Life on earth, as far as anyone can tell, arose only once. A little before Christmas, toward the end of Elena’s first and last semester at Columbia, a professor was explaining about the search for the holy grail of astrobiology: LUCA, he wrote on the board, and stood back for a moment to look at the letters. He leaned in again, punched a staccato period after every letter and then underlined the whole thing. He let the chalk fall to the floor and then turned to the class. A girl in the front row raised her hand.
“The Last Universal Common Ancestor?”
“The Last Universal Common Ancestor,” he said.
The Last Universal Common Ancestor: one cell that appeared four or five billion years ago, from which all life on earth is descended. The ancestor we have in common with violets, with blue whales, with cats and with ferns. The cell from which we and the starfish and the pterodactyls and the daffodils originated, DNA mutating and spinning out in all directions over the passage of millennia and becoming elm trees, goldfish, humans, cacti and dragonflies, sparrows and panthers, cockroaches, turtles and orchids and dogs. We evolved from the same cell that spawned the daisy, and Elena had always been soothed by this thought. Two days before the first time she went to see Anton on the mezzanine level, she was waiting in the lobby of an office suite on the twelfth floor of the new World Trade Center 7. She was staring into space thinking of daisies and starfish and birds when she heard her name.
“Elena,” said the investigator, “I’m Alexandra Broden.” She was a calm woman in a gray suit, with extremely blue eyes and short dark hair. Her office had a temporary, rented-by-the-hour look about it, generic photographs of sunsets and black-and-white forests on the walls and two stiff-looking little armchairs by the window, and there was nothing on the desk but a telephone and a banker’s lamp. Broden retrieved a pad of paper and a pen from a desk drawer, sat down in one armchair and gestured Elena into the other. It was no more comfortable than it looked. “Thank you for coming in to see me this afternoon.”
“You’re welcome,” Elena said. It wasn’t at all clear that she’d had any choice in the matter, but she decided not to bring this up. She sat on the edge of the seat, fiddling with the pearl ring she wore on her right hand. The investigator leaned back in her chair and watched her. “I wasn’t sure I was in the right place. There’s no sign on the door.”
“We’re just moving into the space.”
Elena nodded and looked at her ring. Eventually Broden flipped the first page of the legal pad over—it was already filled with notes—and said, “You were Anton Waker’s assistant?”
“I was, yes. For two years or so.”
“Until when?”
“Until just recently. I guess it’s been a couple of weeks.”
“You liked working for him?”
“I did.” Elena had the impression that Broden was writing more words than she was actually saying, but it was impossible to verify this. The notepad was tilted away from her.
“Why?”
“He was nice to me. Most people you work for in your life aren’t.”
“I hope you don’t mind,” Broden said, “but I’d like to just get a little more background on you before we move on to Anton. I believe you did a semester at Columbia?”
“I was an astrobiology major.”
“Why did you drop out?”
“It was too much,” Elena said. “I’d never left the Canadian arctic before, and then all of a sudden I was in New York on a full scholarship, and it was just, I guess it was too much all at once. I’m sorry, it’s hard to explain. I was eighteen and I was alone in the city. I did badly in my first semester, so I thought I’d take a semester off.”
“But you never went back, did you?”
“No. I didn’t go back.”
“I see. We’ll just go through this quickly. So you left Columbia five years ago now? Six? And you began working in a restaurant, if memory serves. Was this immediately after you left school?”
“Was the restaurant your first job?”
“I was a waitress in my hometown back in high school. Then I went to Columbia, then I worked in a restaurant and posed for a photographer, and then I came here. That’s my entire employment history.”
Broden turned the page and continued to write. “And are you on a work visa, or do you have a green card?”
“My father’s an American,” Elena said. “I have dual citizenship.”
“How fortunate for you. Where was your father born?”
“Wyoming.”
“Nice state.” Broden kept writing. “Now, I know HR’s likely gone over this with you, but if you’ll just bear with me, I do need to ask you a few questions about Anton.”
“Do you work with them?”
“With . . .?”
“With HR,” Elena said.
