The Singer's Gun

by Emily St. John Mandel

  She takes the envelope and puts it in her bag and the moment of transaction is over so quickly that she’s almost unsure it happened. He’s still holding up his wineglass, and she smiles.

  “Well,” Elena says, “congratulations. I assume this isn’t the easiest line of work.”

  “That’s just it,” he says. “It is easy. I could do this forever. But I want something different. What will you do with your new-found legality?”

  “I’ll stop washing dishes for a living. I’ll stop posing naked for photographers. I don’t know. Anything.”

  Gabriel goes quiet for a moment, sipping his wine. “Listen, I shouldn’t ask probably,” he says suddenly. “This is probably silly of me, but do you have any office skills? Can you type?”

  She nods.

  “I started a new job last month,” he says. “It’s nothing that exciting, but I’ve been told to find a new secretary for my division . . .” She listens for some time to the details of the position, she sips her wine and then the glass of water that follows, and she is stricken by a sense that has come over her before in moments of unreality; it’s as if she’s stepped outside herself and is observing the scene from afar. At a small table in the Russian Café in a snowstorm she talks to the man she met a few hours earlier and laughs as if she’s always known him, just as if they’re two old friends out for dinner on a snowy night in New York. Just as if the envelope that Anton slid over the table hadn’t contained a Social Security card and an impeccably forged American passport.

  “I don’t know,” Gabriel says in the snow outside the restaurant, walking toward the Williamsburg Bridge, “it’s difficult to explain. I just want, I’ve always wanted a different kind of life than this. This will sound strange, I mean, I know it’s crazy, but I always wanted to work in an office.”

  “You have a corporate soul?”

  She’s mostly joking, but Gabriel nods as if she isn’t and says, “Exactly. Yes.”

  Late at night on the bridge the cold is deep and absolute. The lights of the Domino Sugar Factory shine over the river, and the snow is still falling. Gabriel tells her he’s spending the evening with his parents in Williamsburg. They walk together, talking, and a boat moves silently over the dark water far below.

  On the far side of the bridge he calls a car service for her on his cell phone and they stand together waiting for it to arrive, stamping their feet to keep warm until the black car pulls up to the curb. “Let me give you my business card so you can call me about the job. There’s just one thing I have to tell you,” he says as he gives it to her. “About my name . . .”

  The car takes her away from there to the apartment building in East Williamsburg. She leans her head against the window to look up at the snow and it seems at that moment that it’s going to get easier now, that the long nightmare of hunger and dishwashing and posing naked is almost over; there’s a chance at a job here in her beloved city, something different, health insurance, a new life. The driver, already paid by Gabriel/Anton, grunts something about the neighborhood when she says goodnight. Elena lets herself in through the first door, a steel gate that clangs shut behind her. Her boyfriend is lying on her bed when she opens the door to her bedroom; she can’t suppress a gasp. They’ve been talking about moving in together, and she forgets sometimes that she’s given him a key. He grins at her and puts down the book he was reading, The Botany of Desire, green-gold apples resplendent on the dust jacket.

  “I let myself in,” he says. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all. I’m glad you’re here.” She opens the closet door and steps behind it, hidden from his view. She’s taking her clothes off; the thought of undressing for Ilieva in the storeroom returns to her, and she blinks and tries to erase Ilieva’s face from her mind. “What time is it?”

  “Almost eleven,” he says. “Where’ve you been?”

  “I went out with a girl from work. Jennifer.”

  The American passport is cool to the touch. She takes it from her coat pocket and opens it quickly, hidden from Caleb’s view by the closet door. The light in the closet is bad but the document seems perfect. The photograph that she mailed to a post-office box two weeks earlier stares back at her.

  “A waitress?”

  “Yes,” Elena says. She’s running her fingers over the letters. Nationality: United States of America. “She works mornings, usually. You haven’t met her. How long have you been here?”

  “Oh, a few hours,” Caleb says. “Missing you rather urgently, I might add. Are you naked yet?”

  Later on in bed she opens her eyes to watch the movements of his shoulders above her, the side of his face, his neck. His eyes are clenched shut. She watches him intently. Trying to concentrate on Caleb only, trying not to pretend that Caleb is anyone else.

  16.

  It took nearly an hour to clear Customs in Rome. The cat’s health records and proof of rabies vaccination were examined at great length, it seemed to her, by customs officials while the cat glared at everyone through the bars of the carrying case. When she was finally allowed to leave the airport Elena took a silver shuttle train to the central station, Termini, and found that there was some time to kill before the next train to Naples.

  There were men posted in Termini, a few women too, police officers with dark uniforms and sharp white leather belts. She tried to walk casually and to carry the cat on the side facing away from the police officers, deeply afraid and simultaneously cursing herself for paranoia. It was morning in Italy, three A.M. in New York. She had another thirteen hours before she failed to show up for her appointment with Broden, and she imagined that still more time would pass after that missed appointment before the machine of inquiry would begin to roll into motion, before agents arrived at her apartment, before her passport was tagged—perhaps hours, perhaps a day—but she was traveling on the Canadian passport, not the American; would that make a difference? She wasn’t sure. Nothing made sense anymore. She was exhausted but wired, scattered, alive, her thoughts moving in circles like a flock of dark birds.

