The Singer's Gun

8

In a quiet office on the twelfth floor of the new World Trade Center 7, Broden played Elena a tape.

“It can’t have been an easy business.”

“It was an easy business. I was good at it. It was the easiest thing I ever did in my life.”

“Then why did you get out?”

“I don’t know, I just gradually didn’t want to do it anymore.”

“Why not? What changed you?”

“I don’t know. It was gradual.”

“If you could name one thing.” Listening to her own voice all these weeks later, Elena closed her eyes and thought, Why did you keep talking to me? Wasn’t it obvious that you were being interrogated? She was strangely angry with him.

“Well, there was a girl. Catina. I’d been thinking about getting out, but it was meeting her, it was talking to her. . I didn’t know before her that I was really going to do it. Get out, I mean.”

“A girlfriend?”

“No, not a girlfriend. I sold her a passport.”

Broden stopped the tape.

“The tape runs out two minutes later. Did he say anything more about his other clients?”

“No,” Elena said. “Just what’s on the tape. The woman from Lisbon. And that stuff later on about the falling man.”

“Oh, I know all about the woman from Lisbon.” Broden was smiling, more animated than Elena had ever seen her. “I spoke with her at great length. Nonetheless, Elena, it’s the best tape you’ve given me. Good work.”

“Can I ask you a question?” Elena asked.

“Of course.”

“Why was Anton put in a file storage room?”

“I thought it was an elegant solution,” Broden said. “We need him close at hand, but the company wasn’t willing to keep him once the results of his background check came up.”

“What did the background check say?”

“What do you think it said? No one’s invisible,” Broden said. “There’s no such thing as operating under the radar. The background check said he’d never been to Harvard and that he and his cousin were the subjects of an ongoing criminal investigation. Water Incorporated didn’t want him, but he was judged a significant flight risk if he lost his job, so a compromise was reached: the company’s keeping him in storage while we conduct our investigation.”

“Why not just arrest him?”

“Because I don’t want to tip off Aria just yet,” Broden said. “But at any rate, I called you in to ask you something. Did he say anything to you about staying on in Italy? I expected him back some time ago.”

“He didn’t tell me anything,” Elena said. She was slumped in her chair. She hadn’t been sleeping well. She’d gone to Anton’s office with a sunflower — a rose seemed too ordinary — at five o’clock on the afternoon when he’d said he’d be back, but the room was empty with papers blowing over the floor. There was a fine layer of dust on Anton’s desk. She sat in his swivel chair and spun around once or twice, then went to lie down on the sofa. She lay there for a long time, drowsy and a little sad, watching the movement of loose-leaf paper over the floor. She left the sunflower lying on his desk, but when she came back the next day at five o’clock it remained undisturbed. She visited the empty room every afternoon for the rest of that week, lying on the sofa in the quiet, resting in her memories. She was startled by her longing. By Friday Anton hadn’t returned and the sunflower was wilted, so she dropped it out the window onto the roof of the hotel and didn’t go back again.

9

Anton sometimes stood on the balcony of his hotel room on Ischia and thought about the span of oceans that divided him from Brooklyn, and the thought of being four thousand miles away from his family was exhilarating but the days on Ischia were endless. There were contentious phone calls to New York. The sea changed from blue to gray and back again. Anton wandered the narrow streets of Sant’Angelo (he had a hard time thinking of them as streets, these narrow corridors between villas and walled gardens that turned into staircases every now and again), talked to himself by the harbor, read the English-language newspapers and stared out at the sea. He called Aria every third or fourth day and listened to her tell him that the package was still delayed and then hung up on her, which was satisfying the first few times and later tedious. He convinced her to pay him seventeen thousand dollars in consideration of the delays; she agreed but was furious. He tried to call Sophie sometimes, but her phone rang endlessly. She never picked up.

There were a number of brief storms during which Capri vanished from the horizon and wind moaned around the edges of the hotel and came in through the shutters. When the weather was nice he drank endless cups of coffee in the piazza and read the International Herald Tribune and worried about the transaction.

“Why are you paying me so much?” he asked her once, when he’d been on Ischia for four weeks.

“Because you’ve forced me up to seventeen thousand dollars,” she said.

“But why did you agree to pay me that much?”

“Because it’s important that I move into a new business,” she said. “It’s worth it to me. You don’t need to know why.”

Sometimes Sant’Angelo started closing in on him, so he took the bus to Ischia Porto and drank cappuccinos at an outdoor café and watched the ferries come in from Napoli for a while. Once he took the bus all the way around the island, but he remained unmoved by the unchanging paradise of his surroundings and didn’t get off until the bus came full circle and reached Sant’Angelo again. By the middle of October the tourists were thinning out; the only other regulars on the piazza were a grim-faced German couple who drank beer and stared at the water without speaking to one other and a man staying in Anton’s hotel who always had paint on his clothes and always seemed to be either sketching something or doing a crossword puzzle.

Anton couldn’t find any English-language books in Sant’Angelo, which was at first an annoyance and then a genuine problem. He’d been reading two or three books at a time for his entire life, and he was unsure what to do with himself in the vacuum. He made inquiries here and there — a waiter at his favorite café in the piazza, the woman who ran the newsstand, a girl who spoke English in a clothing store by the harbor — and they all told him the same thing: the closest English-language books were in Napoli. At the end of the sixth week of waiting he took the bus back to Ischia Porto and boarded a ferry to Naples, blue Tyrrhenian, drinking a cappuccino on deck as he watched the city approach. It’s a civilized country that sells cappuccinos on the commuter ferries, Anton thought, and an affection for the place swelled inside him like music.

For almost the first time he began thinking of later, of after the transaction, of a job somewhere and an apartment in Sant’Angelo, or perhaps just a rented room. Napoli sprawled bright on the hills over the harbor. He made his way inland in stages, basking in the exuberance of being off Ischia — an hour in a café reading a newspaper, time spent browsing in innumerable little shops, a long interval on a bench in an ancient piazza with dread-locked university students playing drums nearby, seagulls sidling up to the café tables. There were two blissful hours in a bookstore near the university; Anton emerged near sunset with a hundred euros’ worth of fiction in a heavy paper bag. No reason to go back to Ischia just yet. The ferry ran late.

He stopped for pizza at a brightly painted little place near the water. Sometime past nightfall he climbed a flight of stairs up to the elegant sweep of Corso Vittorio Emanuele, the lights of boats in the Bay of Naples glimmering far below and Mount Vesuvius a blunt shadow against the southern sky. He looked up at the Hotel Britannique, at the balcony six floors up where in a previous lifetime he’d turned away from the lights of boats and islands and watched Sophie emerge from the shower. He was thinking about the night they’d arrived in Naples, the way the city had seemed an undifferentiated chaos of gray buildings and broken plaster and lights spreading up over the hillside, Sophie’s blue linen dress, the singer in the restaurant. He glanced at his watch and decided he had more than enough time for a drink before the last ferry to Ischia.

It took Anton some time to reach the restaurant where he’d dined with Sophie. When he stepped through the door the girl who had been singing that night was onstage again, midsong, and the déjà vu was startling. She wore the same dress as before, tight silver, and she was singing in the same languorous style but something was wrong with the microphone; her voice had a wavery, underwater quality, and it was difficult to make out the words. The restaurant was nearly empty.

Anton took a stool at the bar. The bartender brought the wrong drink. A brief argument ensued. His scotch was set down on the countertop with somewhat more force than was strictly necessary and it didn’t taste quite right, but he sipped it anyway and turned in his stool to look at the stage. The girl was singing a song he’d never heard before.

“What’s her name?” he asked the bartender. “Uh, the girl, the singer, sua nome? Parla inglese?” The bartender ignored him. The girl was leaving the stage. It wasn’t her night, or perhaps the sound quality was to blame. The applause was merely polite. Anton paid quickly and left the restaurant. The night air was cool. The stars were blacked out over the sea, a bank of clouds moving in from the distance. He found the side entrance and waited there, pacing, until the door opened and the girl came out.

“Excuse me,” he said.

She drew her breath in sharply and reached into her handbag.

“Wait,” he said, “I’m sorry, please don’t pepper-spray me, I didn’t mean to scare you. I just enjoyed your performance, I don’t know anyone here and I wondered if I could buy you a drink. That’s all.”

She considered him for a moment. Up close she was wearing too much makeup.

“I wasn’t going to pepper-spray you,” she said. She removed her hand from her bag. He would have guessed her to be somewhere in her early to midtwenties, but she had a voice like a twelve-year-old with an indefinable accent. “Just a drink?”

“Just a drink,” he said. “No strings. I just want to talk with someone who speaks English for a while. We’ll talk about the weather if you’d like.”

“That’s sweet of you. I know a place near here.”

“I’m Gabriel,” he said. “Gabriel Jones.”

She smiled, and the hand she extended was so warm that he wondered if she had a fever. “Arabelle,” she said.

“Arabelle? That’s a beautiful name.”

“Isn’t it?” She sounded pleased. “I made it up just now. Here, it’s further up the street.” She was leading him away from the sea, farther around the endless curve of CorsoVittorio Emanuele. They walked for a few minutes in silence, an arm’s length away from the street’s murderous traffic.

“What’s your real name, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Kara,” she said.

“Where are you from?”

“Saskatchewan.”

“Saskatchewan?”

“Here we are,” she said. And he followed her into a low-lit room, a new-looking place with a red-tiled floor and candles flickering. The tables were unoccupied. A lone bartender was polishing glasses behind the empty bar, and there were faint notes of paint and varnish in the air.

“This is a nice place,” he said. She didn’t answer. She was leaning over the counter to greet the bartender, who kissed her on the cheek and said, “Ciao, Kyla.” Anton pulled back a barstool for her. Her skirt rode up above her thighs as she climbed onto the bar-stool. Anton looked away and caught the bartender’s eye. There was something in the man’s amused expression that he didn’t entirely like.

“Kyla,” Anton said, “not Kara?”

“It’s Kyra, actually,” she said, and ordered a drink in Italian. “No one can pronounce it here.”

“Due, per favore,” he said to the bartender, who nodded and turned away. “What did I just order?”

“You’ll like it. It’s grapey.”

“Excellent,” he said. But the drinks were the color of ultraviolet light and they tasted like sugar and lighter fluid; he swallowed his first sip with difficulty and set the glass down on the bar.

“It’s a grape martini,” she said. “I think they invented it here. Isn’t it something?”

“It’s certainly something, but I’m not sure it’s a martini. Listen,” Anton said, “don’t be offended, but I’m going to ask you your name one more time. Just for fun.”

“My name’s Carrie,” she said.

“Short for Kara?”

She shook her head. She was wide-eyed, biting her lip like a little girl trying not to laugh before the punch line.

“So your name’s changed. Are you still from Saskatchewan?”

“I’m from Albuquerque.” She stared at him for a moment longer and then burst into laughter. Her laugh was high-pitched, silvery, with a hysterical edge that made him shiver.

“Who are you?”

“Oh, come on,” she said, “don’t go all serious on me.”

“Why won’t you tell me your name?”

“Because everyone wants something. Your name, or a kiss, or your body, or whatever. Haven’t you ever just wanted to disappear?”

“I have,” Anton said. “I’m sorry. I understand now.”

“Can I have another grape martini?”

“Can you at least tell me what country you’re from?”

She hesitated.

“Just the name of your country. Your country for a drink.”

“Mexico.” He held up the girl’s glass and gestured to the bartender. The bartender nodded, and began mixing vodka and something that looked like grape Kool-Aid. Anton tried not to watch.

“You mind if I ask again?”

“It’s Mexico. Really.”

“You don’t look like any of the Mexicans I know.”

“I’m a gringo,” she said. “My parents moved there from the States.”

“Can I ask the name of the city?”

“San Miguel de Allende. The kingdom of fake artists and retired Texans.” She was already halfway through the second martini and her eyes were bright. “How about you? Where are you from?”

“Brooklyn. How did you end up here?”

“I shot someone,” she said between sips. He laughed, hoping she was kidding, but she didn’t smile. “Then I took a bus to Mexico City,” she continued, “and then I got on a plane. I’ve been here for years now.”

“Why Naples, though? I’ve heard it can be dangerous here.”

“Not for me,” she said.

“Really.”

“No, see, look. .” She was fumbling in her purse for something, but then she caught sight of her drink and seemed to lose track of what she was looking for. She removed her hand from the bag and finished her drink and winked at the bartender, who smiled warily back.

“It isn’t dangerous here because you have pepper spray?”

“Oh, I don’t have pepper spray,” she said. She opened her purse and held it open for him. He peered in and saw the dull shine of the Beretta between a Hello Kitty wallet and a pack of spearmint gum. Anton leaned on the bar, shaken, while she finished her drink and then held the glass up to the light in case there might be a few hitherto unnoticed drops remaining.

“I hate guns,” he said. “I don’t believe in them.”

“Well, you don’t have to believe in them,” she said. “They’ll still work regardless. Can I have another drink?”

“Have you ever fired it?”

She laughed that silvery laugh again and put her glass down. Anton shivered.

“Is it loaded?”

“We’re in Napoli,” she said. “Be reasonable. Can I have another martini?” He was thinking of Ischia, of the boats in the harbor, of Elena, of his cat, of putting money on the counter and wishing her a pleasant evening and walking away down CorsoVittorio Emmanuele and never coming back to Naples again as long as he lived, but like a man in a dream he gestured at the bartender, who stepped forward and began mixing another poison-violet drink.

“Last one,” he said quietly. “Why do you have a gun?”