“I’m sorry, I must not have been very clear when we spoke on the phone. I’m a corporate investigator. I work in conjunction with the HR departments of various companies, but I’m a third-party consultant.” Broden looked up briefly, then returned her attention to the pad of paper. “Did Anton ever mention anything to you about his background?”
“You know, a guy from HR asked me that exact same question. Three times.”
“And what was your response?”
“That the extent of my knowledge of his background was the Harvard diploma on his wall, and no, he never talked about it.”
“He never spoke about his family at all? His cousin?”
“No, nothing about that. He never mentioned a cousin.”
“I see. And you never met his family, I assume.”
“I met his fiancée once at a company Christmas party. Does that count?”
“When did you first meet him?”
“Anton? A little over two years ago. At my job interview.”
“You’re certain that was the first time you ever met him,” said the investigator. “At your job interview.”
“Yes,” Elena said.
When Elena returned to her desk an hour and a half later a stack of interoffice envelopes had accumulated, but she didn’t open them. She stared at the cubicle wall for a while, and when she looked at her watch it was four fifteen.
“Slipping out early?” Graciela asked. She was a company messenger, one of two; she stood by the elevator with an armload of envelopes.
“Coffee break,” Elena said dully.
“You look pale. Maybe take the day off tomorrow. Call in sick.”
“Maybe.” The elevator arrived. Graciela pressed the lobby button. Elena pushed the button for the third floor.
“What’re you doing on the third floor?”
“Just wanted to say hello to someone who works down there,” Elena said. When the door opened she said goodbye and walked down the corridor quickly, turned a corner, looked both ways and slipped through an exit door. In the cold gray light of Stairway B, a man was sitting on the cement steps with his eyes closed.
“Excuse me,” Elena said.
He nodded wanly as she stepped around him, and when she looked back he had closed his eyes again. She heard the sounds of the mezzanine as she pushed open the door: the rush of water through exposed pipes overhead, the rattling of vents, the movement of air—an industrial hum with no beginning or end, constant as the ocean. The corridor was wide and empty with a drifting population of dust bunnies, dimly lit. She passed a number of doors before the file storage rooms began: Dead File Storage One, Dead File Storage Two, Dead File Storage Three. She stood for a moment in front of the closed door to Dead File Storage Four and then backed silently away and walked back toward the stairwell. The office worker was still sitting on the stairs. He nodded again but didn’t speak as she stepped around him. On the elevator between the third and twenty-second floors she closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against the wall.
“Took another unscheduled break?” her coworker asked. Nora occupied the desk closest to the elevators, where she took apparent pleasure in observing and commenting on the comings and goings of the department. Elena ignored her and went to her cubicle. The number on Broden’s card was apparently a cell phone. There was a shaky, staticky quality to the rings.
“I’m sorry,” she said when Broden answered. “I know your investigation is important, but I don’t think I can do this.”
“Why’s that?” Broden’s voice was mild.
“I know it’s a serious thing to lie about your credentials on your résumé, I know it’s fraud and I don’t agree with it, it’s not that I approve, it’s just that he was my boss for two and a half years and I almost consider him a friend, I can’t just spy on him and try to get him to say something and report back to you, I just—”
“Tell you what,” Broden said, “why don’t you come in tomorrow and we’ll talk about it. I think it might help if I explained the situation more fully.”
When Elena had hung up the phone she stared at the document she was supposed to be proofreading, but her eyes kept skipping over the same paragraph over and over again. She closed her eyes, rested her elbows on her desk, and pressed her fingertips to her forehead. She wanted it to appear to any casual observer that she merely had a headache or was perhaps resting her eyes for a moment. The problem was more serious: she had forgotten how to read.
This happened almost daily and she was used to it—she understood it to be a side effect of being unable to stand her job—but lately it had been happening earlier and earlier in the day. The mornings went quickly but the afternoons were deadly. Time slowed and expanded. She wanted to run. By four P.M. she sometimes had to correct the same paper three times. She reread words over and over again, she broke them down into individual syllables, she stared, but if you stare at any word for long enough it loses all meaning and goes abstract. She had had this job for two or three weeks now, ever since she’d been exiled without explanation from Anton Waker’s research department, and it was becoming gradually less tenable each day.
