Emily St. John Mandel - The Singer's Gun

“You wrecked your own life,” she said. “You needed no help from me. And now you want me to pay you twenty thousand dollars because you’ve had to hang out in the Mediterranean for a few extra weeks? Don’t push me any further.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that you’ve already talked me up to seventeen thousand dollars, which is excessive, incidentally, and I’m afraid I’ve reached the edge of my patience. Just go downstairs to the restaurant on Friday night, hand over the package, and you’re done.”

“Eighteen thousand five hundred,” Anton said.

“You’re unbelievable,” Aria said, and hung up. The piazza tilted unsteadily in the half-light; Anton made his way carefully back to the pier and sat down beside David again.

“It’s finally happening,” Anton said. “That transaction I’ve been waiting for.”

“What kind of transaction are we talking about here?”

“I’m not exactly sure, to be honest. It’s my cousin’s transaction. I’m just the guy who hands the other guy the package. I don’t even handle the payment. We’ve never really been business partners,” he said. “She said we were, but I always just did what I was supposed to.”

David nodded. “When’s the transaction supposed to take place?”

“Soon. It was supposed to be weeks ago. I’ve just been stuck here waiting. But you know what’s crazy? I wish I could stay here, actually, when all this is done. There’s nothing for me to go back to in New York. I’m thinking about getting a job in a hotel somewhere during the tourist season, maybe in Napoli, coming back to Sant’Angelo in the evenings after work, reading a book, spending time with my cat if I can get someone to ship him here, walking on the beach, maybe going for a swim. It’s the kind of life I think I’ve always wanted, crazy as it sounds. Just working all day and coming home at night, nothing shady. Seems uncomplicated, doesn’t it?”

“Everything’s more complicated than it looks, but what’s stopping you from doing it?”

“I’m here now,” Anton said, “and no one knows me. I could be anyone. But today or tomorrow or the day after that a nice man in a FedEx uniform will park his truck at the gates of Sant’Angelo and walk down to the hotel with an envelope for me, and shortly afterward a man will show up and I’ll give a package to him, and then that man will know who I am. Do you see? My anonymity will be completely ruined. And say this man has a good memory and decides someday that he needs to tell someone else about me. Now that he’s seen me, now that I’ve handed him an envelope, he’d be able to pick me out of a lineup or recognize me on the street, and voilà! Any chance of a new life vanishes at that instant. I could stay here in peaceful anonymity, but once I give the guy the envelope, I’ll always be looking over my shoulder.”

“What if you paid me to do it?”

“To do what?”

“You give this guy a package,” David said, “and you never see him again.”

“Yes. Right.”

“So why can’t it be me? I’m broke, I’ll do anything. Well, not anything, but I’m a retired coke dealer. Whatever’s in this envelope of yours, how much more illegal can it possibly be? I’m Anton Waker, I have a package for you, here you go, pleasure doing business .”

“You’d do that?”

David grinned. “For the right price,” he said.

The effects of the wine were leaving Anton. He was slightly disappointed to realize that he was no longer quite drunk. “I have to make another phone call,” he said. “Let me think about it. We’ll talk soon?”

“Soon,” David said. He gave Anton a loose salute and lay on his back on the pier to stare up at the sky. Anton went back to the pay phone, searched the scraps of paper in his wallet until he found the number he was looking for.

“Elena,” he said.

At four o’clock in the haze of the third Tuesday in October, Elena stood on the corner of Columbus and West 81st Street waiting for the light to change. In her right hand she held a set of keys that had arrived from Italy by mail a day earlier, and she wore a hat pulled down low over her forehead. Her hair was damp with sweat. She was unaccountably nauseated, but she wasn’t sure if it was the heat or her nerves. What she was thinking of at that moment, before Sophie appeared on the other side of the avenue, was the note from Anton hidden in the bottom of her jewelry box in Brooklyn. She almost wished she had it with her, for reference or for companionship, but the girl approaching Columbus Avenue was unmistakably Sophie. She carried a blue handbag and her hair was pinned up away from her face with dark strands escaping; she was the girl met once in passing at a company Christmas party, the girl whose face was a tiny blob in the string section in full-orchestra photographs of the New York Philharmonic, the girl who’d left her husband alone on Ischia over a month and a half ago.

Sophie and Elena stood for a moment on opposite sides of the avenue with cars passing between them, Elena trying to be invisible with her hat pulled down low and Sophie apparently oblivious, gazing at nothing in particular. The light changed and they came within a few feet of one another on the crosswalk. Elena turned back to watch Sophie from the other side of the street. Sophie walked away slowly, seemingly in no rush. She looked up at the trees that lined the lawn of the Museum of Natural History, she looked at the last of the flowers growing under the branches, she seemed lost in a dream. She disappeared down the steps of the subway station, a long block away. Elena counted to ten and then walked quickly west on 81st Street until she found the address. She stood for a moment on the sidewalk, extending this last moment before she entered the building. Nothing is over yet, she told herself. The cat’s still inside. I can still turn and walk away. Instead she unlocked the inner door of the building and ascended the stairs.

Anton’s apartment smelled faintly of incense. It was a dim book-filled space, with dark wood furniture and soft-looking white carpets, and somewhere a tap was dripping. There were sounds of traffic from the street outside. Elena closed the door behind her and locked it, her heart beating too hard and too quickly. Impossible not to imagine him everywhere.

The cat was emerging from the bedroom in stages, pausing at intervals to stretch one leg at a time; he yawned hugely and padded toward her. One of his eyes was closed and something about the set of his face suggested that it had never opened. She was shaken by his friendliness. Jim dropped to the floor at her feet just as if she weren’t an intruder planning on kidnapping him and sending him to a foreign country. She stroked his milk-white stomach and he twisted on his back with his paws in the air. She stood then, opened the door to the closet where Anton had said the pet carrier box would be, and this was the moment when her nerve failed her all at once; in the space of a few heartbeats she was locking the door of the apartment behind her, she was halfway down the stairs, she was out on the street gasping for breath and walking quickly away from there.

“You look a little feverish,” the photographer said.

“Oh, I’m fine,” Elena said brightly. She had come straight from Anton’s apartment and was fifteen minutes early. She sat down on the sofa in Leigh Anderson’s apartment, and he gave her a glass of water that she drank all at once.

“Would you like some more?”

“No, I’m fine, I’m fine, thank you. I was just walking a little too fast, and the heat. . it’s as if fall isn’t coming this year.”

The photographer was nodding absently. “Brutal,” he said. “Might as well still be August.” He had produced a portfolio from somewhere and was sitting down in the armchair across from her. “So,” he said, “I should warn you, my work has evolved somewhat since I worked with you last. I’d like you to take a look at my current portfolio.” He slid the portfolio across the tabletop, and Elena flipped it open. On the first page two girls lay together in a bathtub, half-submerged; the one on top had pierced nipples and a tongue stud.