“I live alone by the train station. It isn’t really safe.”

“Tell me your name?”

She smiled.

“Your name for a drink. Doesn’t seem that unfair, does it?” Of course it seemed that unfair. He felt horrifically cheap and the evening was spiraling.

“Jane,” she said. The bartender set the third drink down on the countertop and she lifted the glass unsteadily to her lips.

“Jane? Really?”

“Jane,” she said. “I’m serious this time.” She leaned closer to him and beckoned. He leaned in and smelled the alcohol and sweet purple and acetone on her breath. “I’m going to go find the bathroom,” she whispered, “and then we’re going to do something fun.”

“What kind of fun?” he asked, a little desperate.

She inclined her head sideways to indicate the bartender, who was leaning against the counter and staring out the open door at the ceaseless traffic. There were still no other customers. She smiled and cocked her finger at Anton and whispered, “Bang. Bang.” She blew on the tip of her finger like a gunslinger blowing smoke from the tip of a gun and then fell against the bar in a fit of giggles. “We’ll be outlaws,” she said. “We’ll be like Bonnie and Clyde.”

“Are you crazy?”

“No no no, this way. .” She was laughing and could hardly get the words out, “this way we don’t have to pay for our drinks. Relax, there’s no one else in here. This place just opened. Do you see a security camera? I don’t.”

“Come on,” he said. “It isn’t funny.”

She winked at him. “Wait here while I go to the bathroom,” she said. She turned away from him and slid unsteadily from the barstool while Anton slipped the gun from her purse into his jacket pocket. Her dress clung to her body like broken glass. She reached for her bag and wavered away from him, sequins glittering down the dim corridor at the end of the room, until her dress flickered out behind a wooden door.

Anton stood up, opened his wallet, and left three twenty-euro bills on the bar — the bartender called after him, he had drastically overpaid, but he was on his way out the door and could not stop — and he began to walk rapidly downhill toward the Hotel Britannique. After a moment he broke into a run. The sidewalk was narrow in places; he had to dodge around people and heard himself gasping with every breath, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, the words turning into a meaningless sobbing for air, and the traffic was a blur of steel and death and lights at his fingertips. When he looked up he saw that the sky had gone starless. Past the warm soft lights of the Grand Hotel Parker’s, past the Hotel Britannique with its faded lobby full of tourist brochures, and then he darted across the street — horns blared, a Vespa swerved to avoid him — and jogged down the stairs toward the water. At the bottom of the steps he stopped running and settled into a loose staggering walk.

On the last ferry to Ischia he slumped over a railing on the outside deck, staring down at dark water and trying not to think about anything. The gun was a solid weight in his pocket. He couldn’t stop thinking about the things that might happen to a girl like that, drunk and alone in the seething city of Napoli, making her way home to an apartment near the train station unarmed. He had left the precious English-language books in the bar.

In the morning Anton woke with a pounding headache. He’d only sipped at the violet drink in the bar, but he felt poisoned. He took a cold shower and lay on top of his bed for a while before he went down to breakfast, thinking about what it would mean to never return to New York again.

10

Just before Aria’s fifteenth birthday she returned home to her father’s apartment after a weeklong absence, but the locks had been changed and there was a note on the door next to the eviction notice (Went to Ecuador, go stay at your uncle’s place) and from the street she saw that the curtains were gone from the windows. She came back to Anton’s neighborhood quickly, with enormous bravado and shaking hands. She sat at the table while Anton’s mother fluttered around her, bringing her a plate, a fork, some food, some coffee, you poor thing. When Anton’s father heard that his brother had taken off for Ecuador he almost punched a hole in the wall, and for the rest of that week everyone stayed out of his way. He talked to his vanished brother while he worked, while he did the dishes, in any situation where he was more or less alone and no customers were present: a furious muttered monologue about family and responsibility, punctuated by curses.

But Aria didn’t talk about her father at all. She didn’t talk about much of anything. She disappeared for long hours, she went to school and worked in the store, she listened to music in her room. She was a polite and quiet presence in their lives that year, always on the margins or just out of sight. Anton’s mother did what she could, but Aria was unreachable. After a few weeks there was a phone call from Ecuador. Her father apologized. He just couldn’t bear to be away from Aria’s mother any longer, he said, so he’d sold everything they had to pay for the plane ticket. The furniture. The dishes. Aria’s clothes. All temporary stuff, he assured his daughter. Nothing they couldn’t eventually replace. Aria’s mother had never felt like marrying Aria’s father while they were all in Brooklyn together, but now they were going to be married in Ecuador. They were happy. Sylvia had stopped drinking. It was unbelievable, miraculous, a whole new life. He said Aria was welcome to move to Ecuador and join them, but Aria laughed and hung up the phone.

That was the year Gary introduced Anton to cigarettes, which they felt conveyed a certain hard glamor. The technique was to squint into the distance and smoke as if you’d been smoking for so long that you hardly noticed the cigarette anymore and in fact had no idea how it had ended up in your hand. They practiced smoking under the bridge, separated from Anton’s parents’ store by several hundred yards and an array of enormous concrete pilings.

“You know your cousin steals?” Gary asked once, when the cigarettes were lit. He passed one to Anton, who took it gingerly — the thing he didn’t like about cigarettes was that one end was hot — and used it to stall for time.

“She’s fucked up,” he said, after he’d exhaled, when it became apparent that Gary was waiting for an answer. “I’m sorry. I can’t stop her.”

But he realized as he spoke that he didn’t really want to. Every time he thought of her he was shot through with strange envy. She was six months older but miles ahead.

Aria had a way of staring at the river while she smoked her cigarettes. Standing in front of the store, under the awning when it was raining. One hand in her pocket, the other holding her cigarette, and she lit one cigarette after another and looked out at nothing, or at Ecuador.

Anton’s and Aria’s sole chore around the apartment was to do the dishes, because his parents liked to read after dinner. When the dishes were done Aria usually disappeared into the demands of her private life, going out with friends who exchanged inscrutable jokes in rapid-fire Spanish or closing herself in her room and listening to music with the volume turned down low. She saved and saved and bought her own CD player. Anton’s father was willing to put down his book to have a conversation if he saw Anton hovering around, but there were two or three hours after dinner when his mother was lost to them; she read with all of herself, immersed, breathing language, and couldn’t be reached until she was ready to emerge.

When he didn’t have plans with anyone he closed himself into his bedroom to read after dinner, or stayed with his parents in the living room. Anton resented the absence of a television, but there were things he read in books that took his breath away. His mother’s collection of travel guides never moved him, but Kirkegaard’s last words were Sweep me up. He read those three words when he was fifteen years old and his eyes filled unexpectedly with tears.

It was his mother’s absence in the evenings that made Sundays important. When it was warm enough she sat with him on the loading dock in front of the store, watching the boats on the river and Manhattan on the other side. Anton would go out by himself around ten and after a few minutes she came to join him with two mugs of coffee, and they sat there together for an hour or so. They didn’t talk much; the point was contemplation and silence. In winter they drank coffee in the store, where there were two old chairs behind the counter that were too comfortable to sell, but it wasn’t the same as watching the river.

“Does it bother you ever?” he asked her once. “The way we do things?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.” It was a Sunday morning, almost noon. He was fifteen years old and they were watching a Brooklyn-bound J train passing over the Williamsburg Bridge. The warehouse was so close to being under the bridge that at a certain point any approaching subway train disappeared overhead.

“I know a lot of it’s stolen,” Anton said. “The stuff we sell.”

“True,” said his mother. She had finished her coffee and she held the empty mug clasped loosely in her hands. She was looking at Manhattan, or looking through Manhattan at something else. There were moments when Anton’s parents seemed very far away from him.

“Doesn’t it bother you?”

“No,” she said. “Does that disappoint you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

She was quiet for a while. “Your grandfather was an official in the Church of Latter-Day Saints. He was a well-respected man, one of those pillar-of-the-community types, but he was terrifically cruel in his personal life. I ran away at sixteen. Was he moral? He thought so. He operated a soup kitchen and a shelter for the homeless during the winter and probably saved lives. There are probably people alive today who were homeless in Salt Lake City in the ’60s, and they didn’t freeze to death in the winter because of him. Or my sister,” she said. “We’ve had a few misunderstandings, so you haven’t seen her since you were tiny, but she’s a wonderful woman. She was on welfare because she had three little kids to take care of, and her ex-husband never did pay child support. Once there was a bureaucratic error and she received two welfare checks for the same month. She spent the extra money on new winter coats and boots for the kids and a radio, and her ex-husband found out and threatened to report her for welfare fraud unless she stopped pestering him for child support. Was she immoral? Was what she did wrong? I frankly don’t believe so, my beloved child. My point is that it isn’t black-and-white, what we do or what anyone else does in this world.”

“We deal in stolen goods.”

“We deal in goods that would in all likelihood be destroyed anyway. We’re a salvage operation.”

“But stolen. We don’t know they’ll be destroyed. Someone else might be planning to save them, and we don’t own them. They’re not ours.” He blinked and was humiliated to realize that he was ready to cry. He clenched his coffee cup with both hands to steady himself. Adolescence had made him embarrassingly emotional.

“Anton,” she said, “sweetheart, I know it’s questionable. But we work hard. I’m at peace. Your father’s at peace. We sleep well at night. What are our options?”

“Normal jobs?”

“Normal jobs,” she repeated. Her voice held an edge. “You’ve never worked a normal job, Anton. What do you imagine it might be like?”

“I don’t know. Less questionable.”

“Well, most things you have to do in life are at least a little questionable,” she said. She stood abruptly, took his coffee cup from his hands and left him alone on the loading dock.

11

The day after he stole the singer’s gun Anton went down to the piazza and called Gary.

“You want me to kidnap your cat,” Gary repeated.

“Not kidnap, exactly.” Anton had purchased aspirin with great difficulty at a pharmacy near the hotel — the pharmacist didn’t speak English, which necessitated a brief game of charades at the counter — but his headache wasn’t entirely gone yet. The sharp light of afternoon made him want to go to bed with the curtains drawn, and the gun was a malignant presence in the top dresser drawer in the hotel room. “I mean, he’s my cat, it’s not like you’re stealing him.”

“Oh, so I’m not kidnapping him in the technical sense of the word, I’m just breaking into your apartment, extracting your cat, and then putting it in a crate and shipping it to Italy. Cool.”

“No, I’d send you my house keys. No break and enter involved.”

“Oh, okay. That changes everything.”

“Look, and I’d pay your expenses and all the shipping — we’re clear about that, right? I’ll throw in another fifty for your time if you want. A hundred. Make it a hundred, okay? A hundred dollars for two hours of your time.”

“Thanks, but why don’t you keep the money and buy a new cat?”

“Because I already have a cat. Jim isn’t replaceable.”

“Yeah, look, it’s just a little crazy for me. Isn’t there anyone else you could call?”

“You’re my best friend. Who else would I call?”

“Sorry,” Gary said.

“Two hundred. Would you do it for two hundred?”

“No, I’m sorry, I wouldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s crazy, Anton, I’m sorry. I’ve known you forever. And I gotta tell you, man, you’ve just been a little out there lately.”

“Why? Because I miss my cat? I’ve been here for six weeks, Gary. It’s lonely as hell.”

“No, because you left your wife on your honeymoon and now you want me to take the cat from her too, and all this after you cheated on her with your secretary. You ever stop to think about what kind of a person you are?”

“I do, actually. I think about it all the time.”

“And you can still sleep at night? Because it’s just not admirable, Anton. It isn’t. And look, hey, you know I’m not one to judge, I’ve always been here for you, I was the guy you called and went for beers with every time she fucking canceled a wedding on you, man, but how could you leave your wife on your honeymoon?”

“You don’t understand, there were—”

“Oh Christ, let me guess. There were mitigating circumstances.”

“Well, yes, there—”

“How fucking mitigating could a circumstance possibly be?”

“Pretty mitigating,” Anton said.

“She cheated on you? She tried to kill you? What?”

“No. Nothing like that. It wasn’t anything she did. Look, I can’t tell you.”

“You can’t tell me.”

“I’m sorry,” Anton said. “I just can’t.”

The phone call ended badly and afterward Anton went to the café closest to the water. It was the only café on the piazza that still kept regular hours, the only one frequented by the fishermen; the other cafés were opening later and closing earlier as the supply of tourists dwindled and colder winds moved over the surface of the sea. He suspected that the nozzle on this particular café’s milk frother wasn’t cleaned very often — the lattes tasted slightly like yogurt — but the beer was decent and the grilled panini were good. He’d taken to watching the sunset from this place. Anton sat outside in the last light of afternoon, thinking about his cat and about all the things he should have said to Gary.

Later he took a circuitous walk that lasted three hours and returned to the café after dark to get drunk. There were other lonely foreigners in the piazza that night. They came together as the café emptied out and shared three bottles of wine, and when the café had closed they sat together on a pier: Anton, a couple of Germans who spoke English, another American whose name he didn’t know. The Germans were catching an early flight back to Munich; after a while they went back to their hotel and then it was just Anton and the other American, some guy from Michigan. Anton sat on his hands and looked down at the water, the slick of lights on the surface. He was cold. The effervescence of the previous few hours was fading. He was starting to think about the singer and her gun and his far-off cat again.

“I can’t remember your name,” Anton said finally. “Did you tell me?”

“David Grissom.”

“Anton Waker. Pleasure.” He reached sideways to shake David’s hand. “I’ve seen you around here a few times before tonight. Doing the crossword puzzle. Sketching stuff. I think we’re staying in the same hotel.”

