The Singer's Gun

by Emily St. John Mandel

  His father was approaching from the back of the warehouse. He was holding a paintbrush in his hand, tipped with paint the color of poppies. “Are we back on the blackmail thing again?” his father asked.

  Anton rested his hand on a stone bird to steady himself. “Yeah, Dad, we’re back on the blackmail thing again.” The curve of stone wings beneath his fingers.

  “Well, she’s family, Anton. No getting around it.”

  “She’s your niece. I’m your son.”

  “She’s as much my daughter as—”

  “Anton,” his mother said. “Ari, Sam, what is this?” She had appeared from somewhere in her work clothes, a streak of dust across her shirt. She was twisting a damp rag between her hands. “I heard you all the way in the back.”

  “This blackmail thing again,” his father said. “Talk to him, Miriam.”

  “Oh, Anton, it’s an important deal for her, you know that. I don’t know why you won’t help her.”

  “Well, I don’t have a choice but to help her out, Mom, that’s the thing. That’s actually what blackmail is, in case no one ever told you.”

  “Don’t speak that way to your mother.”

  “Okay. Okay.” Strange to realize, looking at the three of them, that he didn’t want to see them again. No, that wasn’t it; it was more that not seeing them again was suddenly, staggeringly, absolutely necessary. “Tell you what,” Anton said, “I’m getting married in three weeks.”

  “Well,” his mother said, “assuming Sophie doesn’t—”

  “Shut up. Just shut up. I’m getting married in three weeks, and I don’t want to see you there. Any of you.” He forced himself to meet their eyes. They were staring at him, uncomprehending but starting to understand. “I don’t want any of you to come to my wedding. You are not invited. You are not people who I want to see again. Do you understand me? I’m done.” His mother was weeping. The look in his father’s eyes. “I love you,” Anton said. His father made an indecipherable sound. “I love you. All of you. I just can’t, I just don’t want to, I just don’t want to live the way you live anymore. I can’t.” He was at the threshold, backing out. “I can’t. I’m sorry.” They stood frozen in place, and something broke in him at the instant he turned away.

  But they came to his wedding anyway, of course. They were family. He saw them sitting far back in the last row of the church—not Aria, just his parents, his mother in her favorite yellow dress—and they slipped away before the reception.

  Anton sat with David on the pier on Ischia until it was too cold to sit there anymore and the wine was completely finished, then he excused himself and crossed the piazza to the pay phone. He started to dial the Santa Monica number and then remembered that she’d said she’d be back in New York by now. Her phone rang for some time before she picked up.

  “Anton,” she said. She had taken to pronouncing his name ironically lately, in italics, because he had hung up on her four or five times in a row. “What time is it there?”

  “Aria, my darling. Any news?”

  “Yeah. We’re in production.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “I’m too tired to be kidding you. You woke me up.”

  “Only, what? Seven weeks late?”

  “Six. You know I’m sorry about the delays you’ve been through. Believe me, it’s not that convenient for me either.”

  “You didn’t have to leave your wife on your honeymoon.” The moon was setting.

  “Yes, well, if I’d known the delay would be this long I would have done it differently, but nine more days and then it’s over. The package will arrive on Friday of next week. That evening your contact will come to your hotel. You’ll meet him at the restaurant downstairs at ten P.M.”

  “The restaurant downstairs isn’t open at ten P.M.”

  “He’ll be there anyway.”

  “How will I know it’s him?”

  “His name’s Ali. I’ll have more details on Thursday. Just go down and meet him, give him the package, shake hands and you’re done.”

  “Aria, I want twenty thousand dollars.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “A little, but that’s beside the point. What am I supposed to do after the transaction’s done? I’ve lost practically everything. I do this transaction, and then what?”

  “What do you mean, and then what? You do this transaction, and then you’re done. You can come back to New York.”

  “With no wife and no job? What am I coming back to, exactly?”

  “Not my problem,” Aria said.

