The Singer's Gun (12 page)

Outside the city had fallen into a subtropical nightmare. It was even hotter on Lexington Avenue than it had been on the rooftop, and he moved like a sleepwalker through the heat-locked air. It was impossible to move quickly; it took Anton a half-hour to get to the open-till-midnight GAP in Times Square, another few minutes under the fluorescent lights with bored night-shift sales associates and dazed tourists before he left with a new clean shirt in a bag. Outside on the sidewalk he took his old shirt off in front of gawping tourists and buttoned up the new one, overexposed in the lights of Times Square. It was after eleven
P.M
. but he could see his shadow on the sidewalk.

“In
dec
ent,” a passing woman said to him, indignant under a cloud of bleached hair.

“You don’t know the half of it,” he said, struggling to remove the price tag from the new shirt. He threw the old shirt in a trash can before he buttoned up the new one and stepped out into the street to hail a cab, but there were no empty taxis traveling northward that night, and the new shirt was soaked to his back almost instantly. After a few minutes of waving at full taxis he gave up and descended into the 110-degree hell of the subway system, where he waited a long time for a train to arrive.

When he got home it was well past midnight. All of the lights were on in the apartment, and the door to Sophie’s study was closed. She was working. He stood for a moment with his ear to the door. She didn’t come out to greet him, and he fell asleep an hour later to the sounds of Bach’s First Cello Suite.

In the morning Anton woke and saw blood on the pillow, and remembered the sting on the side of his face as he swung the keyboard into the window. In the bathroom mirror he saw the cut, very small and swollen pink. He removed a tiny piece of glass. It came out clear and shining, a translucent bloody absence between the prongs of the tweezers. He held it up to the light for a moment and then flushed it down the toilet, and only then did he notice Sophie in the bathroom doorway.

“What happened to your face?”

“I cut myself shaving.”

“You were shaving with glass?”

“I—”

But she’d stepped away from the door, she was making coffee in the kitchen, and when he tried to bring it up later her mouth tensed and she shook her head and turned away from him. This was the morning of August 4th. “That wasn’t
glass
,” he told her twice. “That isn’t what you saw.” But she didn’t want to talk about it, that day or on any of the days that followed. The wedding was a silently approaching thing, like a hurricane spiraling closer over the surface of a weather map.

“Are you nervous about getting married?” Elena asked softly. It was almost six o’clock and time had been passing very quickly. In a moment she would stand up and put her clothes back on. In a week he would leave her and fly to Italy on his honeymoon.

“Yes,” Anton said.

He tried to imagine coming home to Elena instead of Sophie, tried to imagine light hair instead of dark on the pillow beside him in the mornings, his apartment with the study door flung open and no cello inside, the room converted into a second bedroom, an office, another place for reading books. Sophie living somewhere else, Sophie losing significance with time and fading eventually into the ranks of former girlfriends. He looked at Elena, but she was looking at the ceiling. She reached absently for her handbag, as she always did when they were finished, fumbled around for a moment and came out empty-handed, then reached in again and extracted a tube of Chapstick. She was biting her lower lip.

“Does your fiancée get along with your family?”

But what would life be, with the two of us alone for longer than an hour? Do we depend on the ghosts of the others, Caleb and Sophie, is it the thrill of stealing you from him that makes me want to take you on the floor of the office every afternoon at five ten? Elena was tense and still beside him. He was never sure what made her so ill at ease at these moments, but he assumed it was guilt. A few miles to the north in a basement laboratory, her boyfriend mapped the genome of the
Lotus japonicus.

“Why are you always so curious about my family?”

“I don’t know. I just am. I feel like I don’t know you that well.”

“Why don’t you tell me about your family, for a change?”

“There’s not much to tell. My dad’s a social worker. My mother’s a nurse at the hospital.”

“Were you born in the north?”

“I was born in Toronto,” she said. “We went to the north when I was three.”

“Why?”

“There was a shortage of nurses and social workers up there. They wanted to be helpful. But I’ve been plotting my escape from the north for as long as I can remember. Let’s not talk about the north.”

“Okay. Do you have siblings?”