“Yeah, I’ve been here a few weeks.”

“Long vacation?”

“Staying here a while. Painting,” David said.

“You know, that’s a skill I always wanted. I could never even draw.”

“It’s an overrated talent.” David seemed uninterested in the subject. “Where do you live?”

“Here. I used to live in New York, but I don’t think I’m going back there. You?”

“No fixed address, as they say in the newspapers. I’ve been drifting around Europe for a while.”

“What do you do, aside from traveling and painting?”

“You know, I used to think that was the most banal question,” David said. “What do you do? I used to think it was synonymous with How much money do you make? But lately I’ve begun to think it’s the most important question you can ask someone. What do you do? What are you doing? What is your method of conducting your life, by what means do you move through the world? Important information, isn’t it? But I’m sorry, I’m rambling. Is that bottle empty? In answer to your question, I travel aimlessly and try not to think too much. I work odd jobs and paint still-life paintings and then throw out the canvases every time I move to a new place, unless I can sell them to tourists, which only happens if I paint landscapes. I’m going to ask what you do in a minute, bear with me, but first, what’s the most important question you’ve ever been asked?”

“The most important. .?”

“It’s a subject that interests me,” David said. “I used to start conversations the regular way — you know, Hi, how are you, how ’bout this weather we’re having—but then a few years ago, around the time my wife died, I developed an allergy to small talk. So lately I’ve been starting with that question, and I find it makes all the conversations I’m in more interesting. Also, I’m drunk.”

“It’s a good question.” Anton was quiet for a moment. “A girl in New York asked me something once. She said, What was it like when you were growing up?”

“What was it like when you were growing up. That’s good. That’s very good. I’ll remember that one. What do you do?”

“Me?” Anton raised the wine bottle to his lips, drank for a moment and set it back on the pier. “Nothing good. Nothing at all, actually. I’m not doing anything but waiting. Can’t we just ask each other what we used to do? Because the present, well, I have to tell you, I don’t like the present very much.”

“I used to sell cocaine to art school kids in Michigan,” David said.

“Really?”

“Not a bad business,” David said. “I only left Detroit because my wife died.”

“I’m sorry about your wife. I used to work at a consulting firm,” Anton said, “but I think it’s safe to say that that career’s more or less over. Now I’m just waiting to perform a transaction. I’ve been waiting for a while now.”

“What kind of transaction?”

“One I’d rather not do,” Anton said. “It’s nothing, actually. I just have to give a package to someone, and after that I’ll be free. The waiting’s killing me, though. I’m not sure there’s anything much worse than this.”

“Really? You don’t think there’s anything much worse than sitting on a pier on the southern coast of Italy drinking wine?” David was smiling. “How drunk are you, exactly?”

“Drunker than I’ve been in a while. I meant there’s nothing much worse than this limbo,” Anton said. “This waiting. All this waiting, and I have nothing to go back to once the waiting’s done. There’s nothing left in New York City. It isn’t just that my marriage is over, it’s that it never should have started in the first place. I don’t know what I was thinking. She was a once-in-a-lifetime person, but that doesn’t mean I should have married her. There’s nothing left there for me there except my cat and a girl I had an affair with once.”

“Do you love her?”

“The girl? I don’t know. A little. Yes. Okay, the thing is, I miss her, but not as much as I miss my cat.”

“Your cat.”

“Jim. He’s not just any cat, I rescued him when he was a little kitten. I was walking one night with Sophie, my wife, back when we were still just dating. It was raining, and there was this little wet shivering kitten in a doorway. He almost died. Lost an eye to infection. I tried to get my best friend to kidnap him and ship him over just now, but he wouldn’t do it.”

“That’s why I try to avoid having too many friends,” David said. “Unreliable species.”

“Not as bad as family.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“You don’t have a family?”

“Not really,” David said.

“I envy you, man. I wish I didn’t have a family.”

“No, you don’t.”

“You’re right,” Anton said, “I don’t. I wish I had a different family.”

The evening after the thirtieth anniversary dinner at Malvolio’s, Anton took the subway out to Brooklyn. He was tired. His footsteps were heavy on the steel steps up to the loading dock, and his planned speech evaporated when he stepped into his parents’ warehouse. There was the stone fountain just inside that had been there for a decade, sold at last, tagged, waiting for transport. He stopped to touch it — Look at this holy work of art, these holy stone birds along the edge of this basin — and ran one finger over the ecstatic curved spine of a finch. He thought he was alone but when he looked up Aria was already watching him. She was behind the counter, leaning on it, the New York Times spread out under her elbows.

“How could you do this?” It wasn’t at all what Anton had meant to say.

“Anton,” she said, not unkindly, “grow up.”

“It’s not—”

“You’re not really going to say It’s not fair, are you?” They were again thirteen, standing under the awning across the street from Gary’s father’s store; she was explaining how to shoplift but he was a baby and she was disgusted with him, You just take it from the shelf and then you don’t have to pay for it. The things she was stealing were different now, colossal: entire futures, perhaps lives, and he wondered how he hadn’t noticed when her crimes became so enormous. It occurred to him that perhaps he hadn’t been paying enough attention.

“Aria,” he said, “this is my life. I’ve done something different. No one else in our family—” he was about to say has ever gone to college, but stopped himself just in time. “Aria, listen, I’m getting married, I’m going to have kids someday, and they’ll go to good schools because I have an office job and I can support that, and they will never have to do anything even remotely corrupt.”

“You’re saying they won’t have to do what you did.”

Anton sensed a trap but nodded anyway.

“Except that you didn’t have to do what you did either.” He had stepped on the tripwire; the trap snapped shut. “What were your grades like in high school?”

“I hate rhetorical questions.” Anton couldn’t look at her.

“Straight A’s,” Aria said. “You could have done anything. You always said you wondered what life would be like with a college degree, well, you could have gone to college. You had the grades. They have scholarships for kids with grades like yours. But you didn’t go to college, did you?”

Anton had no answer to this.

“The way I live is my decision,” she said. “The way you live is yours. No one ever forced you to be corrupt.”

His father was approaching from the back of the warehouse. He was holding a paintbrush in his hand, tipped with paint the color of poppies. “Are we back on the blackmail thing again?” his father asked.

Anton rested his hand on a stone bird to steady himself. “Yeah, Dad, we’re back on the blackmail thing again.” The curve of stone wings beneath his fingers.

“Well, she’s family, Anton. No getting around it.”

“She’s your niece. I’m your son.”

“She’s as much my daughter as—”

“Anton,” his mother said. “Ari, Sam, what is this?” She had appeared from somewhere in her work clothes, a streak of dust across her shirt. She was twisting a damp rag between her hands. “I heard you all the way in the back.”

“This blackmail thing again,” his father said. “Talk to him, Miriam.”

“Oh, Anton, it’s an important deal for her, you know that. I don’t know why you won’t help her.”

“Well, I don’t have a choice but to help her out, Mom, that’s the thing. That’s actually what blackmail is, in case no one ever told you.”

“Don’t speak that way to your mother.”

“Okay. Okay.” Strange to realize, looking at the three of them, that he didn’t want to see them again. No, that wasn’t it; it was more that not seeing them again was suddenly, staggeringly, absolutely necessary. “Tell you what,” Anton said, “I’m getting married in three weeks.”

“Well,” his mother said, “assuming Sophie doesn’t—”

“Shut up. Just shut up. I’m getting married in three weeks, and I don’t want to see you there. Any of you.” He forced himself to meet their eyes. They were staring at him, uncomprehending but starting to understand. “I don’t want any of you to come to my wedding. You are not invited. You are not people who I want to see again. Do you understand me? I’m done.” His mother was weeping. The look in his father’s eyes. “I love you,” Anton said. His father made an indecipherable sound. “I love you. All of you. I just can’t, I just don’t want to, I just don’t want to live the way you live anymore. I can’t.” He was at the threshold, backing out. “I can’t. I’m sorry.” They stood frozen in place, and something broke in him at the instant he turned away.

But they came to his wedding anyway, of course. They were family. He saw them sitting far back in the last row of the church — not Aria, just his parents, his mother in her favorite yellow dress — and they slipped away before the reception.

Anton sat with David on the pier on Ischia until it was too cold to sit there anymore and the wine was completely finished, then he excused himself and crossed the piazza to the pay phone. He started to dial the Santa Monica number and then remembered that she’d said she’d be back in New York by now. Her phone rang for some time before she picked up.

“Anton,” she said. She had taken to pronouncing his name ironically lately, in italics, because he had hung up on her four or five times in a row. “What time is it there?”

“Aria, my darling. Any news?”

“Yeah. We’re in production.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“I’m too tired to be kidding you. You woke me up.”

“Only, what? Seven weeks late?”

“Six. You know I’m sorry about the delays you’ve been through. Believe me, it’s not that convenient for me either.”

“You didn’t have to leave your wife on your honeymoon.” The moon was setting.

“Yes, well, if I’d known the delay would be this long I would have done it differently, but nine more days and then it’s over. The package will arrive on Friday of next week. That evening your contact will come to your hotel. You’ll meet him at the restaurant downstairs at ten P.M.”

“The restaurant downstairs isn’t open at ten P.M.”

“He’ll be there anyway.”

“How will I know it’s him?”

“His name’s Ali. I’ll have more details on Thursday. Just go down and meet him, give him the package, shake hands and you’re done.”

“Aria, I want twenty thousand dollars.”

“Are you drunk?”

“A little, but that’s beside the point. What am I supposed to do after the transaction’s done? I’ve lost practically everything. I do this transaction, and then what?”

“What do you mean, and then what? You do this transaction, and then you’re done. You can come back to New York.”

“With no wife and no job? What am I coming back to, exactly?”

“Not my problem,” Aria said.

“Do you know what these weeks have cost me? I used to have a job I loved—”

“You wrecked your own life,” she said. “You needed no help from me. And now you want me to pay you twenty thousand dollars because you’ve had to hang out in the Mediterranean for a few extra weeks? Don’t push me any further.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that you’ve already talked me up to seventeen thousand dollars, which is excessive, incidentally, and I’m afraid I’ve reached the edge of my patience. Just go downstairs to the restaurant on Friday night, hand over the package, and you’re done.”

“Eighteen thousand five hundred,” Anton said.

“You’re unbelievable,” Aria said, and hung up. The piazza tilted unsteadily in the half-light; Anton made his way carefully back to the pier and sat down beside David again.

“It’s finally happening,” Anton said. “That transaction I’ve been waiting for.”

“What kind of transaction are we talking about here?”

“I’m not exactly sure, to be honest. It’s my cousin’s transaction. I’m just the guy who hands the other guy the package. I don’t even handle the payment. We’ve never really been business partners,” he said. “She said we were, but I always just did what I was supposed to.”

David nodded. “When’s the transaction supposed to take place?”

“Soon. It was supposed to be weeks ago. I’ve just been stuck here waiting. But you know what’s crazy? I wish I could stay here, actually, when all this is done. There’s nothing for me to go back to in New York. I’m thinking about getting a job in a hotel somewhere during the tourist season, maybe in Napoli, coming back to Sant’Angelo in the evenings after work, reading a book, spending time with my cat if I can get someone to ship him here, walking on the beach, maybe going for a swim. It’s the kind of life I think I’ve always wanted, crazy as it sounds. Just working all day and coming home at night, nothing shady. Seems uncomplicated, doesn’t it?”

“Everything’s more complicated than it looks, but what’s stopping you from doing it?”

“I’m here now,” Anton said, “and no one knows me. I could be anyone. But today or tomorrow or the day after that a nice man in a FedEx uniform will park his truck at the gates of Sant’Angelo and walk down to the hotel with an envelope for me, and shortly afterward a man will show up and I’ll give a package to him, and then that man will know who I am. Do you see? My anonymity will be completely ruined. And say this man has a good memory and decides someday that he needs to tell someone else about me. Now that he’s seen me, now that I’ve handed him an envelope, he’d be able to pick me out of a lineup or recognize me on the street, and voilà! Any chance of a new life vanishes at that instant. I could stay here in peaceful anonymity, but once I give the guy the envelope, I’ll always be looking over my shoulder.”

“What if you paid me to do it?”

“To do what?”

“You give this guy a package,” David said, “and you never see him again.”

“Yes. Right.”

“So why can’t it be me? I’m broke, I’ll do anything. Well, not anything, but I’m a retired coke dealer. Whatever’s in this envelope of yours, how much more illegal can it possibly be? I’m Anton Waker, I have a package for you, here you go, pleasure doing business.”

“You’d do that?”

David grinned. “For the right price,” he said.

The effects of the wine were leaving Anton. He was slightly disappointed to realize that he was no longer quite drunk. “I have to make another phone call,” he said. “Let me think about it. We’ll talk soon?”

“Soon,” David said. He gave Anton a loose salute and lay on his back on the pier to stare up at the sky. Anton went back to the pay phone, searched the scraps of paper in his wallet until he found the number he was looking for.

“Elena,” he said.

12

At four o’clock in the haze of the third Tuesday in October, Elena stood on the corner of Columbus and West 81st Street waiting for the light to change. In her right hand she held a set of keys that had arrived from Italy by mail a day earlier, and she wore a hat pulled down low over her forehead. Her hair was damp with sweat. She was unaccountably nauseated, but she wasn’t sure if it was the heat or her nerves. What she was thinking of at that moment, before Sophie appeared on the other side of the avenue, was the note from Anton hidden in the bottom of her jewelry box in Brooklyn. She almost wished she had it with her, for reference or for companionship, but the girl approaching Columbus Avenue was unmistakably Sophie. She carried a blue handbag and her hair was pinned up away from her face with dark strands escaping; she was the girl met once in passing at a company Christmas party, the girl whose face was a tiny blob in the string section in full-orchestra photographs of the New York Philharmonic, the girl who’d left her husband alone on Ischia over a month and a half ago.