  Elena carried the cat and the suitcase onto the first train to Napoli, and watched the sun rise over the Bay of Naples from the train. In a small lurching bathroom onboard the train she let the cat out of the carrier, opened the can of tuna she’d brought from Brooklyn and watched while the cat ate frantically and purred. Some hours later she found herself standing in front of the pink hotel on the island of Ischia, unsure what to do next. The restaurant seemed open, a waiter moving about setting the tables, but all at once she needed more time. She didn’t know what to say to Anton; they had left it that she would call him once she had the cat.

  Elena turned away from the hotel and continued on down the cobbled street, which curved and opened into a large piazza. There were three cafés here, their outdoor areas distinguished by different styles of umbrellas, and a harbor full of painted boats. She stood for a while in the sunlight by the water’s edge, looking at the boats—they moved against each other in the harbor ripples, soft sounds of wood on wood—and at the far side of the harbor a sheer face of rock rose up to become a tree-crested hill, connected to Sant’Angelo by only the narrowest strip of beach. The weight of the cat was suddenly too much; she turned back to the piazza and made her way to the closest café area, to a table shaded by an immense white umbrella. Her heart was pounding and her head was light, the sleeplessness of the previous night falling down around her. She was dizzy. The waiter approached and said something. She stared at him blankly and smiled, a little panicked. He repeated himself in what sounded like halting German.

  “He’s asking if you’d like some water and a menu,” a woman at the next table said conspiratorially.

  “Oh,” Elena said. “Thank you. Um, si. Per favore. And also a café latte. Please.”

  Two men were sitting together a few tables away. They had been talking intently over coffee but at the sound of her voice one of them looked over his shoulder, did a double-take, glanced at the cat, stood up slow
ly and came to sit at her table. His hair was longer than she remembered, and he looked like he’d been spending some time in the sun.

  “Elena,” he said.

  Later Anton held her in the room as she lapsed into sleep, looking up at the blue of the ceiling. The cat climbed on top of him and fell asleep on his stomach.

  Later still Anton went down to the pay phone in the piazza, found his phone card and dialed a number from memory.

  “I wish you’d just let me call you from my cell phone,” he said when Aria answered. “I think it’d be cheaper.”

  “We’ve talked about this,” Aria said. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “I have the package. It came yesterday.”

  “Excellent. You haven’t opened it?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Don’t. You’ll think I’m paranoid, but I’m going to call you back in three minutes from the pay phone on my corner. Tell me the number of the pay phone on Ischia.”

  “You’re not serious,” he said, but she apparently was. He stood by the phone for a few minutes until it rang.

  “Your contact will be in the restaurant at ten P.M. tonight,” she said. There was static on the line.

  “I still want twenty thousand dollars,” he said.

  “I’m paying you eighteen. The money should be in your checking account by now.”

  “Aria,” he said, “what do these people do?”

  “You want back in the business now?”

  “I need to know,” he said. “You said in the restaurant that night that they’re import-exporters, but what do they ship?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “I was lying awake thinking last night,” said Anton. “It’s too quiet here, and I’ve been by myself. I can’t sleep sometimes. If they’re going to blow up the subway system, Aria, I’ll tell Sophie about Harvard myself.”

  “Really,” she said. “If I told you they were smuggling bomb materials, you’d tell Sophie about Harvard?”

  “I would tell everyone about everything,” he said.

  Aria was quiet for a moment.

  “If you don’t want to be my business partner anymore,” she said, “the least you could do is stay out of my way.”

  “Explosives are a step too far for me, Aria. I take the subway to work.”

  The silence was so long this time that he thought he might have lost her. After a moment he said her name.

  “I’m still here,” she said.

  “Then tell me what they’re shipping.”

  “I suppose it can’t do too much harm to tell you, at this point. You know how hard it is to immigrate to the United States,” she said.

  “Well, yeah, that was the foundation of our business plan. What does that have to do with . . .?”

  “They help people enter the country. That’s all.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t quite—”

  “Fine. What they do, Anton, is they help lovely young ladies from ex-Soviet republics start new lives in the United States. Is that clear enough for you?”

  “Trafficking,” he said. “Aria, please tell me you’re joking.”

  “We’ve always helped immigrants once they arrived in the country,” Aria said. “Is it such a stretch to help them arrive in the first place?”

  “How did you get involved with these people?”

  “The importers? They’re the people who brought in Natalka,” she said.

  “Who?” The name caught briefly on some outcropping of memory, but tore off and left only hanging shreds. Anton knew a Natalka. He had met a Natalka. An impression of red lipstick, of cigarette smoke. A memory, or was it just that he’d met so many Russian girls who wore bright lipstick and smoked cigarettes that he heard a Russian-sounding name and his memory offered up a stock photograph? He couldn’t quite see her face.

  “Natalka,” Aria said. “You sold her a passport.”

