What’s it all about?

If you lost everything in the world that meant anything to you, how long would you wait and how far would you go to get revenge?

When a popular Italian restaurant is bombed by the Mob, one man struggles with his desperate feelings of guilt at surviving the blast whilst his family are among the innocent victims killed.
The loss is overwhelming for him, and when the case collapses against the Mafia boss responsible, he believes the only reason for his survival was to enact a brutal and appropriate justice.
Exactly ten years after the murder of his brother, sister-in-law and their unborn baby, he is ready to take revenge and cross the line that separates him from the murderer he has pursued.
The 3rd novel by Matthew Solo is a shocking story about love, loss, hatred and sadistic torture on an unparalleled level.

Chapter 1 – The beginning of the end

 The sun burned across the city and was rising high in the sky when I woke. Napoleon was comfortable at my feet, but as I stirred, so did he. After a long stretch that ended in his whole body trembling, he walked confidently up the bed and examined me. He purred as he licked my face and arched his back when my hand came into contact with it. Having stopped licking, he sniffed me as if to check whether I was what he had just tasted.

The boards of the floor were warm in the morning sunshine and I overextended myself in full view of Napoleon. He looked up at me, unimpressed by what he assumed was my vain attempt to outstretch him. As I began to walk to the kitchen, he jumped off the bed and ran to join me. Encircling my legs, he dragged his soft grey fur against my skin.

“Do you want some food?” I asked looking down at him. He looked up at me and meowed. Whilst I’m not fluent in cat, I took this as a yes.

I took a packet from cupboard and opened it into his dish. He pushed my hands out of the way and started to devour the rather repulsive looking meat and jelly combination. I waited until he had begun to slow down and then squeezed the remainder of the contents of his breakfast into the white ceramic bowl.

After washing and drying my hands, I prepared what I would eat and took satisfaction in how civilized I felt in comparison to my feline friend on the floor. As I began to eat, I looked down at him as he finished. He licked his lips and then his paw before licking his lips once more. Then he looked up at me, obviously impressed by my civility, he decided to join me. As usual, he took the painful route of jumping up to my lap and forcing his head between the table and my stomach.

“And what do you want now?” I asked. He didn’t reply, at least not with words, just another lick of his lips and an inquisitive yet confusing stare. I continued eating and I could feel him watch every forkful enter my mouth.

•••

After a short, but hot shower, I dressed myself and prepared to go next door. I have lived in this apartment for the last eight years. When I first moved in, Mrs Levinstein’s husband, Jacob, was still alive. I didn’t see that much of him, at the end he was bedridden and Miriam cared for him until his very last breath. I waited uncomfortably after he died before I built up enough courage to knock on her door.

Miriam and Jacob had grown up together. They fled Germany together and been married for nearly 60 years. They had only one child, Ruth, who had married and left to live in London. She came over for the funeral, but didn’t stay around for too long after that. It upset me that Ruth seemed so uncaring for her mother, but it was not my place to say anything.

They argued most days for the two weeks that she was over. The evenings were the worst. The chorus of Ruth shouting and Miriam crying became quite unbearable. I found respite in walking the streets, several blocks at a time.

The streets of Brooklyn are filled with all sorts of things to catch one’s eyes and stir the imagination as you tread the well-trodden sidewalks. My mind was never quite susceptible to its lurid enchantment and on those occasions was quite preoccupied and focused beyond its attempt at distraction. Even the music in my headphones could not divert my intention. My eyes stared vacantly as my body walked with an equal lack of consideration for the urban stimuli that filled the warm evening air around me.

When I returned, if Ruth was still shouting I would turn the television on. Without removing my headphones, I would lie, face down on the floor. I stared at the wooden boards beneath me as Napoleon stared at me. Then retaining focus on the area of floor between my hands I would do fifty push-ups. After fifty regular, I would return to the floor in the position that I had started. I did not rest because I needed it, I just wanted to hear over the silence of my inactivity whether they had stopped. Invariably they had not and I would do fifty with one leg raised before fifty more with the other raised.

I hadn’t always been fit and strong, in fact, far from it. I have never been large. I was the smaller of the two brothers in build and age, but time and circumstance change things. For me, now, 150 push-ups and I barely break a sweat.

When Ruth did finally leave, I left it a few days deliberating what to do. What to say and how to do and say it. I have never been a very talkative person. I was the quieter of the two brothers. Even though Miriam was old and frail, I found her abrupt and intimidating, but hearing her crying, alone, in her lonely world of sorrow seemed even more unbearable than hearing her crying in the presence of her uncaring daughter.

I felt like a self-proclaimed master of solitude and the misery it can bare. And yet I wanted so much to be her prophet of companionship. My destiny had shown me the darkness and landed me next to her. So I knocked.

