The Singer's Gun

by Emily St. John Mandel

  “You grew up in the business,” she said. “You’d be fine.”

  “You mean I have dishonesty in my blood? Thanks, Ari.”

  “What, you think you don’t?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Does it have to be hereditary? I think I want something different.”

  “You poor sweet incorruptible soul. How are you going to earn the money for college?”

  “I’m not sure I’m going, actually.”

  “Well,” she said, “why don’t you just make some money, then, and decide whether you’re spending it all on tuition once you have it?”

  Anton had no immediate response. He lay on his back to look up at the underside of the Williamsburg Bridge, dark steel bisecting the left side of the sky. Beyond the bridge clouds floated inscrutably over blue. Aria had become harder and harder to talk to lately, not that talking to her had ever been particularly easy. “Where did you get this idea, anyway?”

  “From Jesús,” she said.

  “The Jesús who used to work for my parents?”

  “Yeah, him. I knew him my whole life. Anyway, he comes up to me right before he moves back to Mexico, asks if I know anyone who might want to buy his Social Security number from him. Says he bought it himself fifteen years ago and figures he doesn’t really need it anymore, and he thought someone else could use it. That’s where I got the idea. Think about it, Anton: there must be a million immigrants in this city whose chances of becoming legal are slim to none. Green cards are difficult. There are fees involved, you need a lawyer to make it all happen, the waiting list can be twenty years long depending on which country you’re from, and how are you going to survive in the meantime? Even marrying an American offers no guarantee—if you entered the country illegally, they can still break up your family and deport you. So they buy a Social Security card, they can then get a better job because they’re plausibly legal, we make a profit, and everybody wins.”

  “And everybody wins!” Anton said. “I never knew you were such a philanthropist. Where do we get the numbers?”

  “We make them up. I’ve done some research. The first three numbers correspond to the state in which the card was issued, and for New York State, that’s any number between 050 and 134. It’s a little more complicated, but the rest is more or less random.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Let me think about it.”

  The business was a success from the first month and Anton loved his job for years. There was no career he could possibly have been better suited to, he thought at first, than the sale of fraudulent Social Security cards to illegal aliens in the city of New York. They were interesting. They came from everywhere. They were polite, as people on the margins of the world often are, and grateful for his services. The transactions were never boring, because every transaction carried the possibility of prison time, and they were never impersonal, because he was selling each and every one of his customers a future. He thought of himself as the last step before their new jobs, the last step before an office where a manager would glance at the Social Security card—the forgery flawless; Aria bought an expensive printer and acquired a credible facsimile of the official card paper from somewhere—before the employment forms were pushed across the desk.

  Within a year they had expanded into the sale of American passports. Aria would tell him nothing about this side of the business. Anton understood that the passports were manufactured elsewhere, but he didn’t know where or by whom. Aria told him it was none of his concern and they had a series of unpleasant fights about it. The thought of unknown people being involved with their business made him profoundly uneasy.

  “The less you know, the less risk there is for you,” Aria said reasonably. “The only people you’ll ever meet are our clients.”

  Of all the people Anton met, all the Hungarian strippers and Chinese factory workers and Jamaican nannies, there was only one who ever scared him: Federico, a Bolivian architect with a high-pitched laugh who rambled for an hour about his tormented and visa-dependent love life (“But turns out she’s on a six-month visa, so back to Brazil at the end of June, bye-bye, and no more girlfriend! Just like that!”), then beckoned Anton close across the table and joked that he might just shoot him and run off without paying, ha ha! But this was Anton’s last week in the business, and the system had been perfected years ago: Anton ordered a ginger ale, which was code for catastrophe. The waitress, Ilieva, nodded and moved quickly behind the counter to make a quiet phone call. Anton listened to Federico talk about his girlfriend and wondered if Aria was back from Los Angeles yet. She’d been renting an apartment in Santa Monica under an assumed name and going out there every three or four weeks for reasons that seemed vaguely business-related, although she wouldn’t discuss her activities in any great detail.

  “So when do I get the documents?” Federico asked, but Aria had already pulled up outside. She tapped her horn three times lightly as Anton stood up from the table.

  “This is a sting,” Anton said softly. “Leave now and you won’t be deported.”

  “What the . . .?”

  “Seriously, take off. You’ll be arrested in three minutes if you don’t.”

  Federico went pale and left quickly. Anton gave a hundred dollars to Ilieva and got in Aria’s car and she berated him all the way back over the Williamsburg Bridge while he fiddled with the radio and the heat knobs. It was snowing. She was living near the store in those days, dressing the same way every other girl in the neighborhood dressed in the first few years of the twenty-first century: shapeless dresses made out of t-shirt material in eye-popping colors, low-slung leather boots and an asymmetrical haircut. He understood this to be a uniform; none of her income came from legal sources, and she didn’t especially want to draw attention to herself.

  “Anton, answer me. Seriously, what happened? Why did Ilieva call?”

  “I told you, he made a joke about shooting me. I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not.”

