The Singer's Gun (8 page)

“Help me with the back,” Aria said, and held out the scissors.

Anton closed the door behind him and stood perfectly still. She was destroying something beautiful, and he felt that he should say something but he didn’t.

“I’m serious, Anton. Take the scissors.”

He took the scissors from her outstretched hand and knelt on the floor behind her. She had attacked her hair unevenly, from a number of angles, but at the back a section still hung straight and shining almost to the floor. He lifted the sheen and carefully cut it away in pieces, until her neck was visible and hot to the touch when his hand brushed accidentally against her skin. He swallowed hard.

“You’re ogling my neck,” she said pleasantly. “Pervert.”

“I’m sorry.” His voice was hoarse. He tried to even out her hair as best he could, but it still looked ragged when he was done with it and he was afraid to make it any shorter. He set the scissors down on the floor and they sat in silence for a moment, almost not breathing, so close that her nightgown touched his legs. Until he whispered, strained, “I’m not sure what you want me to do.”

“Nothing,” she said, the spell broken. She smiled over her shoulder, and then stood up and brushed pieces of hair from her nightgown. “I just wanted shorter hair. Goodnight.”

Anton closed the door behind him and then spent a fevered hour in his bed entertaining an alternative version of events in which she turned to him and pulled her nightgown off over her head.

“What is there to think about?” Aria asked. “We have both supply and demand.”

Anton was sitting on the loading dock of his parents’ store looking out at the river, eighteen years old. Aria stood nearby smoking a cigarette and explaining a business proposition. He had graduated high school the previous spring and his grades were superb but he’d applied to no colleges, and now summer was over and he was tired and trapped. He’d stopped smoking, which seemed like his only accomplishment in a while. He had grandiose ideas with no clear structure to them. He had no long-term plans but he found himself anxious for the future to start, whatever the future might entail. Aria had graduated a year earlier and it seemed implicitly understood that she wasn’t going to college either, although she spent most of her time rereading Machiavelli and it was obvious to Anton that she was smarter than him. What he wanted was to be an executive of some kind, to work in an office, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to go to school to achieve this. He had an idea that there had to be some easier, less expensive way, a different approach that might somehow be faster. He’d spent a lot of time trying to explain this suspicion to Gary, who was going to Brooklyn College next month and didn’t really understand what he was talking about.

Aria did understand. A part of her was always scheming.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It sounds insanely dangerous.”

“As opposed to what, exactly? Dealing in stolen antiques?” A movement of her hand expressed her contempt of the warehouse behind them. Anton sighed. He wasn’t really sure about anything these days, especially how he felt about his parents’ business. His parents had recently started a new side business that he wasn’t supposed to know about. There was a new climate-controlled room behind a hidden door in the back of the warehouse basement where the fruits of far more serious salvage operations were sold: strange objects from protected archaeological heritage sites, paintings with missing paper trails, statues that had disappeared years earlier from looted museums in war zones.

“You grew up in the business,” she said. “You’d be fine.”

“You mean I have dishonesty in my blood? Thanks, Ari.”

“What, you think you don’t?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Does it have to be hereditary? I think I want something different.”

“You poor sweet incorruptible soul. How are you going to earn the money for college?”

“I’m not sure I’m going, actually.”

“Well,” she said, “why don’t you just make some money, then, and decide whether you’re spending it all on tuition once you have it?”

Anton had no immediate response. He lay on his back to look up at the underside of the Williamsburg Bridge, dark steel bisecting the left side of the sky. Beyond the bridge clouds floated inscrutably over blue. Aria had become harder and harder to talk to lately, not that talking to her had ever been particularly easy. “Where did you get this idea, anyway?”

“From Jesús,” she said.

“The Jesús who used to work for my parents?”

