Emily St. John Mandel - The Singer's Gun

“I can picture it,” Anton said. “I remember it exactly. Stone birds all around the edges. Beautiful piece.” He felt like throwing up but kept his voice as bright as possible. I’d just like to thank the Academy. “How long have you had it?”

“Ten years,” said Aria. “I remember when we got it in. You remember how much Sophie liked it when she first came into the store?”

Anton smiled painfully. His father had intercepted a passing waiter and was ordering wine.

“How is Sophie?” his mother asked.

“Excellent,” Anton said. “She’s doing well these days. She sends her regards, by the way, and her regrets and her congratulations.”

“Quite a combination,” his mother said. “Regrets, congratulations, regards.”

“She couldn’t get out of rehearsal tonight, otherwise she’d be here.”

“Ah, is that it. Sir, may we have some menus? Thank you,” his mother said. “She feeling a little calmer these days?”

“Miriam,” his father said. The two canceled wedding dates had been difficult to explain to Anton’s mother, who had some trouble understanding why anyone would hesitate even momentarily to marry her only child. The wine was being poured, and a basket of bread had appeared on the table. His father raised his glass of wine, so everyone else raised their glasses too. “To marriage,” he said. He reached across the table to hold Miriam’s hand.

“Thirty years,” said Aria. “Congratulations.”

“Congratulations,” Anton repeated. “Happy anniversary.”

“Thank you,” his mother whispered. She was smiling, radiant. There were tears in her eyes.

“And to Anton and Sophie,” his father said.

“To Anton and Sophie.” Aria looked Anton in the eye and smiled as she spoke. “August 28th?”

“The 29th,” Anton said. “The wedding’s August 29th.” His throat was dry. He put down the wine and drank half a glass of water without stopping for breath. It was already August 3rd.

The appetizers were arriving. Aria, utterly at ease beside him, speared a white circle of mozzarella and ate it in pieces from the fork, talking about something — he was having trouble hearing, and also he wanted to kill her and his head was light — and his father said, “And then the next thing I know—” and Aria was laughing but he’d missed the joke. Anton couldn’t concentrate. Things were difficult to grasp.

“You seem a little out of it,” his mother said finally. “Everything okay?”

“Prewedding jitters?” his father asked.

“No, actually, I’m being blackmailed by my cousin,” Anton said.

Aria shot him a look, which he ignored, but he felt it graze his cheek.

“Blackmailed,” Sam repeated. “Really?”

Aria shrugged.

“Really,” said his mother. “Aria, please explain.”

“Well,” said Aria, “I’m conducting a transaction.” She leaned forward across the table and dropped her voice to a murmur. She repeated the details about the ten-thousand-dollar wedding gift and the FedEx package at the Italian hotel, but added that her plans depended on Anton’s involvement in the initial transaction — the successful completion of this deal would open up a particularly profitable segment of the import-export business, which was where she’d been wanting to focus her attention for some time. Aria wasn’t entirely sure, she had to admit, why anyone would consider her request for assistance even faintly unreasonable under the circumstances.

“Under what circumstances?”

“You left me hanging,” she said. “I’ve been through three business partners since you left the business, and none of them worked out.”

“How is that my fault? And she’ll tell Sophie about Harvard if I don’t do it,” Anton said.

His parents were silent. Miriam looked at her wineglass, twisting the stem between two fingers and her thumb. Sam nodded and stared into space, considering the situation.

“Well,” his mother said, after some time had passed, “she is family , Anton.”

“What? Mom. She’s blackmailing me.”

“Listen,” his father said quietly, “I can’t say I’m down with the coercion aspect, but it does seem fairly low-risk if you think about it.” He speared a tomato slice, and looked contemplatively at the wall behind Anton and Aria as he talked. Anton glanced over his shoulder. There was a mural on the wall, painted long ago and cleaned rarely since, a greasy waterscape of gondolas and dim canals. “You sign for a package, you give the package to someone without opening it, in the worst-case scenario you deny all knowledge of its contents, and in any event you get ten thousand dollars wired to your bank account. Do you know what she’s sending you?”

“No.”

“There you go,” his father said, as if that resolved everything. “You keep it that way and come home with a nice little nest egg for your life with Sophie, you don’t even know what you did, you help out your cousin at great personal gain and virtually no personal risk. Why not?”

All three were looking at him. Aria was smiling slightly.

“You’re only going along with this,” Anton said to his mother, “because you don’t want me to marry Sophie.”

“Oh, don’t be silly,” his mother said. “Why wouldn’t I want my only son to marry a girl who’s canceled the wedding twice?”

Anton’s father raised his hand for silence; the waiter was approaching.

“Who ordered the chicken parmesan?” the waiter asked.

“Me,” Anton said, without taking his eyes off his mother’s face. She was looking at the waiter.

“I’m the veal,” she said helpfully.

“Linguine?” asked the waiter.

“Over here,” said Anton’s father.

“And you must be the steak.”

“I am,” said Aria. “Grazie.”

“Listen,” his father said when the waiter was out of earshot, “it seems like a fairly smooth transaction.” He was winding pasta around his fork. “I’m not going to lie to you, I think you’d be a fool not to do it.”

“Well, that’s exactly it, Dad, actually. I don’t have a choice but to do it.”

“But why wouldn’t you want to?” his mother asked. “I know you lead a different kind of life these days, but ten thousand dollars , love.”

“You don’t understand, I don’t have a—”

The waiter was approaching again; Anton fell silent and clenched the tablecloth with both hands under the table.

“Fresh pepper, sir?”

“Thank you,” Anton’s father said. He leaned back in his chair to allow the pepper mill unrestricted access to his plate.

“Because that was the whole point of Harvard,” Anton said when the waiter was gone. “So I wouldn’t have to do this kind of thing anymore.”

“But you didn’t go to Harvard,” Aria said reasonably.

“ But she doesn’t know that .”

“A marriage has to be based on honesty, sweetie,” his mother said. She put down her fork and held her husband’s hand for a moment on the tabletop.

“Thirty years,” Aria said. She raised her wineglass. “To Sam and Miriam.”

“Thank you,” his mother whispered. They raised their glasses again. Anton raised his glass too, but he couldn’t make himself speak. He set the glass down next to his plate and tried to concentrate on dinner. Look at this holy chicken parmiggiano, this holy salt shaker, the starched purity of this tablecloth. Behold the holiness of my family, serene and utterly at ease in their corruption, toasting thirty years of love and theft in a restaurant on an island in a city by the sea.

Anton paid for dinner. Outside Malvolio’s Aria said goodbye and he stared at her flatly until she shrugged and climbed into her silver Jaguar and disappeared into the river of red taillights that flowed south down the canyon of Park Avenue. When Aria was gone his parents kissed him and thanked him for a wonderful evening, said goodnight and walked east holding hands. Anton stood on the corner of Park Avenue and 53rd Street, dazed, a little lost. He glanced at his watch, nine thirty but the summer light was endless — it was twilight still, not night, and the city was hazy. He began to walk south, in the opposite direction of home. After a few blocks he took his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed a cell number from memory as he crossed 49th Street.