The Singer's Gun

by Emily St. John Mandel

  “More than I can say,” she said. “But if I go home to the north pregnant I’ll never leave again. I’ll be like my sister and just get stuck there forever.”

  She drifted off in the middle of a story about a grand hotel in Marseilles where she’d worked in the laundry room, woke seconds later from a dream about snowmobiles and said, “He knew where I was from.”

  “What?”

  “People from the south, you tell them you’re from the far north and they think you grew up in an igloo, but he knew what it was like up there. Can you believe he’d actually been to Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk? It’s so dark up there,” she said. “It was cold in Paris in January, but I kept thinking, I could be up there. Where it’s dark and there’s nothing. The sun doesn’t even rise in the winter. You live by moonlight for weeks.”

  “Ellie, you should rest.”

  He took the plate of spaghetti from her hands, set it on the desk behind him. She was slumped over on the edge of the bed. He knelt before her and began unbuckling her shoes.

  “You kept the painting,” she said. She was looking up at the small painting of David and Evie, propped up against the wall on top of the desk. Elena’s shoes were stylish, red and shiny like lipstick, and the left buckle was somehow stuck. Anton struggled with it while she talked. Her feet were swollen. “You wouldn’t think a night could last that long,” she said. “My sister won’t talk to me anymore, did you know that? I don’t even know why. I think it’s because I left her there. I used to call her from New York City, and she wouldn’t come to the phone . . .”

  “You should rest,” Anton murmured. “You’ve been traveling too long.”

  24.

  The case had gone cold, all loose ends and questions. Anton’s parents wouldn’t admit that Anton was missing, let alone that he was dead, which meant there wasn’t even a missing-persons case, and Aria had yet to resurface—in candid moments Broden thought the odds of apprehending Aria were relatively slim, given that the woman made passports for a living—which meant there wasn’t actually much of a false-documents case either. Aria’s one and only known associate—a man whom she’d met once in front of her apartment building, who’d been overheard mentioning a pickup at the docks at Red Hook on the day Broden had last spoken with Elena and who had said nothing interesting since—was followed for three uneventful months until Broden’s supervisor decided that trailing him was a waste of manpower. The girls who had survived the shipping container languished in an immigration facility upstate, awaiting their hearings. They knew very little about the people who had imported them to New York, and they didn’t know the name of the girl who had died. Efforts to track the origins of the container had gone nowhere; the company that had paid for shipping turned out to be a shell corporation in Estonia, its corporate address an abandoned post-office box.

  Broden’s director agreed that the case had stalled, and Broden’s days were far too long and too frantic. No one had time for hopeless cases. But she was attending a conference in Geneva that April and it was a small matter to extend the trip by two days, to fly south to Rome and board a silver train at Termini and follow a story about a cat down the coast to Naples, where she paid a taxi driver to take her to the docks.

  She bought a ticket for Ischia and boarded the next ferry. At the very least, she told herself, it’s a day on a beautiful island. But her next thought was that it was yet another day without her daughter and her throat tightened. When she’d emptied her jacket pockets to pass through airport security she’d found a blue plastic barrette; she’d carefully removed it from her sleeping daughter’s hair some months ago and it hadn’t left her pocket.

  “You’re never here for her,” her husband had said as she was packing for Europe, and Broden couldn’t deny the accusation. Her work required long hours. There were days when she left for work before Tova was awake and came home after Tova had gone to bed. The child had turned seven while Broden was in Geneva.

  “Ischia!” a crew member shouted, and Broden stepped out onto the dock. She traveled by taxi to the town of Sant’Angelo, where the driver let her off at the top of a long hill and told her he could go no farther.

  She went first to the hotel where Sophie had said they had stayed. It was a warm day; the doors of the restaurant had been thrown open, and one or two waiters moved about in the cool shadows of the interior. An orange cat was sleeping in a beam of sunlight just inside the threshold.

