he would have to take to get himself back to a recognizable life: leave his wife, leave his child, hitch a ride across the seething ocean to a home that, by all reports, no longer exists. Leave the Brooklyn streets, so familiar to Saul they could be the lines carved into his own palm. Still, he thinks, some days, the alternative is staying. Staying in a world where feeding his family means menacing others’. A world where he comes home and washes other men’s blood from his knuckles before dinner. Saul understands luck. He understands that given the slightest twist of fate, he could have lived a thousand different lives—some more lucky, some less.

—

Sofia has settled in to her role as The Boss’s Daughter, a term a couple of the men used pejoratively under their breaths to describe her when she started but which is now for all intents and purposes a term of endearment, earned over the year and a half her father’s men have watched her stand her ground against men much bigger than her, men who have the unpredictability engendered by desperation and fear. My father won’t like to hear that, she tells indebted shopkeepers, importers, restaurateurs, a policeman hoping to get off the Family payroll. Or more recently, my husband is a kind man, but I imagine this will test his limits. Sofia has mastered the blank face and imperturbable tone of her father, of Saul. She has added a red lip. She has added her own flair. She is touted as psychological weaponry. You’re just a woman, someone might say, a politician who paid for discretion, for protection. Yes, Sofia would respond. I’m a messenger.