Sophie and Elena stood for a moment on opposite sides of the avenue with cars passing between them, Elena trying to be invisible with her hat pulled down low and Sophie apparently oblivious, gazing at nothing in particular. The light changed and they came within a few feet of one another on the crosswalk. Elena turned back to watch Sophie from the other side of the street. Sophie walked away slowly, seemingly in no rush. She looked up at the trees that lined the lawn of the Museum of Natural History, she looked at the last of the flowers growing under the branches, she seemed lost in a dream. She disappeared down the steps of the subway station, a long block away. Elena counted to ten and then walked quickly west on 81st Street until she found the address. She stood for a moment on the sidewalk, extending this last moment before she entered the building. Nothing is over yet, she told herself. The cat’s still inside. I can still turn and walk away. Instead she unlocked the inner door of the building and ascended the stairs.

Anton’s apartment smelled faintly of incense. It was a dim book-filled space, with dark wood furniture and soft-looking white carpets, and somewhere a tap was dripping. There were sounds of traffic from the street outside. Elena closed the door behind her and locked it, her heart beating too hard and too quickly. Impossible not to imagine him everywhere.

The cat was emerging from the bedroom in stages, pausing at intervals to stretch one leg at a time; he yawned hugely and padded toward her. One of his eyes was closed and something about the set of his face suggested that it had never opened. She was shaken by his friendliness. Jim dropped to the floor at her feet just as if she weren’t an intruder planning on kidnapping him and sending him to a foreign country. She stroked his milk-white stomach and he twisted on his back with his paws in the air. She stood then, opened the door to the closet where Anton had said the pet carrier box would be, and this was the moment when her nerve failed her all at once; in the space of a few heartbeats she was locking the door of the apartment behind her, she was halfway down the stairs, she was out on the street gasping for breath and walking quickly away from there.

“You look a little feverish,” the photographer said.

“Oh, I’m fine,” Elena said brightly. She had come straight from Anton’s apartment and was fifteen minutes early. She sat down on the sofa in Leigh Anderson’s apartment, and he gave her a glass of water that she drank all at once.

“Would you like some more?”

“No, I’m fine, I’m fine, thank you. I was just walking a little too fast, and the heat. . it’s as if fall isn’t coming this year.”

The photographer was nodding absently. “Brutal,” he said. “Might as well still be August.” He had produced a portfolio from somewhere and was sitting down in the armchair across from her. “So,” he said, “I should warn you, my work has evolved somewhat since I worked with you last. I’d like you to take a look at my current portfolio.” He slid the portfolio across the tabletop, and Elena flipped it open. On the first page two girls lay together in a bathtub, half-submerged; the one on top had pierced nipples and a tongue stud.

“It’s still very much on the side of art,” Leigh said. “Or if it’s moved toward pornography, it’s in the hinterlands between the two.” The next picture was of a woman sitting on a chair, legs spread wide, naked from the waist down with her head thrown back. Elena wanted to ask how this was different from pornography, but the photographer was still talking. “I like to see it as art photography,” he said, “but thrown into the deep end, pushed over the edge. The idea is that the viewer is pushed toward the outer edge of — forgive me,” he said, “I get a little pedantic on the topic. I’ve been teaching a photography class.” Elena was looking at a photograph of two girls — a different duo — standing in a bathtub kissing, blurred behind a transparent shower curtain.

“Is your rate still twenty an hour?” Elena asked.

“Forty. You’re comfortable with the overall aesthetic?”

“Absolutely,” Elena said. Not counting the money Anton had sent her to pay for shipping the cat to Italy, she had less than a hundred dollars left in her checking account.

“But what I do need to see at this point,” the photographer said, “is what you look like naked.”

“But you’ve seen me naked. I used to pose for you.”

“That was nearly five years ago,” the photographer said. “People change in five years. I find it puts my models at ease. It may seem paradoxical, but if you think about it. .” He had stood up from the armchair, and he was closing the blinds. “I need to know what you look like naked — what you look like now, because bodies change in five years — and taking your clothes off for the first time is the hardest part.” He paused at a window, looking at something on the street, then closed the blinds and turned back to her. “This way, if you’re naked in front of me for a few minutes now, it’ll be easier to be naked for four hours when we meet next week for the session.”

“You said that five years ago.”

“It’s still true.”

Elena took her shirt off. She unfastened her bra and slid down her skirt with no trouble, and found that she could even look up at him once she’d taken off her underwear.

“Please,” he said, gesturing expansively.

Elena came out from behind the coffee table, and stood exposed on his living room floor.

“Nice,” he said. “You still have a good body.”

“Thanks.” She watched his face, obscurely anxious. His eyes drifted professionally downward.

“Can you trim?” he asked. “Not a lot, just a bit. Think of making it into a V-shape. Do you mind?”

She didn’t, although she was aware that her hands were shaking slightly. She was trying to remember if it had been like this the first time, five years ago, but found that she’d lost the memory.

“Can you turn around for me?”

She turned slowly away from him.

“Stop.”

She stood facing his tiny Manhattan kitchen, a closet-sized corner tiled in black with one wall painted the color of an emerald in sunlight. There was a Van Gogh postcard magneted haphazardly to the fridge, explosions of stars in a swirling sky.

“You have nice calves.”

“Thanks,” she said hollowly. She turned back toward him.

“When are you due?”

“What?”

He winked. “I can always tell,” he said.

It took her a moment to understand. “Oh, I’m not pregnant.”

Leigh didn’t look embarrassed, only surprised. “You’re positive about that?”

“Positive,” she said.

The photographer nodded and began moving back toward the armchair, and she understood this as her cue to get dressed again. She put her clothes back on and they spoke of practical things. Dates, methods of payment, the model release.

Twenty minutes later she found herself standing in the 81st Street Museum of Natural History subway station, looking at the tiled mosaic elephants and bats and sea turtles and frogs, realizing that actually she wasn’t positive at all.

“So, what did you do today?” Caleb asked.

He had come to bed earlier than usual but seemed unready to sleep. He lay on his back and she lay beside him with her head in the crook of his arm. Her thoughts were turned toward the Upper West Side, toward the photographer’s green kitchen wall and Sophie drifting across the intersection.

“Not much,” she said. “I met with the photographer.”

“That same one as before, right? Upper West Side?”

“The same one. Yes.”

“Have you given any more thought to finding a job?”

“I’m posing for him tomorrow. He pays more now than he used to.”

“I meant real work,” Caleb said.

“I hate real work.” She was trying to keep her voice light.

“Most people have to work, though, sweetie.” It was a delicate topic: he didn’t have to work, and he didn’t entirely understand. The closest Caleb could come to imagining what an office job might be like was to compare it to research, which he loved, or to depression, which the pills had eradicated so successfully and for so many years that it was beginning to seem abstract, a half-real memory of six months in the late ’90s when he hadn’t wanted to get out of bed, something that might have happened to somebody else.

“Aren’t you listening? That’s not what I’m saying at all,” Elena said. “Of course I have to work. I’m not suggesting that any alternative exists.”

“But maybe if you had a different kind of job,” Caleb said carefully. “You were happy when you were working as Anton’s assistant, weren’t you?”

“Was I? I don’t know, I suppose it’s a question of ratio. I was probably less unhappy more of the time.”

“Have you thought about going back to school?”

“So I could do what? Work in yet another job? It’s work itself, Caleb, it’s not the job I happen to be in. I don’t mean to go on and on about it, it’s just, I’m still. . I’ve been working since I was sixteen years old, except for that one semester at Columbia, and the initial shock of work hasn’t worn off yet. I still have these moments where I think, Come on, this can’t possibly be it. I cannot possibly be expected to do something this awful day in and day out until the day I die. It’s like a life sentence imposed in the absence of a crime.”

“Perhaps you should see someone,” Caleb said. He went to a psychiatrist once a month, and came back introspective and a little dazed.

“How could I see someone? I have no health insurance now, and anyway, I don’t want to see someone. I don’t want to be numbed.”

He was quiet.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s okay. It must seem like that to you sometimes.”

“It does. I’m sorry.”

He stroked her face for a moment, withdrew his hand and kissed her on the forehead.

“Well,” he said, “we should probably get to sleep. I love you.”

“I love you too.”

Elena couldn’t sleep that night. After a while she got up and went to the kitchen. She turned on the light above the table. The clock above the stove was ticking loudly in the quiet. She was reading a two-day-old newspaper when the telephone rang at midnight.

“It’s okay,” Anton said when she told him. “Everyone loses their nerve sometimes.”

“I’m sorry, Anton. I’ll go back again.”

“You don’t have to,” he said, perfectly aware that his former secretary was incapable of leaving a project unfinished.

“Of course I’ll go back.” She was standing by the kitchen window, which was as far from the bedroom as a person could get and still be inside the apartment.

“Did you get the veterinary records?” he asked. “The vet was supposed to mail them to you.”

“I have them,” she said.

“What’s the weather like there?” He was watching the fishermen preparing their nets, the first few boats gliding out around the breakwaters. He had taken to going to bed early, for lack of anything else to do in the evenings, and rising at dawn to watch the sunrise and the boats.

“Warm,” she said. “Hot, actually. It’s as if it’s still summer.”

“Have you found work?”

“I haven’t tried. I’ve just been posing naked for people.”

“People?”

“Art classes. Borderline pornographers.”

“Does that kind of thing pay well?” His tone was studiedly neutral.

“Not particularly. No. I think I have to do something else soon, or else commit to it completely.” It was impossible to keep her voice from wavering.

“What do you mean, commit to it?”

“I mean actual pornography, not just the borderline stuff.” She was looking at her reflection in the kitchen window and thinking that she looked like a ghost; in the window she was transparent against the fire-escape railings outside. “I don’t know what to do,” she said.

“What kind of job do you want?”

“That’s exactly the problem. The thought of finding another job. .” She was breathing somewhat quickly; she closed her eyes, concentrating on the idea of five-thousand-year-old pine trees, the first cup of tea and the first line of Gilgamesh, the first sheet of glass ever held up to the light, and forced the wavering part of herself to be still. She laughed in what was meant to be a carefree manner, but it was a strange clenched sound that escaped her throat.

“Elena,” he said, “it’s all going to be all right. I’ll call you tomorrow or the next day, and we’ll figure out what to do. Listen, Sophie has therapy on Thursdays. She’s always gone between five and seven.”

“I’ll go back again.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I can’t tell you how I appreciate it.”

Caleb was awake when she came back to bed.

“I’m sorry,” he said gently, when she reached out to him. It had been months now, a growing distance, like the gradual tec-tonic division of continents.

“Yes, I’m sorry too.” She hadn’t meant to speak so sharply.

“What’s upsetting you really?”

“This,” she said.

Caleb was silent. It was too dark to see his face, but she knew he was staring up at the ceiling unblinking.

“It’s late,” he said. “We should go to sleep.”

Beyond the fact that Caleb couldn’t quite bring himself to touch her anymore, there seemed to be an underlying question of compatibility. He talked about specimens, types of leaves. She found herself grieving for the absolute tragedy of the lost tree in Utah. He talked about cross-sections of bark, the genetic structure of the Lotus japonicus, work that was being done on the plant genome project. Elena listened to him and found her mind wandering, wondering if that Utah geology student who felled the four-thousand-nine-hundred-year-old tree felt remorseful, what kind of person could do that, if a person capable of felling a tree to retrieve a broken tool is even capable of understanding the sheer magnitude of his crime; someone must have pointed out to him that the organism he’d killed had been alive three thousand years before Christ, but can a man who thinks so small perceive anything so enormous?

In the morning after Caleb had left for the university Elena stood in the hallway for a while, watching the movement of the goldfish, trying to think ordered thoughts. Phylum Chordata, with us and the otters and the monkeys and the sea squirts; the phylum for all of us in possession of a nerve cord. Class Actinopterygii, the domain of bright fishes. Order Cypriniformes, of carps and minnows; family Cyprinidae, genus Carassius, species auratus. Fins like orange silk in the water. Memories of childhood cartoons with orange fishes and black cats.

Two days later she stood in the photographer’s apartment on the Upper West Side, blinking in a flood of sunlight with dust motes drifting bright around her. She hadn’t been sleeping well. Her eyes were heavy. She remembered posing here five years ago, but the memory was so distant that it was almost third-person: the five-years-ago girl had insisted that the blinds be closed even though the sunlight in the room was perfect when they were open, the five-years-ago girl had taken off her clothes but lain on her stomach on the sofa and had to be gently persuaded to turn over. Elena shied away from nothing now, but the difference was more frightening than liberating; she could feel the five-years-ago shadow staring at her from the sofa while she stood in the window in full view of the neighbors across the street, naked from the waist down except for her most perilous pair of high-heeled shoes, alarmed by how little the thought of strangers seeing her in the window concerned her.

“That’s beautiful,” Leigh said. He was moving around her, taking picture after picture, the faint digital beep of the shutter sounding over and over again. “Now take off your shirt.”

She did this, and stood naked except for the shoes. She turned her face toward the camera, but she was looking at dust motes drifting through the light.

