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.”
“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.”
“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.