The Singer's Gun

by Emily St. John Mandel

  “It’s messy,” Aria said. “I don’t like it.” They were sitting together on the loading dock at the end of the day. The metal loading dock was still warm from the sunlight but a cool breeze was blowing in off the river.

  “What’s messy about it?” Anton was feeling a little defensive about the Godfather technique.

  “Anyone could walk into the bathroom and grab the card before she does. Just come up with a better idea.”

  “What if I can’t?”

  “You got straight A’s in high school,” she said, and muttered something in Spanish under her breath.

  The solution came to him when he was out with Aria and his parents for someone’s birthday, his mother’s perhaps, at a restaurant in Chelsea. Anton observed the mechanism of paying: the bill arrives, tucked discreetly into the check folder. Cash is placed in the folder, and even from the next table those bills could be ones, tens, twenties, fifties, hundreds—God bless America and her monochromatic green bills!—and the check folder is taken away and returned with change. If the count is correct, there must be a signal: perhaps the waitress, your co-conspirator, brings a glass of red wine to the table and that’s how you know to discreetly hand off the envelope with the Social Security card. Later, as the business expanded, perhaps also a passport. Using a waitress made the moment of transaction difficult to observe, and if the customer were stopped later by the police, the quality of the product was high enough that unless the transaction itself had been witnessed, the most a police officer would reasonably be able to accuse them of would be carrying their Social Security card and passport around with them, which was not recommended but not illegal. “We’ll stop doing business in this country,” Aria said, “when it’s no longer legal to carry our product.”

  “It’s never legal to carry our product,” Anton pointed out. “And what other country would we do business in?”

  He flew to Italy the morning after his wedding.

  Sophie posed for pictures in front of the Colosseum, next to a gladiator with a digital wristwatch. She stood in front of the Trevi fountain while he took picture after picture after picture of her, trying to use up the whole roll.

  “Excuse me,” she said to a passing tourist, “would you mind taking a shot of the two of us?” Anton was putting the lens cap on the camera as she spoke, and neither Sophie nor the photographer noticed it as the shot was taken. He wanted no photographic evidence that he had ever been in this country.

  On the island of Capri she noticed the lens cap.

  No, he said, of course it hadn’t been on the whole trip. Yes, he was positive. No, seriously, he said, he’d just put it back on after the last set of pictures. It’s all right, she needn’t be sorry for doubting him. No, hey, it was a fair question. He loved her too. No, he really did. Shh, shh, don’t cry. The Norwegian tourist who’d been taking their picture gave the camera back in the emotion of the moment, inexplicably apologetic, and the picture wasn’t taken after all.

  On Capri Sophie wanted to see the Blue Grotto. It cost thirty-five euros to board a vessel that carried them out along the formidable shoreline. Anton held Sophie’s hand and looked up at the fishermen’s saints, small figurines wedged into dark rocks above them at impossible heights. Look at this holy island, these saints bestowing blessings from high up on the rocks. Patron saints of luck and strong netting, of tides and fish. Sophie held his hand and looked down at the water.

  When they reached the grotto two other boatloads of tourists were already there, the boats idling in the choppy waters a few yards from the shore, and it seemed that it was another twenty-five euros to climb out into a little rowboat that transported two tourists at a time into a small space between the rocks and the sea. The men rowing the tourists into the underworld were friendly and animated, but the whole operation reminded Anton of a conveyer belt—extract money from tourist, insert tourist into cave, return tourist to boat—and he was put off by the unexpectedness of the extra fee. But Sophie wanted to do it; she paid the extra money and waited her turn patiently on the lower deck while Anton watched the progression of tourists in and out of the cave. Most of the tourists who came back were smiling but to his eyes they all looked faintly disappointed, like the crowds he’d seen trickling out of the Sistine Chapel a few days before. “I’ve heard about the Blue Grotto all my life,” he heard one of them say to another, but he didn’t hear the reply. When Anton looked down at the lower deck again Sophie had vanished and there was a flash of near panic when he thought she might have somehow slipped overboard, but then he looked over in time to see her duck her head as the rowboat carried her under the rocks. It seemed she was gone for a very long time.

  Anton held on to the railing while he waited for her, the boat tossing in the wakes of the other vessels around them. He closed his eyes and felt in that moment that he could disappear here in this brilliant light so far from Brooklyn, his parents and Aria four thousand miles away.

  “Wake up, sleepy. Are you really that bored?” Sophie had appeared beside him.

  “No, just enjoying the sun. How was it?” She looked different from most of the others, more alive; he realized that she wasn’t disappointed.

  “You should’ve gone,” she said. “It was beautiful and blue.”

  “Beautiful and blue,” he repeated. He kissed her and tried not to think about Ischia.

