The Singer's Gun

by Emily St. John Mandel

  Anton: “Yellowknife?”

  “A small northern city. Then you fly from Yellowknife to Inuvik.”

  “How long does all of this take?”

  “A long time.”

  “How long?”

  “Twenty-four hours. Sometimes longer in winter.”

  “How much longer?”

  “Days. The northern airports close sometimes when the weather’s bad.”

  “A distant northern land. How long since you’ve been back there?”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Haven’t what?”

  “Haven’t been back.”

  There was a light commotion here, a rustling sound on the tape; Elena was reaching into her purse, fumbling around. A click and then the tape went dead. She told Broden at the time that she’d reached into her purse to get a lozenge and turned the device off by accident, and that the lozenge was because her throat was dry and that was why her voice sounded funny.

  Broden took off her headphones, stood up and stretched. It was seven thirty. In other offices she heard people working, a soft murmur of activity and computer keyboards, but when she left her office to put the tape away all of the other doors were closed. Back in her office she looked up a map of the Northwest Territories—there was Inuvik, a tiny red dot on the northern edge of the world—and she thought about involving the Canadian police, placing a call to the RCMP detachment at Inuvik, but there was no real reason to believe Elena was there. The distance between Inuvik and New York was almost dazzling in its extremity.

  Broden stood by the window for a moment, thinking of Sophie’s odd comment about Elena taking a cat, before she returned to her desk to make a phone call. The phone rang four times in Elena’s old apartment before Caleb picked up. They’d had a few tense conversations early on and Caleb was no more endearing this evening than he had been previously; the announcement of Broden’s name was greeted with an audible sigh.

  “I told you,” Caleb said, “I don’t know anything.”

  “Tell me about the cat.” To Broden’s utter amazement there was silence at the end of the line, so she decided that perhaps Sophie wasn’t insane after all and pressed further. “Whose cat was it?”

  “She said it belonged to her ex-boss.”

  “Can you describe it?”

  “What? The cat? I only saw it for a minute. Okay, it was orange. It only had one eye.”

  “She was going to Italy to be with him,” Broden said, testing him.

  “Look,” Caleb said, “she had every right.”

  “Did she?”

  “Now you know as much as I do. Anyway, it’s none of your business.” He hung up the phone and Broden didn’t call him back.

  The traffic was heavy between Broden’s office and her apartment; she crept home slowly with classical music playing on the radio. Broden arrived home a few minutes too late to kiss her daughter goodnight. Tova had gone to sleep with a blue barrette in her hair. She stirred when Broden gently removed it, but didn’t wake. Broden put the barrette in her jacket pocket. She stood in the bedroom doorway for a long time watching Tova sleep.

  22.

  Anton tried to find David’s family and got nowhere. Two days after the gunshots he left Elena alone on the balcony in the morning—she was staring at the sea, at the horizon, at the cat, at everything except him—and went out into the hallway. No one else was at the hotel so late in the season and Gennaro’s presence was intermittent, but he still looked around before he slipped into David’s room. The room was unlocked. He closed and locked the door behind him, stood blinking for a moment in the warm dim light. The curtains were drawn, the balcony doors closed.

  The lamp on the bedside table was on, shining down on a single yellowing lime. An easel was set up by the dresser. When Anton opened the balcony shutters and the room flooded with sunlight he saw that the easel held a small canvas, about ten by ten inches, with an unfinished painting of a lime. Odd to see the same lime, on the same bedside table before the same robin’s-egg wall, as it had existed two or three days earlier; on the canvas it was alive and gleaming, almost photo-real, a brilliant green. Short brush-strokes radiated outward around it; the white of the table, the blue of the walls. Strange, he thought, to rent a room overlooking the Aegean Sea and then close the shutters and paint a piece of fruit on a table. There were four or five canvases stacked against the wall, paintings of limes in waxy perfect detail.

  Anton moved the contents of David’s room into his in stages. First the stack of lime paintings and then the clothes, stuffed into a backpack that he found under the bed. The dresser was empty. He threw out the paltry contents of the bathroom—a toothbrush, toothpaste, a razor, a bar of soap—and on his final pass through the room he saw the last painting. It was small and square, perhaps eight inches by eight inches, propped up on top of the dresser. A portrait of a white man and a black woman. The man had dark hair and brown eyes—it was a shock to recognize David—and in the painting he held the woman close. She was startlingly beautiful, with very high cheekbones and enormous brown eyes, and she wore a pale blue dress of some floaty fabric that exposed her collarbones. There was something about the way the air around her was painted; Anton leaned in closer. They were standing together against a brick wall, and there was the faintest disturbance in the bricks, the slightest electrical charge, a haze, and then he understood: Evie had a halo around her. An opening line from a novel he’d once read came back to him unbidden—We are not alone, this side of death— and he took the painting and left the room very quickly, leaving the door ajar. He locked the door of his own room behind him.