  Broden knelt awkwardly on the cobblestones and touched the cat’s soft fur. The cat started awake, but only one eye opened. He purred when Broden stroked his head.

  “He likes you,” a man said in Italian. He stood a few feet inside the restaurant. An immaculate man in his fifties, well dressed. Blue sea glinted through the windows behind him.

  “I like him,” Broden said. “Who does he belong to?”

  “He’s the hotel cat,” Gennaro said. “He keeps the mice away.”

  “So he doesn’t belong to anyone in particular?” It had been some years since she’d had occasion to speak Italian, and the language felt awkward to her. She was sure she was mispronouncing important words. The cat turned over on his back so Broden could stroke his milk-white stomach.

  “Well, he’s Anton’s cat, I suppose. But we’ve all adopted him.”

  Broden was still for a moment, her hand on the cat. She stood up slowly to look at him.

  “Anton’s cat,” she said carefully. “Are you saying . . . is Anton here?”

  “He lives here,” Gennaro said, “but he works in another town during the day.”

  Broden smiled. “He lives here?”

  “You know him?”

  “I’m a friend of the family,” she said. “His mother said he might be here and I was hoping to see him. Do you know what time he’ll be back?”

  Gennaro glanced at his watch. “He usually eats dinner here around seven,” he said, “but it’s still only the afternoon. Is he expecting you?”

  “It’s a surprise,” Broden said. “Is there somewhere I might wait for him?”

  “There’s a piazza just around the corner.”

  “When you see Anton, will you tell him I’m waiting for him?”

  “Of course.”

  She walked away down the hill and the piazza opened up before her. It was only April but summer had started early. The air was hot and tourists already wandered the cobblestones, buying newspapers at the newsstand and linen dresses at the clothing boutique by the still-closed seafood restaurant, and two out of three cafés had outdoor tables and umbrellas set up in the sunlight. Broden chose a table with a pleasant view of the harbor, ordered a cup of coffee and a sandwich and settled down to wait.

  An hour passed, and then two. The boats moved in and out of the harbor. She paid and went across the square to another café for a change of view. She drank more coffee, ordered another sandwich, bought a paper and read it cover to cover, then sat for a long time watching the boys play on the beach. She had brought a novel with her—a thick paperback about spies that she’d picked up in an airport—but she didn’t care for the opening and put it back in her bag.

  There’s something unnatural about being alone in paradise, and the loneliness was strange and unexpected. She watched the stream of tourists and realized that she was surrounded by couples and children. She missed her husband and daughter. She was thinking of Anton’s parents, remembering his mother sitting slumped on the loading dock, staring out at the water with no light in her eyes. There was no doubt in Broden’s mind that they believed Anton to be dead, and she found herself trying to imagine what unfathomable set of circumstances might compel her to turn the police away if she thought her child had been murdered. In her mind’s eye she saw Tova lying on the ground like a broken doll, and the thought was so blindingly horrific that she had to close her eyes for a moment and force herself to think of nothing.

  In her wallet she was carrying an identification card. Anton Waker, Water Inc., 420 Lexington Ave. Broden looked at the photograph
in the warm end-of-day light. Anton Waker stared into the camera, just another office worker, smiling slightly. Nothing in his calm gaze suggested that he’d sold a Social Security number and fake passport to his secretary, or that the diploma on the wall above his desk was a fake, or that he came from the kind of family that sold stolen goods and imported girls from Europe in shipping containers.

  Broden had been waiting for nearly four hours. The sun was dropping low in the sky but the heat was undiminished and tourists milled about on the beach. She closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair. Listening to the seagulls, the voices, the waves and the movement of boats in the harbor.

  “You know,” Anton said, “I could never figure out where they hide the magnetic strip.”

  Broden opened her eyes. The man sitting across the table in a t-shirt and jeans bore little resemblance to the pale young office worker on the surface of the identity card.