  In the morning they woke early in their hotel room on Capri. Anton opened the curtains and sunlight glanced over the tiled floor. Sophie hadn’t slept well. She was tired and moody and she didn’t want to talk to him. They ate breakfast in incompatible silence and took a taxi to the ferry. Back in Salerno there were a few dead hours. They wandered the streets amid groups of tourists, walked in and out of stores, sat for a while in a café where the waiters greeted them in English. Sophie bought an unattractive skirt. Anton lied and told her he liked it, but she accused him of insincerity and then he had to lie about lying. The train was an hour late leaving Salerno. They sat in a compartment across from a middle-aged woman who spoke even less English than Anton spoke Italian, which he wouldn’t have thought possible. When the train was forty-five minutes late the woman tapped her watch and made an exasperated face. “Italia,” she said. She shook her head and rolled her eyes. Anton nodded. Sophie was reading a biography of Jim Morrison, frowning slightly, ignoring them both.

  They arrived after dark in the city of Naples.

  A memory: nine years old on a cold morning in Brooklyn, waiting for the school bus with his mother in the rain. Usually Anton waited with Gary, but Gary was home sick that day and his mother didn’t like him waiting alone. The neighborhood was rougher back then. She stood over him with an enormous purple umbrella that a customer had left behind in the store.

  “Why would anyone want to be a school bus driver?” Anton asked. His parents encouraged the assumption that he might grow up to be anything, and at nine things were possible that became less possible later on. It was still plausible that he might grow up to be an astronaut, for example, or the king of an as-yet-undiscovered country.

  “You just make decisions as you go along, my magnificent child,” his mother said. “A or B, two options present themselves, and you choose the one that seems best at the time.”

  Years later on an island in the Bay of Naples he walked a discreet distance away from the outdoor café where his new wife sat drinking coffee, waved reassuringly at her, and called Aria on his cell phone.

  “I’m here,” he said. “I’m on Ischia.”

  “I’ll call you back. Are you calling from your cell phone?”

  “There’s no phone in my hotel room. It’s a very small hotel.”

  “Well, then find a pay phone and call me back at home,” she said. “You know I don’t discuss business on cell phones. I’m at the Santa Monica apartment.”

  “I don’t have the number there,” he said. She gave it to him and hung up.

  He went back to the newsstand and bought a phone card. There was a pay phone on the edge
of the piazza, by a low stone wall.

  “Anton,” Aria said, “there’s been a slight delay.”

  “How slight?”

  “Three weeks.”

  “Are you out of your mind? You want me to stay on this island for three weeks?” Sophie was watching him, holding a glass of coffee. She waved when he looked at her. He forced his face into a weak facsimile of a smile, raised his hand and turned his back on her.

  “Four at the most,” she said. “I’m sorry, Anton. It’s out of my hands.”

  “Four? Aria, I’m sorry, listen, I can’t . . . Aria, I can’t do this. We go back to Rome tomorrow. We fly home Thursday night.”

  “Well, you don’t have to do it,” Aria said. “It’s of course your decision.”

  “But if I don’t, you’ll tell Sophie . . . you’ll tell Sophie . . .” He was beside himself. He looked over his shoulder again, watching Sophie pretending not to be watching him. She sipped her coffee, gazed out at the harbor, glanced fleetingly at him where he stood with the red pay-phone receiver against his face. Aria was silent.

  “Aria,” he said, “we’re family. My parents took you in.”

  “And then we entered into business together,” Aria said, “and stayed in business, until you abandoned me, and now I’m asking you to do this one last thing.”

  “I don’t want to do this. I’m sick of—”

  “I know you don’t want to do this,” Aria said. “I’m perfectly aware of that. It’s a question of what you want to do least: perform this one last transaction, or explain to Sophie that you’re a fraud. Which is it going to be?”

  He looked over his shoulder. On the other side of the piazza, Sophie sipped at her coffee and looked up at the clouds.

  “My commission will be what?”

  “Twelve thousand dollars for the extra trouble, secrecy, and an exit.”

  “I want fifteen.”

  Aria was silent for a moment and then said, “Fine. Fifteen.”

  “I also want payment in advance.”

  “Half now, half when the transaction’s complete.”

  “Okay. I do this one last thing for you, and Sophie will never hear anything about Harvard, and I’m out of the business. Swear on something you believe in. Do you believe in anything?”

  “No,” she said, “but I swear anyway. No, wait. I swear on my financial independence.”

  “That’s the highest thing you believe in? Financial independence?”

  “’Fraid so.”

  “Jesus Christ. Three weeks?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Well, possibly four.”

  He hung up the receiver, closed his eyes for a moment and took several deep breaths, and then took the phone card out of his pocket and redialed.

  “Four weeks,” he said, when Aria picked up. “What am I supposed to do here for four weeks?”

  “You sound tense,” she said mildly. “Don’t you like Ischia?”

  “I’m about to leave my wife on our honeymoon. Wouldn’t you be a little edgy?”

  “As I was saying, it’ll be the easiest deal you ever played in your life. In three weeks a man will come to the hotel and introduce himself to you. You give him the package, you fly home, buy some roses for your wife, and you’re done.”

  “I think this will take a little more than roses, Ari.”

