The Singer's Gun

21

When Broden left Waker Architectural Salvage she drove deeper into Brooklyn, east down Graham Avenue into a neighborhood that was bleaker, less expensive, where even now in this era of glass-tower condominiums all the windows still had bars. On the block where Elena had lived an organic grocery store had sprung up and also a hipster clothing boutique, asymmetrical dresses hanging bright between a run-down bodega and a hardware store. Broden parked by the boutique and walked down the block to Elena’s building, rang twice, but no one was home. She got back in the car and took an aspirin — she felt the beginnings of a headache — and turned left on Montrose Avenue. There was the subway, and a small bakery beside it. She parked and bought a couple of croissants before she drove back toward Manhattan. She couldn’t stop thinking about the dead girl in the shipping container, about the girl’s parents waiting for news of their child in some distant land. She called her daughter from the car, but it was getting late and Tova was already in the bath.

“You haven’t seen her yet today,” her husband said.

“I know,” Broden said. “I’m trying to get home before bedtime.”

She took a detour in order to pass in front of Anton’s parents’ store again. Anton’s mother was still on the loading dock, staring out at the river with no expression on her face. Anton’s father was outside now, kneeling beside her with his hand on her back, speaking to her intently. Broden slowed down, but neither of them looked at the car as she passed. At the end of the block she sped up again and passed over the bridge to the spired city.

Broden was tired. There was no case to speak of at this point and no one involved was talking and the whole mess was going nowhere, but back at the office she called Anton’s wife in San Francisco. She had tried before and left unreturned messages. This time Sophie answered the phone and said that she’d left Anton in Europe and as far as she knew he was still there, and could Broden please pass on the message that it would be nice if Anton would come back and sign the annulment papers one of these days. Broden asked if she could tell her anything about Elena James. Sophie went silent, and then said that Elena James had stolen Anton’s cat and that was the last time she’d seen her. Broden asked her what she was talking about and Sophie got angry, said she didn’t feel like getting into it and she knew nothing that she hadn’t already told her and actually she’d really like to just be left alone if Broden wouldn’t mind.

There was a tape that Broden had pulled out earlier in the day. The first tape Elena had ever given her, a few months before she disappeared. After Broden hung up the phone she put on her headphones and pressed play on the machine. The recording begins with a rustling sound — Elena has reached into her bag to activate the machine — and they speak for a moment about points of origin and distant towns.

Anton: “Yellowknife?”

“A small northern city. Then you fly from Yellowknife to Inuvik.”

“How long does all of this take?”

“A long time.”

“How long?”

“Twenty-four hours. Sometimes longer in winter.”

“How much longer?”

“Days. The northern airports close sometimes when the weather’s bad.”

“A distant northern land. How long since you’ve been back there?”

“I haven’t.”

“Haven’t what?”

“Haven’t been back.”

There was a light commotion here, a rustling sound on the tape; Elena was reaching into her purse, fumbling around. A click and then the tape went dead. She told Broden at the time that she’d reached into her purse to get a lozenge and turned the device off by accident, and that the lozenge was because her throat was dry and that was why her voice sounded funny.

Broden took off her headphones, stood up and stretched. It was seven thirty. In other offices she heard people working, a soft murmur of activity and computer keyboards, but when she left her office to put the tape away all of the other doors were closed. Back in her office she looked up a map of the Northwest Territories — there was Inuvik, a tiny red dot on the northern edge of the world — and she thought about involving the Canadian police, placing a call to the RCMP detachment at Inuvik, but there was no real reason to believe Elena was there. The distance between Inuvik and New York was almost dazzling in its extremity.

Broden stood by the window for a moment, thinking of Sophie’s odd comment about Elena taking a cat, before she returned to her desk to make a phone call. The phone rang four times in Elena’s old apartment before Caleb picked up. They’d had a few tense conversations early on and Caleb was no more endearing this evening than he had been previously; the announcement of Broden’s name was greeted with an audible sigh.

“I told you,” Caleb said, “I don’t know anything.”

“Tell me about the cat.” To Broden’s utter amazement there was silence at the end of the line, so she decided that perhaps Sophie wasn’t insane after all and pressed further. “Whose cat was it?”

“She said it belonged to her ex-boss.”

“Can you describe it?”