  And she snaps into focus. Natalka’s in her twenties, but her hair is white. Not platinum blonde white, like the Norwegian girl whom he’d dated briefly in high school. Natalka’s hair is white-silver, white-decades-early, cut in a slightly uneven bob. In a recess of memory she sits across from him at a table in the Russian Café, raises a cigarette to her lips and smiles. She inhales with the languid desperation of a girl who will very soon be out of cigarettes and is trying to make the current one last as long as possible. Ilieva comes to the table, and when she asks to take their order Natalka smiles at Ilieva’s accent and speaks to her in Russian. Ilieva comes alive at the sound of her own language; they talk for a moment and then Ilieva brings a small black coffee, into which Natalka pours so much sugar that Anton half-expects the coffee to congeal into sludge. He realizes that she’s trying to make her coffee as meal-like as possible, and his heart drops a little. He buys her a sandwich and watches her eat.

  “How did you come here?” he asks her. It’s a question he’s been asking almost everyone lately. Their stories are seldom uninteresting. He has half-baked ideas about writing something someday—working title: A Totally Fictional Guide to Immigrating Illegally to New York—and to this end he’s been taking some notes in the evenings.

  “In a box,” Natalka says. “I came here in a box.” She lights a new cigarette with shaking hands, and lifts it quickly to her lips. She’s gone pale; her smile has vanished; he presses her no further. And it’s only several years later, holding a pay-phone receiver to his face on the island of Ischia, that he understands what she meant.

  “Shipping containers. It’s shipping containers, isn’t it?”

  “Bright boy,” said Aria.

  “Do you know what happened to her?”

  “To Natalka? No idea. She put me in touch with the people who imported her in exchange for a discount on her passport, and that was the last time I spoke with the girl.”

  “I don’t think it’s right.”

  “No,” she said, “of course you don’t.”

  “Aria, you know what happens to girls like that.”

  “All of them? Anton, grow up. It’s a way of entering the country. What would their lives be like, in these places they come from? These radioactive little Ukrainian towns, Anton, these dark little villages without jobs, these fallen-down countries where everything’s corrupt? It isn’t that there’s no industry in these places, it’s that they are the industry in these places. They can be strippers and call girls there or strippers and call girls here, and here at least they stand a chance. When you think about it, Anton, do you disagree with me?”

  “No,” he said after a moment. “I don’t disagree with you.”

  “Besides, you’re helping a friend.”

  “You’re many things to me, Aria, but friend isn’t exactly—”

  “No,” she said, “I mean you know someone who’s arriving on the next boat.”

  “What? Who?”

  “Ilieva went back to Russia two months ago. Her grandmother was dying and she wanted to see her, but then she couldn’t get a visa to come back to the United States and she got stuck over there. Think of everything she’s done for us over the years.”

  “She’s done a lot.”

  “So do something for her. Go downstairs to the restaurant tonight, and give the FedEx envelope to the men who are bringing her back to New York. The interaction’s over in five minutes, and you’re done. Ilieva’s boat moves unmolested into the port at Red Hook. The shipping container is driven away and unloaded, and she’s back in New York on Monday morning. You can come home tomorrow, make up a story for Sophie about a nervous breakdown or something, and life resumes its former course.”

  “And life resumes its former course,” he said. He was watching Elena. After they’d made love in the hotel room and slept for a while she had wanted to go swimming, and he’d left her to change while he came down to call Aria. Now Elena was crossing the piazza barefoot, wrapped in a towel and headed for the beach. “Why does she have to come back in a shipping container? Couldn’t you have just sent her a pa
ssport?”

  “There wasn’t time. She told me she was in some kind of trouble. She wanted to get out of Russia quickly and it was the best I could do on short notice.”

  “Aria, promise me you’ll leave me alone after this.”

  “This is the last job I’ll ever ask you to do.”

  Elena stepped out of sight along the beach.

  “Do you remember that night,” he said, “when we were fourteen and I cut your hair in your bedroom?”

  She was quiet for a moment. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I was just thinking about it today. There was a certain time in our lives when we didn’t have to become so . . . well, so adversarial, for lack of a better word.”

  “I don’t consider you an enemy,” Aria said.

  “What do you consider me, then?”

  “Listen,” she said, “I’d love to stay on the line and talk, but I have things to do. It’s just business, Anton. Remember that.”

  “Just business,” he repeated.

  “Goodbye, Anton,” Aria said, and she disconnected before he could respond. He hung up the phone and followed after Elena.

  She was in the water. He watched from the beach while she swam out to the breakwater, pale and full of grace. She swam beautifully. She climbed up onto the breakwater rocks, turned and waved at him. That was the moment when he knew; he saw the slight swell of her body when she turned toward him, the weight of her breasts when she raised her arm, and he understood why she had come to him.

  “Oh my God,” he said, aloud. Elena turned her back on him to look out toward Capri, a small hopelessly erotic figure with his shorts clinging wet around her legs (she’d brought no swimsuit from New York), and the feeling of falling in love was literal: a fall, handholds breaking away in the descent. She swam back to him and he wrapped her in a towel. She sat curled up tight against his side, not quite shivering but not quite warm either, and he held her close with his arm around her shoulders. While she was out at sea he had taken off his wedding ring. Now he buried it with his free hand, pushing it as deep as it would go into the sand.