“Close your eyes,” he said, and when she closed her eyes it was harder to balance; she touched the window frame and felt the warmth of sunlight on her hand. “Can you touch yourself a little?”

She found that she could, but that was more or less when the nausea started, and an hour later she threw up in a Starbucks bathroom near the subway.

13

“You can dispose of my luggage as you see fit,” Sophie had actually said, a half-hour before boarding the ferry to Naples.

How does one dispose of luggage? For the first few weeks Anton kept Sophie’s suitcase in the wardrobe beside the bed, but its presence was oppressive. On a bright clear afternoon in late October he came up from the piazza and was bothered yet again by the way the wardrobe wouldn’t quite close. He lifted the suitcase onto the bed and unzipped it. He was overcome for a moment; sweet, faint, her hair, her skin. She was the kind of preternaturally organized girl who remained packed for entire vacations, extracting a set of clothes every morning and leaving everything else folded neatly, hand-washing the previous day’s clothing in the sink and hanging it up to dry on the hotel balcony overnight, re-folding it the following morning. Everything was clean. There were three pairs of pants, several shirts, a skirt, the blue linen dress she’d worn in Naples. He laid it all out on the bed like evidence. There were t-shirts, a wrinkled blouse, underwear, socks. A bra the color of daffodils, a biography of Jim Morrison; he read the first few pages and then returned his attention to the suitcase. It was empty now but for a wadded-up pair of socks, so he began methodically checking the outside pockets. In the first pocket was an Oxford Italian-English dictionary, two blank postcards from Rome, an article about nuclear ethics torn out of a newspaper, and a packet of sugar with a picture of Capri on the back. In the other pocket were two folded maps (Rome and Naples), a partially consumed bottle of water with condensation clinging to the inside, and an envelope addressed to Sophie c/o the New York Philharmonic.

The envelope been opened. Inside was a typed note on San Francisco Symphony Orchestra letterhead, dated August 15th:

Dear Ms. Berenhardt,

As per our telephone conversation of August 4th, it is with great pleasure that I acknowledge your acceptance of our invitation to join the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra for our upcoming season. As discussed, Jacob Neerman from our personnel department will contact you within the next two weeks to work out the details. We are happy to provide a stipend to offset your expenses in relocating to San Francisco this fall. Jacob will discuss the details when you speak with him.

Sincerely,

Arthur Gonzalez

Administrative Director, San Francisco Symphony Orchestra

“San Francisco,” Anton said. The room was silent. He carried the letter out to the balcony, where he read it again and then stood for a while looking out at the sea. After a few minutes of this he went back inside. His cell phone was flashing a low-battery warning on the desk, so he picked up the keys and his wallet and ran down the hotel stairs and around the corner to the piazza, where a tourist was using the pay phone. He stood nearby, impatiently shifting his weight, and realized that the page was still in his hand. He read it over a few times and then lost himself for a few minutes watching a passionate soccer game being played by boys on the beach. They were the children of fishermen, of restaurant workers, of the woman who ran the newsstand, and they played on the beach all day while their parents worked, an emotional society of small tanned boys in swim shorts who formed and broke alliances, went swimming individually and came back together again, organized themselves into soccer teams and then disbanded to pester their parents for ice cream.

“Ich vermiss dich so sehr,” said the tourist, on the phone.

He wanted to call Sophie and ask when exactly she had planned on telling him that she was moving to San Francisco. As per our telephone conversation of August 4th. He remembered August 4th. He had stood in front of his bathroom mirror that morning, extracted a piece of glass from his face with a pair of tweezers and held the shining transparent thing up to the light. Sophie had stood in the doorway and asked if he’d been shaving with glass and then hadn’t wanted to talk about it later. Had she really decided to leave him that day? But married him anyway? He’d gone off to work, she’d stayed home and placed a call to San Francisco and then behaved as if nothing was wrong that night? He was incredulous. The whole thing seemed pathetic. He was disgusted with both Sophie and himself. A yellow-and-blue boat was coming into the harbor.

“Ich werde niemals zu dir zurückkommen,” said the tourist. She was silent a moment, listening, and then hung up the phone without saying anything else and walked away toward the water. Anton moved in immediately and made the call, but their home phone number in New York had been disconnected. He called Sophie’s cell phone, but it went to voice mail and he didn’t want to leave a message. Anton hung up and dialed a different number but then remembered that he and Gary weren’t necessarily on speaking terms and hung up before Gary answered. He went to the fishermen’s café and read a newspaper until David appeared. It was a bleached-white day, cloudless, the sky so bright he couldn’t look at it.

“Mind if I join you?” David sat down across the table from him without waiting for an answer. He had green paint under his fingernails. He was carrying his own newspaper. He opened it, folded it carefully to expose the crossword puzzle, and ordered a beer from the waiter before he looked up at Anton again.

“What’s the matter?” David asked.

“Something I read.” The letter was still in Anton’s pocket. He unfolded it and gave it to David. “My wife,” he said. “I didn’t know she was going to leave me.”

David took the letter from him and read it through quickly. “She said nothing about it? No hint?”

“Nothing. I found the letter in her suitcase. I mean, to be fair, I guess I left her first.”

“Why didn’t she take her suitcase?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she wanted me to find it.”

“Are you all right?”

“More startled than anything.”

“I would be.”

“I mean, I was cheating on her,” Anton said. “I didn’t think she’d. .” He trailed off and there was a silence, during which a fisherman climbed into his red-and-white boat and started slowly out of the harbor. “It’s all so pathetic,” he said. “I don’t know why we got married. It just seemed like the right thing to do, but why would either of us. .” The putt-putt of the motor played counter-point to the calls of the soccer boys on the beach.

“Hey,” David said, “I think Gennaro wants you.” Anton followed the direction of his gaze. The owner of the hotel was coming around the corner into the piazza. The white FedEx envelope in his hand shone almost painfully in the sunlight.

Anton felt as if the envelope were floating toward him, a glaring white rectangle that he found hard to look at dead-on. The wait was agonizing, so he stood up from the table and went to meet it.

“Good afternoon,” Gennaro said. “This envelope arrived for you. I signed for it, thought I’d give it to you in person.”

“Thank you. I appreciate it.” It was addressed to an Ali Merino, care of Anton Waker. He recognized Aria’s handwriting. She’d used Gary’s father’s store for the return address. “It’s for a friend of mine,” he said. “He forgot some papers.”

“Ah,” said Gennaro. “A beautiful day, yes?”

“It is.” Anton raised the envelope to shield his eyes against the sun and tried to smile.

“Well,” Gennaro said awkwardly, “goodbye.”

“Goodbye.” He watched Gennaro recede for a moment before he returned to the table where David was sitting.

“Your package?” David asked.

“After all these weeks.”

“You going to open it?”

“No,” Anton said. Strange to have it before him after all this time, shining innocuously in the sunlight.

14

On the third Thursday of October in the city of New York, Elena stood on the corner of 81st Street and Columbus watching the slow progress of a moving truck parked halfway up the block. It had arrived an hour earlier and three men were carrying furniture and boxes between the front door and the truck. Five minutes earlier she had seen Sophie come out and speak to them. Sophie had left soon afterward, walking away down West 81st Street in the opposite direction. Elena counted to ten before she ventured up the hill. It was October 20th, but the forecast called for 85 degrees Fahrenheit, here in one of the last countries on earth that still used the Fahrenheit system. Her shirt was wet on her back. She made her way up the sidewalk in the deadening heat, and one of the movers winked as she approached.

“Hey,” she said, “you know where Sophie is?”

“She went out,” the man said. “Running an errand of some sort.”

“Oh, okay. I’m Ellie, I’m here about the cat. She told you I’d be coming?”

“No.”

“That’s strange. I’m Ellie—” She realized that she was repeating herself, but too late—“and I’m taking care of the cat for a couple days. He’s upstairs?”

“Who’s upstairs?”

“The cat?”

“Yeah, yeah, locked in the bedroom. Go on up.”

She ascended the stairs quickly. Inside the apartment a mover was taking apart a table in the middle of the room. He looked up and grunted when she said hello. It seemed to be possible to walk into apartments that people were moving out of without anyone saying much. Her heart was beating very quickly, and there was a disjointedness about the scene — she was crossing the room with the cat-carrying box, although she couldn’t remember reaching up into the closet to retrieve it, she was opening the door to the bedroom and closing herself in.

The bedroom was empty. The closet doors wide open, the bed and dresser gone, pale rectangles on the wall where pictures had hung. Jim was lying on the carpet by the window, absorbing sunlight. He raised his head and watched her with his one bright eye. She set the box down in the middle of the floor and opened the cage door, but it turned out that the cat wasn’t interested in being inserted into it. He began twisting away from her almost immediately when she grasped him, and he braced his legs on the edges of the opening. By the time she had forced him in headfirst and slammed the cage door shut her arms were stinging with scratches. Jim yowled once. When she looked in through the door he was crouched low, glaring with his single eye.

“I’m sorry,” Elena whispered, to everyone. She lifted the box (the cat was surprisingly heavy), and opened the bedroom door just as Sophie opened the door to the apartment. Two movers were indoors now, disassembling the bookcases.

“Elena,” Sophie said, “what are you doing with the cat?”

“I’m sorry,” Elena said, again.

There was a soft thud. “Jesus, that was my thumb,” one of the movers said.

“What are you doing with the cat?” Sophie asked again. She didn’t move away from the doorway or look away from Elena’s eyes.

“Anton asked me to send him to Italy.”

Sophie stared at her, silent.

“He said he misses him,” Elena said.

Sophie still didn’t speak.

“I’m sorry. I’m just really — I’m sorry,” Elena said.

The movers, disassembling the bookcase, worked on in awkward silence. Elena felt that she was becoming transparent under Sophie’s gaze. Her knees were weak. She wanted to fall. “I’m sorry,” she repeated, and to her utter mortification she realized that she was beginning to weep. She stood frozen in the bedroom doorway with sunlight pouring through her, a shadow, a ghost, gripping the cat box as tightly as possible and wishing to be anywhere, anywhere else, her shoulder aching from the cat’s weight and tears on her face, her breath catching, and still Sophie only watched her.

The movers had entirely dismantled the bookshelves now — they lay in a stack of flat boards gleaming dark in the sunlight — and they were wrapping the boards in a packing quilt and bundling the packing quilt with tape. The sounds they made were distant, like actions occurring in another room. Elena began walking forward across the room, trying to come to some internal understanding of what she would do if Sophie didn’t step aside from the doorway. But Sophie did step aside, almost at the last moment, and she said nothing as Elena passed by. Elena kept walking, away down the stairs with Sophie looking down from above, until she was out on the street with the cat. She hailed a taxi, asked for Kennedy Airport and closed her eyes in the backseat.

“You okay?” the driver asked.

“Yeah,” she said, “fine—” and realized that there were still tears streaming down her face, unabated. Her hands were shaking.

“Where you traveling today?”

“Italy,” she said.

“Italy,” said the driver. “Without luggage?”

“Without luggage.”

“Who flies without luggage? I didn’t take you for a terrorist.” His tone was jokey; he was trying to make her laugh. She smiled wanly and didn’t answer him.

“Wait,” she said after a moment, “can we make a stop? I forgot my passport.”

“Of course. Wherever you want.” In East Williamsburg she carried the cat into the apartment and the cab idled out front while she threw a few things into a small suitcase: some clothes, a manila envelope containing old postcards, a piece of paper hidden in a blue sock at the back of her sock drawer, both the Canadian and American passports, a few things from the bathroom. Halfway to the door she remembered the cat, and went to the kitchen for a can of tuna and a can opener. A phone message in Caleb’s handwriting was attached to the fridge: ALEXANDRA BRODEN CALLED PLS CALL BACK. She stood for a moment holding the piece of paper, went to the kitchen phone and dialed the number.

“Please don’t ever call me at home again,” Elena said when Broden picked up.

“I tried your work first. You didn’t tell me you’d left and I need to ask you a question.” There was an urgency in Broden’s voice that Elena hadn’t heard before. “Did Anton ever say anything to you about shipping?”

“Shipping?”

“Shipping containers, or boats, or ports, or travel over oceans, or the import-export business. Anything of that nature. Any mention at all.”

“No,” Elena said, after a moment. “He never did.”

“When did you last speak with him?”

“Just before he left.”

“He was supposed to be back weeks ago,” Broden said.

“I know.”

“Well,” Broden said, “we can discuss this tomorrow.”

“I have to see you tomorrow?”

“Yes, at four o’clock. We scheduled this three weeks ago.”

“I’ll be there,” Elena said.

She paused for a moment by the goldfish tank and then locked the apartment door behind her and ran back down the stairs with the cat and the suitcase. The interior of the cab was too warm.

“One more stop before the airport,” she said. She was opening the window. “Can you take me up to Columbia University?”

“Pretty big detour. What time’s your flight?”

“I don’t have a flight.”

He looked at her in the rearview mirror. “You said you were flying to Italy.”

“I am.”

“Okay,” the driver said.

“Are you from Italy?” she asked after a few miles of silence. They had crossed to the Manhattan side of the bridge and they were racing north up the island, streets passing fast. Flashes of mannequins in store windows, people walking on the sidewalks, whole lives played out between avenues, a bright faux-summer day. All the trees she saw were still green.

“Italy? No.”

“Your accent, I thought it sounded. .”

“I’m from a place you’ve never heard of,” he said, and he winked at her in the rearview mirror.