  “Christ,” she said. “This was one of yours, wasn’t it? I didn’t screen this guy. So tell me, was there any screening involved whatsoever? You didn’t ask him anything before you met with him, did you?” Anton decided not to dignify this with a response. “Stop fucking with the radio,” she said. “All I’m saying is that if he was crazy enough to shoot you, he could just as easily have been FBI.”

  “He wasn’t FBI. He was just some lunatic with a fucked-up sense of humor.”

  “Are you even listening to me? You’re lucky I was in town. I’ve been out in LA half the week.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “The store. I have a new batch of cards for you.” They were leaving the bridge under a deep gray sky.

  “No passports?”

  “One passport. The rest just want cards, because they’re fucking cheapskates. Anton, seriously, I think you should carry a gun.”

  “What? I’m out of the business anyway. You know this is my last week.”

  “For your own protection.”

  “Do you carry one?”

  “Not on a regular basis,” she said.

  “You own a gun. Are you kidding me?”

  “We’re gangsters, sweetheart.”

  “We’re a gang of two, Aria. You watch too much television.”

  “We’re not a gang of two. You know other people work with us on the passport side. Anyway, all I’m saying is, we’re selling an illegal product to illegal people, and things get a little sketchy sometimes. It might not be a bad idea.”

  “Illegal people. Illegal people? Did you actually just say that?”

  Aria ignored him. She had pulled up behind the warehouse; he got out of the car and followed her around through the side entrance into the shadowy interior, where his father was polishing a bronze sculpture of an angel in a 1920s flapper dress. Aria disappeared into his parents’ apartment in the back.

  “Surprised to see you during the day,” his father said. “Doing well?”

  “I’m great. Some craz
y Bolivian just threatened to shoot me.”

  His father whistled softly. “Rough business.”

  “Yeah, that’s why I’m getting out.”

  His father grunted, but didn’t respond to this.

  “Dad, have you ever owned a gun?”

  Aria was emerging from the back with a ziplock bag.

  “There she is,” his father said.

  “Dad? Have you ever owned a gun?”

  “Here you go. Five cards,” Aria said, “and one card-passport combo. They’re all scheduled for this week.”

  Anton gave up on the gun question. “What times? You know I’m nine to five at the company.”

  “Yes, I know you’re nine to five at the company, you poor corporate drone. Here’s your schedule.”

  He glanced at it quickly and folded it into his pocket. “So much for my weekend,” he said.

  Aria gave him a smoky-eyed glare—every hipster girl in the neighborhood was wearing eye shadow the color of gunpowder that season—and turned away from him. She was furious, and had been for some weeks now. It was in the lines of her shoulders, the angle of her head, the way she leaned with exaggerated calm against the counter to look over the store’s order books, the efficient flick of her pen over a completed delivery.

  “You sure have left her hanging,” his father said, without looking up from the bronze. He was buffing a tarnished wrist. The sculpture was half-dark and half-shining from his efforts, like a woman stepping out of shadow. “Walking out on your business partner like that.”

  “I don’t want to live like this anymore. I’m sick of doing illegal things.”

  “What we do for a living bothers you that much?”

  “It has nothing to do with you. It has nothing to do with my family, Christ, haven’t we been over this enough? It’s just me. It’s just me. And another thing,” Anton said, on his way out the door. “I will never carry a fucking gun. Both of you, you hear me? I’m not stooping that low.”

  His father didn’t respond to this. Aria was pointedly not looking in his direction. Anton walked out and headed for the subway station. It was the middle of the day and the platform was mostly empty. Alone near a pillar, he glanced at the schedule again and then thumbed quickly through the cards. He opened the passport. It was perfect, as always, and he wondered for the thousandth time how Aria acquired her passport blanks and how the passports came out so perfectly, who else worked on the passport side of the business and whether or not they could be trusted. There were parts of the business that were closed to him and always had been. The girl in the picture stared solemnly back at him. She was pretty, with short blond-brown hair and gray eyes. Elena Caradin James. Place of birth: Canada. Citizenship: United States of America.

  Elena Caradin James. Two and a half years later she lay on the floor of his office in a fever, a sheen of sweat on her skin. He touched her, her eyes closed, and he was brought back to that moment on the subway platform with such force that the memory rendered him breathless. He realized suddenly who she reminded him of. A photo of a girl on the front cover of one of his parents’ books. What Work Is: a collection of poems. He read the poetry once and liked it, but he was less taken by the poetry than by the cover: a photograph of a girl of about ten, with Elena’s stillness and Elena’s eyes. She stood between an enormous machine and a factory window, and you could see this in her face: she knew what work was, and she knew she wouldn’t escape it in this lifetime. She was facing the camera, half in shadow. When Anton was ten and eleven and twelve and even fifteen he sometimes took the book down from the shelf just to look at her face.

  “It can’t have been an easy business,” Elena said.

  “It was an easy business. I was good at it. It was the easiest thing I ever did in my life.”

  “Then why did you get out?” She was naked, resplendent in the August heat. A current of warm air moved through the broken window and passed over her skin.

  “I don’t know, I just gradually didn’t want to do it anymore.”

  “Why not? What changed you?”

  “I don’t know. It was gradual.”

  “If you could name one thing.”

