The Singer's Gun Read Online Free Page B

phosphorus, but it was Thursday and of course Elena had vanished four days ago, and he was waging a war of attrition with his new secretary. She ignored him as he walked past her into his office that morning.
    He didn’t look at her either, per their unspoken terms of engagement, but it occurred to him as he closed the office door that he’d had no occasion to ask her for anything yet, which struck him as odd. She had come to him for nothing; there had been no phone messages. As he sat down he noticed that his inbox was empty, for the first time in months. He remembered having reached the bottom yesterday afternoon, and he realized with a falling sensation that nothing new had been placed in it. He sat down at the desk, chilled by the air conditioning, and checked his voice mail. No messages. He had left his corporate cell phone in his desk drawer overnight. He tried to check his messages there too, but he couldn’t get more than a fast busy signal no matter which combination of buttons he pressed. He logged on to his company email, or tried to, and then spent some time leaning as far back as his chair would go, contemplating the error message on the screen. Access Denied.
    Jackson’s card was on his desk. Anton hadn’t really wanted to touch it since Jackson had left it there. He’d been moving his paperwork carefully around and over the card for the past several days in the hope that it might just disappear by itself. He looked at his screen another moment and then dialed Jackson’s number.
    “Anton,” Jackson said, in a tone implying that Anton was absolutely the last person he wanted to speak with that morning. “What can I do for you?”
    “Good morning, Jackson. Listen, I’m locked out of my company email account.”
    “I see,” Jackson said.
    “And my cell phone’s not working.”
    “Really?”
    “Since you were here a few days ago,” Anton said, “I just thought you might be in a position to tell me what’s going on.”
    “Well, I’m not a technical support person, Anton.”
    “Jackson, listen, my staff isn’t reporting to me. Let’s not pretend this is a technical issue.”
    Jackson was silent for a moment, and then Anton heard a soft click on the line.
    “Anton,” Jackson said very clearly, “have you thought any more about our conversation last week?”
    “Am I being recorded ?”
    Jackson went quiet again, and then asked Anton if there was anything he’d like to add to last week’s conversation.
    “Nothing,” Anton said. “Absolutely nothing, Jackson, but thank you for asking. Sorry to bother you.”
    Anton hung up, spent some time staring at the diploma on his office wall, and then dialed Jackson’s number again.
    “Jackson, I’m sorry to bother you again. But I wondered if you could tell me what happened to my secretary.”
    “Your secretary? She isn’t at her desk?”
    “I meant Elena,” he said. “Elena James.”
    “Marlene is your secretary, Anton.”
    “Is that her name? My former secretary, then. She wasn’t fired, was she?”
    “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