“Elena?” Nora had a strong clear voice, like a singer’s. “Could you come here for a moment?”
When Elena went to her she had a document Elena had labored over that morning, lying on her desk like a piece of evidence. Nora weighed well over three hundred pounds and had beautiful long dark hair, but what was more notable about her was that she loved mistakes. Here in this dead-end department in the still brackish backwaters of the company, her power and her happiness lay in the discovery of errors. “Elena,” very patiently, as if addressing a child, “I’m not sure why you didn’t correct the spelling of this word. Were you under the impression that there’s a hyphen in ‘today’?”
“Oh. The writer’s British, he does that sometimes. Give it back to me, I’ll mark it.”
“Oh, I mark all the errors that I find.” The pleasure in Nora’s voice was unmistakable. Her eyes were alight; she was in her element. “I’ve told you that many times.”
“Okay, well, thanks for pointing it out. I’m going back to work.”
But Nora disliked having the game cut short. “If you’d ever like to borrow my dictionary, Elena,” she said sweetly, “you’re welcome to look up any thing you need.”
“I don’t need your dictionary. Thanks.”
“Well, but the thing is, Elena, you thought there was a hyphen in ‘today.’” All wide-eyed innocence now, the malice vanished like a passing cloud.
“No, I didn’t.”
“So what you’re telling me is that you saw it,” her voice incredulous now, “but decided not to correct it, even though you knew it was wrong?”
“Look, obviously I just missed it,” Elena said. “Are we done?”
“Elena,” spoken very seriously and reproachfully, like a CEO on the verge of firing a disobedient minion, although as far as Elena was aware Nora’s supervisory role was so nominal that she didn’t have the ability to fire anyone, “I know you haven’t been in your position for very long, but one thing that might not have been made clear to you is that it is our responsibility to correct every error that is made. That includes the errors that we don’t think are important enough to correct.”
“That’s cute, Nora. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going back to work.”
“Elena, just because I pointed out your mistake doesn’t mean that you have to get all pissy with me. I find it annoying.”
Elena went back to her cubicle, and some time passed in which she did no work whatsoever.
“What are you doing? Are you okay?”
“Oh, I’m fine,” Elena said. A coworker was standing at the cubicle entrance. She realized she had been sitting for some time with her head in her hands. “Just a headache.”
“It’s five o’clock,” Mark said. “You could probably leave if you wanted to.”
“Right,” she said. “Thanks.” She was unsure what she was thanking him for, and Mark didn’t seem to know either. He stared at her for a moment through glasses so thick that his eyes were magnified, shook his head and turned away. It was the most he’d ever said to her. She picked up her handbag and left her desk in disarray. She descended to the marble lobby and down the steps that connected the tower to Grand Central Station, walked across the main concourse with its ceiling of stars. She stood packed in among strangers on a series of subway trains until one of them deposited her on a hot street in Brooklyn, the air still bright but the shadows slanting now, children drawing pictures of people with enormous free-form heads and stick arms on the warm sidewalk and men playing dominoes at a folding card table, speaking to each other in Spanish and ignoring her as she passed. Three keys were required to get into her apartment building. A metal grid door slammed behind her like a cage and there was a regular apartment-building door just behind it, then a little foyer with dusty archaeological layers of takeout menus and unclaimed mail rising up under the mailboxes, then another door after that. At the top of the stairs a fourth key was required to open the door to the apartment, where the first thing she saw when she came in was the tank of goldfish that Caleb kept on a table in the hallway, the five fish bright and perfect, the tank impeccably maintained.
“You know,” her mother said, “I wish your sister had your kind of ambition.”
“I don’t know that it’s ambition, exactly.” Elena was filling a kettle with water, the phone held between her shoulder and her ear. She hadn’t spoken with her mother in two or three months, and she was surprised by how much she’d missed her voice. “I’m not sure what it is. It’s more like a gene for escape. You’re either born with it or—” She placed the kettle on the stove and stood watching the blue gas flame as she listened. “No,” she said after a moment, “I think ambition makes you accomplish things, see things through. All I’ve done is leave and quit.”
