Emily St. John Mandel - The Singer's Gun

“Oh, a few hours,” Caleb says. “Missing you rather urgently, I might add. Are you naked yet?”

Later on in bed she opens her eyes to watch the movements of his shoulders above her, the side of his face, his neck. His eyes are clenched shut. She watches him intently. Trying to concentrate on Caleb only, trying not to pretend that Caleb is anyone else.

It took nearly an hour to clear Customs in Rome. The cat’s health records and proof of rabies vaccination were examined at great length, it seemed to her, by customs officials while the cat glared at everyone through the bars of the carrying case. When she was finally allowed to leave the airport Elena took a silver shuttle train to the central station, Termini, and found that there was some time to kill before the next train to Naples.

There were men posted in Termini, a few women too, police officers with dark uniforms and sharp white leather belts. She tried to walk casually and to carry the cat on the side facing away from the police officers, deeply afraid and simultaneously cursing herself for paranoia. It was morning in Italy, three A.M. in New York. She had another thirteen hours before she failed to show up for her appointment with Broden, and she imagined that still more time would pass after that missed appointment before the machine of inquiry would begin to roll into motion, before agents arrived at her apartment, before her passport was tagged — perhaps hours, perhaps a day — but she was traveling on the Canadian passport, not the American; would that make a difference? She wasn’t sure. Nothing made sense anymore. She was exhausted but wired, scattered, alive, her thoughts moving in circles like a flock of dark birds.

Elena carried the cat and the suitcase onto the first train to Napoli, and watched the sun rise over the Bay of Naples from the train. In a small lurching bathroom onboard the train she let the cat out of the carrier, opened the can of tuna she’d brought from Brooklyn and watched while the cat ate frantically and purred. Some hours later she found herself standing in front of the pink hotel on the island of Ischia, unsure what to do next. The restaurant seemed open, a waiter moving about setting the tables, but all at once she needed more time. She didn’t know what to say to Anton; they had left it that she would call him once she had the cat.

Elena turned away from the hotel and continued on down the cobbled street, which curved and opened into a large piazza. There were three cafés here, their outdoor areas distinguished by different styles of umbrellas, and a harbor full of painted boats. She stood for a while in the sunlight by the water’s edge, looking at the boats — they moved against each other in the harbor ripples, soft sounds of wood on wood — and at the far side of the harbor a sheer face of rock rose up to become a tree-crested hill, connected to Sant’Angelo by only the narrowest strip of beach. The weight of the cat was suddenly too much; she turned back to the piazza and made her way to the closest café area, to a table shaded by an immense white umbrella. Her heart was pounding and her head was light, the sleeplessness of the previous night falling down around her. She was dizzy. The waiter approached and said something. She stared at him blankly and smiled, a little panicked. He repeated himself in what sounded like halting German.

“He’s asking if you’d like some water and a menu,” a woman at the next table said conspiratorially.

“Oh,” Elena said. “Thank you. Um, si. Per favore. And also a café latte. Please.”

Two men were sitting together a few tables away. They had been talking intently over coffee but at the sound of her voice one of them looked over his shoulder, did a double-take, glanced at the cat, stood up slowly and came to sit at her table. His hair was longer than she remembered, and he looked like he’d been spending some time in the sun.

“Elena,” he said.

Later Anton held her in the room as she lapsed into sleep, looking up at the blue of the ceiling. The cat climbed on top of him and fell asleep on his stomach.

Later still Anton went down to the pay phone in the piazza, found his phone card and dialed a number from memory.

“I wish you’d just let me call you from my cell phone,” he said when Aria answered. “I think it’d be cheaper.”

“We’ve talked about this,” Aria said. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“I have the package. It came yesterday.”

“Excellent. You haven’t opened it?”

“No.”

“Good. Don’t. You’ll think I’m paranoid, but I’m going to call you back in three minutes from the pay phone on my corner. Tell me the number of the pay phone on Ischia.”

“You’re not serious,” he said, but she apparently was. He stood by the phone for a few minutes until it rang.

“Your contact will be in the restaurant at ten P.M. tonight,” she said. There was static on the line.

“I still want twenty thousand dollars,” he said.

“I’m paying you eighteen. The money should be in your checking account by now.”

“Aria,” he said, “what do these people do?”

“You want back in the business now?”

“I need to know,” he said. “You said in the restaurant that night that they’re import-exporters, but what do they ship?”

“What difference does it make?”

“I was lying awake thinking last night,” said Anton. “It’s too quiet here, and I’ve been by myself. I can’t sleep sometimes. If they’re going to blow up the subway system, Aria, I’ll tell Sophie about Harvard myself.”

“Really,” she said. “If I told you they were smuggling bomb materials, you’d tell Sophie about Harvard?”

“I would tell everyone about everything,” he said.

Aria was quiet for a moment.

“If you don’t want to be my business partner anymore,” she said, “the least you could do is stay out of my way.”

“Explosives are a step too far for me, Aria. I take the subway to work.”

The silence was so long this time that he thought he might have lost her. After a moment he said her name.

“I’m still here,” she said.

“Then tell me what they’re shipping.”

“I suppose it can’t do too much harm to tell you, at this point. You know how hard it is to immigrate to the United States,” she said.

“Well, yeah, that was the foundation of our business plan. What does that have to do with. .?”

“They help people enter the country. That’s all.”

“I’m afraid I don’t quite—”

“Fine. What they do, Anton, is they help lovely young ladies from ex-Soviet republics start new lives in the United States. Is that clear enough for you?”

“Trafficking,” he said. “Aria, please tell me you’re joking.”

“We’ve always helped immigrants once they arrived in the country,” Aria said. “Is it such a stretch to help them arrive in the first place?”

“How did you get involved with these people?”

“The importers? They’re the people who brought in Natalka,” she said.

“Who?” The name caught briefly on some outcropping of memory, but tore off and left only hanging shreds. Anton knew a Natalka. He had met a Natalka. An impression of red lipstick, of cigarette smoke. A memory, or was it just that he’d met so many Russian girls who wore bright lipstick and smoked cigarettes that he heard a Russian-sounding name and his memory offered up a stock photograph? He couldn’t quite see her face.

“Natalka,” Aria said. “You sold her a passport.”

And she snaps into focus. Natalka’s in her twenties, but her hair is white. Not platinum blonde white, like the Norwegian girl whom he’d dated briefly in high school. Natalka’s hair is white-silver, white-decades-early, cut in a slightly uneven bob. In a recess of memory she sits across from him at a table in the Russian Café, raises a cigarette to her lips and smiles. She inhales with the languid desperation of a girl who will very soon be out of cigarettes and is trying to make the current one last as long as possible. Ilieva comes to the table, and when she asks to take their order Natalka smiles at Ilieva’s accent and speaks to her in Russian. Ilieva comes alive at the sound of her own language; they talk for a moment and then Ilieva brings a small black coffee, into which Natalka pours so much sugar that Anton half-expects the coffee to congeal into sludge. He realizes that she’s trying to make her coffee as meal-like as possible, and his heart drops a little. He buys her a sandwich and watches her eat.