“Elena,” Sophie said, “what are you doing with the cat?”
“I’m sorry,” Elena said, again.
There was a soft thud. “Jesus, that was my thumb,” one of the movers said.
“What are you doing with the cat?” Sophie asked again. She didn’t move away from the doorway or look away from Elena’s eyes.
“Anton asked me to send him to Italy.”
Sophie stared at her, silent.
“He said he misses him,” Elena said.
Sophie still didn’t speak.
“I’m sorry. I’m just really—I’m sorry,” Elena said.
The movers, disassembling the bookcase, worked on in awkward silence. Elena felt that she was becoming transparent under Sophie’s gaze. Her knees were weak. She wanted to fall. “I’m sorry,” she repeated, and to her utter mortification she realized that she was beginning to weep. She stood frozen in the bedroom doorway with sunlight pouring through her, a shadow, a ghost, gripping the cat box as tightly as possible and wishing to be anywhere, anywhere else, her shoulder aching from the cat’s weight and tears on her face, her breath catching, and still Sophie only watched her.
The movers had entirely dismantled the bookshelves now—they lay in a stack of flat boards gleaming dark in the sunlight—and they were wrapping the boards in a packing quilt and bundling the packing quilt with tape. The sounds they made were distant, like actions occurring in another room. Elena began walking forward across the room, trying to come to some internal understanding of what she would do if Sophie didn’t step aside from the doorway. But Sophie did step aside, almost at the last moment, and she said nothing as Elena passed by. Elena kept walking, away down the stairs with Sophie looking down from above, until she was out on the street with the cat. She hailed a taxi, asked for Kennedy Airport and closed her eyes in the backseat.
“You okay?” the driver asked.
“Yeah,” she said, “fine—” and realized that there were still tears streaming down her face, unabated. Her hands were shaking.
“Where you traveling today?”
“Italy,” she said.
“Italy,” said the driver. “Without luggage?”
“Without luggage.”
“Who flies without luggage? I didn’t take you for a terrorist.” His tone was jokey; he was trying to make her laugh. She smiled wanly and didn’t answer him.
“Wait,” she said after a moment, “can we make a stop? I forgot my passport.”
“Of course. Wherever you want.” In East Williamsburg she carried the cat into the apartment and the cab idled out front while she threw a few things into a small suitcase: some clothes, a manila envelope containing old postcards, a piece of paper hidden in a blue sock at the back of her sock drawer, both the Canadian and American passports, a few things from the bathroom. Halfway to the door she remembered the cat, and went to the kitchen for a can of tuna and a can opener. A phone message in Caleb’s handwriting was attached to the fridge: ALEXANDRA BRODEN CALLED PLS CALL BACK. She stood for a moment holding the piece of paper, went to the kitchen phone and dialed the number.
“Please don’t ever call me at home again,” Elena said when Broden picked up.
“I tried your work first. You didn’t tell me you’d left and I need to ask you a question.” There was an urgency in Broden’s voice that Elena hadn’t heard before. “Did Anton ever say anything to you about shipping?”
“Shipping?”
“Shipping containers, or boats, or ports, or travel over oceans, or the import-export business. Anything of that nature. Any mention at all.”
“No,” Elena said, after a moment. “He never did.”
“When did you last speak with him?”
“Just before he left.”
“He was supposed to be back weeks ago,” Broden said.
“I know.”
“Well,” Broden said, “we can discuss this tomorrow.”
“I have to see you tomorrow?”
“Yes, at four o’clock. We scheduled this three weeks ago.”
“I’ll be there,” Elena said.
She paused for a moment by the goldfish tank and then locked the apartment door behind her and ran back down the stairs with the cat and the suitcase. The interior of the cab was too warm.
“One more stop before the airport,” she said. She was opening the window. “Can you take me up to Columbia University?”
“Pretty big detour. What time’s your flight?”
“I don’t have a flight.”
He looked at her in the rearview mirror. “You said you were flying to Italy.”
“I am.”
