Emily St. John Mandel: The Singer's Gun

“But if by done they meant me,” Anton said, “I wouldn’t be sitting here, would I?” He was suddenly very tired. This is my last job, he remembered telling Elena, over a glass of wine in the Russian Café on a snowy night some years earlier, and the memory made him want to laugh or weep. The jobs since that night had been all but unsurvivable.

“The point isn’t that you’re still alive,” Broden said, “although that’s certainly an interesting twist. The point is that when Aria heard those words she thought you were dead, because that was the outcome she was expecting.” Broden was putting the device away. “A detective visited your parents the morning after the call went through. Your father insisted they knew nothing and that they’d heard from neither you nor Aria, but your mother was too distraught to speak. When I went to see them two weeks later, your mother was talking about far-off countries and your father’s hands were still shaking.”

Anton looked away from her and his eyes filled unexpectedly with tears.

“You’ve known her all your life,” Broden said. “She’s family. Even if you don’t know for certain exactly where she is, where do you think she might have gone?”

“I don’t know.”

“How close is Aria to your parents?”

“Close,” he said. “They talk all the time.”

Broden took a cell phone out of her pocket and flipped it open. “I have the number for Waker Architectural Salvage programmed into my phone,” she said. She was looking at the cell-phone screen as she spoke to him, scrolling through the contacts in her address book. “I can’t imagine how happy your parents will be when I tell them you’re alive and well. If I call them now, how long do you think it will be before Aria knows?”

“Please don’t,” he said.

“Why not?”

“I think it’s possible that the only reason I’m still alive,” Anton said, “is because my cousin thinks I’m dead.”

Broden glanced up from her phone. “Yes,” she said dispassionately. “I think that’s entirely likely.”

Elena was coming up from the beach, making her way slowly toward the piazza. Anton saw her approach and all but panicked, tried to think of a way to silently warn her not to come to him, but some distance from the table she seemed to catch sight of Broden’s face and in an instant she had turned away from them. He looked at Broden. She had followed the direction of Anton’s gaze, and now she watched Elena recede for a moment.

“It’s a boy,” he said softly. “We’re going to call him David.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes, both watching Elena. Elena was walking slowly, trying to lose herself amid the tourists. Broden’s voice was quiet when she finally spoke.

“Do you know who Aria’s working with?”

“I never did.”

“These people aren’t delicate,” Broden said. “They don’t like to leave witnesses. You seem willing to risk your own life, but are you willing to risk Elena’s? What about your child’s? Suppose one day a friend of Aria’s comes to pay you a visit, a quiet professional with a silenced firearm in his jacket. I hope Elena and your child aren’t with you in that room.”

The beach was emptying gradually, and he couldn’t see Elena anymore. The sun had set and the tourists were disappearing into the restaurants and hotels. The breeze off the water was cool, and only a few other people were still sitting in the outdoor cafés. There was no one near them.

“Look, you seem to have a life here,” Broden said. She held the phone open in her hand. She put her other hand in her jacket pocket and her fingers brushed the hard edge of a blue plastic barrette. On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, her daughter was walking with her nanny in the park.

Broden was silent for a moment before she spoke again. “For your child’s sake,” she said, “I’m willing to pretend I never saw you. I’m willing to leave this new life of yours intact. If you give me what I want, I won’t tell your parents or Aria that you’re here.”

“You’ll leave us alone.”

“I will,” Broden said. “But only if you tell me where Aria is.”

The sun had dropped below the surface of the water and the sky was darkening, a cool breeze moving over the water. He was aware of every sound around him. The quiet of the waves against the sand, the wood-on-wood of boats moving against each other and against the piers, the faraway voices and laughter of tourists, an inconsolable small child being carried back to a hotel. He wanted to run from the piazza and dive into the water and keep swimming till he drowned or reached the north coast of Africa.

“Do you have an address?” she asked.

“I have a phone number.” Anton had written it down the day he’d arrived on Ischia, and now he found it among the innumerable scraps of paper in his wallet. “That’s a landline into an apartment in Santa Monica.”

Broden took the scrap of paper from his hand, looked at it for a moment and then folded it into her notebook. “Santa Monica? Do you know for certain that she’s there?”

“No, but that’s where she goes when she leaves New York. She’s been renting it for a few years now. I don’t know what she does out there.”

“Thank you,” Broden said. She was standing, zipping up her jacket and putting her notebook away. “I’ll need to be able to contact you if I need any further information.”

“You know where I live,” Anton said.

Broden turned and walked away from him. Anton left money on the table for the Orangina and followed her at some distance, up the hill past the pink hotel to the gates of Sant’Angelo. She got into a taxi. When her car had disappeared around the curve of the island Anton walked back down the hill into the village of Sant’Angelo, under the archway beyond which no cars were allowed. Down the cobblestone road past the hotel where he’d lived all these strange long months, back into the piazza and then out along the narrow beach with the harbor on his left, the breakwaters long shadows in the water on either side.

The lights of Capri were bright in the distance. A child’s plastic bucket lay discarded on the sand. Sant’Angelo seemed deserted now, everyone dining somewhere indoors, the boys from the beach gone home for the evening. It was a clear night and there was movement all around him, seagulls wheeling through the darkening air. He thought, Look at these holy boats in the harbor. Look at the holy darkness of the islet against the first few stars, look at this beautiful island where I will live with my beloved, with our child, with my ghosts and my guilt. Look at this holy woman coming down the holy beach toward me, eight and a half months pregnant with a holy sun hat in her hands.

With profound thanks to my editor, Greg Michalson, for his invaluable editorial guidance; to Caitlin Hamilton Summie, Steven Wallace, Fred Ramey, Libby Jordan, Rachel J.K. Grace, Rich Rennicks, and all of their colleagues at Unbridled Books for their hard work, talent, and support; to my wonderful agent, Emilie Jacobson, and her colleagues at Curtis Brown; to Kim McArthur, Devon Pool, and their colleagues at McArthur & Company; to Mandy Keifetz and Douglas Anthony Cooper for graciously reading and commenting on early drafts of the novel; to Louisa Proske for her assistance with German translations; and to Kevin Mandel.

Note: the line “We are not alone, this side of death”, quoted in chapter 22, is from an unfinished novel by Douglas Anthony Cooper and appears by generous permission of the author.