“What? The cat? I only saw it for a minute. Okay, it was orange. It only had one eye.”

“She was going to Italy to be with him,” Broden said, testing him.

“Look,” Caleb said, “she had every right.”

“Did she?”

“Now you know as much as I do. Anyway, it’s none of your business.” He hung up the phone and Broden didn’t call him back.

The traffic was heavy between Broden’s office and her apartment; she crept home slowly with classical music playing on the radio. Broden arrived home a few minutes too late to kiss her daughter goodnight. Tova had gone to sleep with a blue barrette in her hair. She stirred when Broden gently removed it, but didn’t wake. Broden put the barrette in her jacket pocket. She stood in the bedroom doorway for a long time watching Tova sleep.

22

Anton tried to find David’s family and got nowhere. Two days after the gunshots he left Elena alone on the balcony in the morning — she was staring at the sea, at the horizon, at the cat, at everything except him — and went out into the hallway. No one else was at the hotel so late in the season and Gennaro’s presence was intermittent, but he still looked around before he slipped into David’s room. The room was unlocked. He closed and locked the door behind him, stood blinking for a moment in the warm dim light. The curtains were drawn, the balcony doors closed.

The lamp on the bedside table was on, shining down on a single yellowing lime. An easel was set up by the dresser. When Anton opened the balcony shutters and the room flooded with sunlight he saw that the easel held a small canvas, about ten by ten inches, with an unfinished painting of a lime. Odd to see the same lime, on the same bedside table before the same robin’s-egg wall, as it had existed two or three days earlier; on the canvas it was alive and gleaming, almost photo-real, a brilliant green. Short brush-strokes radiated outward around it; the white of the table, the blue of the walls. Strange, he thought, to rent a room overlooking the Aegean Sea and then close the shutters and paint a piece of fruit on a table. There were four or five canvases stacked against the wall, paintings of limes in waxy perfect detail.

Anton moved the contents of David’s room into his in stages. First the stack of lime paintings and then the clothes, stuffed into a backpack that he found under the bed. The dresser was empty. He threw out the paltry contents of the bathroom — a toothbrush, toothpaste, a razor, a bar of soap — and on his final pass through the room he saw the last painting. It was small and square, perhaps eight inches by eight inches, propped up on top of the dresser. A portrait of a white man and a black woman. The man had dark hair and brown eyes — it was a shock to recognize David — and in the painting he held the woman close. She was startlingly beautiful, with very high cheekbones and enormous brown eyes, and she wore a pale blue dress of some floaty fabric that exposed her collarbones. There was something about the way the air around her was painted; Anton leaned in closer. They were standing together against a brick wall, and there was the faintest disturbance in the bricks, the slightest electrical charge, a haze, and then he understood: Evie had a halo around her. An opening line from a novel he’d once read came back to him unbidden—We are not alone, this side of death— and he took the painting and left the room very quickly, leaving the door ajar. He locked the door of his own room behind him.

When he went through the backpack he found almost nothing. Worn clothing, a plastic bag with two new-looking paint-brushes, an unmarked house key on a plain metal ring. An address book. Anton took the address book with him when he left the hotel, sat down on a low wall by the harbor and turned on his cell phone. Then he remembered that he was supposed to be dead, so he turned it off again and dropped it discreetly into the water. It landed with a little splash and flashed silver for a moment like a sinking fish. He turned back to the piazza and went to the pay phone, where he opened the address book and flipped through page after empty page. It wasn’t that the book was new; its cover was worn, the edges blunted. It was just that in all the years David had carried it with him he’d only seen fit to write down nine telephone numbers, and six of these were 1-800 numbers for various airlines. The others were Margaret (no last name), the Northern Lights Hotel in Inuvik, and the Gallerie Montaigne in Duluth. He called Margaret first.

“Hello,” he said, when a female voice answered. “Are you Margaret?”

“I used to be.”

“You used to be?”

“I changed my name to Margot when I left Sault Ste. Marie,” she said.

“Okay. Margot, do you know a man named David Grissom?”

She was quiet.

“I have his address book,” Anton said. “Yours was the only name in it. I thought—”

“Who are you? Why do you have his address book?”

“Listen,” Anton said, “there’s something. . look, I don’t—”

“Oh God,” she said. “Something’s happened to him.”

