Emily St. John Mandel - The Singer's Gun

“I’m sorry,” Elena said. “It isn’t that I don’t think it’s important, your investigation, it’s just that I’d feel like I was betraying him, spying on him like that, and we worked together for years, it just doesn’t seem. .”

“Doesn’t seem right?”

“To be honest, it doesn’t.”

Broden nodded. “I appreciate your candor,” she said. “Still, I can’t help but wonder if it’s not a question of motivation. What if there were more at stake than just a fraudulent résumé?”

“Are you saying that he’s committed a crime?”

Broden looked at her for a moment, and then smiled. Elena shivered.

“Cold?”

“A little. The air conditioning in this building. .”

“It is a little cool in here,” Broden said. “I’d just like to go through your background one more time. Just to clarify a few points, and I believe that will bring us naturally back to the question at hand. After you graduated high school, you moved to the United States to go to college.”

“Exactly. Yes.”

“You were eighteen?”

“Yes.”

“You had a scholarship to Columbia?”

“And an offer of one at MIT. But I wanted to live in New York.”

“Quite an accomplishment,” Broden said. “Did you work while you were in school?”

“No. I worked after I left school,” Elena said.

“Tell me about that time,” said Broden. “After you left school.”

“Well, there’s not much to tell. I was washing dishes at a restaurant. Then I was a photographer’s model, and then I came here.”

“Uh-huh. Let’s go back a step. The time when you were posing for the photographer. What made you start doing that?”

“The posing? I don’t know, it’s hard to find a decent job without a bachelor’s degree. I didn’t make a lot of money at the restaurant. It was just extra income.”

“I understand,” Broden said. “It was something you could do without being legal in the United States.”

“Oh no, I, wait — I beg your pardon?”

“Did you mishear?”

“No, but perhaps you misunderstood. My father was born in Wyoming. I was born and raised in Canada, but I’m an American citizen.” Elena was flailing. The waters were rising and there was nowhere to go.

Broden sighed, and set the pad of paper down on the desk. “Do you ever get headaches?” She was examining her fingernails, which were cut very close and unpolished.

“I—”

“I get them in the evenings sometimes. After work, when I come home at night. My husband thinks it’s stress, but I think it’s deception.”

“I don’t—”

“And listen, let’s be frank for a moment, it’s not that the job itself isn’t stressful.” Broden stood up from the chair and moved behind it to the window, where she gazed out at other towers and the sky. “Believe me, it is. You’ve no idea what’s at stake here. But it isn’t the stress that wears at me, it’s the deception. This endless, juvenile, pathetic deception, when the facts of your life were so easily verified, when a copy of your father’s birth certificate was obtained so easily from Canada. And believe me, it’s not just you, everyone thinks they’ve somehow moved through life without leaving any kind of a paper trail. It’s frankly baffling to me.” She clasped her hands behind her back and craned her neck to look up at the bright blue sky between towers. “Is there any part of a person’s life that isn’t recorded? The major events require certificates: births, marriages, and deaths are marked and counted, and the rest of it can be filled in with a little research. Your country of residence and citizenship is a matter of public record, as is your education, the identities of your parents, and their countries of citizenship and birth. So tell me, Elena, has this American father of yours ever even set foot in the United States?”

“No, listen, there’s been some kind of a. . I’m not. . I’m an American, my father’s an American, we—”

“And yet both your parents were born in Toronto, and you attended Columbia University on an international student visa. Which would have become null and void, of course, once you dropped out of school.” Broden spoke without malice. She was stating a fact. “Everyone leaves a paper trail, Elena, even illegal aliens who can’t afford immigration attorneys. Do you think you’re invisible?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Elena was having trouble breathing.

“It isn’t easy being illegal here. I do understand that. It isn’t exactly easy immigrating here legally, either, especially if you’re a shiftless college dropout from some frozen little town north of the Arctic Circle. It isn’t quite ‘Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’ anymore, is it?” Standing in the late-afternoon sunlight with her hands clasped behind her back, looking up at the sky above Lower Manhattan, Broden looked perfectly serene. “It’s a little more like ‘Give us your wealthy, your well-connected, your overeducated and your highly skilled.’ I don’t like what you did, but I understand your difficulty.” She was quiet for a moment. “But at any rate,” she said, “we have something in common.”

“What’s that?” Elena’s voice was a whisper.

“We’ve both misrepresented ourselves.” Broden reached into the inside pocket of her jacket and held up a yellow-and-blue badge in Elena’s direction without looking at her. U.S. Department of State, Special Agent. “I’m not really a freelance corporate investigator, and you’re not really legal to work in this country.”

Elena’s hands were shaking. She clenched them together in her lap until her knuckles went white and when she tried to remember the conversation a few hours later this was the point where her memory faltered. What did she say then? Difficult to recall: something stammering and unconvincing along the lines of “There’s been a mistake” or “I think you’re mistaken,” something utterly inadequate to the catastrophe at hand.

“I work with the Diplomatic Security Service. We’re an enforcement arm of the State Department, and my specialty is passport fraud.” Broden turned away from the window and stood watching her. “It isn’t that I’m all that interested in you, to be perfectly frank. What I’m interested in,” Broden said, “professionally speaking, are your dealings with the syndicate from which you acquired your Social Security number and that gorgeous fake passport of yours. It’s the syndicate I’m interested in prosecuting, Elena, not you. So answer me honestly when I speak to you, cooperate fully in our efforts, and I’ll put you on track for a green card. You won’t be deported. Otherwise I’m afraid all bets are off in that department.” Broden was silent for a moment, watching her. Elena felt anchorless, as if she might float upward toward the ceiling. She was painfully aware of her heartbeat. “A response might be appropriate at this point,” Broden said. “Do you understand your choice?”

“It’s just,” one last attempt at deflection, “that I have no idea what you’re talking about. I don’t know what you’re referring to.”

Broden sighed and glanced briefly at the ceiling as if hoping for divine intervention.

“I’m referring to the time,” she said, very patiently, “when you purchased a Social Security number and a fake passport from Anton Waker at a café on East 1st Street.”

Elena remembered this part of the interview very clearly, and the part immediately afterward when they talked about recording devices, but later she couldn’t remember how she got home after the interview was done. She closed her eyes in her cubicle a day later and pressed her fingertips to her forehead, wishing herself almost anywhere else. There were tears on her face. Soon she would go down to the mezzanine level, where at that moment Anton was contemplating throwing his stapler through the window. In a moment she’d step through the door of Dead File Storage Four with a recorder in her handbag, and smile, and ask him questions about his life. It was Friday, and it was nearly five o’clock.