had all been securely shredded.
“Everything is for sale for the right price,” the man insisted, peeling off some more crisp bills. “Think what you can buy with twenty thousand dollars.” He slipped the money into Stone’s hand and it felt like freedom.
Stone considered leaving Brooklyn behind forever, starting out anew on the far side of the world. There was nothing here for him, nothing at all.
“What makes you so sure he’s dying?” Stone asked after a moment.
“Only Hashem knows for certain,” the man said. “But I am making an offer now.”
Stone heard his father stirring in his bed, clicking the morphine drip, and he suddenly felt the violent need for the man to be gone.
“You have to leave,” Stone said, pressing the bills back onto the stranger. “Get out.”
“I’m here to help you.”
“He’s not dying, he’s not dying. He’s not.”
Stone managed to push the man into the hall, but he was certain he heard through the closed door the words, “I’ll be back, Matthew.”
Stone retreated to his father’s room, furious at himself for even considering the money. What kind of son could do such a thing? His father was going to get better, he was going to survive this. But there in his sickbed, his father looked like a stranger, a pale withered husk of what he once was. His eyes were closed and Stone observed movement behind the lids, a sign of life. And then his eyes swung open, icy blue and pitiless, and he said, “You are smart, but not so smart.” After a long pause in which he never removed his eyes from Stone, he added, “Everything is in the books.”
Stone knew for certain his father was calling him through these books. The Judge was gone, but his eyes had tracked these pages, his mind had been shaped by the words written before him. Somebody was in the room with him, just over his shoulder, there but not there, whispering the words in English as they appeared on the pages, overlaid at the same time with that other strange and ancient language. He found a leather-bound copy of One Thousand and One Nights; Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples; Rashi’s commentaries; a colossal book on the origins of the Spanish Inquisition; religious texts; legal texts; two books on gematria; the complete works of G. K. Chesterton; a silk-bound copy of Othello, with a tasseled bookmark that tickled Stone’s wrist.
When he finally reached the box in which he had placed the photo albums, Stone took a deep breath, expecting to be consumed by emotion. This was the life behind his own life, a blueprint to himself, which would go a long way toward explaining his future and what he might become. The albums were heavy and bursting with black-and-white pictures of his father as a child on Ocean Parkway: young Walter and poor Aunt Bunny playing on the front lawn, her broad mongoloid face shining beneath a frilled bonnet; his father lacing up a brand-new pair of PF Flyers, the corner of his tongue poking from his mouth in concentration; his father, missing his two front teeth, mugging with a baseball mitt in the stands at Ebbets Field. Stone’s father was small like he was, with a full head of hair and easy smile. He saw his father as a shirtless, happy teen, hair cropped short in the military style, leaning carefree on an oar beside some nameless lake. What an impossible image, that this smiling teen was his father. Stone had rarely seen him smile, and when he did there was a deep cruelty behind his calculating eyes as if he were taking pleasure in someone else’s misfortune. And then, deeper into the album, something changed in his father: he’d grown into the six-foot-three clean-headed giant that he was, a full six inches taller than Stone had ever grown. What a drastic change he had undergone, from an ordinary midcentury American boy into something almost mythic. He no longer resembled his son in the least—he looked like a different man.
In another album Stone found pictures of himself as a child, at birthday parties, Passover seders, Thanksgiving dinners—all the usual events at which a camera ordinarily appeared to document the moment for posterity. There was nothing unusual about these pictures—he might have been any one of ten million American boys the same age—except nearly every photograph had been defaced. Where Stone’s mother would have been, smiling as he opened his fifth birthday present or crying on his first day of school, there was nothing but a scratched-out spot as if somebody had taken a razor to the glossy sheen and rubbed it down to the raw photographic paper. Again and again his mother had been eliminated from each photograph, scratched out or excised with a pair of scissors, eliminated and thrown down Orwell’s memory hole.
Stone had little sympathy for his mother, who had disappeared without a word when he was twelve years old. But he had hoped he would see in these photographs a family as yet unbroken, happy, ignorant of the future that lay ahead. He wrapped himself in the robe and took a deep draft of the fabric, but instead of his father’s scent all he smelled now was the stink of his own marijuana.
A wrinkled manila envelope slipped out of the back of the album, scattering old scallop-edged black-and-white photos about the floor.
“Papa Julius,” Stone said, snatching up a photo. The Judge had never referred to him by name, but Stone’s mother had insisted her son call him Papa as a sign of respect—an early suggestion of the rift yet to come. The name had felt right on the tip of Stone’s young tongue despite the fact that he had not met the man and was forbidden to speak his name aloud when his father was near.
He was surprised the Judge had kept pictures of Julius; he had not seen him, as far as Stone knew, since he had moved uptown to Columbia over forty years earlier. But there was Stone’s grandfather, faded against the yellowing photographic paper, smiling, his foot on the running board of a black Oldsmobile. Another shot: under the sign for Ratner’s Deli, the Williamsburg Bridge in the background, Julius laughing as he pulled a hat off Meyer Lansky’s half-turned head.
“Meyer fucking Lansky!” Stone said, laughing. “Holy shit!” This was history, he thought, with a flash of pride. He had met his grandfather only once, just before he died, and had been trained by the Judge to act as if he had never existed. But if his grandfather had never existed, it would mean his father had never existed, which in turn would mean that he himself could never have come into being. But Stone was here, and he belonged to them; he’d inherited their genes, shared the same strands of DNA, climbed a similar whirling double helix like a magic ladder to his past and future at the same time.
There were dozens of photos of Julius Stone from his days with Murder Incorporated. Stone studied the photos. His grandfather did not look like a killer. He had intense eyes, sure, but there was a playful glimmer in them, as if he were about to tell a joke. He might have been a vaudeville comedian or a magician with those mischievous eyes. Stone was amazed how similar in build he was to his grandfather, the wild-haired killer, one hundred and twenty pounds of dynamite set with a short fuse.
Stone had to pee and stumbled his way to the bathroom. He caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror as he passed. His image swam in and out of focus as he looked into his own eyes, bloodshot and coated in a sickly film, and saw no sparkle, just pools of sorrow.
A strange thought occurred to Stone as he slipped out of his father’s robe. He looked so much smaller now, pale and gaunt, his body like a plucked bird, like some depilated mammal waiting to be snatched in predatory jaws. But he knew he was not helpless; he stood on the shoulders of two powerful men whom one crossed at one’s own peril. His fingers were slim and tapered—musician’s fingers. He had let his father down giving up on piano as a boy even though he had shown some brilliant sparks of talent. His father had wanted him to be the next Vladimir Horowitz or Arthur Rubinstein, but he had no interest in playing just to please his father, so he quit and never played again. Now, he formed the delicate fingers of his right hand into the shape of a pistol and pointed them at his own image
