The Singer's Gun

by Emily St. John Mandel

  17.

  Ilieva moving over the ocean:

  It is dark, but dark isn’t a strong enough word. It is ink, purest black, purest absence-of-light. The air is dense and still. There are fifteen girls in a small room squared out of the middle of a shipping container. They sit shoulder-to-shoulder with their backs to the walls, as they have since the ship left Lithuania. If you want to lie down you have to move to the center, but they can’t all lie down at once, there isn’t room, so they often fall asleep sitting upright and wake up disoriented with numb legs and painful backs. Time comes to a standstill. They long for fresh air. The ship is so enormous that they feel no movement of waves; there is only a faint steady vibration of engines that surrounds them in their metal room. Their imagined lives in America are heady and bright but when they drift off to sleep with their backs to the walls they have nightmares. It’s sometimes hard to tell the difference between being awake and being asleep.

  The captain lets them out at intervals, when it’s safe, but the intervals are too rare and the claustrophobia is pure agony. There’s a girl from Kiev who will do nothing but sit in the corner and weep. The others try to comfort her, but none of them happen to speak Ukrainian and the girl from Kiev speaks neither Russian nor English. Ilieva closes her eyes in the stifling darkness and thinks the same thought over and over again: I will never go home again. She draws her knees to her chest and tries to vanish into memories. The girl from Kiev sobs once beside her, and Ilieva takes her hand. The hand is hot and fevered, and the girl is shaking. She’s sick and has been for days now. She won’t eat or drink. She whispers something through her tears.

  “I’m sorry,” Ilieva murmurs, in Russian and then in English. “I don’t speak Ukrainian. I don’t understand.”

  But the girl keeps whispering, and after a while Ilieva does understand her, even though the girl’s delirious, even though they have no language in common. I miss my family. I am so afraid. It takes so much to come here, and I’ve left so much behind.

  18.

  “Where did you come from?” David asked in the evening.

  Elena had been on Ischia for less than six hours, and she’d slept for a while and gone swimming. Now she sat with Anton and David on the piazza, eating pizza, and Anton had his arm over her shoulders. Over the past few days the breeze from the sea had grown cooler. One or two other stragglers from the tourist season were inside the restaurant, but no one else sat outside. A waiter had come around and placed a candle on the table, and David seemed ill at ease and restless in the flickering light.

  “New York,” Elena said.

  “I meant originally.”

  “A place you’ve never heard of,” Elena said lightly. “A town up in northern Canada.”

  “I’ve been to Canada. I’ve been traveling since my wife died.”

  “Not this far north, trust me.”

  “I took the ice road to Tuktoyaktuk,” David said.

  “You’ve been to Tuktoyaktuk? You’re serious?”

  “I was trying to get as far north as I could,” he said. “Which town are you from?”

  “Inuvik.”

  “I spent a few days there.”

  “In Inuvik? Why?”

  “I liked it there,” David said. “I was there in the winter and the northern lights were beautiful. The sun never came up, but I liked living by moonlight.”

  “It’s small,” she said. “Everything’s always either muddy or frozen. There’s nothing up there.”

  “You’re talking about a lack of employment?”

  “No, I’m talking about a lack of everything. A loss of potential. It’s hard to explain. There’s just . . . it’s a narrowing of possibilities,” she said. “Even the smartest people end up doing nothing much with their lives, because there’s nothing to do. It’s not just Inuvik, it’s everywhere in the world that’s small and remote. Fewer things are possible in places like that.”

  “I think I understand. Do you believe in ghosts?” David asked her.

  “David,” Anton said, “the poor girl just got here.” He couldn’t seem to lift his hand from her thigh under the table.

  “You know how much I hate small talk.”

  “I hate it too,” Elena said. “It’s small.”

  “Well said.”

  “I don’t think I believe in ghosts,” she said.

  “Have you ever seen one?”