  “Well, there was a girl. Catina. I’d been thinking about getting out, but it was meeting her, it was talking to her . . . I didn’t know before her that I was really going to do it. Get out, I mean.”

  “A girlfriend?” Elena asked. The recording device in her purse listened silently.

  “No, not a girlfriend. I sold her a passport.”

  Catina was reading a magazine when Anton came into the café. She looked up and smiled when he said her name, and he caught a glimpse of the page she’d been reading as she closed the magazine—the headline, “Who Was the Falling Man?” and a famous photograph. He’d seen it years earlier, and he recognized it at a glance. The picture was taken on September 11, 2001, at fifteen seconds past nine forty-one A.M.: a man, having jumped from one of the North Tower’s unsurvivable floors above the point of impact, plummets toward the chaos of the plaza below. He is falling headfirst. He will be dead in less than sixty seconds. One knee is bent; otherwise his body is perfectly straight, his arms close against his sides. He is executing a dive that will never be replicated.

  “Did they figure out the guy’s name?” Anton asked. Catina looked blankly at him until he gestured at the magazine.

  “Oh.” She shook her head. “They thought they knew. But the family wouldn’t concede it.”

  “The family doesn’t think it’s him?”

  “They don’t want it to be him. The guy in the picture’s jumping before his tower falls, so I guess they see something unheroic about it. They say their son wouldn’t have jumped.”

  Anton shrugged. “Doesn’t seem like an unreasonable thing to do,” he said. “I might’ve jumped.”

  “I think the falling man’s . . . admire-able?”

  “Admirable.”

  “Admirable.” Catina spoke with a Portuguese accent; she had been in the country for four years now, working as an assistant to a Portuguese businessman, and her English was good but traces of Lisbon remained. “There was no way out, and he made a choice. The air was all flames. On flames?”

  “On fire.”

  “The air was on fire. He could pause . . . no, hesitate. He could hesitate and burn to death, or he could take control in those last few seconds and dive into the air. I like to think I would have done the same thing.”

  Anton nodded and found suddenly that he couldn’t breathe. He excused himself and went to the bathroom and spent several minutes staring at his face in the mirror, trying to think about what he would do if he were marooned a hundred stories above the surface of the earth with the air on fire all around him. He went back out into the Russian Café and completed the transaction as quickly as possible. Outside in the sunlight he stood still on the sidewalk, watching Catina depart with the magazine rolled up in her hand, and then he walked away slowly in the opposite direction. He locked eyes with everyone he saw on the sidewalk. Some stared back at him, some ignored him, others glanced quickly and then looked away. At dinner with his parents a few hours later he pushed food around his plate and didn’t eat until his mother put her fork down and asked what was wrong with her spaghetti.

  “No, the food’s good. I’m sorry. I’ve just been thinking a lot about the business.”

  “What about it?” his father asked.

  “Not your business. This thing with Aria.”

  “Really,” Aria said.

  “Oh,” his mother said, visibly relieved. She preferred not to discuss the family business in any great detail, but her niece’s forged-documents venture was fair game. “What about it?”

  “I was thinking about this earlier in the day. Do you mind if I ask a hypothetical question?”

  “I love hypothetical questions,” his mother said.

  “How would a terrorist get into the country?”

  “Well, he’d come in on a tourist visa, I imagine.”

  �
�Or he’d get a friend in the country to come to me and Aria and get him a passport, and then he’d enter as an American citizen. Or if he were already here on his tourist visa, he’d buy a Social Security card directly from us and use it to get a job. You know, guarding a seaport. Or driving a truck that he could then pack with explosives. Or whatever.”

  His father shrugged.

  “So then what are we doing? What are we doing here? We—”

  “Think of your aunt,” his mother said. “Don’t get worked up, sweetie. You’re helping people like your aunt.”

  “Yes,” Aria said, “my dear departed mother.” She liked to say departed instead of deported, which was disconcerting, because as far as anyone knew her mother was alive and well and living in Ecuador.

  “Yeah, I am. Hardworking illegal aliens who have no chance of getting citizenship, I know, I get it, but who else? Who else besides them?”

  His parents were quiet. Aria watched him silently over the table.

  “It was just something I was thinking about today. Actually, not just today, it’s been . . . it weighs on me,” Anton said.

  “You have to do things that are a little questionable sometimes,” his father said. “It’s all part of making a living.”

  “Yeah, but maybe it doesn’t have to be. I keep thinking there’s maybe something else I could be doing. I’ve been putting my résumé together.”

  “Your résumé,” Aria said. “Your résumé? Really? You’ve only ever had two jobs in your life: selling stolen goods in your parents’ store and selling fake documents to illegal aliens.” His father’s jaw was tensing again; he didn’t like the word stolen. Anton’s mother was immune to accusations of theft, but disliked any suggestion of disloyalty; she was sipping water, watching Anton, her eyes cool over the top of her glass. Aria pressed onward: “Are your jobs on your résumé, Anton?”

  “My education’s on my résumé.”

  “Our high school’s on your résumé? Are you serious? If it weren’t for social promotion, you’d have been the only student in your graduating class.”