Hard not to look across the harbor at the islet, its sheer side rising up behind a single row of bright-painted shops and hotels; hard not to imagine what might lie on the other side of that hill, shallow-buried or maybe lost to the sea, but Anton forced himself to turn away from the thought.

“There was an accident,” Anton said. He looked down at the red pay-phone buttons and felt the islet at his back.

“Is he. .?”

“Yes,” he said quietly, and on the other end of the line she began to weep. Anton closed his eyes for a moment.

“He has no family,” she said.

“None?”

“Well, there’s a sister,” she said. “Somewhere in India, or maybe it was Bangladesh. She belongs to a cult or travels with a guru or does yoga or something. I don’t think they ever spoke.”

“His parents?”

“His mother ran off when he was a little kid. He hasn’t seen her since he was three or four. His father’s dead.”

“Are there friends? Cousins? Anyone?”

“We were living in a commune together for a while,” she said, “so there were always a lot of people around, but no one — he was never — he wasn’t close with anyone.”

“No one except you.”

“No one except me. He’d just been drifting for years, since his wife died. He came down to Sault Ste. Marie for a few months after he’d been up in the arctic, then he said he was going to Europe and I never saw him again. You said I’m the only name in his address book?”

“The only one.”

“I should go,” she said. “Thank you for telling me. At least maybe he’s with her now, you know?”

“With who?” he asked, but she’d already hung up. He realized what she’d meant a second later. He had that same ground-falling-from-under-him sensation that had overcome him when he’d looked at the painting earlier and had to collect himself. He called the Northern Lights Hotel in Inuvik, but the woman who answered told him that they kept no records. He asked if she remembered a David Grissom, but realized how silly the question was as he spoke. It had been years since David had traveled through the far north. The woman had only been working there for a month, she said. She was kind and Anton half-wanted to stay on the phone longer. He said goodbye and called the Gallerie Montaigne in Duluth, but the number had been disconnected.

Anton put David’s address book in his pocket, bought a panino and a latte at the fishermen’s café and brought them up to the room. He opened the balcony door and stepped around Jim — the balcony was just large enough to accommodate two deck chairs and a fully extended cat — and kissed Elena on the forehead. She looked up at him and almost managed a smile but her eyes were glassy.

“You should eat something,” he said.

“I’m not really hungry.”

“Yeah, but that’s what you said yesterday.” He found a place to sit with his back to the sea, his spine pressed against the railing and Jim close against his leg. He tore off a small piece of sandwich.

“I’m really not—”

“Just this one little piece.”

“Okay.” She ate slowly, watching the horizon.

“I called a girl he knew. From his address book. She says he has no family.”

“None?”

“Almost none. An estranged sister somewhere in Asia. Here. Another piece.”

“I’m—”

“One more bite.”

“Fine.” Her face was pale and she’d been crying. She was all but translucent in the sunlight. “But what are you going to do?”

“I think I should wait here,” Anton said.

“For what?”

“Maybe his sister will come looking for him someday. Look, I don’t know what to do. But staying here is the only thing I can think of that seems even halfway honorable.”

“Maybe the police will come looking for you.”

“It’s possible,” he said. “Have I told you how sorry I am to have gotten you involved in this mess?”

“A dozen times.”

“Whatever you decide to do, Elena. .”

“Is it a kind of penance?” Her voice was flat.

“Is what a kind of penance?”

“Waiting here at the scene of the crime.”

“Maybe. Yes.”

“You might wait here forever. It’s possible that no one will ever come looking for him.”

“I know,” he said.

She said she wanted to go and he gave her ten thousand dollars. She insisted it was too much but he insisted she take it. He saw her off at the ferry. Afterward he took the bus back to Sant’Angelo. He walked past the hotel and through the piazza, along the narrow sand beach to the islet, past the strip of hotels on the far shore.

The path that David had walked on his last night on earth curved up around the far side of the islet, but at a certain point it faded out into brush and loose rocks. Anton came upon a broad sloping ledge and found that he could go no further. The cliff rose above him, and it was a sheer drop down to the water below. He looked for footprints, but it had rained twice since the last time he’d seen David. He looked down at the sea, but there was nothing on the rocks and the current seemed rapid. A seagull landed on the surface of the water and was carried quickly away from the shore.