She took a while to answer the door. She hovered low, unable to stand fully upright. Behind the partially opened door she peered out at me, as frightened as I was peering in. The chain was pulled tight as she peaked around the dark, scratched wood to see who it was. She seemed more perturbed and agitated than relieved by my offer of company. Insisting she didn’t need my help, she pushed the door the few inches to its closed position. I told her she could knock anytime if she needed anything. I waited a minute or so before retreating unceremoniously to my apartment.

I knocked twice every day after that, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. For five weeks I knocked before she finally spoke something other than dismissive insults. I told her about Napoleon. That he and I could hear her crying and how sad it made us feel. She had seen him on the ledges outside our windows and confessed to feeding him scraps occasionally. She took some solace in the friend who never shouted at her when she spoke and so finally opened the door to another one.

That was two years ago. I have seen her every day since. On Monday’s, Wednesday’s and Friday’s I take her garbage down and pick her groceries up. We sit and have a cup of coffee together and she tells me stories of growing up in a nationalist state and how she a Jacob survived here in New York. She shows me through her photo albums and I pretend I haven’t seen them before. I can’t fake the genuine interest I take in seeing the images of the Brooklyn streets the way they were.

Last year, I decorated her apartment for her, with her guidance of course. There was more cleaning up than decorating. The wallpaper had grown inevitably tired with age and I cleaned it down with sugar soap before painting all the doors and frames. The smell of paint lingered for weeks and I bought her fresh flowers with every shopping trip in a vain effort to hide it. She pretended that it didn’t bother her, but I found it intoxicating.

In the living room, I mounted her photographs on the walls on either side of the mantelpiece. The pictures that had never been framed before and previously filled the inside of a dusty old shoe box. All those images and memories that she kept concealed in a small, beaten up beige suitcase underneath the bed. She cried with joy at her wall of remembrance as she called it. She thanked me in words that I could not distinguish from German or Hebrew. It was one of those special days, when the air is sweet to breathe and everything felt alright for a change.

My visit today had no such arduous tasks attached to it. I bent down as I greeted her and she gave me a kiss on each cheek. She had prepared a small bag with some juice and milk bottles that needed to take down to the corner store and an equally small list of groceries to pick up. Just like always, she insisted on giving me some money and just like always, I insisted in taking the money when I returned knowing that she would have forgotten by the time I did so.

Jacob had been tailor in Germany. He had worked for a small business that his father owned and Miriam was employed as a seamstress in the shop. That was how they met and they fell in love at first sight. Her mother had died of tuberculosis and her father had brought her up alone. He and Jacob’s parents sent the two of them to America in hope of better life away from the escalating tensions of Nazi Germany. They married before they left with plans of their parents joining them as soon as they had settled and found a place that could accommodate them all.

The boat journey from Europe was long and difficult. They were surrounded by so many people with the same idealistic dreams. Their parents never made it to America to join them. Jacob’s father died in Dachau concentration camp, his mother didn’t survive the train journey. Miriam’s mother, Rebecca, died in Auschwitz. Miriam remembers incredible details about her parents, the boat journey and all sorts of things about Jacob, but she never remembers that she hasn’t paid me when I tell her that she has.

When I returned with her milk, crackers and jam, I asked her to wait whilst I got something for her. The package was about the size of a paperback book. I told her it was very important that she kept it safe and that she was not to open it unless I didn’t come around next week. I told her I would be away for a few days and that depending how the job went, I might not be back. In the package was a goodbye present from me, just in case I didn’t get to see her before I went. She seemed as sad at the thought of not seeing me again as she was happy at the thought of me taking control of my life and moving on.

I bent down as she kissed me on each cheek and her hands felt small and cold in mine. Back in my apartment, I looked at Napoleon looking back at me and realised these were my only two friends in the world. I stood and gazed above where at one time had been the fireplace. There on the gloss painted wooded ledge sat all my trophies, his and mine. They told the story of two journeys years apart, the same path, the same roads only different times.

The day was taking forever to end. I had packed two suitcases and reviewed my list for what must have been the twentieth time that day. Napoleon stared on amused and confused and then left to follow a fly that interested him more. All my tools had been cleaned and sterilized and were packed. I paced around the table reading through the list. It was an early start tomorrow and I was sweating as much from the afternoon’s heat as I was from the anticipation of the journey ahead. I felt anxious and yet somewhat relieved by the thought that it was nearly over.

Besides the bed, on top of the chest of drawers there was a stack of five books that had no good place being together. A man may choose to read any one of those books for academic reasons, even out of some strange and morbid curiosity, but no man would have chosen to read those books as they lay collected. Together they told an unnerving tale that had no proper place in this world.

They had been my bible for the last ten years. Each book was a chapter, but together they represent an exploration into the darkest annals of a man’s soul. A treatment beyond reason and they were not alone, they were just the final chapters in the transformation about to take place. I took no pride in their subject matter, nor their intended use.