“So am I,” said Elena. She thought for a second about obscure countries and then said, “Kyrgyzstan?”

“Tajikistan,” the cab driver said. He looked at her in the rearview mirror, startled. “But I’ve been to Kyrgyzstan many times. Many times.”

“What’s it like there?”

“Kyrgyzstan? I don’t know. Different from here.”

“Everywhere’s different from here.” The gates of Columbia were on their right. “You’ll wait for me?”

“I’ll wait,” the driver said.

She took her suitcase and the cat with her anyway and made her way through the gates and over the sunlit expanse of the grounds, through a doorway and down several flights of stairs to the underground laboratory where Caleb was working. He looked up from his computer when Elena said his name. On the screen before him line upon line of gibberish ran down the screen. He hit a key and the letters and numbers stopped moving and flickered silently in place.

“Ellie? What’s going on?”

Elena set down her suitcase and Jim, who meowed furiously and then sank into a prowling orange fury that moved him back and forth across the carrier.

“Whose cat is that?”

“It’s Anton’s,” she said. “Caleb, listen—”

“Anton your old boss?”

“Yes. Caleb—”

“Why would you have your boss’s cat? Your ex-boss’s cat.” He spoke without malice.

“Caleb.”

“Are you leaving me?”

Elena found all at once that she had nothing to say. She had planned a speech on the way down the corridor but all the words were fading out in the cool air of the room. She looked down at the floor and nodded.

“You’re leaving me,” Caleb said. He smiled briefly, ran his hands through his hair and looked at her. “Where are you going?”

“Italy,” she said.

“Italy,” he repeated. “With no money, and Anton’s cat.”

“I have a little cash. And I still have a credit card.”

“Italy,” he said again, very quietly, and laughed.

“Caleb, I’m sorry, I just. .”

He raised his hand to stop the sentence, and smiled, and shook his head. She smiled back at him, and for an instant there was peace. Then Jim meowed again, more urgently, and she remembered the time and the cab idling out front with the meter running. She picked up the cat’s carrying box and the suitcase.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m sorry too, I just couldn’t. .”

“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.

15

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?”

“No handbag,” Elena says.

When Elena goes back out into the restaurant Gabriel is where she left him, drinking his latte. He smiles when he sees her but doesn’t speak. Ilieva appears a moment later and murmurs something in his ear. He nods.

“I apologize sincerely,” he says to Elena. “I know it’s intrusive, to say the least. My cousin’s a little paranoid about security.”

“I understand.”

“I hate it,” Gabriel says. “The whole procedure. It just seems somewhat necessary these days. The current political climate, et cetera. But anyway, listen, may I buy you a sandwich?”

“Oh, there’s no need, I—”

“Seriously,” he says gently. “You’re looking a little pale.”

All at once she is desperately hungry again.

Later on it’s difficult to remember the conversation, except that it’s effortless and that hours pass before Ilieva brings the check and the snow outside the window sparkles blue and amber in the lights of the street.

“We close early,” Ilieva says apologetically. “For the snow.” The café is empty but for an older couple eating dessert nearby.

“Bear with me for one last absurd ritual,” Gabriel says softly, “and then you’re free to work in the United States of America. Will you do exactly as I say for a moment?”

“Yes,” Elena whispers.

Gabriel opens his wallet and slides a twenty into the check folder. “That’s for the food and drink,” he tells her quietly. “Now put in your share.” His tone leaves no doubt as to his meaning, and all at once it is the last moment before potential catastrophe again: the whole evening has unwound to this point, now, and it’s too late again. Elena reaches into her left coat pocket, where the precious stack of bills that she’s been accumulating for months resides, but the police don’t break down the door. Perhaps it won’t happen. Perhaps she’ll walk out with a forged passport and a Social Security number, exactly as promised. “Turn the folder so that it opens away from that couple,” Gabriel murmurs, “and slide the money in. Don’t count it — good — now put the folder on the table and look at me as if nothing out of the ordinary has occurred.”

Ilieva takes the check folder and Elena is alone with Gabriel for a moment, and the music playing in the café at that moment sounds like a Russian lullaby. Ilieva reappears with the folder and two glasses of red wine.

“Your change,” Ilieva says. “A pleasure, as always.”

Gabriel raises his glass. “Red wine means the count was correct,” he says softly. “If she’d brought water, I’d be out the door by now. Cheers.”

“What are we toasting?”

“My last job,” he says, “and your future gainful employment.”

“Really? I’m your very last?”

“Well, I have one more tomorrow, actually. But my second-to-last job doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it?” He’s reaching into an inside pocket of his jacket, and he passes her the envelope so casually that Elena almost doesn’t see it until it’s on the table. It’s the kind of envelope that film developers use for photos. “Here are some vacation pictures,” he says. “You can look at them later.”

She takes the envelope and puts it in her bag and the moment of transaction is over so quickly that she’s almost unsure it happened. He’s still holding up his wineglass, and she smiles.

“Well,” Elena says, “congratulations. I assume this isn’t the easiest line of work.”

“That’s just it,” he says. “It is easy. I could do this forever. But I want something different. What will you do with your new-found legality?”

“I’ll stop washing dishes for a living. I’ll stop posing naked for photographers. I don’t know. Anything.”

Gabriel goes quiet for a moment, sipping his wine. “Listen, I shouldn’t ask probably,” he says suddenly. “This is probably silly of me, but do you have any office skills? Can you type?”

She nods.

“I started a new job last month,” he says. “It’s nothing that exciting, but I’ve been told to find a new secretary for my division. .” She listens for some time to the details of the position, she sips her wine and then the glass of water that follows, and she is stricken by a sense that has come over her before in moments of unreality; it’s as if she’s stepped outside herself and is observing the scene from afar. At a small table in the Russian Café in a snowstorm she talks to the man she met a few hours earlier and laughs as if she’s always known him, just as if they’re two old friends out for dinner on a snowy night in New York. Just as if the envelope that Anton slid over the table hadn’t contained a Social Security card and an impeccably forged American passport.

“I don’t know,” Gabriel says in the snow outside the restaurant, walking toward the Williamsburg Bridge, “it’s difficult to explain. I just want, I’ve always wanted a different kind of life than this. This will sound strange, I mean, I know it’s crazy, but I always wanted to work in an office.”

“You have a corporate soul?”

She’s mostly joking, but Gabriel nods as if she isn’t and says, “Exactly. Yes.”

Late at night on the bridge the cold is deep and absolute. The lights of the Domino Sugar Factory shine over the river, and the snow is still falling. Gabriel tells her he’s spending the evening with his parents in Williamsburg. They walk together, talking, and a boat moves silently over the dark water far below.

On the far side of the bridge he calls a car service for her on his cell phone and they stand together waiting for it to arrive, stamping their feet to keep warm until the black car pulls up to the curb. “Let me give you my business card so you can call me about the job. There’s just one thing I have to tell you,” he says as he gives it to her. “About my name. .”

The car takes her away from there to the apartment building in East Williamsburg. She leans her head against the window to look up at the snow and it seems at that moment that it’s going to get easier now, that the long nightmare of hunger and dishwashing and posing naked is almost over; there’s a chance at a job here in her beloved city, something different, health insurance, a new life. The driver, already paid by Gabriel/Anton, grunts something about the neighborhood when she says goodnight. Elena lets herself in through the first door, a steel gate that clangs shut behind her. Her boyfriend is lying on her bed when she opens the door to her bedroom; she can’t suppress a gasp. They’ve been talking about moving in together, and she forgets sometimes that she’s given him a key. He grins at her and puts down the book he was reading, The Botany of Desire, green-gold apples resplendent on the dust jacket.

“I let myself in,” he says. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all. I’m glad you’re here.” She opens the closet door and steps behind it, hidden from his view. She’s taking her clothes off; the thought of undressing for Ilieva in the storeroom returns to her, and she blinks and tries to erase Ilieva’s face from her mind. “What time is it?”

“Almost eleven,” he says. “Where’ve you been?”

“I went out with a girl from work. Jennifer.”

The American passport is cool to the touch. She takes it from her coat pocket and opens it quickly, hidden from Caleb’s view by the closet door. The light in the closet is bad but the document seems perfect. The photograph that she mailed to a post-office box two weeks earlier stares back at her.

“A waitress?”

“Yes,” Elena says. She’s running her fingers over the letters. Nationality: United States of America. “She works mornings, usually. You haven’t met her. How long have you been here?”

“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.

16

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.

“How did you come here?” he asks her. It’s a question he’s been asking almost everyone lately. Their stories are seldom uninteresting. He has half-baked ideas about writing something someday — working title: A Totally Fictional Guide to Immigrating Illegally to New York—and to this end he’s been taking some notes in the evenings.

“In a box,” Natalka says. “I came here in a box.” She lights a new cigarette with shaking hands, and lifts it quickly to her lips. She’s gone pale; her smile has vanished; he presses her no further. And it’s only several years later, holding a pay-phone receiver to his face on the island of Ischia, that he understands what she meant.

“Shipping containers. It’s shipping containers, isn’t it?”

“Bright boy,” said Aria.

“Do you know what happened to her?”

“To Natalka? No idea. She put me in touch with the people who imported her in exchange for a discount on her passport, and that was the last time I spoke with the girl.”

“I don’t think it’s right.”

“No,” she said, “of course you don’t.”

“Aria, you know what happens to girls like that.”

“All of them? Anton, grow up. It’s a way of entering the country. What would their lives be like, in these places they come from? These radioactive little Ukrainian towns, Anton, these dark little villages without jobs, these fallen-down countries where everything’s corrupt? It isn’t that there’s no industry in these places, it’s that they are the industry in these places. They can be strippers and call girls there or strippers and call girls here, and here at least they stand a chance. When you think about it, Anton, do you disagree with me?”

“No,” he said after a moment. “I don’t disagree with you.”

“Besides, you’re helping a friend.”

“You’re many things to me, Aria, but friend isn’t exactly—”

“No,” she said, “I mean you know someone who’s arriving on the next boat.”

“What? Who?”

“Ilieva went back to Russia two months ago. Her grandmother was dying and she wanted to see her, but then she couldn’t get a visa to come back to the United States and she got stuck over there. Think of everything she’s done for us over the years.”

“She’s done a lot.”

“So do something for her. Go downstairs to the restaurant tonight, and give the FedEx envelope to the men who are bringing her back to New York. The interaction’s over in five minutes, and you’re done. Ilieva’s boat moves unmolested into the port at Red Hook. The shipping container is driven away and unloaded, and she’s back in New York on Monday morning. You can come home tomorrow, make up a story for Sophie about a nervous breakdown or something, and life resumes its former course.”

“And life resumes its former course,” he said. He was watching Elena. After they’d made love in the hotel room and slept for a while she had wanted to go swimming, and he’d left her to change while he came down to call Aria. Now Elena was crossing the piazza barefoot, wrapped in a towel and headed for the beach. “Why does she have to come back in a shipping container? Couldn’t you have just sent her a passport?”

“There wasn’t time. She told me she was in some kind of trouble. She wanted to get out of Russia quickly and it was the best I could do on short notice.”

“Aria, promise me you’ll leave me alone after this.”

“This is the last job I’ll ever ask you to do.”

Elena stepped out of sight along the beach.

“Do you remember that night,” he said, “when we were fourteen and I cut your hair in your bedroom?”

She was quiet for a moment. “Why?”

“I don’t know. I was just thinking about it today. There was a certain time in our lives when we didn’t have to become so. . well, so adversarial, for lack of a better word.”

“I don’t consider you an enemy,” Aria said.

“What do you consider me, then?”

“Listen,” she said, “I’d love to stay on the line and talk, but I have things to do. It’s just business, Anton. Remember that.”

“Just business,” he repeated.

“Goodbye, Anton,” Aria said, and she disconnected before he could respond. He hung up the phone and followed after Elena.

She was in the water. He watched from the beach while she swam out to the breakwater, pale and full of grace. She swam beautifully. She climbed up onto the breakwater rocks, turned and waved at him. That was the moment when he knew; he saw the slight swell of her body when she turned toward him, the weight of her breasts when she raised her arm, and he understood why she had come to him.

“Oh my God,” he said, aloud. Elena turned her back on him to look out toward Capri, a small hopelessly erotic figure with his shorts clinging wet around her legs (she’d brought no swimsuit from New York), and the feeling of falling in love was literal: a fall, handholds breaking away in the descent. She swam back to him and he wrapped her in a towel. She sat curled up tight against his side, not quite shivering but not quite warm either, and he held her close with his arm around her shoulders. While she was out at sea he had taken off his wedding ring. Now he buried it with his free hand, pushing it as deep as it would go into the sand.

17

Ilieva moving over the ocean:

It is dark, but dark isn’t a strong enough word. It is ink, purest black, purest absence-of-light. The air is dense and still. There are fifteen girls in a small room squared out of the middle of a shipping container. They sit shoulder-to-shoulder with their backs to the walls, as they have since the ship left Lithuania. If you want to lie down you have to move to the center, but they can’t all lie down at once, there isn’t room, so they often fall asleep sitting upright and wake up disoriented with numb legs and painful backs. Time comes to a standstill. They long for fresh air. The ship is so enormous that they feel no movement of waves; there is only a faint steady vibration of engines that surrounds them in their metal room. Their imagined lives in America are heady and bright but when they drift off to sleep with their backs to the walls they have nightmares. It’s sometimes hard to tell the difference between being awake and being asleep.