“That isn’t a minor accomplishment,” her mother said. “The leaving part, I mean. All I’m saying is, when I look at your sister . . .”
“I don’t know, it’s hard to think in terms of having accomplished anything at this point.” Elena listened for a few minutes, looking at her reflection in the darkened window. In the Northwest Territories it was two hours earlier, five o’clock in the afternoon, and her hometown was so far north that at this time of year the sun wouldn’t set at all. She imagined her mother sitting by the window in the blazing daylight, flecks of dust in the sunbeams and the dog sprawled out on the carpet, until the whistle of the kettle snapped her back to New York. Elena turned off the flame and poured hot water into an open container of instant noodles on the countertop. Her mother was still talking. “You don’t understand what my job’s like,” Elena said when her mother stopped to take a breath. “It isn’t really bearable. I was supposed to be a scientist, and now I’m just here working. My only accomplishment is that I left.”
“You’ve survived in that city,” her mother said, “for how long now? Eight years?”
“Eight years. Don’t say ‘that city’ like that. You make it sound like Baghdad. Is Jade home?”
“Your sister’s not feeling so well, actually.”
“She doesn’t want to talk to me.”
“No,” Elena’s mother said mildly, “she doesn’t. She never tells me why not. Don’t take it personally, love, she’s been moody lately. How’s Caleb?” Elena’s mother had never laid eyes on either Caleb or New York City; both entities were the subject of frequent speculation and perpetual concern.
“Caleb’s fine. He’s studying.”
This provoked a brief silence, because the question of why Elena wasn’t studying too had never been resolved to anyone’s satisfaction. Elena’s mother cleared her throat.
“Well,” she said, “take care, now.”
“Goodnight.”
The line went dead. When Elena’s mother ran out of things to say she signed off without preamble. There had been a time when Elena had been annoyed by this, but tonight she found herself admiring the decisiveness of the ending.
Outside the sky was growing dark. There was thunder, and when the rain began Elena opened the window as wide as it would go. The sounds of the storm filled the kitchen. She stopped thinking about Broden for a moment and picked up the newspaper, and she was eating noodles and reading the news when Caleb came in. She heard him stop by the goldfish tank and murmur something approving to the fish. His glasses fogged quickly in the warmth of the kitchen; he took them off and blinked at her from the doorway, his hair dark with rain.
“You had no umbrella?”
“It broke,” he said. He was smiling in a far-off distracted way that meant the research was going well. She raised her face to him when he approached her, but he kissed her forehead instead of her lips.
“Have you eaten?”
“I had a sandwich up at Columbia,” he said. “Instant noodles again?”
She nodded.
“How was work today?” He was taking off his rain-soaked shirt and hanging it over a kitchen chair. His naked back had an unearthly pallor.
“Oh,” Elena said, “you know, an average workday . . .” and realized that of course he didn’t know. Caleb didn’t hold a regular job, and to the best of her knowledge never had. “Well,” she said. He was staring at her, half-smiling, hoping for a punch line. “I guess you wouldn’t know, come to think of it.” She laughed quickly to make this last comment as joke-like and unresentful as possible. Caleb smiled back and retrieved a carton of orange juice from the refrigerator. “Are you cold from the rain? I was just going to take a hot shower.”
“Oh?” He was pouring himself a glass of juice.
“You’re welcome to join me.”
“Oh,” he said again. He was quiet for a moment, looking into his glass. “No, you go ahead. I was actually going to do a little more work before bed.” He kissed her quickly on the lips, not insincerely, and left her sitting alone in the kitchen.
When Caleb left the room she threw the rest of the noodles away and drank a glass of water standing by the sink. The rain had stopped and the heat was again subtropical, moths beating soft wings against the window screen. Elena took the telephone into the bedroom, opened the top right-hand drawer, and extracted a scrap of paper from inside a blue sock. The paper had been folded years ago and was soft along the crease lines. On the piece of paper she’d written a phone number and also the address of a café on East 1st Street. She dialed the number quickly, refolded the paper and put it back in the sock and put the sock back in the drawer in the interlude before a woman’s voice answered.
