The Family(26)

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—

Joey Colicchio is now the coordinator of a grand smuggling empire. Using the contacts he’s built with olive oil and cured-meat exporters in Italy, Joey has—without directly implicating himself in any of it—constructed a flawless network from Brindisi to Red Hook. For a hefty price, Jewish families can pay him to be discreetly transported amongst wheels of parmigiana and double bottles of Chianti. Of course, it is not just Jews. There are Catholics, too. There are homosexuals. There is a Romani family who sells generations’ worth of family jewelry to buy their passage. Joey doesn’t care: If they can pay, he arranges for their transport. If they can pay more, he arranges for their passports, their false histories, the references they need to lease shoddy, crowded apartments.

Business is busier than ever. When the first reports of horror inside Dachau and Buchenwald reach Joey’s ears, he raises his prices. (Of course, there is a persistent rumor that he will not turn down women and children who cannot pay. Of course, the entire idea that Joey Colicchio is responsible for any of this is an unfounded rumor in and of itself. There is no paper trail, and hardly anyone along the route even knows Joey’s name, and those who do would rather have their eyes cut out of their skulls than give it up.)

By the end of 1940, Joey finds himself in need of an assistant.



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—

Does Sofia feel a warmth, or a tremor, or some kind of deep unlocking inside herself as Saul Grossman disembarks from the ocean liner where he has crouched for two weeks, retching bile into a bucket in the hold along with fifteen other threadbare Jews?

Does she settle down a little, into her preordained spot in the universe?



* * *



—

At exactly eleven o’clock at night, two months after he stumbled out of the hold of the SS Hermes into American sunlight, Saul Grossman arrives at the deli where he makes sandwiches for hungry, nocturnal New Yorkers. The icy winter air forces streams of liquid from his eyes and nose, which he wipes with a sleeve as he hurries up the block. He shimmies through the post-theater crowd building outside, lifts the grate on Ludlow, and stomps his feet on the way down to scatter the rats. He is no longer surprised at how many people in New York expect to eat at any time they please.

“I can always hear you comin’, Saul,” says Lenny. “You sound like you weighs four hundred pounds!” Lenny, a three-hundred-pound fixture at the deli, has a slow Brooklyn drawl and a smile that unfolds across his whole face. He exudes a protective gentleness, a slow-to-anger loyalty, a moral compass with a diamond tip. He kept Saul standing and eating when Saul first stumbled into the deli, homesick and haggard.

“We need some cats, Lenny,” says Saul. “I just scared a rat the size of a side of pastrami.”

“Hogwash,” says Lenny. “We got you to keep ’em in line!”

Lenny grins as Saul squeezes past him in the dark basement. In the half-light, he looks maniacal. “Hey, Saul?” he asks.

Saul turns.

“It’s good to see you doin’ a little better,” says Lenny.

“Thanks,” says Saul. “I’ve been trying. I had a letter from home this week.”

“Well now, that’s the stuff,” says Lenny. “Good news?”

Saul shakes his head. “It’s my mother, so she lies. She says everything is fine, that she has been given a job sweeping rubbish from the streets. I’m sure it’s much worse than she admits.” Four years of study in grammar school and months of full immersion had rendered his English nearly perfect, but the German clip of his consonants sneaks in, especially when he is upset.

“She’ll make her way out, Saul.”

Saul nods and walks to the back of the basement. He is exhausted from imagining everything that could have happened to his mother, to his country. He finds an apron and a hat, and leaves his coat on a hook in the staff room. He washes his hands, dries them on his apron, looks in the mirror and blinks the sleep from his eyes before ascending the stairs to the deli floor.

It’s already packed, and the straining crowd outside fogs the windows with its hungry breath. “Get to work, Grossman!” barks Carol. Saul is sure he hadn’t paused for more than half a breath, but he nods at Carol and shuffles behind the row of other sandwich makers to his station.

Saul stacks roast beef in precarious towers; he layers steaming chunks of turkey on rye; he spears slices of brisket and ladles their drippings on top. His hands deftly manipulate loaves of bread, slabs of meat, spoonfuls of gravy and dressing, mustard and mayonnaise. The world narrows down to the thumping, hissing, beating of a busy deli. Thoughts of his mother and his country are subsumed into the squeak of rubber shoes on floor, the sizzle of melting cheese, the clang of empty metal trays being exchanged for new ones, the happy burble and chatter of chair-screeching, finger-sucking customers. Down the counter at the pickle station Lenny has emerged from doing the books in the basement to shout, “One sour, one sour, two half, pickles, pickles, dill pickles, how many, ma’am, yes, three sour, enjoy!”

“Hey, kid!”

Saul turns toward the counter, wondering what he has forgotten. Pastrami on rye, two pickles—he can’t imagine. “What can I do for you?”

The man who spoke to him is tall and dark-featured like Saul, but with the broad chest, the chiseled-out cheekbones, and the smoothed-back hair he has learned to associate with Italians, rather than Jews. “You make a damn good sandwich,” he says.