Emily St. John Mandel - The Singer's Gun

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 something. 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.