  “Do you know what these weeks have cost me? I used to have a job I loved—”

  “You wrecked your own life,” she said. “You needed no help from me. And now you want me to pay you twenty thousand dollars because you’ve had to hang out in the Mediterranean for a few extra weeks? Don’t push me any further.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that you’ve already talked me up to seventeen thousand dollars, which is excessive, incidentally, and I’m afraid I’ve reached the edge of my patience. Just go downstairs to the restaurant on Friday night, hand over the package, and you’re done.”

  “Eighteen thousand five hundred,” Anton said.

  “You’re unbelievable,” Aria said, and hung up. The piazza tilted unsteadily in the half-light; Anton made his way carefully back to the pier and sat down beside David again.

  “It’s finally happening,” Anton said. “That transaction I’ve been waiting for.”

  “What kind of transaction are we talking about here?”

  “I’m not exactly sure, to be honest. It’s my cousin’s transaction. I’m just the guy who hands the other guy the package. I don’t even handle the payment. We’ve never really been business partners,” he said. “She said we were, but I always just did what I was supposed to.”

  David nodded. “When’s the transaction supposed to take place?”

  “Soon. It was supposed to be weeks ago. I’ve just been stuck here waiting. But you know what’s crazy? I wish I could stay here, actually, when all this is done. There’s nothing for me to go back to in New York. I’m thinking about getting a job in a hotel somewhere during the tourist season, maybe in Napoli, coming back to Sant’Angelo in the evenings after work, reading a book, spending time with my cat if I can get someone to ship him here, walking on the beach, maybe going for a swim. It’s the kind of life I think I’ve always wanted, crazy as it sounds. Just working all day and coming home at night, nothing shady. Seems uncomplicated, doesn’t it?”

  “Everything’s more complicated than it looks, but what’s stopping you from doing it?”

  “I’m here now,” Anton said, “and no one knows me. I could be anyone. But today or tomorrow or the day after that a nice man in a FedEx uniform will park his truck at the gates of Sant’Angelo and walk down to the hotel with an envelope for me, and shortly afterward a man will show up and I’ll give a package to him, and then that man will know who I am. Do you see? My anonymity will be completely ruined. And say this man has a good memory and decides someday that he needs to tell someone else about me. Now that he’s seen me, now that I’ve handed him an envelope, he’d be able to pick me out of a lineup or recognize me on the street, and voilà! Any chance of a new life vanishes at that instant. I could stay here in peaceful anonymity, but once I give the guy the envelope, I’ll always be looking over my shoulder.”

  “What if you paid me to do it?”

  “To do what?”

  “You give this guy a package,” David said, “and you never see him again.”

  “Yes. Right.”

  “So why can’t it be me? I’m broke, I’ll do anything. Well, not anything, but I’m a retired coke dealer. Whatever’s in this envelope of yours, how much more illegal can it possibly be? I’m Anton Waker, I have a package for you, here you go, pleasure doing business.”

  “You’d do that?”

  David grinned. “For the right price,” he said.

&nb
sp; The effects of the wine were leaving Anton. He was slightly disappointed to realize that he was no longer quite drunk. “I have to make another phone call,” he said. “Let me think about it. We’ll talk soon?”

  “Soon,” David said. He gave Anton a loose salute and lay on his back on the pier to stare up at the sky. Anton went back to the pay phone, searched the scraps of paper in his wallet until he found the number he was looking for.

  “Elena,” he said.

  12.

  At four o’clock in the haze of the third Tuesday in October, Elena stood on the corner of Columbus and West 81st Street waiting for the light to change. In her right hand she held a set of keys that had arrived from Italy by mail a day earlier, and she wore a hat pulled down low over her forehead. Her hair was damp with sweat. She was unaccountably nauseated, but she wasn’t sure if it was the heat or her nerves. What she was thinking of at that moment, before Sophie appeared on the other side of the avenue, was the note from Anton hidden in the bottom of her jewelry box in Brooklyn. She almost wished she had it with her, for reference or for companionship, but the girl approaching Columbus Avenue was unmistakably Sophie. She carried a blue handbag and her hair was pinned up away from her face with dark strands escaping; she was the girl met once in passing at a company Christmas party, the girl whose face was a tiny blob in the string section in full-orchestra photographs of the New York Philharmonic, the girl who’d left her husband alone on Ischia over a month and a half ago.

