The Singer's Gun (11 page)

“You seem a little out of it,” his mother said finally. “Everything okay?”

“Prewedding jitters?” his father asked.

“No, actually, I’m being blackmailed by my cousin,” Anton said.

Aria shot him a look, which he ignored, but he felt it graze his cheek.

“Blackmailed,” Sam repeated. “Really?”

Aria shrugged.

“Really,” said his mother. “Aria, please explain.”

“Well,” said Aria, “I’m conducting a transaction.” She leaned forward across the table and dropped her voice to a murmur. She repeated the details about the ten-thousand-dollar wedding gift and the FedEx package at the Italian hotel, but added that her plans depended on Anton’s involvement in the initial transaction—the successful completion of this deal would open up a particularly profitable segment of the import-export business, which was where she’d been wanting to focus her attention for some time. Aria wasn’t entirely sure, she had to admit, why anyone would consider her request for assistance even faintly unreasonable under the circumstances.

“Under
what
circumstances?”

“You left me hanging,” she said. “I’ve been through three business partners since you left the business, and none of them worked out.”

“How is that my fault? And she’ll tell Sophie about Harvard if I don’t do it,” Anton said.

His parents were silent. Miriam looked at her wineglass, twisting the stem between two fingers and her thumb. Sam nodded and stared into space, considering the situation.

“Well,” his mother said, after some time had passed, “she is
family
, Anton.”

“What? Mom. She’s
blackmailing
me.”

“Listen,” his father said quietly, “I can’t say I’m down with the coercion aspect, but it does seem fairly low-risk if you think about it.” He speared a tomato slice, and looked contemplatively at the wall behind Anton and Aria as he talked. Anton glanced over his shoulder. There was a mural on the wall, painted long ago and cleaned rarely since, a greasy waterscape of gondolas and dim canals. “You sign for a package, you give the package to someone without opening it, in the worst-case scenario you deny all knowledge of its contents, and in any event you get ten thousand dollars wired to your bank account. Do you know what she’s sending you?”

“No.”

“There you go,” his father said, as if that resolved everything. “You keep it that way and come home with a nice little nest egg for your life with Sophie, you don’t even know what you did, you help out your cousin at great personal gain and virtually no personal risk. Why not?”

All three were looking at him. Aria was smiling slightly.

“You’re only going along with this,” Anton said to his mother, “because you don’t want me to marry Sophie.”

“Oh, don’t be silly,” his mother said. “Why
wouldn’t
I want my only son to marry a girl who’s canceled the wedding twice?”

Anton’s father raised his hand for silence; the waiter was approaching.

“Who ordered the chicken parmesan?” the waiter asked.

“Me,” Anton said, without taking his eyes off his mother’s face. She was looking at the waiter.

“I’m the veal,” she said helpfully.

“Linguine?” asked the waiter.

“Over here,” said Anton’s father.

“And you must be the steak.”

“I am,” said Aria.
“Grazie.”

“Listen,” his father said when the waiter was out of earshot, “it seems like a fairly smooth transaction.” He was winding pasta around his fork. “I’m not going to lie to you, I think you’d be a fool not to do it.”

“Well, that’s exactly it, Dad, actually. I don’t have a
choice
but to do it.”

“But why wouldn’t you
want
to?” his mother asked. “I know you lead a different kind of life these days, but ten thousand
dollars
, love.”

“You don’t understand, I don’t have a—”

The waiter was approaching again; Anton fell silent and clenched the tablecloth with both hands under the table.

“Fresh pepper, sir?”

“Thank you,” Anton’s father said. He leaned back in his chair to allow the pepper mill unrestricted access to his plate.

“Because that was the whole point of Harvard,” Anton said when the waiter was gone. “So I wouldn’t have to do this kind of thing anymore.”

“But you didn’t
go
to Harvard,” Aria said reasonably.

“
But she doesn’t know that
.”

“A marriage has to be based on honesty, sweetie,” his mother said. She put down her fork and held her husband’s hand for a moment on the tabletop.

“Thirty years,” Aria said. She raised her wineglass. “To Sam and Miriam.”

