Emily St. John Mandel - The Singer's Gun

“Who were you calling?” she asked. She was skimming the headlines.

“The office,” he said. “I told them I’d check in.” Check in to what, exactly? He imagined his telephone ringing endlessly on his desk in Dead File Storage Four, the empty room, the drift of paper beneath the window, dust gathering on the telephone and pigeons flying in to investigate from the world outside. Elena flashed through him, eyes the color of storm clouds, and he opened the paper but couldn’t read. His eyes skipped twice over the same paragraph. Two options present themselves, and you choose the one that seems best at the time.

“You know,” he said, as casually as possible, “I was thinking about maybe staying on a while.”

Sophie looked up from her café latte.

“Our plane tickets are for Thursday,” she said.

The morning after Sophie left Ischia he woke up lonely from a dream he couldn’t remember and lay staring at the blue ceiling for some time before he got up. He opened the shutters and the sea was awash in light, Capri a far-off shadow on the edge of the cloudless sky. Down on the piazza were too many tourists, calling out to their children in languages he didn’t understand or reading newspapers at the café tables, so he went back to the restaurant at the hotel and ate pasta and grilled squid at a table by the window, looking out at the ocean. In Sophie’s absence he felt an enormous amount of space around him.

She would be in Rome today, unless she’d changed her flight. He glanced at his watch and imagined her eating breakfast somewhere, alone at an outdoor café with a clear glass of coffee, reading the International Herald Tribune . The thought was almost unbearable even though he was enjoying his solitude, so he went back down to the piazza to call his best friend from the pay phone that stood beside the low wall by the harbor.

“Gary,” he said, “I think I’m alone again.”

In a quiet office on the twelfth floor of the new World Trade Center 7, Broden played Elena a tape.

“It can’t have been an easy business.”

“It was an easy business. I was good at it. It was the easiest thing I ever did in my life.”

“Then why did you get out?”

“I don’t know, I just gradually didn’t want to do it anymore.”

“Why not? What changed you?”

“I don’t know. It was gradual.”

“If you could name one thing.” Listening to her own voice all these weeks later, Elena closed her eyes and thought, Why did you keep talking to me? Wasn’t it obvious that you were being interrogated? She was strangely angry with him.

“Well, there was a girl. Catina. I’d been thinking about getting out, but it was meeting her, it was talking to her. . I didn’t know before her that I was really going to do it. Get out, I mean.”

“A girlfriend?”

“No, not a girlfriend. I sold her a passport.”

Broden stopped the tape.

“The tape runs out two minutes later. Did he say anything more about his other clients?”

“No,” Elena said. “Just what’s on the tape. The woman from Lisbon. And that stuff later on about the falling man.”

“Oh, I know all about the woman from Lisbon.” Broden was smiling, more animated than Elena had ever seen her. “I spoke with her at great length. Nonetheless, Elena, it’s the best tape you’ve given me. Good work.”

“Can I ask you a question?” Elena asked.

“Of course.”

“Why was Anton put in a file storage room?”

“I thought it was an elegant solution,” Broden said. “We need him close at hand, but the company wasn’t willing to keep him once the results of his background check came up.”

“What did the background check say?”

“What do you think it said? No one’s invisible,” Broden said. “There’s no such thing as operating under the radar. The background check said he’d never been to Harvard and that he and his cousin were the subjects of an ongoing criminal investigation. Water Incorporated didn’t want him, but he was judged a significant flight risk if he lost his job, so a compromise was reached: the company’s keeping him in storage while we conduct our investigation.”

“Why not just arrest him?”

“Because I don’t want to tip off Aria just yet,” Broden said. “But at any rate, I called you in to ask you something. Did he say anything to you about staying on in Italy? I expected him back some time ago.”

“He didn’t tell me anything,” Elena said. She was slumped in her chair. She hadn’t been sleeping well. She’d gone to Anton’s office with a sunflower — a rose seemed too ordinary — at five o’clock on the afternoon when he’d said he’d be back, but the room was empty with papers blowing over the floor. There was a fine layer of dust on Anton’s desk. She sat in his swivel chair and spun around once or twice, then went to lie down on the sofa. She lay there for a long time, drowsy and a little sad, watching the movement of loose-leaf paper over the floor. She left the sunflower lying on his desk, but when she came back the next day at five o’clock it remained undisturbed. She visited the empty room every afternoon for the rest of that week, lying on the sofa in the quiet, resting in her memories. She was startled by her longing. By Friday Anton hadn’t returned and the sunflower was wilted, so she dropped it out the window onto the roof of the hotel and didn’t go back again.

Anton sometimes stood on the balcony of his hotel room on Ischia and thought about the span of oceans that divided him from Brooklyn, and the thought of being four thousand miles away from his family was exhilarating but the days on Ischia were endless. There were contentious phone calls to New York. The sea changed from blue to gray and back again. Anton wandered the narrow streets of Sant’Angelo (he had a hard time thinking of them as streets, these narrow corridors between villas and walled gardens that turned into staircases every now and again), talked to himself by the harbor, read the English-language newspapers and stared out at the sea. He called Aria every third or fourth day and listened to her tell him that the package was still delayed and then hung up on her, which was satisfying the first few times and later tedious. He convinced her to pay him seventeen thousand dollars in consideration of the delays; she agreed but was furious. He tried to call Sophie sometimes, but her phone rang endlessly. She never picked up.

There were a number of brief storms during which Capri vanished from the horizon and wind moaned around the edges of the hotel and came in through the shutters. When the weather was nice he drank endless cups of coffee in the piazza and read the International Herald Tribune and worried about the transaction.

“Why are you paying me so much?” he asked her once, when he’d been on Ischia for four weeks.

“Because you’ve forced me up to seventeen thousand dollars,” she said.

“But why did you agree to pay me that much?”

“Because it’s important that I move into a new business,” she said. “It’s worth it to me. You don’t need to know why.”

Sometimes Sant’Angelo started closing in on him, so he took the bus to Ischia Porto and drank cappuccinos at an outdoor café and watched the ferries come in from Napoli for a while. Once he took the bus all the way around the island, but he remained unmoved by the unchanging paradise of his surroundings and didn’t get off until the bus came full circle and reached Sant’Angelo again. By the middle of October the tourists were thinning out; the only other regulars on the piazza were a grim-faced German couple who drank beer and stared at the water without speaking to one other and a man staying in Anton’s hotel who always had paint on his clothes and always seemed to be either sketching something or doing a crossword puzzle.