Emily St. John Mandel - The Singer's Gun

“It’s all right.”

“A lot of it was just the pills, you know. The side effects.”

“I know.”

“You don’t have to go so far away,” he said.

“I can’t stay in the United States anymore.”

“It’s a big place, Ellie.”

“It’s not that. I’m not trying to get away from you. The thing is, look, I don’t have time to get into it, there’s a flight I want to catch, but the thing is, I’m not an American. My American passport’s a fake. I shouldn’t have lied to you. Caleb, listen, I have to go.”

“What? What do you mean your passport’s a—”

“Goodbye, Caleb.”

“Ellie, wait,” he said, but he didn’t make a move to follow her when she turned away. In the cab to the airport she turned to look out the back window at the last possible minute, just in time to see the Manhattan skyline disappear.

At JFK she bought a one-way ticket to Rome and gave the cat over to a red-suited airline representative who promised not to lose him. She used her Canadian passport, half-expecting to be arrested on the spot, and was mildly surprised when she met no resistance. Her suitcase was small, so she carried it with her through security and was grateful that she had something to hold on to as she paced the grayish corridors of the terminal. There was a considerable amount of time to kill before the next flight to Italy.

Elena ate a grease-and-salt meal at a bar beyond the security gates, ordered a glass of cheap wine that she didn’t touch, and sat for a while in the airport restaurant thinking about calling home to talk to her family; calling Caleb and apologizing, saying she’d made a terrible mistake, asking him to come get her; calling Anton to tell him that the cat was arriving in Rome tomorrow morning; calling Anton to tell him that in twenty-four hours she would be on Ischia; calling Broden to announce that she would give her Anton Waker if only she could stay forever in New York. Not all of these options canceled each other out, and contemplating all the possible configurations was exhausting.

She spent some time standing at a wall of glass, watching airplanes rise and descend in the gathering twilight. There was still something breathtaking about the ascent.

Elena, buying a Social Security card at the Russian Café:

She arrives a half-hour early and chooses a table by the window, facing out. The Russian Café on 1st Street is a few feet below street level and when Elena sits down she can only see legs passing above the bank of snow, flickering shadows of high boots and dark overcoats. It is late afternoon and the snow is unceasing.

The café is warm, but Elena is shivering. She takes off her coat but keeps her hat and scarf on, she orders a mug of tea and a muffin — four dollars, which is her entire budget for the day because she’s been saving all her money for the transaction that’s about to occur. The place is nearly empty. An older man in a tweed jacket sits alone at a table on the other side of the door, reading a newspaper and sipping a cappuccino. A couple sits some distance away, laughing at a private joke. They are young, college students perhaps, and the woman’s face is flushed in the warmth of the room. Elena holds the tea near her face and closes her eyes for a moment, waiting for the heavy footsteps, the door flung open and the Homeland Security badge flashed in her face and the shouting, the handcuffs, the guns; but when she opens her eyes the room is still tranquil, candlelight on red wallpaper and the shadows of pedestrians still flickering across the top of the window before her and the snow falling outside, the waitress behind the counter still chatting in Russian on her cell phone, the man in the tweed jacket still turning the pages of the newspaper. Of course. Why would her arrest be so dramatic? She isn’t armed or dangerous. She’s a twenty-two-year-old who goes without dinner too frequently and gets dizzy if she stands up too fast. No need for storm troopers, for the waving of guns. In a moment the man in tweed will take one last sip of his cappuccino, fold his newspaper unhurriedly and stand up from the table, buttoning his jacket as he stands. He will move toward her slowly, he will reach into an inside pocket and remove a police badge and hold it up with a wink as he removes the handcuffs from his belt, speaking confidentially in a friendly voice, You have the right to remain silent, and by morning she will be on a northbound plane with an X stamped on her passport. She sips the tea to calm herself and tries to eat the muffin. An hour earlier she had been desperately, light-headedly, agonizingly hungry, but now she can taste nothing and it’s difficult to swallow. The man in the tweed jacket turns a page of his newspaper. Elena clenches her hands around the mug of tea, trying to look everywhere at once and bracing herself for the sting; the men exploding through the door with guns drawn or the couple across the room standing up and pulling badges from their hipster jean pockets. Every catastrophe has a last moment just before it; as late as eight forty-four A.M. on the morning of September 11, 2001, it was still only a perfect bright day in New York. But the couple remains in conversation, the man in the tweed jacket sips his cappuccino and reads, the waitress stands by the glass door looking up the steps to the sidewalk and street.

“Still snowing,” the waitress says. She’s a young woman with straight blond hair and brown eyes, a small scar on her forehead, and she smiles when Elena looks up. “It will be deep tonight, I think.”

The door opens a moment later and the man is at her table almost instantly, sliding into the chair across from her and unbuttoning his overcoat, his face red with cold.

“Gabriel.” He extends a cold hand. “You must be Elena.”

She nods mutely.

“It’s freezing,” he says. “Jesus.” He waves at someone behind her, presumably the waitress, removes a tissue from his coat pocket and blows his nose. “Excuse me,” he says to Elena, and the waitress has appeared with a latte. She sets it down in front of him and Gabriel kisses her cheek. “Illy,” he says, “you’re a saint. Thank you.” The waitress smiles and steps back, watching them. Gabriel leans forward across the table and beckons for Elena to lean forward too. His breath is hot against her ear. “I apologize for this,” he murmurs, so softly that she has to strain to hear him, “but I need you to go to the back with Ilieva, and do what she says. It’s a security precaution that my cousin insists on. Please don’t take it personally.”

“Here,” Ilieva says, “come with me, please.” Elena stands and follows her past the brightly lit pastry case, down the red corridor past the bathroom, until Ilieva opens a door marked Employees Only and Elena follows her into the storeroom. It is a cramped space filled with boxes and milk crates. An enormous glass-fronted fridge hums in a corner, filled with white cake boxes and ice-cream tubs. Ilieva closes and locks the door behind them.

“Please take off your clothes,” she says.

“What?”

“For the wires,” Ilieva says. “It is to check for the wires.”

“The wires?”

“Wiretapping. The recordings. I’m sorry, my English. .”

“Oh. I understand.” She begins to take off her clothes. It’s warm in the storeroom, but she can’t stop shivering.

“Your bra also,” Ilieva says. She picks up each article of clothing as Elena removes it, patting it down before she returns it to Elena, presumably feeling for recording devices. When Elena is fully dressed again Ilieva makes an unembarrassed search of Elena’s coat pockets. She removes and examines the wad of bills, replaces them and continues searching. “No handbag?”