He’d half-hoped for a ghost. He wanted to turn and see David somewhere nearby, smiling at him perhaps, telling him that it was all right, but David’s absence was absolute. The ledge was empty, the day clear and bright, the sea glittering below. Anton was perfectly alone except for the seagulls. Far off in the distance, the white triangle of a sailboat moved over the water.

The pleasing rhythms of evening: pouring cat food into the porcelain bowl, cold water splashing over Anton’s wrists as he filled another bowl with water in the sink. Jim brushed against his leg and then settled down over the water bowl, lapping steadily. Anton crouched down to scratch behind his ears, and the cat purred without looking up.

In the days after Elena left, he settled into a quiet routine. Once or twice a week he took the bus to a larger town to buy groceries and cat food. He went to Naples every so often and bought three or four English-language novels, but they were expensive and he was always running out between trips. Most nights he studied Italian from a Berlitz textbook, alone in his room with the cat asleep on his desk. After a few months he understood the waiters in the fishermen’s café (the last café still open in all of the shuttered-for-the-season village), but the language of the fishermen remained inscrutable. It was a while before someone told him they were speaking Neapolitan, which in his understanding wasn’t quite Italian but wasn’t quite not Italian either. After a while his own Italian was good enough to get a menial job in an enormous hotel two towns over, one of the few places that stayed open year-round. He was a dishwasher in the restaurant and then they made him a porter.

Anton wore a bright uniform and carried suitcases and came home exhausted at the end of the day, made good tips sometimes from the English-speaking tourists. He worked hard and spent time with the cat and studied Italian in his room at night, reread the books in his slowly growing library, tried not to think too much about anyone he loved.

At first he kept Jim indoors, but the cat gazed at the seagulls with such undisguised longing and the improvised litter box on the balcony was becoming a problem, so Anton took Jim out on the beach one evening. Jim moved close to the sand at first, hissing at rocks and trying to look everywhere at once, but then he gradually relaxed enough to begin pouncing on seashells.

He took Jim down to the water early in the morning and then again late at night, when everyone was sleeping and the ocean was his. The cat was orange in daylight, pale in the moonlight. He stalked Anton’s shadow and dug for things in the sand. Anton would sit on a rock and watch him or look at the water. When Anton stood up and began to walk along the shore the cat came with him, never very far from his feet, executing complicated maneuvers in his lifelong efforts to catch his own tail.

The cat slept in a far corner of the bed, curled and independent, although he sometimes stepped on Anton’s chest to wake him in the morning. Anton always woke unpleasantly, sick with memories of gunshots. Most of his dreams involved people disappearing into thin air: alone on the abandoned dream island he wandered from house to house and then out to the empty piazza, the silent beach. Out onto the pier where the abandoned boats bobbed gently in the dead sea, through abandoned houses, abandoned cafés, the abandoned restaurant with four chairs and a bottle of wine set up at a table, the whole abandoned dream landscape suffused with dread.

23

Elena was back on Ischia at the beginning of April, standing pale on the threshold when Anton opened the door. It was an ordinary evening after working the day shift at the hotel two towns over, and Anton hadn’t changed out of his uniform yet. He’d been drinking an Orangina and reading La Repubblica at his desk, stopping to look up the occasional word. There was a soft knock on the door just before midnight and Anton thought everything was over. He stood up, straightened his jacket, and opened the door with tremendous formality, expecting either the Italian police or a thug with a gun or David’s sister or some combination of the above. Elena stood for a moment like an apparition before she fell into his arms, or tried to; her body got in the way. Holding her was awkward. She was immensely pregnant. It was night and she had been traveling for hours. She sank down on the bed and closed her eyes for a moment and didn’t answer right away when he asked if she was all right. He asked if she was sick and she said no, just tired, but her tiredness had taken on the force of illness. She trembled and her hands were cold.

“I’ve missed you so much,” she said. “I’m so sorry I left.”

“Shh. Shh. It’s okay. Are you hungry?” She nodded. He brought her spaghetti and calamari from the restaurant downstairs, which had just reopened that week — the tourists were coming back to Ischia, a slow but widening trickle that would become a torrent by June. He gave her the plate and asked where she’d been, but she was too tired for coherence. She’d gone immediately to France because she spoke the language, and then she’d spent the winter moving slowly through the country in the cold and the rain. Working odd jobs here and there, trying to decide whether to come back to Ischia or not.