The captain lets them out at intervals, when it’s safe, but the intervals are too rare and the claustrophobia is pure agony. There’s a girl from Kiev who will do nothing but sit in the corner and weep. The others try to comfort her, but none of them happen to speak Ukrainian and the girl from Kiev speaks neither Russian nor English. Ilieva closes her eyes in the stifling darkness and thinks the same thought over and over again: I will never go home again. She draws her knees to her chest and tries to vanish into memories. The girl from Kiev sobs once beside her, and Ilieva takes her hand. The hand is hot and fevered, and the girl is shaking. She’s sick and has been for days now. She won’t eat or drink. She whispers something through her tears.

“I’m sorry,” Ilieva murmurs, in Russian and then in English. “I don’t speak Ukrainian. I don’t understand.”

But the girl keeps whispering, and after a while Ilieva does understand her, even though the girl’s delirious, even though they have no language in common. I miss my family. I am so afraid. It takes so much to come here, and I’ve left so much behind.

18

“Where did you come from?” David asked in the evening.

Elena had been on Ischia for less than six hours, and she’d slept for a while and gone swimming. Now she sat with Anton and David on the piazza, eating pizza, and Anton had his arm over her shoulders. Over the past few days the breeze from the sea had grown cooler. One or two other stragglers from the tourist season were inside the restaurant, but no one else sat outside. A waiter had come around and placed a candle on the table, and David seemed ill at ease and restless in the flickering light.

“New York,” Elena said.

“I meant originally.”

“A place you’ve never heard of,” Elena said lightly. “A town up in northern Canada.”

“I’ve been to Canada. I’ve been traveling since my wife died.”

“Not this far north, trust me.”

“I took the ice road to Tuktoyaktuk,” David said.

“You’ve been to Tuktoyaktuk? You’re serious?”

“I was trying to get as far north as I could,” he said. “Which town are you from?”

“Inuvik.”

“I spent a few days there.”

“In Inuvik? Why?”

“I liked it there,” David said. “I was there in the winter and the northern lights were beautiful. The sun never came up, but I liked living by moonlight.”

“It’s small,” she said. “Everything’s always either muddy or frozen. There’s nothing up there.”

“You’re talking about a lack of employment?”

“No, I’m talking about a lack of everything. A loss of potential. It’s hard to explain. There’s just. . it’s a narrowing of possibilities,” she said. “Even the smartest people end up doing nothing much with their lives, because there’s nothing to do. It’s not just Inuvik, it’s everywhere in the world that’s small and remote. Fewer things are possible in places like that.”

“I think I understand. Do you believe in ghosts?” David asked her.

“David,” Anton said, “the poor girl just got here.” He couldn’t seem to lift his hand from her thigh under the table.

“You know how much I hate small talk.”

“I hate it too,” Elena said. “It’s small.”

“Well said.”

“I don’t think I believe in ghosts,” she said.

“Have you ever seen one?”

“No. If I had I’d believe in them.” She was tired, and a short time later she excused herself and went to bed. David sipped at a glass of coffee and stared out at the harbor.

“I like her,” David said, when his coffee was done.

“So do I.” Anton was perfectly content for the first time in memory.

“What’s she doing here?”

“I have no idea.” Anton knew exactly what she was doing there, but he didn’t want to talk about it. The night was too good; the stars were bright, the coffee was perfect, in a few hours the transaction would be over and he would be perfectly free. There was Elena and soon there would be a child, and he was already thinking about names. Esme. Michael. Zooey. Lucille.

“I have no idea what I’m doing here either.” There was an edge to David’s voice. “I’m thinking about leaving tomorrow.”

“Why are you leaving?” Anton was surprised by the loneliness that overcame him at the thought of this.

“Look, you’ll think I’m crazy.” David was leaning back in his chair, looking up at the stars.

“I promise I won’t.”

“I felt this, well. . this prickling at the back of my neck today. I know it sounds absurd, but I don’t know how else to say it. I was sitting on that wall over there this morning, my back to the harbor, just reading the newspaper, and that feeling comes over me. I turn around, and no one’s watching me. But the last time I felt like that, the last two times, I saw her a little while later.”

“Saw who?”

“My wife,” David said. “If I stay here now I’m just marking time on this little island, waiting for her to appear again. How long can you flee from a ghost? She’s been dead for five years now. I don’t know why I’m afraid of her. I mean Christ, it’s Evie. It’s just my wife. I love her. But I’m afraid of the dead.”

“Who wouldn’t be?” Anton was uneasy. He didn’t know what to say.

“Ideally, no one. Ideally, we’d, I don’t know, we’d embrace them, man, we’d just fucking accept the fact that they walk among us and get on with our lives. It shouldn’t be that big a deal, you know? Things overlap sometimes.”

“You think they walk. .” Anton didn’t want to hear the answer to the question, so he stopped midsentence and let it hang in the air.

“Aren’t you listening? I saw her. Twice.”

“After,” Anton said carefully.

“Yes, fucking after. I went up north after she died, like I was telling Elena. There’s nothing up there, but that was the point — I wanted to get away from everything, from the whole nightmare of the last few months. I think I was just trying to get as far away from the cancer ward as humanly possible, actually. I sold all my stuff, I broke the lease on my apartment and headed north. The landscape up there was so beautiful, I can’t even describe it. There was almost no daylight, just darkness and then twilight, and the moon was brighter than I’d ever seen. I could see the northern lights out the window of my hotel room. I stayed in Inuvik for a while, then I took the ice road up to Tuktoyaktuk and rented a snowmobile one day. I rode a bit out of town. It’s silent up there, but the snowmobile was loud, and I just wanted to be there in the silence for a minute. So I stopped the snowmobile, and I felt like someone was watching me, so I turned around and there she was—” David gestured, and in the movement of his hand Anton almost saw her. “She was standing on top of the snow in her wedding dress. She was only there for an instant, just a flash, but she smiled at me and I could smell the vanilla perfume she used to wear.”

“And then again?”

“Yes, again. I got out of the arctic as fast as I could, headed down to Sault Ste. Marie for a while, and then I went to Europe and I saw her in the crowd in Athens. And you’re thinking, Right, you saw her in the crowd in Athens, whatever. You can see anyone in a crowd in Athens. There’s too many fucking people there, that’s the problem with the place, and everyone on earth sort of looks like someone else from the back. But I was walking, and I saw a black woman wearing a long blue dress far up ahead. My wife was from Kenya, and her wedding dress was blue. This woman in the crowd was moving in and out of view. I started following her, but I couldn’t get close. And just when I’m thinking, Come on, get a grip, she’s been dead for years now, Evie turned around and smiled at me. It was just like we’d been temporarily separated and she was waiting for me to catch up.”

The implications of this caught Anton with a sudden chill.

“Ghost stories,” he said weakly, and made an attempt at a lighthearted laugh.

“The thing is,” David said, “I’m not unafraid, I keep hoping I’ll stop seeing her and then, I don’t know, get some kind of peace in the world — but if she left, I mean really left, if I didn’t think she was still somewhere close by, I think I’d miss her even more. So there’s no way out of this one, is there.”

“You ever see her when you were with someone else?”

“No. I only see her when I’m alone.”

“Then we’ll sit out here for a while. The other night,” Anton said, “on the dock, you said that for a certain sum of money you might be willing to do something for me.”

“Make me an offer,” David said. “God knows I could use some traveling money.”

“Would you do it for five hundred euros?”

“You’d pay me five hundred euros to give an envelope to someone?”

“I don’t know these people. It might be dangerous, they might—”

“It’s a deal,” David said. “I’ll be fine.”

When the restaurant had closed they sat on a low stone wall by the harbor, looking at the boats. The sense of impending freedom was exhilarating. Earlier in the day Anton had called his old bank in New York and had the eighteen thousand dollars from Aria wired into a local checking account where he’d already moved the bulk of his savings. Now he sat by the harbor with David in the half-light, thinking of a bright new life that would start tomorrow, thinking of getting a job somewhere and living with Elena and the child in Sant’Angelo.

“What time is it?” David asked. Anton felt his tension in the air.

“A little after nine. She won’t appear if I’m with you, will she?”

“No,” David said, “she won’t.”

“Then I’ll wait with you,” Anton said. “I’ll wait with you till it’s time.”

They walked out past the harbor and along the narrow strip of beach that tethered Ischia proper to its satellite, the islet that rose out of the water on the other side of the harbor. It was very nearly its own island and no one lived there. A few hotels lined the edge of the islet that faced the harbor, but sheer rock rose up behind them. A path curved around the hill to the right. They started up the hillside, but the path was hard and steep. After a little while they turned and leaned on a bank of sand and soapstone, looking back at the village. On the other side of the harbor Sant’Angelo was a wall of lights, houses terraced up the hillside. Anton could see the hotel from here, on the edge of the lights near the piazza.

“What was she like?” Anton asked.

“Evie? It’s a funny thing, you know. People die, you remember them as angels. It gets harder and harder to remember what was real. She wasn’t an angel. . I mean, look, I was dealing coke and she was handling the money. So she wasn’t necessarily good, you know, in any kind of an absolute law-abiding non-drug-dealing sense of the word, but she was good to me. We were good to each other.”

“All that matters, I guess.”

“I think so, personally. What about your wife?”

“My wife? I don’t know. My wife canceled our wedding twice. My wife was already planning to leave me and move to San Francisco when we left New York on our honeymoon. We disappointed each other.”

“You don’t love her?”

“I do. I did. But not enough. I don’t know why either of us went through with it. Look—”

A single light had blinked on in the restaurant of their hotel, a weak shine over the water. It was hard to tell at this distance, but through the far-off windows he thought he saw figures moving. Four people, setting up chairs at a table.

“We have to go back,” Anton said. “Listen, you go first. Try not to let them hear you. If they hear you, tell them your name’s Anton Waker and that you’ll bring the package down in a few minutes. I’ll be four minutes behind you. We meet in your room.”

David nodded silently and moved away from him down the path, and Anton felt a sudden guilt. He was sending David off alone, the man’s ghost wife could be smiling in the air around any given corner, and then he remembered that he didn’t believe in ghosts and felt like an idiot. He spent a few minutes after that staring at his watch while David crossed the length of beach and disappeared into the shadows at the edge of the piazza. It wasn’t quite four minutes, but Anton couldn’t take it anymore and followed him.

There was no one on the beach. The boats bobbed quietly against the piers, soft sounds of waves calmed by the breakwaters. The piazza was deserted. The front door of the hotel was unlocked, as always. Anton slipped in almost silently, heard the soft murmur of voices from the restaurant. A faint impression of light down the corridor. He looked up the stairs and saw David crouched low at the top of the staircase. David smiled and gave him a silent thumbs-up: he had crept in undetected. Anton let go of the door, too soon — it slipped out of his hand and closed loudly, and the murmur of voices stopped. He was silent. The men in the restaurant were silent. David was silent; he had clenched his hands together white-knuckled and he was glaring at Anton. Anton closed his eyes and thought of praying, but he’d never been to church and had nothing to pray to and the world felt less than holy at that moment.

“Hello?” someone called out, in English. Anton signaled to David—stay— and walked down the darkened corridor that separated the foyer from the restaurant.

A single light was on over one of the tables by the window. Otherwise the restaurant was dark, upside-down chairs on the tables casting shadows on the walls. Four men sat watching him. They were in their thirties, of indeterminate national origin, well dressed. They gazed blandly at him, except for the man sitting to Anton’s right, who smiled and gestured at an empty chair.

“Please,” he said, “join us.”

A bottle of wine stood half-consumed on the table. One of the men was casually folding a map and putting it away as Anton sat down. Another was shuffling papers into a neat little pile and turning them over blank side up.

“What brings you to the island of Ischia, my friend?” The man’s accent was British with Eastern European undertones.

“I’m writing a guidebook,” Anton said. He cursed himself for stupidity as he said this, but it occurred to him that Aria didn’t know about the guidebook so perhaps all wasn’t lost after all, maybe the slip wasn’t ruinous, maybe they’d still believe he was David Grissom and that David Grissom was he.

“A guide to Ischia in the off-season?”

“To the world in the off-season.”

They were quiet for a moment, then one of them laughed and raised his wineglass. “To the world in the off-season,” he repeated. “Cheers.” The others raised their glasses too. “Some wine?”

“Thank you.”

One of the men poured him a glass of wine. A reaction seemed to be expected, so Anton sipped at it and nodded appreciatively. He was aware that he appeared perfectly calm — an old gift, extraordinarily useful in his first career — but his nerves were spun glass. The wine tasted like nothing. It was a dull shock that this moment had actually come; all these strained lost weeks of waiting for the transaction, and the transaction was at last about to occur.

“The wine’s excellent,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Anton Waker, I presume,” the man with the British accent said.

“Who? Oh, no, actually, I’m David Grissom. I’m afraid you’ve mistaken me—” It seemed like the perfect time to make his escape; he smiled apologetically and stood up to leave, but someone grasped his arm.

“Sit, sit, you think we’d renege on our hospitality so quickly? Come now, a small misunderstanding, sit with us a moment anyway. It’s a beautiful evening, and as you say, the wine is excellent. Alberto,” said the man with the British accent. “Ali for short. This is Claro, Mario, Paul.”

Claro said something in another language and the others smiled. Anton smiled too, trying to look as politely clueless as possible and wondering what their real names were. He was acutely aware of his heartbeat. “And you might be wondering,” Ali said, “why Ischia on a Friday night in October?”

“Why Ischia,” Mario repeated. His accent was, if not exactly British, clipped in a manner suggestive of an expensive British education.

