The Singer's Gun (19 page)

“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.