“I was afraid you might have gone home to the north,” he said. “I thought I might never see you again.” He held her close and she rested her head on his shoulder. “Don’t you miss your family?”

“More than I can say,” she said. “But if I go home to the north pregnant I’ll never leave again. I’ll be like my sister and just get stuck there forever.”

She drifted off in the middle of a story about a grand hotel in Marseilles where she’d worked in the laundry room, woke seconds later from a dream about snowmobiles and said, “He knew where I was from.”

“What?”

“People from the south, you tell them you’re from the far north and they think you grew up in an igloo, but he knew what it was like up there. Can you believe he’d actually been to Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk? It’s so dark up there,” she said. “It was cold in Paris in January, but I kept thinking, I could be up there. Where it’s dark and there’s nothing. The sun doesn’t even rise in the winter. You live by moonlight for weeks.”

“Ellie, you should rest.”

He took the plate of spaghetti from her hands, set it on the desk behind him. She was slumped over on the edge of the bed. He knelt before her and began unbuckling her shoes.

“You kept the painting,” she said. She was looking up at the small painting of David and Evie, propped up against the wall on top of the desk. Elena’s shoes were stylish, red and shiny like lipstick, and the left buckle was somehow stuck. Anton struggled with it while she talked. Her feet were swollen. “You wouldn’t think a night could last that long,” she said. “My sister won’t talk to me anymore, did you know that? I don’t even know why. I think it’s because I left her there. I used to call her from New York City, and she wouldn’t come to the phone. .”

“You should rest,” Anton murmured. “You’ve been traveling too long.”

24

The case had gone cold, all loose ends and questions. Anton’s parents wouldn’t admit that Anton was missing, let alone that he was dead, which meant there wasn’t even a missing-persons case, and Aria had yet to resurface — in candid moments Broden thought the odds of apprehending Aria were relatively slim, given that the woman made passports for a living — which meant there wasn’t actually much of a false-documents case either. Aria’s one and only known associate — a man whom she’d met once in front of her apartment building, who’d been overheard mentioning a pickup at the docks at Red Hook on the day Broden had last spoken with Elena and who had said nothing interesting since — was followed for three uneventful months until Broden’s supervisor decided that trailing him was a waste of manpower. The girls who had survived the shipping container languished in an immigration facility upstate, awaiting their hearings. They knew very little about the people who had imported them to New York, and they didn’t know the name of the girl who had died. Efforts to track the origins of the container had gone nowhere; the company that had paid for shipping turned out to be a shell corporation in Estonia, its corporate address an abandoned post-office box.

Broden’s director agreed that the case had stalled, and Broden’s days were far too long and too frantic. No one had time for hopeless cases. But she was attending a conference in Geneva that April and it was a small matter to extend the trip by two days, to fly south to Rome and board a silver train at Termini and follow a story about a cat down the coast to Naples, where she paid a taxi driver to take her to the docks.

She bought a ticket for Ischia and boarded the next ferry. At the very least, she told herself, it’s a day on a beautiful island. But her next thought was that it was yet another day without her daughter and her throat tightened. When she’d emptied her jacket pockets to pass through airport security she’d found a blue plastic barrette; she’d carefully removed it from her sleeping daughter’s hair some months ago and it hadn’t left her pocket.

“You’re never here for her,” her husband had said as she was packing for Europe, and Broden couldn’t deny the accusation. Her work required long hours. There were days when she left for work before Tova was awake and came home after Tova had gone to bed. The child had turned seven while Broden was in Geneva.

“Ischia!” a crew member shouted, and Broden stepped out onto the dock. She traveled by taxi to the town of Sant’Angelo, where the driver let her off at the top of a long hill and told her he could go no farther.

She went first to the hotel where Sophie had said they had stayed. It was a warm day; the doors of the restaurant had been thrown open, and one or two waiters moved about in the cool shadows of the interior. An orange cat was sleeping in a beam of sunlight just inside the threshold.

Broden knelt awkwardly on the cobblestones and touched the cat’s soft fur. The cat started awake, but only one eye opened. He purred when Broden stroked his head.

“He likes you,” a man said in Italian. He stood a few feet inside the restaurant. An immaculate man in his fifties, well dressed. Blue sea glinted through the windows behind him.