  “It’s the black border around the picture,” Broden said. “That’s what the scanner reads in the lobby.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Alexandra Broden.” She reached into her pocket for her badge and set it down on the table between them. “I work with the State Department, Diplomatic Security Service. We’re the division that investigates passport fraud.”

  “Well, I don’t know anything about passport fraud.”

  “I’m afraid it’s a little late for that,” Broden said. “I have you on tape.”

  “I doubt that,” Anton said, with considerably more confidence than he felt at that moment. He had stopped by the hotel on the way to the beach and Gennaro had told him that someone wanted to see him, and now he wished there was some way of silently warning Elena not to come to him. She had been back on Ischia for three weeks, and she spent her afternoons reading on the warm sand under an enormous sun hat. He found himself looking for her among the tourists.

  “Your first sale was to a waitress,” Broden said. “She worked at an Irish bar near Grand Central Station. She wanted to go to flight school.”

  Anton was looking down the beach but he couldn’t see Elena. In a hazy recess of memory she reclined on the floor of his office and reached casually into her handbag. What was it like when you were growing up? His heart was beating very fast. “That’s a nice story,” he said, “but I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Who else? Federico. He was from Bolivia, and he scared you a little. He made a joke about shooting you, so the waitress called Aria from behind the bar and she came and took you away from there. Shall I go on?”

  Anton was silent. He had spotted Elena among the tourists. She was sitting on the sand near the water’s edge under the shade of her sun hat, looking out toward Capri.

  “There was Catina,” Broden said. “Catina from Lisbon. She was reading a magazine when you came into the Russian Café.”

  “Do you still talk to Elena?” Anton asked flatly.

  “No,” she said, “Elena’s served her purpose for me. But if you’re still talking to Elena, you should understand the position she was in. She was facing deportation if she didn’t cooperate.”

  “Back to the arctic,” Anton said. He tried to smile, but it was a painful wince. “I probably would’ve done the same thing.”

  “But I’m not here to talk about Elena,” Broden said, “although I’d be interested to know what became of her. I’d prefer to talk to you about a shipping container.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know very much about shipping containers.”

  “Then let me describe one to you.” Broden’s voice was calm. “A blue shipping container of uncertain origin comes into the dock at Red Hook in Brooklyn. It’s unlike most shipping containers, in that it has a makeshift air pipe, and this air pipe leads to a secret room. The room’s seven feet eight inches by eight feet, and it holds fifteen girls.”

  “Sounds crowded.”

  “Crowded doesn’t begin to describe it, actually.” Her gaze was steady. “Your friend Ilieva described it as a kind of living death. Imagine being locked into a room moving over the surface of the ocean. The air’s coming in through a small pipe, and there’s no light. The darkness is complete. Here’s the thing: one of the girls died in transit, and no one knows her name. These girls carry no identification.”

  Ilieva: standing by the pastry case in the Russian Café, talking to the other waitress and laughing, bringing him a latte unasked and kissing him on the cheek, listening to him all those years ago as he explained the way it would work, asking intelligent questions while they were setting up the system. Ginger ale means I’m in danger. If I order it, go behind the counter and call Aria and tell her to come for me. Red wine means the count was correct. Water means it wasn’t. Ilieva laughing, Ilieva speaking in Russian to the old Eastern European men who used to come into the café sometimes, Ilieva gliding across the room with a glass of wine and a slice of cheesecake. Ilieva trapped in an airless room with a dead girl moving over the sea. Hard to reconcile this last horror with the serenity of his memories.

  “All we know about her is that she was approximately seventeen to twenty years old and spoke only Ukrainian,” Broden said. “We tried to identify her, but the investigation went nowhere and none of the other girls knew her name. After a few weeks in the morgue she was buried in Potter’s Field along with the rest of the unclaimed and anonymous bodies that New York City had to offer that week, and her family will likely never know what happened to her. And it would be a terrible tragedy even if this were an isolated incident, but it isn’t. Shipping containers are an area of particular interest to me.”

  A response seemed expected of him. “You’ve dealt with other shipping containers,” he said. He didn’t want to know the answer.