  “Spend some of the commission on her, then. One of those ten-thousand-dollar I’m-sorry-I-left-you-on-our-honeymoon rings from Tiffany’s.”

  “Oh God, let’s not talk about rings. Who’s the client?”

  “Do you want back in the business?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Then don’t ask me who my clients are.”

  “Fine.” Anton hung up the phone and stood for a moment in the sunlight, watching the movement of boats in bright water. The boats in the Sant’Angelo harbor were painted every conceivable color, two colors per boat; yellow with blue trim, red with green, white with red. The light was too bright, the colors a kaleidoscope, sunlight piercingly brilliant off the surface of the sea. He wanted to be sick. He felt Sophie’s eyes on him from across the piazza and the thought that he’d considered leaving her anyway made the moment no easier. Three weeks. He walked to the newsstand with its supply of German newspapers, its British tabloids, its daily allotment of two International Herald Tribunes, paid for one and brought it back to Sophie. She took the front section.

  “Who were you calling?” she asked. She was skimming the headlines.

  “The office,” he said. “I told them I’d check in.” Check in to what, exactly? He imagined his telephone ringing endlessly on his desk in Dead File Storage Four, the empty room, the drift of paper beneath the window, dust gathering on the telephone and pigeons flying in to investigate from the world outside. Elena flashed through him, eyes the color of storm clouds, and he opened the paper but couldn’t read. His eyes skipped twice over the same paragraph. Two options present themselves, and you choose the one that seems best at the time.

  “You know,” he said, as casually as possible, “I was thinking about maybe staying on a while.”

  Sophie looked up from her café latte.

  “Our plane tickets are for Thursday,” she said.

  The morning after Sophie left Ischia he woke up lonely from a dream he couldn’t remember and lay staring at the blue ceiling for some time before he got up. He opened the shutters and the sea was awash in light, Capri a far-off shadow on the edge of the cloudless sky. Down on the piazza were too many tourists, calling out to their children in languages he didn’t understand or reading newspapers at the café tables, so he went back to the restaurant at the hotel and ate pasta and grilled squid at a table by the window, looking out at the ocean. In Sophie’s absence he felt an enormous amount of space around him.

  She would be in Rome today, unless she’d changed her flight. He glanced at his watch and imagined her eating breakfast somewhere, alone at an outdoor café with a clear glass of coffee, reading the International Herald Tribune. The thought was almost unbearable even though he was enjoying his solitude, so he went back down to the piazza to call his best friend from the pay phone that stood beside the low wall by the harbor.

  “Gary,” he said, “I think I’m alone again.”

  part

  II

  8.

  In a quiet office on the twelfth floor of the new World Trade Center 7, Broden played Elena a tape.

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

  “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?”

  “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.” Listening to her own voice all these weeks later, Elena closed her eyes and thought, Why did you keep talking to me? Wasn’t it obvious that you were being interrogated? She was strangely angry with him.

  “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?”

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

  Broden stopped the tape.

  “The tape runs out two minutes later. Did he say anything more about his other clients?”

  “No,” Elena said. “Just what’s on the tape. The woman from Lisbon. And that stuff later on about the falling man.”

  “Oh, I know all about the woman from Lisbon.” Broden was smiling, more animated than Elena had ever seen her. “I spoke with her at great length. Nonetheless, Elena, it’s the best tape you’ve given me. Good work.”

  “Can I ask you a question?” Elena asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Why was Anton put in a file storage room?”

  “I thought it was an elegant
solution,” Broden said. “We need him close at hand, but the company wasn’t willing to keep him once the results of his background check came up.”

  “What did the background check say?”

  “What do you think it said? No one’s invisible,” Broden said. “There’s no such thing as operating under the radar. The background check said he’d never been to Harvard and that he and his cousin were the subjects of an ongoing criminal investigation. Water Incorporated didn’t want him, but he was judged a significant flight risk if he lost his job, so a compromise was reached: the company’s keeping him in storage while we conduct our investigation.”

  “Why not just arrest him?”

  “Because I don’t want to tip off Aria just yet,” Broden said. “But at any rate, I called you in to ask you something. Did he say anything to you about staying on in Italy? I expected him back some time ago.”

  “He didn’t tell me anything,” Elena said. She was slumped in her chair. She hadn’t been sleeping well. She’d gone to Anton’s office with a sunflower—a rose seemed too ordinary—at five o’clock on the afternoon when he’d said he’d be back, but the room was empty with papers blowing over the floor. There was a fine layer of dust on Anton’s desk. She sat in his swivel chair and spun around once or twice, then went to lie down on the sofa. She lay there for a long time, drowsy and a little sad, watching the movement of loose-leaf paper over the floor. She left the sunflower lying on his desk, but when she came back the next day at five o’clock it remained undisturbed. She visited the empty room every afternoon for the rest of that week, lying on the sofa in the quiet, resting in her memories. She was startled by her longing. By Friday Anton hadn’t returned and the sunflower was wilted, so she dropped it out the window onto the roof of the hotel and didn’t go back again.