“I like him,” Broden said. “Who does he belong to?”

“He’s the hotel cat,” Gennaro said. “He keeps the mice away.”

“So he doesn’t belong to anyone in particular?” It had been some years since she’d had occasion to speak Italian, and the language felt awkward to her. She was sure she was mispronouncing important words. The cat turned over on his back so Broden could stroke his milk-white stomach.

“Well, he’s Anton’s cat, I suppose. But we’ve all adopted him.”

Broden was still for a moment, her hand on the cat. She stood up slowly to look at him.

“Anton’s cat,” she said carefully. “Are you saying. . is Anton here?”

“He lives here,” Gennaro said, “but he works in another town during the day.”

Broden smiled. “He lives here?”

“You know him?”

“I’m a friend of the family,” she said. “His mother said he might be here and I was hoping to see him. Do you know what time he’ll be back?”

Gennaro glanced at his watch. “He usually eats dinner here around seven,” he said, “but it’s still only the afternoon. Is he expecting you?”

“It’s a surprise,” Broden said. “Is there somewhere I might wait for him?”

“There’s a piazza just around the corner.”

“When you see Anton, will you tell him I’m waiting for him?”

“Of course.”

She walked away down the hill and the piazza opened up before her. It was only April but summer had started early. The air was hot and tourists already wandered the cobblestones, buying newspapers at the newsstand and linen dresses at the clothing boutique by the still-closed seafood restaurant, and two out of three cafés had outdoor tables and umbrellas set up in the sunlight. Broden chose a table with a pleasant view of the harbor, ordered a cup of coffee and a sandwich and settled down to wait.

An hour passed, and then two. The boats moved in and out of the harbor. She paid and went across the square to another café for a change of view. She drank more coffee, ordered another sandwich, bought a paper and read it cover to cover, then sat for a long time watching the boys play on the beach. She had brought a novel with her — a thick paperback about spies that she’d picked up in an airport — but she didn’t care for the opening and put it back in her bag.

There’s something unnatural about being alone in paradise, and the loneliness was strange and unexpected. She watched the stream of tourists and realized that she was surrounded by couples and children. She missed her husband and daughter. She was thinking of Anton’s parents, remembering his mother sitting slumped on the loading dock, staring out at the water with no light in her eyes. There was no doubt in Broden’s mind that they believed Anton to be dead, and she found herself trying to imagine what unfathomable set of circumstances might compel her to turn the police away if she thought her child had been murdered. In her mind’s eye she saw Tova lying on the ground like a broken doll, and the thought was so blindingly horrific that she had to close her eyes for a moment and force herself to think of nothing.

In her wallet she was carrying an identification card. Anton Waker, Water Inc., 420 Lexington Ave. Broden looked at the photograph in the warm end-of-day light. Anton Waker stared into the camera, just another office worker, smiling slightly. Nothing in his calm gaze suggested that he’d sold a Social Security number and fake passport to his secretary, or that the diploma on the wall above his desk was a fake, or that he came from the kind of family that sold stolen goods and imported girls from Europe in shipping containers.

Broden had been waiting for nearly four hours. The sun was dropping low in the sky but the heat was undiminished and tourists milled about on the beach. She closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair. Listening to the seagulls, the voices, the waves and the movement of boats in the harbor.

“You know,” Anton said, “I could never figure out where they hide the magnetic strip.”

Broden opened her eyes. The man sitting across the table in a t-shirt and jeans bore little resemblance to the pale young office worker on the surface of the identity card.

“It’s the black border around the picture,” Broden said. “That’s what the scanner reads in the lobby.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m Alexandra Broden.” She reached into her pocket for her badge and set it down on the table between them. “I work with the State Department, Diplomatic Security Service. We’re the division that investigates passport fraud.”

“Well, I don’t know anything about passport fraud.”

“I’m afraid it’s a little late for that,” Broden said. “I have you on tape.”

“I doubt that,” Anton said, with considerably more confidence than he felt at that moment. He had stopped by the hotel on the way to the beach and Gennaro had told him that someone wanted to see him, and now he wished there was some way of silently warning Elena not to come to him. She had been back on Ischia for three weeks, and she spent her afternoons reading on the warm sand under an enormous sun hat. He found himself looking for her among the tourists.