“I have a brother and a younger sister. We used to be close, but she lives at home with her baby and we have absolutely nothing in common anymore. Our brother’s a few years older. He works in a diamond mine in the Northwest Territories.” She was quiet for a while, looking away. “Weren’t you nervous? Selling Social Security cards like that?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I don’t know, I was just thinking about it. I think I’d be afraid of getting caught.”

“I was afraid in the beginning,” Anton said.

“Do you remember the very first one ever?”

“Of course I do,” Anton said.

7.

The first one ever was a red-haired girl with still gray eyes at an Irish bar near Grand Central, four weeks out of Ireland when Aria approached her. She was tired and pale, not sleeping well in a crowded apartment share in the Bronx. She wanted to be a pilot. She moved through the evenings efficiently, was as charming as possible and played up the accent a little and wore a tight shirt in order to obtain maximum tips, read aviation magazines at the library, took long walks through the city and wrote postcards full of half-truths to her friends in Belfast on her days off.

“It’s difficult to imagine going anywhere,” she said. “I can’t go home, or they won’t let me back into the country. I want to stay here, but I already miss them.”

“Miss who?” The fake Social Security card was in Anton’s wallet. His hands were steady but his legs were shaking, which always happened when he was desperately nervous.

“Everyone,” she said. “Even the people I didn’t talk to much, I miss them. My downstairs neighbor Blythe.” She took a slow sip of coffee. Anton glanced discreetly at his watch. He had envisioned this as a fast shadowy transaction, take the money and run, but he hadn’t factored her loneliness into the equation. They’d been in the coffee shop for nearly an hour and she seemed to be in no rush.

“Your downstairs neighbor.”

“Blythe. She must’ve been in her fifties. Lived alone, dunno if she was ever married or had kids. I never heard anyone come by to see her. She never went out except to go to work, this insurance office down the street. She listened to talk radio all day on the weekends, so there was always voices coming from her place, and I’d hear them all day long. When I first moved into the place it drove me crazy, I mean, this woman’s radio was never off, but then after a while I didn’t mind anymore. It was nice, I mean, I lived alone too, and always hearing someone talking, it makes you less alone.” She blinked and sipped at her coffee again. “What about you? Were you born here?” He realized that she must have very few friends in this city.

“Albany,” he lied. His hands were sweating. The lunch-hour crowd was thinning out. He wished she’d stop talking and ask for the card. He was wearing reflective dark glasses that made her look like a ghost across the banquette.

“Is Gabriel your real name, then?”

“Of course,” Anton said. He had thought up the alias with great difficulty.

“How old
are
you, anyway?”

“Twenty.”

“Twenty,” she repeated.
“Twenty.”

“Yeah. Um, think of flight school.” He could see the doubt in her eyes. He tried to look as serious as possible, in an effort to appear somewhat older than eighteen. “I mean seriously, whatever my name is or how old I actually am, think how much easier it will be with a Social Security number.”

“I could get in without one,” she said. “I did the research.”

“Still,” he said, “I can’t help but think it might be easier if the question didn’t come up, don’t you?”

She looked at him flatly for a moment and then sighed. “Christ,” she said. “Okay. How do we do this?”

He leaned toward her over the table; she leaned close, and he was pleasantly surprised to discover that her breath smelled of licorice. “Give me the envelope,” he said very softly. “There’s only one bathroom here, and I’m going to go in there and count the money while you go up to the counter to pay for your coffee, and then I’m going to leave. If the count was correct, then when you go in there after me your card will be taped to the back of the toilet tank.”

“Like in that
Godfather
movie with the gun,” she said. “I like that.”

In the bathroom he counted the money and put it in his wallet. From his wallet he took out the Social Security card, double-checked the name on it and put it in the envelope. There was condensation on the toilet tank, a cold porcelain sweat. He tried four times, but the tape he’d brought with him wouldn’t stick; the envelope kept falling, the tape kept coming away wet and glueless. He was at a loss for a moment until he remembered the gum. He found the last stick in his pocket and chewed rapidly, contemplating the toilet, then stuck the gum to the back of the tank, stuck the envelope to the gum, and opened the bathroom door half-expecting a SWAT team. The girl was paying at the counter. He walked out behind her back and away down the street in the opposite direction of home, his heart pounding. It was a mile before he doubled back toward the Williamsburg Bridge and his parents’ store. He took a circuitous route home amid the warehouses.