“Because I like peace and quiet,” Ali said.

“Hard to find anywhere quieter than a tourist destination in the off-season,” Anton said.

“A man after my own heart. Every tourist destination goes quiet in the winter, but not many places go as quiet as this. There are no cars. There are no tourists. The shops are boarded up; the market hardly opens. And my new favorite restaurateur is kind enough to extend his hospitality.” He raised his glass again. “To Gennaro,” he said. The others repeated him, except for Paul, who only smiled. “You’re staying here at the hotel, Mr. Grissom?”

“I am.”

“You wouldn’t know a man by the name of Anton Waker, would you? A fellow guest?”

“Anton Waker,” Anton repeated. His fear had faded. He felt exactly as he had when he was selling Social Security cards in New York — that perfect serenity, the steadiness that overcame him. He was like a fish slipping back into water, like a bird rising back into the air. He sipped his wine and swirled it in the glass, considering. “The name’s familiar. Yes, actually—” He stilled the glass but the wine continued moving for a moment—“I do know the man you mean. Brown hair, medium build? He’s in the room next to mine upstairs.”

“You know him well?”

“Waker? No, I barely know him at all. We’ve said hello once or twice.”

“Did he mention when he was checking out?”

And the fear crashed down upon him again. “I only know him to say hello in the hallway,” he said. “We’ve never really talked.” His legs trembled a little under the table, but his hands were still.

Ali nodded. The others looked at him steadily. Anton feigned a yawn.

“Forgive me,” he said, “it’s been a long day. If you’ll excuse me, I believe I’ll retire for the evening. Thank you again for the wine.”

“Don’t mention it,” Claro said. “Would you ask Waker to come downstairs?”

“I will. Goodnight.” Anton heard them speaking in some other language as he moved away along the corridor and neared the foot of the stairs. He knew it wasn’t Italian, but he couldn’t otherwise identify it. It wasn’t quite Russian. David was standing at the top of the stairs; Anton motioned him to be still. He walked up the stairs and moved past David, knocked loudly on the door of David’s empty room, opened and closed the door, and then took off his shoes and tiptoed in his socks back to where David stood.

“Listen,” Anton whispered, “I think this is different from what I thought it was.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think it’s more dangerous than I thought.”

David shrugged. “I’ll be fine,” he whispered. “Although I wish I had a gun.”

“What?”

“I always carried one when I was dealing coke. Never fired it, I just liked to have it in my pocket. Go get the package.”

Anton opened the door to his room and closed it behind him. Elena had dozed off with the bedside lamp on, and she was improbably lovely in the yellow light. Jim was curled up close against her side. She awoke with a start and sat up blinking.

“What time is it?”

“Ten fifteen. Shh. Go back to sleep.”

But she was wide-awake now, watching him. He was on his hands and knees, fumbling under the wardrobe. His fingers touched the edge of the FedEx envelope.

“What are you doing?” she asked in a stage whisper. “What’s going on?”

“It’s happening,” Anton murmured. He pressed a finger to his lips.

“That transaction you were telling me about?”

“I don’t want them to hear your voice. Will you lock the door behind me and turn out the light?”

She nodded and he slipped back out into the hall. The door locked behind him with a sharp click; Anton winced at the sound and the light under the door blinked out. David stood motionless at the top of the stairs.

“Just go down there and say you’re Anton Waker. When they ask, you have a package for them.”

“Anton Waker.” David’s eyes were alight. Almost any adventure is better than limbo. “You’re seriously paying me five hundred euros for this?”

“When this is over,” Anton said, “I just want a different life. It’s worth five hundred euros to me.”

“Fair enough.”

“They might bring up my cousin,” Anton said softly. “Her name’s Aria. Aria Waker. She’s the one who’s orchestrating this thing.”

“Aria Waker,” David whispered. “I’ll remember.”

Anton opened his wallet, counted out five one-hundred-euro bills and gave them to David, who fanned them out to examine them and smiled before he stuffed them in his pocket. Anton gave David the FedEx envelope with the passports and David started down the stairs.

“Wait,” Anton whispered. He whispered into the keyhole, “Elena, open up,” and she unlocked the door instantly. He slipped back into the room and removed the singer’s gun from the top dresser drawer. Elena drew in her breath when she saw it glint in the moonlight — he ignored her — and back out in the hallway he pressed the gun into David’s hand. “Here,” he said. “Just don’t fire it, okay?”

“Don’t worry, I won’t,” David whispered. “Thank you.” He was putting the gun in the pocket of his sweatshirt. “Are these guys that dangerous?”

“I assume so, frankly.”

“Hey,” David said, “at least you’re honest.”

“Thank you. I’m trying.”

David Grissom descended the stairs.

At the top of the staircase there was nothing to do but wait. In the locked room behind him Elena was silent. He heard Jim’s movements — a jump from the bed to the dresser and then from the dresser to the floor, soft thudding landings — and willed the cat to be still. He heard the voices down in the restaurant, indistinct from here, the murmured greetings — he heard his own name — and then a period of conversation that he couldn’t quite make out. He crouched low in the shadows, straining to hear. Time was passing very slowly. There was time to take in every detail around him: the shadows of the banisters, the gritty texture of the hallway linoleum under his hand. It began to seem that it was taking too long. He glanced at his watch and fifteen minutes had passed. And then chairs scraping back, and a sound — something small and hard had fallen to the floor. And then, quite clearly, “You came armed, Mr. Waker?”—but as hard as he tried, he could understand nothing else, until finally, “. . a walk on the beach?” and he heard David’s voice, nervous now—“At night?”

The voices were becoming clearer; the group was moving toward the foot of the stairs, toward the door. There were footsteps, a muted “No please — after you,” the door of the hotel opened and closed. The building was silent. Anton knocked softly on the door to his own room, where Elena was waiting.

“What’s happening?” she whispered.

“They took him outside.” Anton closed the door behind him. The moonlight through the sliding glass doors was brilliant. He could see Elena clearly but he couldn’t meet her eyes. She sat cross-legged on the bed, watching him. Anton went to the balcony door and waited with his forehead almost against the glass, until the men came into view on the strip of beach that connected Ischia to the islet. As silently as possible Anton slid open the glass door a few inches, and the room was filled with the sounds of ocean and wind. The men were walking in a tight group, dark receding figures on the sand, and he couldn’t tell which one was David. On the other end of the beach they stopped. There seemed to be some discussion; after a moment they started up the path that curved around the edge of the hill, dim shadows in the moonlight until they disappeared from sight. Anton waited.

Inside the room they were perfectly still. Jim was sitting on the bedside table now, regarding him seriously with one shining eye. Elena sat on the bed and Anton stood by the sliding glass door straining to catch some glimpse of movement in the darkness of the islet. He kept glancing at the bedside clock. Five minutes passed, then ten. Long silence and then a sharp bright sound, a ripple over the surface of the night gone so fast that he thought at first he might have imagined it — If I turn and Elena’s face registers nothing, then I did imagine it and the gun didn’t really go off — but when he looked over his shoulder Elena had pressed the palm of her hand to her mouth and there were tears on her face. The sound was repeated once, twice. Three bullets; she was shaking; she was going to scream.

“Don’t make a sound,” he said.

Elena stared at him for a moment and then went into the bathroom. The light flicked on under the door and he heard water running. He closed the sliding glass door but left the wooden shutters open a few inches, watching through the crack.

Some time passed before he saw them again. A group of figures, four now instead of five, making their way over the hillside. They came back over the strip of beach toward the pink hotel and he stopped breathing when they came close to the building, but no one entered. There were soft voices and footsteps on the cobblestones outside the hotel door. Someone laughed. He stood frozen by the door of the room, but he could hear almost nothing — an impression of voices, of departing footsteps — and a long time later a car started up on the road beyond the edge of Sant’Angelo and receded.

19

In an apartment on the bright sharp edge of New York, glass tower, Aria sat alone on a white leather sofa. She’d paid extra for noise-blocking windowpanes, and the silence in the apartment was all but absolute. A telephone lay on a marble table near her knees. She had been sitting there for an hour when it began to ring; the sound made her jump; she glanced at her watch and picked up the phone to look at the call display, which said italy and nothing else.

“It’s done,” Ali said.

“Thank you. We’ll speak again soon.”

The line went dead. Aria set the receiver down on the glass coffee table and sank back into the sofa. The room was large and bleached of color; white walls, white carpet, white leather, white phone. All of this was by her own design and usually the absence of color soothed her, but at this moment it was making her feel like a ghost. She closed her eyes again and realized that her hands were shaking. She was dizzy. After a long time she stood up and walked unsteadily to the bedroom, took her suitcase down from the closet shelf. She packed quickly, in a daze. She put on her coat and left the apartment.

20

Outside in the street Aria hailed a taxi. From a pay phone at La-Guardia Airport she called Anton’s parents’ apartment.

Anton’s father answered.

“Sam,” she said.

“Aria?”

“I’m going away,” Aria said. “I’m leaving tonight, and I’ll be gone for a while. You haven’t heard from me, okay?”

“Well, okay. Is something the matter?”

“Sam, I’m sorry. I’m just — I’m really sorry.”

“Has something happened?”

“Perhaps you’d better sit down.”

“Wait.” He was on a cordless phone. His wife was lost in a book in the living room. He carried the phone past her and closed the apartment door behind him, walked out through the vast dim warehouse to the loading dock and closed that door behind him too. Summer had finally broken; it was cold outside and he wasn’t wearing a jacket. He stood on the loading dock with his back to the wall. “Okay,” he said quietly. “Tell me what you know.”

“Listen,” and her voice was choked, she didn’t sound like herself. It occurred to him as she began to talk, in a small part of his mind that remained rational and detached against the unspeakable thing she was explaining to him, that he had never known her to cry before. Even when she was eleven, when her mother was deported on a clear March afternoon. Strange child.

“I don’t understand,” he said after a moment. Her building was visible somewhere across the river in the mass of bright towers around the lost World Trade Center. She had pointed it out to him once, but he wasn’t sure now which one it was. Manhattan was as distant as another galaxy tonight, an indifferent constellation of tower lights.

“Sam, there was an accident.” And she began to explain it all over again, a complicated story about a deal gone wrong, a misunderstanding, a body that couldn’t be recovered without bringing both the FBI and the mob down upon them, but he was having a hard time listening or a hard time understanding, he wasn’t sure which. He held the phone to his face and stared at the river.

When the phone call was over he went back into the store and locked the loading-dock doors behind him. The door to the apartment was a shadow at the back of the vast room, and he couldn’t bring himself to pass through it again. On the other side of the door his wife sat reading. She would look up when he came in; he would kneel down beside her and begin to speak. He couldn’t do it yet. He turned on the lights over the back corner of the warehouse, where two figureheads he’d recently started restoring stood waiting for paint. Sam stood looking at them for a while. They were beautiful to him, and in a distant way he understood that it was important to stay busy for a little while, to keep his hands occupied even though they were shaking. From a supply cupboard in the back he fetched his paint and his chisels. He thought there might be a way of surviving Aria’s news.

One was saved from the sea near Gibraltor. She depicted a strong-faced woman arcing forward, her arms disappearing into the folds of her gown and her gown disappearing into the folds of carved waves. One was rescued from a shipwreck off the Cape of Good Hope, barnacles adhering like stars in her hair. In her arms she cradled a fish. Both figureheads were women, but this was by no means a given. His mind wandered over other figureheads he’d read about as he worked. Some took the form of dragons, of lions, of princes and kings. The clipper-ship Styx had a figure of the devil. All the Corsair’s ships set out with a pegasus, and the nineteenth-century ship Flying Cloud bore an angel with a trumpet. During the reign of Henry VIII, the preferred British figurehead was the lion. The British privateer The Terrible had a skeleton at the helm. The French ship Revenant set sail with a corpse.

After a long time he caught himself staring blankly at the figurehead, unmoving, and he realized that his hands were shaking again. He glanced at his watch; it was eleven P.M. and the light under the apartment door had gone out. His wife was in bed. He had survived the first few hours. He blinked and leaned in close to his work. He had been removing the hard pale rings of ancient barnacles from the carved hair of the figurehead from the Cape of Good Hope. Delicate work with a blade-thin chisel. She had drifted to the bottom of the ocean in a cloud of silk and oranges, while a storm tore the surface of the sea far above. Pieces of the merchant ship had descended around her, ribbons of silk unfurling from the broken holds. Some men had drifted downward with the broken ship, he’d been told, but others rose up toward air with the oranges, climbing up onto the rocks and clinging there until the storm had passed, plucking floating oranges from the sea around them and setting off waterlogged for the nearest town. After a while he set down his chisel and began repainting the fish the figurehead held. He gave its scales a shimmering blue-green cast, and painted the inside of its gasping mouth a pink the shade of guavas.

At midnight Samuel Waker stopped painting and went outside to look at the river, at Manhattan shining on the other side. The East River moved over the bedrock riddled with the tunnels of deep underground trains and connected with the Hudson, flowing southeast past the Statue of Liberty, out of New York Harbor and out into the Atlantic. These night seas that circle countries: the Atlantic becomes the Mediterranean at the Strait of Gibraltar, and beyond the island of Sardinia the Mediterreanean becomes the Tyrrhenian Sea. On a Tyrrhenian island Anton sat on his hotel balcony, unblinking. In the room behind him Elena lay motionless, far from sleep. David Grissom had been dead for less than six hours. The moon was a crescent in a clear dark sky.

Anton closed his eyes. Far out over the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, a container ship was moving away from him.