“Okay,” the driver said.
“Are you from Italy?” she asked after a few miles of silence. They had crossed to the Manhattan side of the bridge and they were racing north up the island, streets passing fast. Flashes of mannequins in store windows, people walking on the sidewalks, whole lives played out between avenues, a bright faux-summer day. All the trees she saw were still green.
“Italy? No.”
“Your accent, I thought it sounded . . .”
“I’m from a place you’ve never heard of,” he said, and he winked at her in the rearview mirror.
“So am I,” said Elena. She thought for a second about obscure countries and then said, “Kyrgyzstan?”
“Tajikistan,” the cab driver said. He looked at her in the rearview mirror, startled. “But I’ve been to Kyrgyzstan many times. Many times.”
“What’s it like there?”
“Kyrgyzstan? I don’t know. Different from here.”
“Everywhere’s different from here.” The gates of Columbia were on their right. “You’ll wait for me?”
“I’ll wait,” the driver said.
She took her suitcase and the cat with her anyway and made her way through the gates and over the sunlit expanse of the grounds, through a doorway and down several flights of stairs to the underground laboratory where Caleb was working. He looked up from his computer when Elena said his name. On the screen before him line upon line of gibberish ran down the screen. He hit a key and the letters and numbers stopped moving and flickered silently in place.
“Ellie? What’s going on?”
Elena set down her suitcase and Jim, who meowed furiously and then sank into a prowling orange fury that moved him back and forth across the carrier.
“Whose cat is that?”
“It’s Anton’s,” she said. “Caleb, listen—”
“Anton your old boss?”
“Yes. Caleb—”
“Why would you have your boss’s cat? Your ex-boss’s cat.” He spoke without malice.
“Caleb.”
“Are you leaving me?”
Elena found all at once that she had nothing to say. She had planned a speech on the way down the corridor but all the words were fading out in the cool air of the room. She looked down at the floor and nodded.
“You’re leaving me,” Caleb said. He smiled briefly, ran his hands through his hair and looked at her. “Where are you going?”
“Italy,” she said.
“Italy,” he repeated. “With no money, and Anton’s cat.”
“I have a little cash. And I still have a credit card.”
“Italy,” he said again, very quietly, and laughed.
“Caleb, I’m sorry, I just . . .”
He raised his hand to stop the sentence, and smiled, and shook his head. She smiled back at him, and for an instant there was peace. Then Jim meowed again, more urgently, and she remembered the time and the cab idling out front with the meter running. She picked up the cat’s carrying box and the suitcase.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m sorry too, I just couldn’t . . .”
“It’s all right.”
“A lot of it was just the pills, you know. The side effects.”
“I know.”
“You don’t have to go so far away,” he said.
“I can’t stay in the United States anymo
re.”
“It’s a big place, Ellie.”
“It’s not that. I’m not trying to get away from you. The thing is, look, I don’t have time to get into it, there’s a flight I want to catch, but the thing is, I’m not an American. My American passport’s a fake. I shouldn’t have lied to you. Caleb, listen, I have to go.”
“What? What do you mean your passport’s a—”
“Goodbye, Caleb.”
“Ellie, wait,” he said, but he didn’t make a move to follow her when she turned away. In the cab to the airport she turned to look out the back window at the last possible minute, just in time to see the Manhattan skyline disappear.
At JFK she bought a one-way ticket to Rome and gave the cat over to a red-suited airline representative who promised not to lose him. She used her Canadian passport, half-expecting to be arrested on the spot, and was mildly surprised when she met no resistance. Her suitcase was small, so she carried it with her through security and was grateful that she had something to hold on to as she paced the grayish corridors of the terminal. There was a considerable amount of time to kill before the next flight to Italy.