“It’s messy,” Aria said. “I don’t like it.” They were sitting together on the loading dock at the end of the day. The metal loading dock was still warm from the sunlight but a cool breeze was blowing in off the river.

“What’s messy about it?” Anton was feeling a little defensive about the
Godfather
technique.

“Anyone could walk into the bathroom and grab the card before she does. Just come up with a better idea.”

“What if I can’t?”

“You got straight A’s in high school,” she said, and muttered something in Spanish under her breath.

The solution came to him when he was out with Aria and his parents for someone’s birthday, his mother’s perhaps, at a restaurant in Chelsea. Anton observed the mechanism of paying: the bill arrives, tucked discreetly into the check folder. Cash is placed in the folder, and even from the next table those bills could be ones, tens, twenties, fifties, hundreds—God bless America and her monochromatic green bills!—and the check folder is taken away and returned with change. If the count is correct, there must be a signal: perhaps the waitress, your co-conspirator, brings a glass of red wine to the table and that’s how you know to discreetly hand off the envelope with the Social Security card. Later, as the business expanded, perhaps also a passport. Using a waitress made the moment of transaction difficult to observe, and if the customer were stopped later by the police, the quality of the product was high enough that unless the transaction itself had been witnessed, the most a police officer would reasonably be able to accuse them of would be carrying their Social Security card and passport around with them, which was not recommended but not illegal. “We’ll stop doing business in this country,” Aria said, “when it’s no longer legal to carry our product.”

“It’s never legal to carry our product,” Anton pointed out. “And what other country would we do business in?”

He flew to Italy the morning after his wedding.

Sophie posed for pictures in front of the Colosseum, next to a gladiator with a digital wristwatch. She stood in front of the Trevi fountain while he took picture after picture after picture of her, trying to use up the whole roll.

“Excuse me,” she said to a passing tourist, “would you mind taking a shot of the two of us?” Anton was putting the lens cap on the camera as she spoke, and neither Sophie nor the photographer noticed it as the shot was taken. He wanted no photographic evidence that he had ever been in this country.

On the island of Capri she noticed the lens cap.

No, he said, of course it hadn’t been on the whole trip. Yes, he was positive. No, seriously, he said, he’d just put it back on after the last set of pictures. It’s all right, she needn’t be sorry for doubting him. No, hey, it was a fair question. He loved her too. No, he really did. Shh, shh, don’t cry. The Norwegian tourist who’d been taking their picture gave the camera back in the emotion of the moment, inexplicably apologetic, and the picture wasn’t taken after all.

On Capri Sophie wanted to see the Blue Grotto. It cost thirty-five euros to board a vessel that carried them out along the formidable shoreline. Anton held Sophie’s hand and looked up at the fishermen’s saints, small figurines wedged into dark rocks above them at impossible heights. Look at this holy island, these saints bestowing blessings from high up on the rocks. Patron saints of luck and strong netting, of tides and fish. Sophie held his hand and looked down at the water.

When they reached the grotto two other boatloads of tourists were already there, the boats idling in the choppy waters a few yards from the shore, and it seemed that it was another twenty-five euros to climb out into a little rowboat that transported two tourists at a time into a small space between the rocks and the sea. The men rowing the tourists into the underworld were friendly and animated, but the whole operation reminded Anton of a conveyer belt—extract money from tourist, insert tourist into cave, return tourist to boat—and he was put off by the unexpectedness of the extra fee. But Sophie wanted to do it; she paid the extra money and waited her turn patiently on the lower deck while Anton watched the progression of tourists in and out of the cave. Most of the tourists who came back were smiling but to his eyes they all looked faintly disappointed, like the crowds he’d seen trickling out of the Sistine Chapel a few days before. “I’ve heard about the Blue Grotto all my life,” he heard one of them say to another, but he didn’t hear the reply. When Anton looked down at the lower deck again Sophie had vanished and there was a flash of near panic when he thought she might have somehow slipped overboard, but then he looked over in time to see her duck her head as the rowboat carried her under the rocks. It seemed she was gone for a very long time.