  When he went through the backpack he found almost nothing. Worn clothing, a plastic bag with two new-looking paint-brushes, an unmarked house key on a plain metal ring. An address book. Anton took the address book with him when he left the hotel, sat down on a low wall by the harbor and turned on his cell phone. Then he remembered that he was supposed to be dead, so he turned it off again and dropped it discreetly into the water. It landed with a little splash and flashed silver for a moment like a sinking fish. He turned back to the piazza and went to the pay phone, where he opened the address book and flipped through page after empty page. It wasn’t that the book was new; its cover was worn, the edges blunted. It was just that in all the years David had carried it with him he’d only seen fit to write down nine telephone numbers, and six of these were 1-800 numbers for various airlines. The others were Margaret (no last name), the Northern Lights Hotel in Inuvik, and the Gallerie Montaigne in Duluth. He called Margaret first.

  “Hello,” he said, when a female voice answered. “Are you Margaret?”

  “I used to be.”

  “You used to be?”

  “I changed my name to Margot when I left Sault Ste. Marie,” she said.

  “Okay. Margot, do you know a man named David Grissom?”

  She was quiet.

  “I have his address book,” Anton said. “Yours was the only name in it. I thought—”

  “Who are you? Why do you have his address book?”

  “Listen,” Anton said, “there’s something . . . look, I don’t—”

  “Oh God,” she said. “Something’s happened to him.”

  Hard not to look across the harbor at the islet, its sheer side rising up behind a single row of bright-painted shops and hotels; hard not to imagine what might lie on the other side of that hill, shallow-buried or maybe lost to the sea, but Anton forced himself to turn away from the thought.

  “There was an accident,” Anton said. He looked down at the red pay-phone buttons and felt the islet at his back.

  “Is he . . .?”

  “Yes,” he said quietly, and on the other end of the line she began to weep. Anton closed his eyes for a moment.

  “He has no family,” she said.

  “None?”

  “Well, there’s a sister,” she said. “Somewhere in India, or maybe it was Bangladesh. She belongs to a cult or travels with a guru or does yoga or somethin
g. I don’t think they ever spoke.”

  “His parents?”

  “His mother ran off when he was a little kid. He hasn’t seen her since he was three or four. His father’s dead.”

  “Are there friends? Cousins? Anyone?”

  “We were living in a commune together for a while,” she said, “so there were always a lot of people around, but no one—he was never—he wasn’t close with anyone.”

  “No one except you.”

  “No one except me. He’d just been drifting for years, since his wife died. He came down to Sault Ste. Marie for a few months after he’d been up in the arctic, then he said he was going to Europe and I never saw him again. You said I’m the only name in his address book?”

  “The only one.”

  “I should go,” she said. “Thank you for telling me. At least maybe he’s with her now, you know?”

  “With who?” he asked, but she’d already hung up. He realized what she’d meant a second later. He had that same ground-falling-from-under-him sensation that had overcome him when he’d looked at the painting earlier and had to collect himself. He called the Northern Lights Hotel in Inuvik, but the woman who answered told him that they kept no records. He asked if she remembered a David Grissom, but realized how silly the question was as he spoke. It had been years since David had traveled through the far north. The woman had only been working there for a month, she said. She was kind and Anton half-wanted to stay on the phone longer. He said goodbye and called the Gallerie Montaigne in Duluth, but the number had been disconnected.

  Anton put David’s address book in his pocket, bought a panino and a latte at the fishermen’s café and brought them up to the room. He opened the balcony door and stepped around Jim—the balcony was just large enough to accommodate two deck chairs and a fully extended cat—and kissed Elena on the forehead. She looked up at him and almost managed a smile but her eyes were glassy.

  “You should eat something,” he said.

  “I’m not really hungry.”

  “Yeah, but that’s what you said yesterday.” He found a place to sit with his back to the sea, his spine pressed against the railing and Jim close against his leg. He tore off a small piece of sandwich.

  “I’m really not—”

  “Just this one little piece.”

  “Okay.” She ate slowly, watching the horizon.

  “I called a girl he knew. From his address book. She says he has no family.”

  “None?”

  “Almost none. An estranged sister somewhere in Asia. Here. Another piece.”

  “I’m—”

  “One more bite.”

  “Fine.” Her face was pale and she’d been crying. She was all but translucent in the sunlight. “But what are you going to do?”

  “I think I should wait here,” Anton said.

  “For what?”

  “Maybe his sister will come looking for him someday. Look, I don’t know what to do. But staying here is the only thing I can think of that seems even halfway honorable.”

  “Maybe the police will come looking for you.”

  “It’s possible,” he said. “Have I told you how sorry I am to have gotten you involved in this mess?”

  “A dozen times.”

  “Whatever you decide to do, Elena . . .”

  “Is it a kind of penance?” Her voice was flat.

  “Is what a kind of penance?”

  “Waiting here at the scene of the crime.”

  “Maybe. Yes.”

  “You might wait here forever. It’s possible that no one will ever come looking for him.”

  “I know,” he said.

  She said she wanted to go and he gave her ten thousand dollars. She insisted it was too much but he insisted she take it. He saw her off at the ferry. Afterward he took the bus back to Sant’Angelo. He walked past the hotel and through the piazza, along the narrow sand beach to the islet, past the strip of hotels on the far shore.