“Yeah, him. I knew him my whole life. Anyway, he comes up to me right before he moves back to Mexico, asks if I know anyone who might want to buy his Social Security number from him. Says he bought it himself fifteen years ago and figures he doesn’t really need it anymore, and he thought someone else could use it. That’s where I got the idea. Think about it, Anton: there must be a million immigrants in this city whose chances of becoming legal are slim to none. Green cards are difficult. There are fees involved, you need a lawyer to make it all happen, the waiting list can be twenty years long depending on which country you’re from, and how are you going to survive in the meantime? Even marrying an American offers no guarantee—if you entered the country illegally, they can still break up your family and deport you. So they buy a Social Security card, they can then get a better job because they’re plausibly legal, we make a profit, and everybody wins.”

“And everybody wins!” Anton said. “I never knew you were such a philanthropist. Where do we get the numbers?”

“We make them up. I’ve done some research. The first three numbers correspond to the state in which the card was issued, and for New York State, that’s any number between 050 and 134. It’s a little more complicated, but the rest is more or less random.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Let me think about it.”

The business was a success from the first month and Anton loved his job for years. There was no career he could possibly have been better suited to, he thought at first, than the sale of fraudulent Social Security cards to illegal aliens in the city of New York. They were interesting. They came from everywhere. They were polite, as people on the margins of the world often are, and grateful for his services. The transactions were never boring, because every transaction carried the possibility of prison time, and they were never impersonal, because he was selling each and every one of his customers a future. He thought of himself as the last step before their new jobs, the last step before an office where a manager would glance at the Social Security card—the forgery flawless; Aria bought an expensive printer and acquired a credible facsimile of the official card paper from somewhere—before the employment forms were pushed across the desk.

Within a year they had expanded into the sale of American passports. Aria would tell him nothing about this side of the business. Anton understood that the passports were manufactured elsewhere, but he didn’t know where or by whom. Aria told him it was none of his concern and they had a series of unpleasant fights about it. The thought of unknown people being involved with their business made him profoundly uneasy.

“The less you know, the less risk there is for you,” Aria said reasonably. “The only people you’ll ever meet are our clients.”

Of all the people Anton met, all the Hungarian strippers and Chinese factory workers and Jamaican nannies, there was only one who ever scared him: Federico, a Bolivian architect with a high-pitched laugh who rambled for an hour about his tormented and visa-dependent love life (“But turns out she’s on a six-month visa, so back to Brazil at the end of June, bye-bye, and no more girlfriend! Just like that!”), then beckoned Anton close across the table and joked that he might just shoot him and run off without paying, ha ha! But this was Anton’s last week in the business, and the system had been perfected years ago: Anton ordered a ginger ale, which was code for catastrophe. The waitress, Ilieva, nodded and moved quickly behind the counter to make a quiet phone call. Anton listened to Federico talk about his girlfriend and wondered if Aria was back from Los Angeles yet. She’d been renting an apartment in Santa Monica under an assumed name and going out there every three or four weeks for reasons that seemed vaguely business-related, although she wouldn’t discuss her activities in any great detail.

“So when do I get the documents?” Federico asked, but Aria had already pulled up outside. She tapped her horn three times lightly as Anton stood up from the table.

“This is a sting,” Anton said softly. “Leave now and you won’t be deported.”

“What the . . .?”

“Seriously, take off. You’ll be arrested in three minutes if you don’t.”

Federico went pale and left quickly. Anton gave a hundred dollars to Ilieva and got in Aria’s car and she berated him all the way back over the Williamsburg Bridge while he fiddled with the radio and the heat knobs. It was snowing. She was living near the store in those days, dressing the same way every other girl in the neighborhood dressed in the first few years of the twenty-first century: shapeless dresses made out of t-shirt material in eye-popping colors, low-slung leather boots and an asymmetrical haircut. He understood this to be a uniform; none of her income came from legal sources, and she didn’t especially want to draw attention to herself.

“Anton, answer me. Seriously, what happened? Why did Ilieva call?”

“I told you, he made a joke about shooting me. I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not.”