I was never the strong brother. I was the weak brother; the academic one; the wimpy one; the one that read books; the one that studied, the one that went to libraries and museums. I was the one that preferred documentaries to movies and psychology to cycling.

The night was still, but for the whirring of the fan and the caressing breeze it created. I had been lying there since dinner without being able to sleep. My dinner was light at best, but not as light as the thousands of butterfly wings that flapped around my insides and quelled any hope of me being hungry. None the less, I ate. I needed my strength. My mind had been unable to focus any more energy on the books besides my bed. Even if it had been, I knew those words quite well enough.

My imagination played out alternative versions of what might happen. I imagined what he might say and of how I might respond. His voice cut me. Like an invisible blade it sliced through me with the force of a thousand demons. It was right to silence it. The silence felt good. The stillness felt good.

Words will only antagonize. His words that is. Mine are intended to antagonize. Mine are intended to strike fear. To cast out those demons who have so long hid within me. To evict them from their home where they have dwelled with no value for their proprietor. Mine must be absolute.

The clock clicked and continued counting as another minute passed. The ceiling was black as ink, spilled as day had jetted off beyond the horizon. There was no detail to be seen. No glimmer of anything, but still, I lay there and stared anyway.

I watched as the minutes turned to hours. The blackness was slowly eaten up by the returning daylight and the night was finally done. I had given up counting the clicks each minute, instead I lay hypnotised by the fan’s gyration. I watched it wobble with each rotation. As if it hadn’t been assembled correctly, or that it had but its design was flawed. The comfort of my fear dispelled by distraction.

I had spent the whole night contemplating today. I had spent the last ten years contemplating today. I had imagined waking up to glorious sunshine and embracing the day ahead of me. The reality of the situation was as I lay there, I was terrified that the day had finally come.

I stared up at the ceiling. A single crack traversed from one wall to the other. A join that had been concealed by paint, but time had revealed and exposed its identity. Now it crossed my room unconcealed. The dark mantle of night was no longer around to aid and disguise it. In the centre, a lamp hung down, wearing nothing but a pale yellowy cream coloured shade and some dust.

Rolling on my side, I looked across the chest of drawers and past the books. The clock hid every word from the spine of the bottom two books and left only the last letters exposed from the third. Even though I could not see the sun directly, I could feel it was going to be another hot day today.

The angle of my view revealed the strokes with which I had cleaned the window. In the corner, a tiny piece of fabric hung, snagged and lifeless. On the street side, a spider’s web danced in the morning breeze, its builder and owner, nowhere to be seen.

I looked over at the clock knowing that whatever time it was, it was before I needed to get up. Irresistible force was controlling me now however. Like an unquenchable thirst it pulled me out of bed. I had 17 minutes until my alarm was to go off and I decided to take that time oblivious to my unfolding destiny in the refuge that was my shower.

The water was nearly hot enough to scold me, but the pain made me feel real. It made me feel alive. For the last week I had been on holiday from work. Like a zombie I had hardly slept for more than minutes at a time. Music that had been such a pleasure in my life before, meant nothing anymore and gave no stimulation other than that of sound rattling within my emptiness. I had another week to go before I may or may not return and I thought of that mundane monotony as the water burnt away my pain.

I wiped the condensation from the mirror and watched as the stripes from my hands motion cast watery streams that breached their banks and ran as gravity dictated. I followed their path as they ran to the edge of the mirror and dripped the sink below. The heat in the room was sucked through the gap as I opened the small window. I imagined clouds of water vapour forming above the street below as it absconded through the narrow opening.

Turning back to the mirror, I watched the droplets form and then fall. I took a deep breath and reached over my head with one arm. Taking my elbow with my other hand, I pulled slowly until I reached my pain threshold, then I pulled some more. I held the positing until the pain numbed and existed no more. Standing upright again, I stared at my fading reflection as the mirror slowly hid behind the veil of condensed steam. Reaching over my head with the opposite arm and taking that elbow with my hand, even the steam could not hide the scar that stretched from my forearm down below my shoulder. I stretched as hard as I had before, but with the limitations of skin with reduced elasticity. If I had any doubts about today, they left swiftly through the open window just as surely as the steam had.

Holding the stretch low, my alarm clock began to sound. Inhaling with the motion of standing upright, I stared at the wet, grey glass of the mirror. In the centre, my muffled reflection formed a pink, brown blur. I wiped the glass once more and half expected to see my brother standing in my place. It wasn’t him of course, it was me. I frowned, disappointed and resolute.

I began to grease my hair and then rinsed my hands. After drying them I left the confinement of the bathroom and picked up the photograph from the floor. Wiping the mirror again I pressed it against the glass and the moisture held it in position. Looking at Nico’s image, I fashioned my hair to look like his.

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