“Thank you,” his mother whispered. They raised their glasses again. Anton raised his glass too, but he couldn’t make himself speak. He set the glass down next to his plate and tried to concentrate on dinner. Look at this holy chicken parmiggiano, this holy salt shaker, the starched purity of this tablecloth. Behold the holiness of my family, serene and utterly at ease in their corruption, toasting thirty years of love and theft in a restaurant on an island in a city by the sea.

Anton paid for dinner. Outside Malvolio’s Aria said goodbye and he stared at her flatly until she shrugged and climbed into her silver Jaguar and disappeared into the river of red taillights that flowed south down the canyon of Park Avenue. When Aria was gone his parents kissed him and thanked him for a wonderful evening, said goodnight and walked east holding hands. Anton stood on the corner of Park Avenue and 53rd Street, dazed, a little lost. He glanced at his watch, nine thirty but the summer light was endless—it was twilight still, not night, and the city was hazy. He began to walk south, in the opposite direction of home. After a few blocks he took his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed a cell number from memory as he crossed 49th Street.

“Where are you at this moment?” he asked when Elena answered.

“The Starbucks downstairs from the office.”

“Alone?”

“Caleb’s working.”

“You didn’t want to go home?”

“Something like that.”

She was waiting in his office when he arrived, cross-legged on the sofa with her shoes on the floor, reading a copy of the
Times
that he hadn’t thrown out the window yet.

“You look awful,” she said, when he came in and closed the door behind him.

“Thanks. It’s hot out there. I might drop dead of heatstroke.”

“I meant shaken,” she said. “You look shaken.”

“Yes, well, I talked to Aria. Why didn’t you want to go home?” He sat on the opposite end of the sofa, some distance away from her, leaned his head back on the cushions and closed his eyes.

“Caleb’s working late at the lab. It’s lonely in the apartment.”

“Tell me about Caleb.”

“He’s a scientist,” Elena said after a moment. “We met in my first year at Columbia . . . well, my only year, actually. He’s involved in the plant genome project. Would you believe he’s the only person I’m close to in this city? It’s so hard to make friends here. He’s known me since the week I arrived from the north.”

“What does that mean, the plant genome thing?”

“It means he’s mapping the genes of the
Lotus japonicus.
When that’s done, he’s moving on to geraniums. Other teams are working on cucumbers and tomatoes. I used to know what the point was, but I’m not actually sure I understand anymore. Anton, are you all right?”

“Not really,” he said. “Do you love him?”

“Kind of. I don’t know. Yes.”

“Will you ever marry him?”

“I don’t think so,” Elena said. “I think it’s almost over. He doesn’t want to sleep with me anymore.”

“Clear evidence of insanity.”

“It’s not him,” she said. “It’s the antidepressants he’s on. He can’t help it.”

“I’m sorry. That’s an awful side effect. I didn’t mean to call him insane.”

“It’s okay.”

“What’s it like,” he asked, “living three thousand miles away from your family?”

“Four thousand. I miss them.”

“Why don’t you live closer to them?”

“Because I never wanted to live anywhere but here.”

He nodded, but didn’t speak.

“Do you want me to leave?” she asked.

“No, please stay.”

They sat together in the quiet, listening to the city, until Anton stood up and went to the broken window. “Have you ever played basketball, Ellie?”

“A little in high school. I was never that good.”

“Me either. I realize this sounds a little crazy, but could I interest you in a game of basketball on the roof of the Hyatt Hotel?”

“Absolutely,” she said.

He was looking down at the lower roof of the Hyatt. It was connected to their office tower, no more than a four-or five-foot drop below his windows, but the windows of Dead File Storage Four were painted shut. Anton stood back for a moment, considering the problem, and then went to his desk. He picked up his tape dispenser and his telephone before settling on the computer keyboard. He disconnected the keyboard from the machine, acutely aware that Elena was watching him, went back to the window, held it in both hands and swung. Anton turned his face away at the instant of the impact but he felt a sting on the side of his face and he knew he’d been cut. Glass rained down the outside of the building. It wasn’t hard to break the rest of the glass away around the edges, and after a while all that remained were a few small shards wedged deep in the window frame. These he pulled out gingerly with his bare fingers and dropped out the window. The air-conditioning system was useless against the breach; the room was flooded suddenly with August, like a southern current moving through an undersea cave. He took off his shirt, folded it, put it over the window frame to guard against any stray shards, and then swung his legs over and dropped down to the rooftop in his undershirt.