“Aria,” she said, “I’m not sure if you’ll remember me. It’s Elena James.”
“Elena James,” Aria Waker repeated. She was quiet for a moment, and then said, “You’re the Canadian.”
“Yes. Listen, I just—”
“Before you say anything,” Aria said, “I’m on a cell phone, and I don’t discuss business on cell phones anymore. Give me a land-line number where I can call you back.”
Elena gave her the number and the line went dead. The phone rang twenty minutes later.
“Yes,” Aria said, when Elena answered. The sound quality was tinny, and there was background noise. Elena thought she might be calling from a pay phone in a bar.
“There’s someone interviewing me,” Elena said. “Some kind of consultant, a freelance corporate investigator—at least, she says she’s a corporate investigator, but I don’t . . . listen, I don’t know who she is, and she’s asking me questions about your cousin. About his background.”
“What kind of questions?”
“His family. Where he went to school. I don’t know anything about the school thing, it’s none of my business, but she’s asking questions about me too. My employment history.”
“You knew there were no guarantees,” Aria said, but her voice was gentle.
“Oh, it isn’t that. That’s not why I’m calling. I don’t . . . Listen, I appreciate what you and Anton did for me, and I just thought you should know. She also asked me where I met him. Of course I told her I met Anton at my job interview, but she was insistent, she repeated the question twice. Am I being clear? She’s asking me about my employment history, she’s asking me about my immigration status, and she asked me when I met Anton.”
The line was quiet for a moment.
“I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t say anything to Anton about this,” Aria said. “I’d like to bring it up with him directly.”
“Thank you for calling me,” said Aria. She hung up the phone.
In the morning Elena woke before the alarm clock rang and lay for a while staring at the ceiling. Caleb was asleep beside her with his back turned. She couldn’t remember him coming to bed and realized she’d fallen asleep alone again. It was too hot in the room; the ceiling fan stirred warm air over the bed. She showered and dressed quickly, all in black (there was a feeling of dread), bought the daily croissants and coffee at the bakery by the Montrose Avenue L train station, and sat staring at her reflection in the window of the train. Somewhere under the East River she imagined the weight of the water over the tunnel, boats moving on the surface far overhead, and she closed her eyes. She didn’t open them until she heard the announcement for Union Square, where she switched to a train that took her north to Grand Central. She walked quickly across the main concourse, feeling lost in the crowd, and another day passed like a tedious dream.
At five o’clock Elena took the subway downtown to the World Trade Center area. She was early for her appointment; she stood looking down at the construction site for a few minutes before she crossed the street to the newly rebuilt Tower 7 and took the elevator up to the twelfth floor.
In the cool still air of the waiting room she turned to the magazines, and found a battered copy of the New York Review of Books in the pile. There was an article about trees, and she almost forgot about Broden for a moment. The oldest living thing in the world is a bristlecone pine tree. It grows somewhere in the western United States. She read this while she was waiting for Broden to appear, but even as Broden was opening the door to her office the details were growing hazy, and by the time she sat down on the same stiff chair she couldn’t remember where exactly the tree was—Utah? California?—and the fear was awful. Broden was sitting down across from her, flipping through notes. But location aside, Utah or California, the oldest known living thing on earth has been alive for four thousand six hundred years. Elena had paused when she read this in the waiting room, stared out at nothing for a moment and thought of that great expanse of centuries stretching halfway back to the end of the last ice age.
“Elena,” Broden said, “how’s your day going?”
“Badly,” said Elena. Nora had called her over to her desk four times and finally made her cry, and the thought of returning to the office the next morning made her want to go down to the street and hail a taxi and ask to be taken anywhere. To any other destination, any other life.
“Badly? Well, I’m sorry to hear that. Thank you for coming to see me again. Is it still hot out there?”
“Extremely,” Elena said.
The oldest living thing in the world is a bristlecone pine tree, but the tragedy of the story is that there was one even older. A geology student in Utah, determined to find an even more impressive specimen, went up into the mountains and staked out the biggest tree he could find. He had borrowed a corer, a tool used to take a pencil-sized core sample at the base of the trunk. He began drilling, but the corer snapped, and a park ranger gave him permission to cut down the tree to retrieve it.