  “No. If I had I’d believe in them.” She was tired, and a short time later she excused herself and went to bed. David sipped at a glass of coffee and stared out at the harbor.

  “I like her,” David said, when his coffee was done.

  “So do I.” Anton was perfectly content for the first time in memory.

  “What’s she doing here?”

  “I have no idea.” Anton knew exactly what she was doing there, but he didn’t want to talk about it. The night was too good; the stars were bright, the coffee was perfect, in a few hours the transaction would be over and he would be perfectly free. There was Elena and soon there would be a child, and he was already thinking about names. Esme. Michael. Zooey. Lucille.

  “I have no idea what I’m doing here either.” There was an edge to David’s voice. “I’m thinking about leaving tomorrow.”

  “Why are you leaving?” Anton was surprised by the loneliness that overcame him at the thought of this.

  “Look, you’ll think I’m crazy.” David was leaning back in his chair, looking up at the stars.

  “I promise I won’t.”

  “I felt this, well . . . this prickling at the back of my neck today. I know it sounds absurd, but I don’t know how else to say it. I was sitting on that wall over there this morning, my back to the harbor, just reading the newspaper, and that feeling comes over me. I turn around, and no one’s watching me. But the last time I felt like that, the last two times, I saw her a little while later.”

  “Saw who?”

  “My wife,” David said. “If I stay here now I’m just marking time on this little island, waiting for her to appear again. How long can you flee from a ghost? She’s been dead for five years now. I don’t know why I’m afraid of her. I mean Christ, it’s Evie. It’s just my wife. I love her. But I’m afraid of the dead.”

  “Who wouldn’t be?” Anton was uneasy. He didn’t know what to say.

  “Ideally, no one. Ideally, we’d, I don’t know, we’d embrace them, man, we’d just fucking accept the fact that they walk among us and get on with our lives. It shouldn’t be that big a deal, you know? Things overlap sometimes.”

  “You think they walk . . .” Anton didn’t want to hear the answer to the question, so he stopped midsentence and let it hang in the air.

  “Aren’t you listening? I saw her. Twice.”

  “After,” Anton said carefully.

  “Yes, fucking after. I went up north after she died, like I was telling Elena. There’s nothing up there, but that was the point—I wanted to get away from everything, from the whole nightmare of the last few months. I think I was just trying to get as far away from the cancer ward as humanly possible, actually. I sold all my stuff, I broke the lease on my apartment and headed north. The landscape up there was so beautiful, I can’t even describe it. There was almost no daylight, just darkness and then twilight, and the moon was brighter than I’d ever seen. I could see the northern lights out the window of my hotel room. I stayed in Inuvik for a while, then I took the ice road up to Tuktoyaktuk and rented a snowmobile one day. I rode a bit out of town. It’s silent up there, but the snowmobile was loud, and I just wanted to be there in the silence for a minute. So I stopped the snowmobile, and I felt like someone was watching me, so I turned around and there she was—” David gestured, and in the movement of his hand Anton almost saw her. “She was standing on top of the snow in her wedding dress. She was only there for an instant, just a flash, but she smiled at me and I could smell the vanilla perfume she used to wear.”

  “And then again?”

  “Yes, again. I got o
ut of the arctic as fast as I could, headed down to Sault Ste. Marie for a while, and then I went to Europe and I saw her in the crowd in Athens. And you’re thinking, Right, you saw her in the crowd in Athens, whatever. You can see anyone in a crowd in Athens. There’s too many fucking people there, that’s the problem with the place, and everyone on earth sort of looks like someone else from the back. But I was walking, and I saw a black woman wearing a long blue dress far up ahead. My wife was from Kenya, and her wedding dress was blue. This woman in the crowd was moving in and out of view. I started following her, but I couldn’t get close. And just when I’m thinking, Come on, get a grip, she’s been dead for years now, Evie turned around and smiled at me. It was just like we’d been temporarily separated and she was waiting for me to catch up.”