“Your first sale was to a waitress,” Broden said. “She worked at an Irish bar near Grand Central Station. She wanted to go to flight school.”

Anton was looking down the beach but he couldn’t see Elena. In a hazy recess of memory she reclined on the floor of his office and reached casually into her handbag. What was it like when you were growing up? His heart was beating very fast. “That’s a nice story,” he said, “but I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Who else? Federico. He was from Bolivia, and he scared you a little. He made a joke about shooting you, so the waitress called Aria from behind the bar and she came and took you away from there. Shall I go on?”

Anton was silent. He had spotted Elena among the tourists. She was sitting on the sand near the water’s edge under the shade of her sun hat, looking out toward Capri.

“There was Catina,” Broden said. “Catina from Lisbon. She was reading a magazine when you came into the Russian Café.”

“Do you still talk to Elena?” Anton asked flatly.

“No,” she said, “Elena’s served her purpose for me. But if you’re still talking to Elena, you should understand the position she was in. She was facing deportation if she didn’t cooperate.”

“Back to the arctic,” Anton said. He tried to smile, but it was a painful wince. “I probably would’ve done the same thing.”

“But I’m not here to talk about Elena,” Broden said, “although I’d be interested to know what became of her. I’d prefer to talk to you about a shipping container.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know very much about shipping containers.”

“Then let me describe one to you.” Broden’s voice was calm. “A blue shipping container of uncertain origin comes into the dock at Red Hook in Brooklyn. It’s unlike most shipping containers, in that it has a makeshift air pipe, and this air pipe leads to a secret room. The room’s seven feet eight inches by eight feet, and it holds fifteen girls.”

“Sounds crowded.”

“Crowded doesn’t begin to describe it, actually.” Her gaze was steady. “Your friend Ilieva described it as a kind of living death. Imagine being locked into a room moving over the surface of the ocean. The air’s coming in through a small pipe, and there’s no light. The darkness is complete. Here’s the thing: one of the girls died in transit, and no one knows her name. These girls carry no identification.”

Ilieva: standing by the pastry case in the Russian Café, talking to the other waitress and laughing, bringing him a latte unasked and kissing him on the cheek, listening to him all those years ago as he explained the way it would work, asking intelligent questions while they were setting up the system. Ginger ale means I’m in danger. If I order it, go behind the counter and call Aria and tell her to come for me. Red wine means the count was correct. Water means it wasn’t. Ilieva laughing, Ilieva speaking in Russian to the old Eastern European men who used to come into the café sometimes, Ilieva gliding across the room with a glass of wine and a slice of cheesecake. Ilieva trapped in an airless room with a dead girl moving over the sea. Hard to reconcile this last horror with the serenity of his memories.

“All we know about her is that she was approximately seventeen to twenty years old and spoke only Ukrainian,” Broden said. “We tried to identify her, but the investigation went nowhere and none of the other girls knew her name. After a few weeks in the morgue she was buried in Potter’s Field along with the rest of the unclaimed and anonymous bodies that New York City had to offer that week, and her family will likely never know what happened to her. And it would be a terrible tragedy even if this were an isolated incident, but it isn’t. Shipping containers are an area of particular interest to me.”

A response seemed expected of him. “You’ve dealt with other shipping containers,” he said. He didn’t want to know the answer.

“One other, years ago, when I was with the NYPD. It came into the docks at Red Hook, the same as this last one did. There were certain similarities in the shipping manifest and the design of the secret room was almost identical. The docks can be chaotic,” Broden said. “Sometimes containers get misplaced. That particular container was lost in the stacks for nearly eight weeks.”

“Eight weeks,” Anton said. He felt ill.

“We don’t know why the importers didn’t make efforts to find their container,” she said. “It’s possible that our investigation was getting too close to them and they didn’t want to take the risk. In any event, the container held eleven young women from Eastern Europe. The coroner’s report listed them as being between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, but I think one of them was much younger. This is the trade you’re a party to, Mr. Waker.”

“The thought of these shipping containers. .” Anton couldn’t finish the sentence.

“It isn’t what you wanted,” Broden said.

“It isn’t what I wanted. Of course not, of course it isn’t. If I’d known. . who would want something like that?”