When the rings were counted, the tree turned out to be four thousand nine hundred years old. In order to retrieve a broken measuring tool, a student had killed the oldest living thing on earth. Elena’s mind wandered. Four thousand nine hundred years ago, glass had just been invented in western Asia. The first cup of tea was being brewed in China. A band of wandering tribesmen at the eastern end of the Mediterranean was developing the first monotheistic religion, although some time passed before they came to be known as the Jews. An unknown Sumerian writer had just composed Gilgamesh. A pine cone fell to the ground and produced a minute sapling in the mountains, and you can count the rings yourself—four thousand nine hundred years after the pine cone fell, a thin dusty slice of the trunk hangs in a bar in Nevada.
“So,” Broden said, “let’s get down to business.”
Elena looked up, startled out of her thoughts. She couldn’t think of anything to say and so smiled weakly and said nothing. The office had changed slightly. A child’s drawing of a ballerina was framed on the wall behind the desk, and there was a pot of geraniums on the windowsill behind Broden’s chair with a little plastic flag reading “Happy Birthday!!” sticking out of the dirt.
“Was it your birthday?” she asked.
“It was. Listen, I didn’t mean to stress you out. I just wanted you to go down to the mezzanine level, say hello to Anton, engage him in conversation, ask what he’s doing down there. I was hoping he would volunteer something. An admission of guilt would make things much easier for us.”
“I’m sorry,” Elena said. “It isn’t that I don’t think it’s important, your investigation, it’s just that I’d feel like I was betraying him, spying on him like that, and we worked together for years, it just doesn’t seem . . .”
“Doesn’t seem right?”
“To be honest, it doesn’t.”
Broden nodded. “I appreciate your candor,” she said. “Still, I can’t help but wonder if it’s not a question of motivation. What if there were more at stake than just a fraudulent résumé?”
“Are you saying that he’s committed a crime?”
Broden looked at her for a moment, and then smiled. Elena shivered.
“Cold?”
“A little. The air conditioning in this building . . .”
“It is a little cool in here,” Broden said. “I’d just like to go through your background one more time. Just to clarify a few points, and I believe that will bring us naturally back to the question at hand. After you graduated high school, you moved to the United States to go to college.”
“Exactly. Yes.”
“You were eighteen?”
“Yes.”
“You had a scholarship to Columbia?”
“And an offer of one at MIT. But I wanted to live in New York.”
“Quite an accomplishment,” Broden said. “Did you work while you were in school?”
“No. I worked after I left school,” Elena said.
“Tell me about that time,” said Broden. “After you left school.”
“Well, there’s not much to tell. I was washing dishes at a restaurant. Then I was a photographer’s model, and then I came here.”
“Uh-huh. Let’s go back a step. The time when you were posing for the photographer. What made you start doing that?”
“The posing? I don’t know, it’s hard to find a decent job without a bachelor’s degree. I didn’t make a lot of money at the restaurant. It was just extra income.”
“I understand,” Broden said. “It was something you could do without being legal in the United States.”
“Oh no, I, wait—I beg your pardon?”
“Did you mishear?”
“No, but perhaps you misunderstood. My father was born in Wyoming. I was born and raised in Canada, but I’m an American citizen.” Elena was flailing. The waters were rising and there was nowhere to go.
Broden sighed, and set the pad of paper down on the desk. “Do you ever get headaches?” She was examining her fingernails, which were cut very close and unpolished.
“I—”
“I get them in the evenings sometimes. After work, when I come home at night. My husband thinks it’s stress, but I think it’s deception.”