He was unprepared for the sound. The city was all around him, and he was lost in the noise. There were trucks, horns, sirens from Lexington Avenue and from the cross streets, but behind these individual noises was the sound he stopped to listen to sometimes when he was jogging alone in Central Park at night. A sound formed of traffic and helicopters and distant airplanes, voices, car horns, conversations and music, sirens and shouting and the underground passage of trains, all combined into a susurration as constant and as endless as the sound the ocean makes. He’d looked down at this rooftop from the eleventh-floor window a thousand times and from that distance it had seemed like the smallest gap between towers, a tiny plateau between the dark glass of the Hyatt and the pale bricks of the Greybar Building, but out here in the sound and the darkness he was overtaken by the empty space around him. An expanse of gravel, lit only dimly from windows high above and from the sky that never darkens over the city of New York, passing clouds reflecting light back down from above. Some distance away on the rooftop, a row of colossal air vents rattled in the shadows. Crumpled-up paper lay all around his feet, every wadded ball of newsprint he’d ever thrown through the window. Two or three pieces of his stapler glinted in the half-light. He heard a sound behind him, and when he turned back Elena had dropped down from the window.

“I’ll get the basketball,” he said.

But when he found the ball it had lost most of its air, and anyway, the surface here was gravel. He held it in both hands as he came back to her, the rubber warm and too soft.

“It’s lost air,” he said. “Want to break into a hotel room?” He gestured at the Hyatt across the rooftop, the line of blank windows so close. Elena hesitated.

“I can’t,” she said.

“We’ll say it was my idea,” he said. “We’ll plead insanity. No wait, we’ll plead heatstroke.”

“I’m afraid of being deported.”

“Why would you be deported? You have a Social Security number and an American passport.”

“I don’t want to take the risk,” she said.

“Funny,” he said, “you never struck me as the risk-averse type.”

She was silent. Her hair was illuminated by the light from the office windows above and behind her, a frizzy halo, but he couldn’t quite see her face. He looked up at the sheer tower walls rising all around them, towers of windows reflecting each other and the night.

“Let’s go back inside,” he said. He gave her a leg up. She disappeared over the window frame. Anton stood outside for a moment longer in the heat before he followed her. Glass cracked softly under his shoes. The room was dark and so still that for a moment he thought she’d left.

Elena was lying on the sofa with her eyes closed. Her breathing seemed shallow when he came to her, and her skin was clammy to the touch.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m okay,” she said. “I just don’t deal with heat very well.”

“The heat’s deadly.” He sat on the floor beside the sofa, near her head, and kissed her hand. Her sweat was salty on his lips. He heard himself asking, “Do you think he knows?” and felt clichéd and a little tragic. All the dangerous joys of the five o’clock hour had dissipated; the room had depressurized and gone dim.

“I don’t think so.” She didn’t open her eyes. “I usually get home before he does anyway. If I don’t, I tell him I’m out with friends.”

“And he never suspects anything?”

“Caleb isn’t
stupid
, he just, I don’t know, we’ve known each other for so long and he’s so distracted by his work, he doesn’t—”

“Suspect things.”

“Right.” She opened her eyes, sat on the edge of the sofa for a moment, stood up slowly and took a deep breath. “He doesn’t suspect things. Goodnight, Anton.”

He stood up and kissed her. She closed the office door behind her, and her footsteps were lost instantly in the white noise of the mezzanine. He glanced at his watch—ten thirty
P.M
.—and went to the broken window to retrieve his shirt. It was still damp with sweat. A jagged edge of glass had ripped a hole in the sleeve, and when he put it on there was a crumpled black streak across the front where the fabric had been pressed against the outside of the window frame. He looked to the back of the door where his spare shirt usually hung, but he’d worn it home the night before. On his way down in the elevator in the ruined shirt he decided that from now on it would be a good idea to have two shirts hanging on the back of the door at all times, and he felt suddenly exhausted by the command of detail that successful infidelity required.