“It’s more a question of who would accept something like that,” she said, “as a cost of doing business.”

“You’re talking about Aria.”

“Yes. And beyond that question—who would accept something like this? — the next question is, who will stop something like this from happening again? These shipments won’t just stop. It’s a lucrative trade. I know you tried to turn your back on Aria’s business, but Aria’s business continues with or without you.”

“I’m not sure what you want from me,” he said.

“I want you to tell me where Aria is, to start with.”

“I don’t know where she is. I’m sorry.”

Far down the beach, Elena was half-hidden by her sun hat. She had moved closer to the water so that her feet were lapped by waves.

“I visited your parents a few months ago,” Broden said.

A waiter had appeared. Anton ordered an Orangina. “You want anything?”

“No.”

“How were they?” he asked, when the waiter had left.

“Your parents? A little out of it, frankly.”

“What do you mean, ‘a little out of it’?”

“I mean shaken,” Broden said. “I mean your father’s hands were shaking while he was touching up a figurehead, and your mother looked like she hadn’t slept in a week. When I came to the store your mother was sitting on the loading dock, just staring at the river. She told me you used to sit there with her.”

“Yes. I did.”

“Then I asked your mother where you were,” Broden said, “and she said, He’s in a far-off country.”

“Those were her exact words? A far-off country?”

“A far-off country. That’s what she said. And I wasn’t sure what she meant by that,” Broden said, “but it seemed to me that she wasn’t just talking about Italy.”

“We had a dog when I was little,” Anton said. There was strain in his voice. “It was my parents’ dog from before I was born, and me and Aria used to play with him. We were really little, maybe five at the most. Anyway, the dog got old and sick and my parents had to have him put to sleep, and then when me and Aria asked where the dog had gone, my mother said, He’s gone away to a far-off country.”

“I see. Do your parents still think you’re dead?”

Anton was silent.

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “I don’t speak to them anymore.” The waiter had returned with an Orangina. He lifted the bottle to his lips, grateful for the distraction.

“To tell you the truth, I wasn’t entirely surprised by your parents’ demeanor. I thought you were dead too.” She was looking steadily at him. “I think you were asked to perform a transaction,” she said, “but it wasn’t like all the other transactions you’ve performed over the years. Something went wildly wrong for you. Aria told your parents you were dead, and then I think she fled the city.”

“She could be anywhere,” he said.

“The penalties for dealing in false passports are stiff these days,” Broden said. “Now that you’ve turned up alive, I’m afraid you’re in a certain amount of legal peril. I have you on tape describing the way the operation worked. I can produce a witness who bought a passport from you. And Ilieva speaks highly of you, don’t get me wrong, but she won’t lie under oath. You’re looking at a decade in a federal prison. But I’ll tell you a secret, Mr. Waker. I’m much more interested in finding the origin of that shipping container than I am in having you prosecuted for selling fake passports. If you were to tell me where Aria is, I might be willing to negotiate.”

“I don’t know where she is,” he said. He had a strange feeling that he might be dreaming. All his thoughts were of Elena, of the unborn child, of how to keep them safe, and his heart was beating very quickly.

“I’d like you to hear something.” Broden reached into her bag and placed a small electronic device on the table between them. “This is a phone call that was taped some months ago.”

She pressed a button and over the sounds of the ocean Anton heard a voice. A man speaking in a British accent: It’s done. And then Aria: Thank you. We’ll speak again soon.

“When was this recorded?” he asked, but he already knew. His voice was unsteady.

“That call was recorded two days before the shipping container arrived in Red Hook,” Broden said. “This was the night of Friday October 21st. It was early evening in New York, eleven P.M. in Italy. Aria was gone by the time police arrived at her apartment.”

The night of Friday October 21st. Standing by the sliding glass doors in the darkness of his hotel room, waiting in silence as four shadows came down the side of the islet and passed by the hotel. Footsteps on the cobblestones, a laugh, a car starting up the hill beyond the gates of Sant’Angelo. They had called Aria ten or fifteen minutes later.

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know.”

“How close is Aria to your parents?”

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

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

“Please don’t,” he said.

“Why not?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I never did.”

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

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

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

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

“You’ll leave us alone.”

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

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

“Do you have an address?” she asked.

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

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

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

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

“You know where I live,” Anton said.

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

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