“I don’t—”
“And listen, let’s be frank for a moment, it’s not that the job itself isn’t stressful.” Broden stood up from the chair and moved behind it to the window, where she gazed out at other towers and the sky. “Believe me, it is. You’ve no idea what’s at stake here. But it isn’t the stress that wears at me, it’s the deception. This endless, juvenile, pathetic deception, when the facts of your life were so easily verified, when a copy of your father’s birth certificate was obtained so easily from Canada. And believe me, it’s not just you, everyone thinks they’ve somehow moved through life without leaving any kind of a paper trail. It’s frankly baffling to me.” She clasped her hands behind her back and craned her neck to look up at the bright blue sky between towers. “Is there any part of a person’s life that isn’t recorded? The major events require certificates: births, marriages, and deaths are marked and counted, and the rest of it can be filled in with a little research. Your country of residence and citizenship is a matter of public record, as is your education, the identities of your parents, and their countries of citizenship and birth. So tell me, Elena, has this American father of yours ever even set foot in the United States?”
“No, listen, there’s been some kind of a . . . I’m not . . . I’m an American, my father’s an American, we—”
“And yet both your parents were born in Toronto, and you attended Columbia University on an international student visa. Which would have become null and void, of course, once you dropped out of school.” Broden spoke without malice. She was stating a fact. “Everyone leaves a paper trail, Elena, even illegal aliens who can’t afford immigration attorneys. Do you think you’re invisible?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Elena was having trouble breathing.
“It isn’t easy being illegal here. I do understand that. It isn’t exactly easy immigrating here legally, either, especially if you’re a shiftless college dropout from some frozen little town north of the Arctic Circle. It isn’t quite ‘Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’ anymore, is it?” Standing in the late-afternoon sunlight with her hands clasped behind her back, looking up at the sky above Lower Manhattan, Broden looked perfectly serene. “It’s a little more like ‘Give us your wealthy, your well-connected, your overeducated and your highly skilled.’ I don’t like what you did, but I understand your difficulty.” She was quiet for a moment. “But at any rate,” she said, “we have something in common.”
“What’s that?” Elena’s voice was a whisper.
“We’ve both misrepresented ourselves.” Broden reached into the inside pocket of her jacket and held up a yellow-and-blue badge in Elena’s direction without looking at her. U.S. Department of State, Special Agent. “I’m not really a freelance corporate investigator, and you’re not really legal to work in this country.”
Elena’s hands were shaking. She clenched them together in her lap until her knuckles went white and when she tried to remember the conversation a few hours later this was the point where her memory faltered. What did she say then? Difficult to recall: something stammering and unconvincing along the lines of “There’s been a mistake” or “I think you’re mistaken,” something utterly inadequate to the catastrophe at hand.
“I work with the Diplomatic Security Service. We’re an enforcement arm of the State Department, and my specialty is passport fraud.” Broden turned away from the window and stood watching her. “It isn’t that I’m all that interested in you, to be perfectly frank. What I’m interested in,” Broden said, “professionally speaking, are your dealings with the syndicate from which you acquired your Social Security number and that gorgeous fake passport of yours. It’s the syndicate I’m interested in prosecuting, Elena, not you. So answer me honestly when I speak to you, cooperate fully in our efforts, and I’ll put you on track for a green card. You won’t be deported. Otherwise I’m afraid all bets are off in that department.” Broden was silent for a moment, watching her. Elena felt anchorless, as if she might float upward toward the ceiling. She was painfully aware of her heartbeat. “A response might be appropriate at this point,” Broden said. “Do you understand your choice?”
“It’s just,” one last attempt at deflection, “that I have no idea what you’re talking about. I don’t know what you’re referring to.”
Broden sighed and glanced briefly at the ceiling as if hoping for divine intervention.
“I’m referring to the time,” she said, very patiently, “when you purchased a Social Security number and a fake passport from Anton Waker at a café on East 1st Street.”
Elena remembered this part of the interview very clearly, and the part immediately afterward when they talked about recording devices, but later she couldn’t remember how she got home after the interview was done. She closed her eyes in her cubicle a day later and pressed her fingertips to her forehead, wishing herself almost anywhere else. There were tears on her face. Soon she would go down to the mezzanine level, where at that moment Anton was contemplating throwing his stapler through the window. In a moment she’d step through the door of Dead File Storage Four with a recorder in her handbag, and smile, and ask him questions about his life. It was Friday, and it was nearly five o’clock.