  Sophie and Elena stood for a moment on opposite sides of the avenue with cars passing between them, Elena trying to be invisible with her hat pulled down low and Sophie apparently oblivious, gazing at nothing in particular. The light changed and they came within a few feet of one another on the crosswalk. Elena turned back to watch Sophie from the other side of the street. Sophie walked away slowly, seemingly in no rush. She looked up at the trees that lined the lawn of the Museum of Natural History, she looked at the last of the flowers growing under the branches, she seemed lost in a dream. She disappeared down the steps of the subway station, a long block away. Elena counted to ten and then walked quickly west on 81st Street until she found the address. She stood for a moment on the sidewalk, extending this last moment before she entered the building. Nothing is over yet, she told herself. The cat’s still inside. I can still turn and walk away. Instead she unlocked the inner door of the building and ascended the stairs.

  Anton’s apartment smelled faintly of incense. It was a dim book-filled space, with dark wood furniture and soft-looking white carpets, and somewhere a tap was dripping. There were sounds of traffic from the street outside. Elena closed the door behind her and locked it, her heart beating too hard and too quickly. Impossible not to imagine him everywhere.

  The cat was emerging from the bedroom in stages, pausing at intervals to stretch one leg at a time; he yawned hugely and padded toward her. One of his eyes was closed and something about the set of his face suggested that it had never opened. She was shaken by his friendliness. Jim dropped to the floor at her feet just as if she weren’t an intruder planning on kidnapping him and sending him to a foreign country. She stroked his milk-white stomach and he twisted on his back with his paws in the air. She stood then, opened the door to the closet where Anton had said the pet carrier box would be, and this was the moment when her nerve failed her all at once; in the space of a few heartbeats she was locking the door of the apartment behind her, she was halfway down the stairs, she was out on the street gasping for breath and walking quickly away from there.

  “You look a little feverish,” the photographer said.

  “Oh, I’m fine,” Elena said brightly. She had come straight from Anton’s apartment and was fifteen minutes early. She sat down on the sofa in Leigh Anderson’s apartment, and he gave her a glass of water that she drank all at once.

  “Would you like some more?”

  “No, I’m fine, I’m fine, thank you. I was just walking a little too fast, and the heat . . . it’s as if fall isn’t coming this year.”

  The photographer was nodding absently. “Brutal,” he said. “Might as well still be August.” He had produced a portfolio from somewhere and was sitting down in the armchair across from her. “So,” he said, “I should warn you, my work has evolved somewhat since I worked with you last. I’d like you to take a look at my current portfolio.” He slid the portfolio across the tabletop, and Elena flipped it open. On the first page two girls lay together in a bathtub, half-submerged; the one on top had pierced nipples and a tongue stud.

  “It’s still very much on the side of art,” Leigh said. “Or if it’s moved toward pornography, it’s in the hinterlands between the two.” The next picture was of a woman sitting on a chair, legs spread wide, naked from the waist down with her head thrown back. Elena wanted to ask how this was different from pornography, but the photographer was still talking. “I like to see it as art photography,” he said, “but thrown into the deep end, pushed over the edge. The idea is that the viewer is pushed toward the outer edge of—forgive me,” he said, “I get a little pedantic on the topic. I’ve been teaching a photography class.” Elena was looking at a photograph of two girls—a different duo—standing in a bathtub kissing, blurred behind a transparent shower curtain.

  “Is your rate still twenty an hour?” Elena asked.

  “Forty. You’re comfortable with the overall aesthetic?”