  The implications of this caught Anton with a sudden chill.

  “Ghost stories,” he said weakly, and made an attempt at a lighthearted laugh.

  “The thing is,” David said, “I’m not unafraid, I keep hoping I’ll stop seeing her and then, I don’t know, get some kind of peace in the world—but if she left, I mean really left, if I didn’t think she was still somewhere close by, I think I’d miss her even more. So there’s no way out of this one, is there.”

  “You ever see her when you were with someone else?”

  “No. I only see her when I’m alone.”

  “Then we’ll sit out here for a while. The other night,” Anton said, “on the dock, you said that for a certain sum of money you might be willing to do something for me.”

  “Make me an offer,” David said. “God knows I could use some traveling money.”

  “Would you do it for five hundred euros?”

  “You’d pay me five hundred euros to give an envelope to someone?”

  “I don’t know these people. It might be dangerous, they might—”

  “It’s a deal,” David said. “I’ll be fine.”

  When the restaurant had closed they sat on a low stone wall by the harbor, looking at the boats. The sense of impending freedom was exhilarating. Earlier in the day Anton had called his old bank in New York and had the eighteen thousand dollars from Aria wired into a local checking account where he’d already moved the bulk of his savings. Now he sat by the harbor with David in the half-light, thinking of a bright new life that would start tomorrow, thinking of getting a job somewhere and living with Elena and the child in Sant’Angelo.

  “What time is it?” David asked. Anton felt his tension in the air.

  “A little after nine. She won’t appear if I’m with you, will she?”

  “No,” David said, “she won’t.”

  “Then I’ll wait with you,” Anton said. “I’ll wait with you till it’s time.”

  They walked out past the harbor and along the narrow strip of beach that tethered Ischia proper to its satellite, the islet that rose out of the water on the other side of the harbor. It was very nearly its own island and no one lived there. A few hotels lined the edge of the islet that faced the harbor, but sheer rock rose up behind them. A path curved around the hill to the right. They started up the hillside, but the path was hard and steep. After a little while they turned and leaned on a bank of sand and soapstone, looking back at the village. On the other side of the harbor Sant’Angelo was a wall of lights, houses terraced up the hillside. Anton could see the hotel from here, on the edge of the lights near the piazza.

  “What was she like?” Anton asked.

  “Evie? It’s a funny thing, you know. People die, you remember them as angels. It gets harder and harder to remember what was real. She wasn’t an angel . . . I mean, look, I was dealing coke and she was handling the money. So she wasn’t necessarily good, you know, in any kind of an absolute law-abiding non-drug-dealing sense of the word, but she was good to me. We were good to each other.”

  “All that matters, I guess.”

  “I think so, personally. What about your wife?”

  “My wife? I don’t know. My wife canceled our wedding twice. My wife was already planning to leave me and move to San Francisco when we left New York on our honeymoon. We disappointed each other.”

  “You don’t love her?”

  “I do. I did. But not enough. I don’t know why either of us went through with it. Look—”

  A single light had blinked on in the restaurant of their hotel, a weak shine over the water. It was hard to tell at this distance, but through the far-off windows he thought he saw figures moving. Four people, setting up chairs at a table.

  “We have to go back,” Anton said. “Listen, you go first. Try not to let them hear you. If they hear you, tell them your name’s Anton Waker and that you’ll bring the package down in a few minutes. I’ll be four minutes behind you. We meet in your room.”

  David nodded silently and moved away from him down the path, and Anton felt a sudden guilt. He was sending David off alone, the man’s ghost wife could be smiling in the air around any given corner, and then he remembered that he didn’t believe in ghosts and felt like an idiot. He spent a few minutes after that staring at his watch while David crossed the length of beach and disappeared into the shadows at the edge of the piazza. It wasn’t quite four minutes, but Anton couldn’t take it anymore and followed him.

