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.