Anton held on to the railing while he waited for her, the boat tossing in the wakes of the other vessels around them. He closed his eyes and felt in that moment that he could disappear here in this brilliant light so far from Brooklyn, his parents and Aria four thousand miles away.

“Wake up, sleepy. Are you really that bored?” Sophie had appeared beside him.

“No, just enjoying the sun. How was it?” She looked different from most of the others, more alive; he realized that she wasn’t disappointed.

“You should’ve gone,” she said. “It was beautiful and blue.”

“Beautiful and blue,” he repeated. He kissed her and tried not to think about Ischia.

In the morning they woke early in their hotel room on Capri. Anton opened the curtains and sunlight glanced over the tiled floor. Sophie hadn’t slept well. She was tired and moody and she didn’t want to talk to him. They ate breakfast in incompatible silence and took a taxi to the ferry. Back in Salerno there were a few dead hours. They wandered the streets amid groups of tourists, walked in and out of stores, sat for a while in a café where the waiters greeted them in English. Sophie bought an unattractive skirt. Anton lied and told her he liked it, but she accused him of insincerity and then he had to lie about lying. The train was an hour late leaving Salerno. They sat in a compartment across from a middle-aged woman who spoke even less English than Anton spoke Italian, which he wouldn’t have thought possible. When the train was forty-five minutes late the woman tapped her watch and made an exasperated face.
“Italia,”
she said. She shook her head and rolled her eyes. Anton nodded. Sophie was reading a biography of Jim Morrison, frowning slightly, ignoring them both.

They arrived after dark in the city of Naples.

A memory: nine years old on a cold morning in Brooklyn, waiting for the school bus with his mother in the rain. Usually Anton waited with Gary, but Gary was home sick that day and his mother didn’t like him waiting alone. The neighborhood was rougher back then. She stood over him with an enormous purple umbrella that a customer had left behind in the store.

“Why would anyone want to be a school bus driver?” Anton asked. His parents encouraged the assumption that he might grow up to be anything, and at nine things were possible that became less possible later on. It was still plausible that he might grow up to be an astronaut, for example, or the king of an as-yet-undiscovered country.

“You just make decisions as you go along, my magnificent child,” his mother said. “A or B, two options present themselves, and you choose the one that seems best at the time.”

Years later on an island in the Bay of Naples he walked a discreet distance away from the outdoor café where his new wife sat drinking coffee, waved reassuringly at her, and called Aria on his cell phone.

“I’m here,” he said. “I’m on Ischia.”

“I’ll call you back. Are you calling from your cell phone?”

“There’s no phone in my hotel room. It’s a very small hotel.”

“Well, then find a pay phone and call me back at home,” she said. “You know I don’t discuss business on cell phones. I’m at the Santa Monica apartment.”

“I don’t have the number there,” he said. She gave it to him and hung up.

He went back to the newsstand and bought a phone card. There was a pay phone on the edge of the piazza, by a low stone wall.

“Anton,” Aria said, “there’s been a slight delay.”

“How slight?”

“Three weeks.”

“Are you out of your mind? You want me to stay on this island for three weeks?” Sophie was watching him, holding a glass of coffee. She waved when he looked at her. He forced his face into a weak facsimile of a smile, raised his hand and turned his back on her.

“Four at the most,” she said. “I’m sorry, Anton. It’s out of my hands.”

“
Four?
Aria, I’m sorry, listen, I can’t . . . Aria, I can’t do this. We go back to Rome tomorrow. We fly home Thursday night.”

“Well, you don’t
have
to do it,” Aria said. “It’s of course your decision.”

“But if I don’t, you’ll tell Sophie . . . you’ll tell Sophie . . .” He was beside himself. He looked over his shoulder again, watching Sophie pretending not to be watching him. She sipped her coffee, gazed out at the harbor, glanced fleetingly at him where he stood with the red pay-phone receiver against his face. Aria was silent.

“Aria,” he said, “we’re family. My parents took you in.”

“And then we entered into business together,” Aria said, “and stayed in business, until you abandoned me, and now I’m asking you to do this one last thing.”

“I don’t want to do this. I’m sick of—”

“I know you don’t want to do this,” Aria said. “I’m perfectly aware of that. It’s a question of what you want to do least: perform this one last transaction, or explain to Sophie that you’re a fraud. Which is it going to be?”