  There was no one on the beach. The boats bobbed quietly against the piers, soft sounds of waves calmed by the breakwaters. The piazza was deserted. The front door of the hotel was unlocked, as always. Anton slipped in almost silently, heard the soft murmur of voices from the restaurant. A faint impression of light down the corridor. He looked up the stairs and saw David crouched low at the top of the staircase. David smiled and gave him a silent thumbs-up: he had crept in undetected. Anton let go of the door, too soon—it slipped out of his hand and closed loudly, and the murmur of voices stopped. He was silent. The men in the restaurant were silent. David was silent; he had clenched his hands together white-knuckled and he was glaring at Anton. Anton closed his eyes and thought of praying, but he’d never been to church and had nothing to pray to and the world felt less than holy at that moment.

  “Hello?” someone called out, in English. Anton signaled to David—stay— and walked down the darkened corridor that separated the foyer from the restaurant.

  A single light was on over one of the tables by the window. Otherwise the restaurant was dark, upside-down chairs on the tables casting shadows on the walls. Four men sat watching him. They were in their thirties, of indeterminate national origin, well dressed. They gazed blandly at him, except for the man sitting to Anton’s right, who smiled and gestured at an empty chair.

  “Please,” he said, “join us.”

  A bottle of wine stood half-consumed on the table. One of the men was casually folding a map and putting it away as Anton sat down. Another was shuffling papers into a neat little pile and turning them over blank side up.

  “What brings you to the island of Ischia, my friend?” The man’s accent was British with Eastern European undertones.

  “I’m writing a guidebook,” Anton said. He cursed himself for stupidity as he said this, but it occurred to him that Aria didn’t know about the guidebook so perhaps all wasn’t lost after all, maybe the slip wasn’t ruinous, maybe they’d still believe he was David Grissom and that David Grissom was he.

  “A guide to Ischia in the off-season?”

  “To the world in the off-season.”

  They were quiet for a moment, then one of them laughed and raised his wineglass. “To the world in the off-season,” he repeated. “Cheers.” The others raised their glasses too. “Some wine?”

  “Thank you.”

  One of the men poured him a glass of wine. A reaction seemed to be expected, so Anton sipped at it and nodded appreciatively. He was aware that he appeared perfectly calm—an old gift, extraordinarily useful in his first career—but his nerves were spun glass. The wine tasted like nothing. It was a dull shock that this moment had actually come; all these strained lost weeks of waiting for the transaction, and t
he transaction was at last about to occur.

  “The wine’s excellent,” he said. “Thank you.”

  “Anton Waker, I presume,” the man with the British accent said.

  “Who? Oh, no, actually, I’m David Grissom. I’m afraid you’ve mistaken me—” It seemed like the perfect time to make his escape; he smiled apologetically and stood up to leave, but someone grasped his arm.

  “Sit, sit, you think we’d renege on our hospitality so quickly? Come now, a small misunderstanding, sit with us a moment anyway. It’s a beautiful evening, and as you say, the wine is excellent. Alberto,” said the man with the British accent. “Ali for short. This is Claro, Mario, Paul.”

  Claro said something in another language and the others smiled. Anton smiled too, trying to look as politely clueless as possible and wondering what their real names were. He was acutely aware of his heartbeat. “And you might be wondering,” Ali said, “why Ischia on a Friday night in October?”

  “Why Ischia,” Mario repeated. His accent was, if not exactly British, clipped in a manner suggestive of an expensive British education.

  “Because I like peace and quiet,” Ali said.

  “Hard to find anywhere quieter than a tourist destination in the off-season,” Anton said.

  “A man after my own heart. Every tourist destination goes quiet in the winter, but not many places go as quiet as this. There are no cars. There are no tourists. The shops are boarded up; the market hardly opens. And my new favorite restaurateur is kind enough to extend his hospitality.” He raised his glass again. “To Gennaro,” he said. The others repeated him, except for Paul, who only smiled. “You’re staying here at the hotel, Mr. Grissom?”