5) Stanley’s first impulse was to talk to Rose, to unburden himself to his wife and ask for her help in stopping Lew, but again and again he struggled to get the words out of his mouth, and again and again he failed, each time backing down at the last minute because he couldn’t bear the thought of listening to what she would say to him, what he knew she would say to him. He couldn’t go to the police. No crime had been committed yet, and what sort of a man accuses his brother of plotting a potential crime when he has no hard evidence to substantiate proof of a conspiracy? On the other hand, even if Bernstein and his brother eventually went through with it, would he have it in him to go to the police and have his brother arrested? Lew was in danger. They were threatening to blind him, to kill his wife and daughter, and if Stanley stepped forward now, he would be responsible for that maiming, for those deaths, which meant that he was a part of it, too, an unwilling co-conspirator in spite of himself, and if things went wrong and Bernstein and Lew were caught, he had no doubt that his brother wouldn’t hesitate to name him as an accomplice. Yes, he despised Lew, he was sickened by the mere thought of him, and yet how deeply he despised himself for feeling that hatred, which was sinful and grotesque and only further increased his inability to act, for by failing to talk to Rose he understood that he had chosen the past over the present, had renounced his place as husband and father to go back to the dark world of son and brother, a place where he had no wish to be anymore, but he couldn’t escape, he had been sucked back into it, and for the next two weeks he walked around in a demented state of dread and fury, walled off from everyone by his unbroken silence, seething with frustration, wondering when the bomb inside his head would finally explode.
6) As he saw it, there was no alternative but to play along — or pretend to play along. He needed to know what Bernstein and company were planning, to be kept abreast of the details, and in order to learn those things he had to trick Lew into believing he was with him, so the next morning, just twenty-four hours after their last conversation, the chilling dialogue that had ended with the words It has to be done, Stanley told Lew that he had changed his mind, that against his better judgment and with infinite disgust in his heart, he understood there was no other way. This falsehood produced the desired results. Thinking Stanley was now on board, a grateful, trembling, all but unhinged Lew began to treat his brother as his cherished ally and most trusted confidant, and not once did he suspect that Stanley was acting as a double agent whose sole intention was to gum up the works and prevent the fire from happening.
7) There would be two men, Lew informed him, a seasoned arsonist with no criminal record working in tandem with a lookout, and the date was set for next Tuesday, the night of November second/third, as long as it turned out to be a dry night with no rain in the forecast. Lew’s job was to dismantle the burglar alarm and provide the men with keys to the store. He would spend the night at home and suggested Stanley do the same, but Stanley had other plans for that night, or just a single plan, which was to park himself in the unlit store and chase off the firebug before he could start his work. Stanley wanted to know if the men would be carrying guns, but Lew wasn’t certain, Bernstein had neglected to touch on that point with him, but what difference did it make, he asked, why worry about something that didn’t concern them? Because someone might choose the wrong moment to go walking past the store, Stanley said, a cop, a man out with his dog, a woman on her way home from a party, and he didn’t want anyone to get hurt. Burning down a business for three hundred thousand dollars in insurance money was bad enough, but if some innocent bystander happened to be shot and killed in the process, they could go to jail for the rest of their lives. Lew hadn’t thought of that. Maybe he should bring it up with Bernstein, he said, but Stanley told him not to bother, since Bernstein’s men were going to do exactly as they pleased, regardless of what Lew wanted. That put an end to the discussion, and as Stanley walked away from his brother and entered the downstairs showroom, he realized that this question of guns or no guns was the great unknown variable, the one factor that could destroy his plan. It would make sense for him to buy a gun before Tuesday, he told himself, but something in him balked at the idea, a lifetime of revulsion toward guns, so much so that he had never fired one or even held one in his hand. His father had been killed by a gun, and what good had it done him to be carrying his own revolver in that Chicago warehouse thirty-one years ago, he had been shot down anyway, killed with an unfired thirty-eight in his right hand, and who knew if he hadn’t been killed because he’d gone for his gun first, leaving his killer no choice but to shoot him in order to save his own life? No, guns were a complicated business, and once you pointed a weapon at someone, especially someone with a weapon of his own, the thing you were counting on to protect you was just as likely to turn you into a corpse. Besides, the man Bernstein had dug up to incinerate 3 Brothers Home World wasn’t a contract killer but an arsonist, an ex-firefighter according to Lew, that was a good one, a man who once made his living putting out fires now setting them for fun and profit, and why would he need a gun to do that? The lookout was another matter, no doubt some broad-chested thug who would come to the store fully armed, but Stanley figured he would be waiting outside while the ex-fireman went about his job, and since Stanley would already be inside before the two of them showed up, he concluded that a gun wouldn’t be necessary. That didn’t mean he would go there empty-handed, but a baseball bat would serve his purpose just as well, he felt, a thirty-six-inch Louisville Slugger would scare off the torch just as effectively as a thirty-two-caliber pistol, and given Stanley’s state of mind in the two weeks leading up to November second, the demonic, half-mad, out-of-control roar of thoughts that had been raging in his head since the morning of Lew’s confession, he found the idea of a baseball bat deeply and perversely funny, so funny that he laughed out loud when the idea came to him, a brief yelp of a laugh that rose up from the bottom of his lungs and burst out of him like a splatter of buckshot bouncing off a wall, for the whole gruesome comedy had started with a baseball bat, the bat used by Dusty Rhodes at the Polo Grounds on September twenty-ninth, and what better way to end the farce than by taking hold of another bat and threatening to bash in the head of the man who wanted to burn down his store?