Emily St. John Mandel - The Singer's Gun

“You haven’t seen her yet today,” her husband said.

“I know,” Broden said. “I’m trying to get home before bedtime.”

She took a detour in order to pass in front of Anton’s parents’ store again. Anton’s mother was still on the loading dock, staring out at the river with no expression on her face. Anton’s father was outside now, kneeling beside her with his hand on her back, speaking to her intently. Broden slowed down, but neither of them looked at the car as she passed. At the end of the block she sped up again and passed over the bridge to the spired city.

Broden was tired. There was no case to speak of at this point and no one involved was talking and the whole mess was going nowhere, but back at the office she called Anton’s wife in San Francisco. She had tried before and left unreturned messages. This time Sophie answered the phone and said that she’d left Anton in Europe and as far as she knew he was still there, and could Broden please pass on the message that it would be nice if Anton would come back and sign the annulment papers one of these days. Broden asked if she could tell her anything about Elena James. Sophie went silent, and then said that Elena James had stolen Anton’s cat and that was the last time she’d seen her. Broden asked her what she was talking about and Sophie got angry, said she didn’t feel like getting into it and she knew nothing that she hadn’t already told her and actually she’d really like to just be left alone if Broden wouldn’t mind.

There was a tape that Broden had pulled out earlier in the day. The first tape Elena had ever given her, a few months before she disappeared. After Broden hung up the phone she put on her headphones and pressed play on the machine. The recording begins with a rustling sound — Elena has reached into her bag to activate the machine — and they speak for a moment about points of origin and distant towns.

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.

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.