  The path that David had walked on his last night on earth curved up around the far side of the islet, but at a certain point it faded out into brush and loose rocks. Anton came upon a broad sloping ledge and found that he could go no further. The cliff rose above him, and it was a sheer drop down to the water below. He looked for footprints, but it had rained twice since the last time he’d seen David. He looked down at the sea, but there was nothing on the rocks and the current seemed rapid. A seagull landed on the surface of the water and was carried quickly away from the shore.

  He’d half-hoped for a ghost. He wanted to turn and see David somewhere nearby, smiling at him perhaps, telling him that it was all right, but David’s absence was absolute. The ledge was empty, the day clear and bright, the sea glittering below. Anton was perfectly alone except for the seagulls. Far off in the distance, the white triangle of a sailboat moved over the water.

  The pleasing rhythms of evening: pouring cat food into the porcelain bowl, cold water splashing over Anton’s wrists as he filled another bowl with water in the sink. Jim brushed against his leg and then settled down over the water bowl, lapping steadily. Anton crouched down to scratch behind his ears, and the cat purred without looking up.

  In the days after Elena left, he settled into a quiet routine. Once or twice a week he took the bus to a larger town to buy groceries and cat food. He went to Naples every so often and bought three or four English-language novels, but they were expensive and he was always running out between trips. Most nights he studied Italian from a Berlitz textbook, alone in his room with the cat asleep on his desk. After a few months he understood the waiters in the fishermen’s café (the last café still open in all of the shuttered-for-the-season village), but the language of the fishermen remained inscrutable. It was a while before someone told him they were speaking Neapolitan, which in his understanding wasn’t quite Italian but wasn’t quite not Italian either. After a while his own Italian was good enough to get a menial job in an enormous hotel two towns over, one of the few places that stayed open year-round. He was a dishwasher in the restaurant and then they made him a porter.

  Anton wore a bright uniform and carried suitcases and came home exhausted at the end of the day, made good tips sometimes from the English-speaking tourists. He worked hard and spent time with the cat and studied Italian in his room at night, reread the books in his slowly growing library, tried not to think too much about anyone he loved.

  At first he kept Jim indoors, but the cat gazed at the seagulls with such undisguised longing and the improvised litter box on the balcony was becoming a problem, so Anton took Jim out on the beach one evening. Jim moved close to the sand at first, hissing at rocks and trying to look everywhere at once, but then he gradually relaxed enough to begin pouncing on seashells.

  He took Jim down to the water early in the morning and then again late at night, when everyone was sleeping and the ocean was his. The cat was orange in daylight, pale in the moonlight. He stalked Anton’s shadow and dug for things in the sand. Anton would sit on a rock and watch him or look at the water. When Anton stood up and began to walk along the shore the cat came with him, never very far from his feet, executing complicated maneuvers in his lifelong efforts to catch his own tail.

  The cat slept in a far corner of the bed, curled and independent, although he sometimes stepped on Anton’s chest to wake him in the morning. Anton always woke unpleasantly, sick with memories of gunshots. Most of his dreams involved people disappearing into thin air: alone on the abandoned dream island he wandered from house to house and then out to the empty piazza, the silent beach. Out onto the pier where the abandoned boats bobbed gently in the dead sea, through abandoned houses, abandoned cafés, the abandoned restaurant with four chairs and a bottle of wine set up at a table, the whole abandoned dream landscape suffused with dread.

  23.

  Elena was back on Ischia at the beginning of April, standing pale on the threshold when Anton opened the door. It was an ordinary evening after working the day shift at the hotel two towns o
ver, and Anton hadn’t changed out of his uniform yet. He’d been drinking an Orangina and reading La Repubblica at his desk, stopping to look up the occasional word. There was a soft knock on the door just before midnight and Anton thought everything was over. He stood up, straightened his jacket, and opened the door with tremendous formality, expecting either the Italian police or a thug with a gun or David’s sister or some combination of the above. Elena stood for a moment like an apparition before she fell into his arms, or tried to; her body got in the way. Holding her was awkward. She was immensely pregnant. It was night and she had been traveling for hours. She sank down on the bed and closed her eyes for a moment and didn’t answer right away when he asked if she was all right. He asked if she was sick and she said no, just tired, but her tiredness had taken on the force of illness. She trembled and her hands were cold.

  “I’ve missed you so much,” she said. “I’m so sorry I left.”

  “Shh. Shh. It’s okay. Are you hungry?” She nodded. He brought her spaghetti and calamari from the restaurant downstairs, which had just reopened that week—the tourists were coming back to Ischia, a slow but widening trickle that would become a torrent by June. He gave her the plate and asked where she’d been, but she was too tired for coherence. She’d gone immediately to France because she spoke the language, and then she’d spent the winter moving slowly through the country in the cold and the rain. Working odd jobs here and there, trying to decide whether to come back to Ischia or not.

  “I was afraid you might have gone home to the north,” he said. “I thought I might never see you again.” He held her close and she rested her head on his shoulder. “Don’t you miss your family?”