“Christ,” she said. “This was one of yours, wasn’t it? I didn’t screen this guy. So tell me, was there any screening involved whatsoever? You didn’t ask him anything before you met with him, did you?” Anton decided not to dignify this with a response. “Stop fucking with the radio,” she said. “All I’m saying is that if he was crazy enough to shoot you, he could just as easily have been FBI.”

“He wasn’t FBI. He was just some lunatic with a fucked-up sense of humor.”

“Are you even
listening
to me? You’re lucky I was in town. I’ve been out in LA half the week.”

“Where are we going?”

“The store. I have a new batch of cards for you.” They were leaving the bridge under a deep gray sky.

“No passports?”

“One passport. The rest just want cards, because they’re fucking cheapskates. Anton, seriously, I think you should carry a gun.”

“
What?
I’m out of the business anyway. You know this is my last week.”

“For your own protection.”

“Do you carry one?”

“Not on a regular basis,” she said.

“You own a gun. Are you kidding me?”

“We’re gangsters, sweetheart.”

“We’re a gang of
two,
Aria. You watch too much television.”

“We’re not a gang of two. You know other people work with us on the passport side. Anyway, all I’m saying is, we’re selling an illegal product to illegal people, and things get a little sketchy sometimes. It might not be a bad idea.”

“Illegal people.
Illegal people?
Did you actually just say that?”

Aria ignored him. She had pulled up behind the warehouse; he got out of the car and followed her around through the side entrance into the shadowy interior, where his father was polishing a bronze sculpture of an angel in a 1920s flapper dress. Aria disappeared into his parents’ apartment in the back.

“Surprised to see you during the day,” his father said. “Doing well?”

“I’m great. Some crazy Bolivian just threatened to shoot me.”

His father whistled softly. “Rough business.”

“Yeah, that’s why I’m getting out.”

His father grunted, but didn’t respond to this.

“Dad, have you ever owned a gun?”

Aria was emerging from the back with a ziplock bag.

“There she is,” his father said.

“Dad? Have you ever owned a gun?”

“Here you go. Five cards,” Aria said, “and one card-passport combo. They’re all scheduled for this week.”

Anton gave up on the gun question. “What times? You know I’m nine to five at the company.”

“Yes, I know you’re nine to five at the company, you poor corporate drone. Here’s your schedule.”

He glanced at it quickly and folded it into his pocket. “So much for my weekend,” he said.

Aria gave him a smoky-eyed glare—every hipster girl in the neighborhood was wearing eye shadow the color of gunpowder that season—and turned away from him. She was furious, and had been for some weeks now. It was in the lines of her shoulders, the angle of her head, the way she leaned with exaggerated calm against the counter to look over the store’s order books, the efficient flick of her pen over a completed delivery.

“You sure have left her hanging,” his father said, without looking up from the bronze. He was buffing a tarnished wrist. The sculpture was half-dark and half-shining from his efforts, like a woman stepping out of shadow. “Walking out on your business partner like that.”

“I don’t want to live like this anymore. I’m sick of doing illegal things.”

“What we do for a living bothers you that much?”

“It has nothing to do with you. It has nothing to do with my
family
, Christ, haven’t we been over this enough? It’s just me. It’s just me. And another thing,” Anton said, on his way out the door. “I will never carry a fucking gun. Both of you, you hear me? I’m not stooping that low.”

His father didn’t respond to this. Aria was pointedly not looking in his direction. Anton walked out and headed for the subway station. It was the middle of the day and the platform was mostly empty. Alone near a pillar, he glanced at the schedule again and then thumbed quickly through the cards. He opened the passport. It was perfect, as always, and he wondered for the thousandth time how Aria acquired her passport blanks and how the passports came out so perfectly, who else worked on the passport side of the business and whether or not they could be trusted. There were parts of the business that were closed to him and always had been. The girl in the picture stared solemnly back at him. She was pretty, with short blond-brown hair and gray eyes.
Elena Caradin James. Place of birth: Canada. Citizenship: United States of America.