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

Chapter 23

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.

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.