Elena ate a grease-and-salt meal at a bar beyond the security gates, ordered a glass of cheap wine that she didn’t touch, and sat for a while in the airport restaurant thinking about calling home to talk to her family; calling Caleb and apologizing, saying she’d made a terrible mistake, asking him to come get her; calling Anton to tell him that the cat was arriving in Rome tomorrow morning; calling Anton to tell him that in twenty-four hours she would be on Ischia; calling Broden to announce that she would give her Anton Waker if only she could stay forever in New York. Not all of these options canceled each other out, and contemplating all the possible configurations was exhausting.
She spent some time standing at a wall of glass, watching airplanes rise and descend in the gathering twilight. There was still something breathtaking about the ascent.
15.
Elena, buying a Social Security card at the Russian Café:
She arrives a half-hour early and chooses a table by the window, facing out. The Russian Café on 1st Street is a few feet below street level and when Elena sits down she can only see legs passing above the bank of snow, flickering shadows of high boots and dark overcoats. It is late afternoon and the snow is unceasing.
The café is warm, but Elena is shivering. She takes off her coat but keeps her hat and scarf on, she orders a mug of tea and a muffin—four dollars, which is her entire budget for the day because she’s been saving all her money for the transaction that’s about to occur. The place is nearly empty. An older man in a tweed jacket sits alone at a table on the other side of the door, reading a newspaper and sipping a cappuccino. A couple sits some distance away, laughing at a private joke. They are young, college students perhaps, and the woman’s face is flushed in the warmth of the room. Elena holds the tea near her face and closes her eyes for a moment, waiting for the heavy footsteps, the door flung open and the Homeland Security badge flashed in her face and the shouting, the handcuffs, the guns; but when she opens her eyes the room is still tranquil, candlelight on red wallpaper and the shadows of pedestrians still flickering across the top of the window before her and the snow falling outside, the waitress behind the counter still chatting in Russian on her cell phone, the man in the tweed jacket still turning the pages of the newspaper. Of course. Why would her arrest be so dramatic? She isn’t armed or dangerous. She’s a twenty-two-year-old who goes without dinner too frequently and gets dizzy if she stands up too fast. No need for storm troopers, for the waving of guns. In a moment the man in tweed will take one last sip of his cappuccino, fold his newspaper unhurriedly and stand up from the table, buttoning his jacket as he stands. He will move toward her slowly, he will reach into an inside pocket and remove a police badge and hold it up with a wink as he removes the handcuffs from his belt, speaking confidentially in a friendly voice, You have the right to remain silent, and by morning she will be on a northbound plane with an X stamped on her passport. She sips the tea to calm herself and tries to eat the muffin. An hour earlier she had been desperately, light-headedly, agonizingly hungry, but now she can taste nothing and it’s difficult to swallow. The man in the tweed jacket turns a page of his newspaper. Elena clenches her hands around the mug of tea, trying to look everywhere at once and bracing herself for the sting; the men exploding through the door with guns drawn or the couple across the room standing up and pulling badges from their hipster jean pockets. Every catastrophe has a last moment just before it; as late as eight forty-four A.M. on the morning of September 11, 2001, it was still only a perfect bright day in New York. But the couple remains in conversation, the man in the tweed jacket sips his cappuccino and reads, the waitress stands by the glass door looking up the steps to the sidewalk and street.
“Still snowing,” the waitress says. She’s a young woman with straight blond hair and brown eyes, a small scar on her forehead, and she smiles when Elena looks up. “It will be deep tonight, I think.”
The door opens a moment later and the man is at her table almost instantly, sliding into the chair across from her and unbuttoning his overcoat, his face red with cold.
“Gabriel.” He extends a cold hand. “You must be Elena.”
She nods mutely.
“It’s freezing,” he says. “Jesus.” He waves at someone behind her, presumably the waitress, removes a tissue from his coat pocket and blows his nose. “Excuse me,” he says to Elena, and the waitress has appeared with a latte. She sets it down in front of him and Gabriel kisses her cheek. “Illy,” he says, “you’re a saint. Thank you.” The waitress smiles and steps back, watching them. Gabriel leans forward across the table and beckons for Elena to lean forward too. His breath is hot against her ear. “I apologize for this,” he murmurs, so softly that she has to strain to hear him, “but I need you to go to the back with Ilieva, and do what she says. It’s a security precaution that my cousin insists on. Please don’t take it personally.”
