Emily St. John Mandel: The Singer's Gun

“Of course not. No. Her reviews were excellent.”

“Yes, I know her reviews were excellent, Jackson, I wrote them. Was she transferred somewhere? A different department?”

“I’m afraid I can’t divulge—”

Anton hung up again and spent the remainder of the day reading and rereading the New York Times , drumming his fingers on his desk and staring into space, walking back and forth across the room with his hands in his pockets, writing his letter of resignation and then crumpling it up and throwing it across the room, wishing he were in Italy already.

The stop before Ischia was the city of Naples. Anton and Sophie came in by train after sunset and emerged from the station into a broad curved cobblestone street where no one spoke English but the taxi drivers all insisted that they knew where their hotel was, and the streets glimpsed near the train station were dark and strewn with trash, ancient apartment buildings towering unlit. The driver took them at high speed through an intricate network of freeways, and the overpasses curving overhead had a futuristic and sinister gleam. As they sped around corners the city was fleetingly visible, a gray glimmering chaos of buildings clinging to the hillside as far as the eye could see, and then they were plunging down the hairpin turns of a narrow street, passing between buildings that appeared to have sustained some unrepaired shell damage during the course of the Second World War. The driver performed a harrowing U-turn and screeched to a halt before the Hotel Britannique. They checked in and ascended in silence to the room, where Sophie took a shower and Anton stood on the tiny terrace six stories above the traffic. He was looking out over a scattering of palm trees that stood across the street, down over the narrow section of city that descended from their street to the Tyrrhenian Sea, the Bay of Naples calm below. There were boats in the moonlight. He heard the bathroom door open in the room behind him and he realized that he and Sophie had barely spoken in hours, and not at all since they’d arrived in the city. Anton turned and through the gauze curtains she was a ghost in the steam, drifting across the room toward her suitcase, pulling a dress on over her skin. He parted the curtains and she stood barefoot and pensive before him, hair dripping dark water spots on the sky-blue linen of her dress. She looked at him and for an instant he thought he saw panic in her eyes.

“I’m just tired,” she said quickly.

It took him a second to notice that her eyes were red. Three months ago, he thought, he would have noticed that instantly.

“That’s why you were crying?”

“I just get tired sometimes,” she said.

“I know you do. It’s okay.”

She smiled and twisted her hair up behind her head, secured it with a clip, seemed unaware of her beauty as a few strands escaped and fell over her neck.

“Sophie,” he said. She looked up. “Let’s go out and see the city.”

On the street outside the night was subtropical, palm trees lit up against a deep blue sky. The sidewalk was narrow, cars and scooters passing so close that he could have reached out and touched them. Sophie clung to his hand. The street began a curve that didn’t seem to end. They kept walking uphill, the road turning and turning ahead of them, until Anton thought they should have gone in a complete circle. There was no breeze from the sea below — it was as hot here as it had been in New York when they’d left — and his shirt was wet against his back. It was a long time before they came to a restaurant. He pushed open the wooden door, and Sophie moved past him into the room without speaking. The sign read Ristorante, but it was more of a lounge; a dim space filled with tables that terraced down toward a small stage where a girl in a sparkly dress was singing in English. Anton thought she was pretty and wished for a moment that he could share this observation with his wife.

“She’s singing a New Order song,” Sophie said suddenly. “Listen.”

“I have this album,” Anton said. “I used to listen to it all the time.”

“I know, but she’s singing it at half-speed. Like a nightclub song.”

“Well,” he said, “it is a nightclub.”

“Do you hear an accent?” Sophie asked. She didn’t seem to have heard him. “I think she’s British.”

“I think you’re right.”

“She’s terrible,” Sophie said after a moment.

A waiter had appeared. Anton got Sophie to order for him in her phrase-book Italian, and the song finished to surprisingly fervent applause. The singer’s dress was very tight and seemed to be made entirely of sequins, so that she emitted shards of light with every movement. It hurt his eyes to look directly at her. Her hair was dark and pinned up elaborately. She wasn’t terrible, he thought. Her voice was sweet and a bit too young for her body.

“Now she’s singing old Depeche Mode stuff,” Sophie said, in the tones of a girl watching a scandal unfold, and he forced himself to avert his attention from the broken-glass dress and listen to the song.

“I like it,” he said. “I think it’s interesting.” He watched Sophie’s face, but she didn’t respond or look away from the girl. They were taking a ferry tomorrow to the island of Ischia.

“What I wish you could tell me,” Gary said at the beginning of Anton’s fourth week alone on Ischia, “is what you’re actually doing there.”

“I can’t talk about it,” Anton said. He’d been calling Gary almost every day since Sophie had left the island. He was bored and there was no one to talk to there.

“Are you waiting for something?”

“You know what’s strange,” Anton said, “and this will sound awful — but what I really miss is my cat. I miss my cat more than I miss Sophie.”

“Your cat?”

“Jim. I know it probably sounds strange, in light of everything, but he’s the one I keep thinking about.”

“You’re right, that sounds strange. Why don’t you come back?”

“I can’t. It’s a long story.”

“Is there some reason you’re avoiding New York?”

“Well,” Anton said, “now that you mention it.”

“You kill someone?”

“Please. I can’t even set mousetraps.”

“Affair with your secretary? Unpaid debt?”

“Can you think of anything more banal,” Anton said, “than having an affair with your secretary?”

“You were sleeping with her. Jesus.”

“Things happen,” Anton said. “Look, I’m not proud of it.”

“Christ. Your secretary. How did it start?”

“The way I noticed her,” he said. “It wasn’t the way you’re supposed to notice someone you work with.”

Elena in the evenings: she stood by the window at six thirty P.M., watching as the evening reflection of their office tower appeared on the side of the Hyatt Hotel. The hotel was a reflective wall of square panels no more than fifty feet away, a mirror on which the bright windows of their offices began to appear at nightfall, before five in the winter. This was the time of day when, just by looking out the window, Anton could see the movement of workers on the floors above and below him. They walked across their offices from one lit square to another, wavering like ghosts in the reflection. The exterior of the hotel was composed entirely of glass and revealed nothing of its secret life except when a window was opened, which was rarely. Once Anton looked out and a man was leaning out the hotel window smoking a cigarette, and the sight gave him a shock — he was so used to thinking of the hotel as a mirror that he’d all but forgotten about the hotel rooms and suitcases and transient human souls on the other side of the glass.