  “One other, years ago, when I was with the NYPD. It came into the docks at Red Hook, the same as this last one did. There were certain similarities in the shipping manifest and the design of the secret room was almost identical. The docks can be chaotic,” Broden said. “Sometimes containers get misplaced. That particular container was lost in the stacks for nearly eight weeks.”

  “Eight weeks,” Anton said. He felt ill.

  “We don’t know why the importers didn’t make efforts to find their container,” she said. “It’s possible that our investigation was getting too close to them and they didn’t want to take the risk. In any event, the container held eleven young women from Eastern Europe. The coroner’s report listed them as being between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, but I think one of them was much younger. This is the trade you’re a party to, Mr. Waker.”

  “The thought of these shipping containers . . .” Anton couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “It isn’t what you wanted,” Broden said.

  “It isn’t what I wanted. Of course not, of course it isn’t. If I’d known . . . who would want something like that?”

  “It’s more a question of who would accept something like that,” she said, “as a cost of doing business.”

  “You’re talking about Aria.”

  “Yes. And beyond that question—who would accept something like this?—the next question is, who will stop something like this from happening again? These shipments won’t just stop. It’s a lucrative trade. I know you tried to turn your back on Aria’s business, but Aria’s business continues with or without you.”

  “I’m not sure what you want from me,” he said.

  “I want you to tell me where Aria is, to start with.”

  “I don’t know where she is. I’m sorry.”

  Far down the beach, Elena was half-hidden by her sun hat. She had moved closer to the water so that her feet were lapped by waves.

  “I visited your parents a few months ago,” Broden said.

  A waiter had appeared. Anton ordered an Orangina. “You want anything?”

  “No.”

  “How were they?” he asked, when the waiter had left.

  “Your parents? A little out of it, frankly.”

 
; “What do you mean, ‘a little out of it’?”

  “I mean shaken,” Broden said. “I mean your father’s hands were shaking while he was touching up a figurehead, and your mother looked like she hadn’t slept in a week. When I came to the store your mother was sitting on the loading dock, just staring at the river. She told me you used to sit there with her.”

  “Yes. I did.”

  “Then I asked your mother where you were,” Broden said, “and she said, He’s in a far-off country.”

  “Those were her exact words? A far-off country?”

  “A far-off country. That’s what she said. And I wasn’t sure what she meant by that,” Broden said, “but it seemed to me that she wasn’t just talking about Italy.”

  “We had a dog when I was little,” Anton said. There was strain in his voice. “It was my parents’ dog from before I was born, and me and Aria used to play with him. We were really little, maybe five at the most. Anyway, the dog got old and sick and my parents had to have him put to sleep, and then when me and Aria asked where the dog had gone, my mother said, He’s gone away to a far-off country.”

  “I see. Do your parents still think you’re dead?”

  Anton was silent.

  “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I don’t speak to them anymore.” The waiter had returned with an Orangina. He lifted the bottle to his lips, grateful for the distraction.

  “To tell you the truth, I wasn’t entirely surprised by your parents’ demeanor. I thought you were dead too.” She was looking steadily at him. “I think you were asked to perform a transaction,” she said, “but it wasn’t like all the other transactions you’ve performed over the years. Something went wildly wrong for you. Aria told your parents you were dead, and then I think she fled the city.”

  “She could be anywhere,” he said.

  “The penalties for dealing in false passports are stiff these days,” Broden said. “Now that you’ve turned up alive, I’m afraid you’re in a certain amount of legal peril. I have you on tape describing the way the operation worked. I can produce a witness who bought a passport from you. And Ilieva speaks highly of you, don’t get me wrong, but she won’t lie under oath. You’re looking at a decade in a federal prison. But I’ll tell you a secret, Mr. Waker. I’m much more interested in finding the origin of that shipping container than I am in having you prosecuted for selling fake passports. If you were to tell me where Aria is, I might be willing to negotiate.”