“Here,” Ilieva says, “come with me, please.” Elena stands and follows her past the brightly lit pastry case, down the red corridor past the bathroom, until Ilieva opens a door marked Employees Only and Elena follows her into the storeroom. It is a cramped space filled with boxes and milk crates. An enormous glass-fronted fridge hums in a corner, filled with white cake boxes and ice-cream tubs. Ilieva closes and locks the door behind them.
“Please take off your clothes,” she says.
“What?”
“For the wires,” Ilieva says. “It is to check for the wires.”
“The wires?”
“Wiretapping. The recordings. I’m sorry, my English . . .”
“Oh. I understand.” She begins to take off her clothes. It’s warm in the storeroom, but she can’t stop shivering.
“Your bra also,” Ilieva says. She picks up each article of clothing as Elena removes it, patting it down before she returns it to Elena, presumably feeling for recording devices. When Elena is fully dressed again Ilieva makes an unembarrassed search of Elena’s coat pockets. She removes and examines the wad of bills, replaces them and continues searching. “No handbag?”
“No handbag,” Elena says.
When Elena goes back out into the restaurant Gabriel is where she left him, drinking his latte. He smiles when he sees her but doesn’t speak. Ilieva appears a moment later and murmurs something in his ear. He nods.
“I apologize sincerely,” he says to Elena. “I know it’s intrusive, to say the least. My cousin’s a little paranoid about security.”
“I understand.”
“I hate it,” Gabriel says. “The whole procedure. It just seems somewhat necessary these days. The current political climate, et cetera. But anyway, listen, may I buy you a sandwich?”
“Oh, there’s no need, I—”
“Seriously,” he says gently. “You’re looking a little pale.”
All at once she is desperately hungry again.
Lat
er on it’s difficult to remember the conversation, except that it’s effortless and that hours pass before Ilieva brings the check and the snow outside the window sparkles blue and amber in the lights of the street.
“We close early,” Ilieva says apologetically. “For the snow.” The café is empty but for an older couple eating dessert nearby.
“Bear with me for one last absurd ritual,” Gabriel says softly, “and then you’re free to work in the United States of America. Will you do exactly as I say for a moment?”
“Yes,” Elena whispers.
Gabriel opens his wallet and slides a twenty into the check folder. “That’s for the food and drink,” he tells her quietly. “Now put in your share.” His tone leaves no doubt as to his meaning, and all at once it is the last moment before potential catastrophe again: the whole evening has unwound to this point, now, and it’s too late again. Elena reaches into her left coat pocket, where the precious stack of bills that she’s been accumulating for months resides, but the police don’t break down the door. Perhaps it won’t happen. Perhaps she’ll walk out with a forged passport and a Social Security number, exactly as promised. “Turn the folder so that it opens away from that couple,” Gabriel murmurs, “and slide the money in. Don’t count it—good—now put the folder on the table and look at me as if nothing out of the ordinary has occurred.”
Ilieva takes the check folder and Elena is alone with Gabriel for a moment, and the music playing in the café at that moment sounds like a Russian lullaby. Ilieva reappears with the folder and two glasses of red wine.
“Your change,” Ilieva says. “A pleasure, as always.”
Gabriel raises his glass. “Red wine means the count was correct,” he says softly. “If she’d brought water, I’d be out the door by now. Cheers.”
“What are we toasting?”
“My last job,” he says, “and your future gainful employment.”
“Really? I’m your very last?”
“Well, I have one more tomorrow, actually. But my second-to-last job doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it?” He’s reaching into an inside pocket of his jacket, and he passes her the envelope so casually that Elena almost doesn’t see it until it’s on the table. It’s the kind of envelope that film developers use for photos. “Here are some vacation pictures,” he says. “You can look at them later.”
The Singer's Gun Page 17
