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Emily St. John Mandel

The Singer's Gun

To Kevin

Something about the tanks at London’s Heathrow Airport changed my mind. Before they rolled into place, in the innocent days when security just meant men with submachine guns, a travel book could be fluffy, silly, familiar or carefully manufactured, and it hardly mattered. Afterward, every destination acquired a sudden glow of hellfire, every trip an element of thoroughly unwanted suspense. Escape has become a problem in itself. A travel book without danger — to the body, the soul or the future — is entirely out of time.

. . We stand in need of something stronger now: the travel book you can read while making your way through this new, alarming world.

MICHAEL PYE, The New York Times, June 1, 2003

~ ~ ~

In an office on the bright sharp edge of New York, glass tower, Alexandra Broden was listening to a telephone conversation. The recording lasted no longer than ten seconds, but she listened to it five or six times before she took off her headphones. It was five thirty in the afternoon, and she had been working since seven A. M. She closed her eyes for a moment, pressed her fingertips to her forehead, and realized that she could still hear the conversation in her head.

The recording began with a click: the sound of a woman picking up her telephone, which had been tapped the day before the call came in. A man’s voice: It’s done. There is a sound on the tape here — the woman’s sharp intake of breath — but all she says in reply is Thank you. We’ll speak again soon. He disconnects and she hangs up three seconds later.

The woman’s name was Aria Waker, and the call had taken place fifteen days earlier. The incoming call came from an Italian cell phone but proved otherwise untraceable.

Police were at Aria’s apartment forty minutes after the call went through, but she was already gone and she never came back again.

Broden went down the hall for a coffee, talked about the baseball season with a colleague for a few minutes, went back to her office and put the headphones back on. She listened to the recording one last time before she made the call.

“Is that it?” she asked when the detective answered.

“That’s it, Al. ”

“Please don’t call me that. And you think they’re talking about Anton Waker?”

“If you’d seen what his parents were like the morning after that call came through, you wouldn’t ask me that question,” the detective said.

“How’s the investigation going?”

“Horribly. No one knows anything. No one even knows the dead girl’s name. ” The detective sighed. “At least it’s not as bad as the last shipping container we dealt with,” he said.

“I suppose I should be grateful that only one girl died this time. Listen, I’m going to talk to the parents. ”

“I tried that two weeks ago. They’re useless,” said the detective, “but be my guest. ”

On the drive over the Williamsburg Bridge Broden kept the radio off. She called her six-year-old daughter from the car. Tova was home from school, baking cookies with her nanny, and she wanted to know what time her mother would be home.