  “Absolutely,” Elena said. Not counting the money Anton had sent her to pay for shipping the cat to Italy, she had less than a hundred dollars left in her checking account.

  “But what I do need to see at this point,” the photographer said, “is what you look like naked.”

  “But you’ve seen me naked. I used to pose for you.”

  “That was nearly five years ago,” the photographer said. “People change in five years. I find it puts my models at ease. It may seem paradoxical, but if you think about it . . .” He had stood up from the armchair, and he was closing the blinds. “I need to know what you look like naked—what you look like now, because bodies change in five years—and taking your clothes off for the first time is the hardest part.” He paused at a window, looking at something on the street, then closed the blinds and turned back to her. “This way, if you’re naked in front of me for a few minutes now, it’ll be easier to be naked for four hours when we meet next week for the session.”

  “You said that five years ago.”

  “It’s still true.”

  Elena took her shirt off. She unfastened her bra and slid down her skirt with no trouble, and found that she could even look up at him once she’d taken off her underwear.

  “Please,” he said, gesturing expansively.

  Elena came out from behind the coffee table, and stood exposed on his living room floor.

  “Nice,” he said. “You still have a good body.”

  “Thanks.” She watched his face, obscurely anxious. His eyes drifted professionally downward.

  “Can you trim?” he asked. “Not a lot, just a bit. Think of making it into a V-shape. Do you mind?”

  She didn’t, although she was aware that her hands were shaking slightly. She was trying to remember if it had been like this the first time, five years ago, but found that she’d lost the memory.

  “Can you turn around for me?”

  She turned slowly away from him.

  “Stop.”

  She stood facing his tiny Manhattan kitchen, a closet-sized corner tiled in black with one wall painted the color of an emerald in sunlight. There was a Van Gogh postcard magneted haphazardly to the fridge, explosions of stars in a swirling sky.

  “You have nice calves.”

  “Thanks,” she said hollowly. She turned back toward him.

  “When are you due?”

  “What?”

  He winked. “I can always tell,” he said.

  It took her a moment to understand. “Oh, I’m not pregnant.”

  Leigh didn’t look embarrassed, only surprised. “Y
ou’re positive about that?”

  “Positive,” she said.

  The photographer nodded and began moving back toward the armchair, and she understood this as her cue to get dressed again. She put her clothes back on and they spoke of practical things. Dates, methods of payment, the model release.

  Twenty minutes later she found herself standing in the 81st Street Museum of Natural History subway station, looking at the tiled mosaic elephants and bats and sea turtles and frogs, realizing that actually she wasn’t positive at all.

  “So, what did you do today?” Caleb asked.

  He had come to bed earlier than usual but seemed unready to sleep. He lay on his back and she lay beside him with her head in the crook of his arm. Her thoughts were turned toward the Upper West Side, toward the photographer’s green kitchen wall and Sophie drifting across the intersection.

  “Not much,” she said. “I met with the photographer.”

  “That same one as before, right? Upper West Side?”

  “The same one. Yes.”

  “Have you given any more thought to finding a job?”

  “I’m posing for him tomorrow. He pays more now than he used to.”

  “I meant real work,” Caleb said.

  “I hate real work.” She was trying to keep her voice light.

  “Most people have to work, though, sweetie.” It was a delicate topic: he didn’t have to work, and he didn’t entirely understand. The closest Caleb could come to imagining what an office job might be like was to compare it to research, which he loved, or to depression, which the pills had eradicated so successfully and for so many years that it was beginning to seem abstract, a half-real memory of six months in the late ’90s when he hadn’t wanted to get out of bed, something that might have happened to somebody else.

  “Aren’t you listening? That’s not what I’m saying at all,” Elena said. “Of course I have to work. I’m not suggesting that any alternative exists.”

  “But maybe if you had a different kind of job,” Caleb said carefully. “You were happy when you were working as Anton’s assistant, weren’t you?”