She shook her head, but she wasn’t sure. Maybe he had.
“Anyway, I told him that Zora hadn’t tried again. I never even saw her after that. But he didn’t believe me. He sat me down for more talks, trying to trip me up on my story. Eventually, he brought Harry into it. Stan showed him his evidence, but no one ever showed it to me. I was lucky—Harry wanted to believe me. Still, he couldn’t afford to have me around anymore, so he suggested I put in for a transfer. Make me someone else’s problem, I suppose.”
“Stan never told me any of this,” she said, but it was getting harder to find air, and the last word barely made it out.
“Secrets are his game, aren’t they?”
Silence fell between them, and Emmett returned to his steak.
People talk of conflicting emotions as if they’re a daily occurrence, but at that moment Sophie felt as if it were the first time she’d experienced them. Honesty pulled from one side, while the other side, the one that was motivated by self-preservation, held a tighter grip. She stared at her pasta, knowing she wouldn’t be able to taste it anymore, maybe not even be able to keep it down, and it occurred to her that maybe her husband deserved to know. To really know. Exactly what kind of a woman he was married to. It would be the end, of course. The end of everything. Yet when she thought back to their honeymoon, it was obvious that he was the one person on the planet who deserved to know it all. He was probably the only person who could understand.
She was still trying to decide when the restaurant was filled with a woman’s scream. It came from the table behind her. She began to turn to get a look at the woman, but instead saw what the scream had been about. It was at their table, where their waiter should have been standing, a large man—bald, sweating, in a long, cheap overcoat. Upon looking at him, she understood why their neighbor had screamed, for she had the same impulse herself. He was all muscle—not tall but wide—with muddy blue prison tattoos creeping out from under his collar. A man of absolute violence, like those tracksuited Balkan mafiosi she occasionally saw in overpriced bars. He wasn’t looking at her, though, but at Emmett, and he was holding a pistol in his hairy hand.
It was the first time she’d ever seen a gun in a restaurant. She’d seen hunting rifles disassembled in her childhood living room, then put to use outdoors when her father went hunting for red stag deer in West Virginia. She once saw a pistol hanging from inside a jacket in their Cairo kitchen when an agent of one of the security services had come to have a talk with Emmett. In Yugoslavia, they had been on soldiers and militiamen and in one grimy kitchen that still sometimes appeared in her dreams, but she had never seen one in a restaurant. Now she had, and the pistol—a modern-looking one, slide-action—was pointed directly at her husband.
“Emmett Kohl,” the man said with a strong accent, but it wasn’t a Hungarian accent. It was something Sophie couldn’t place.
Emmett just stared at him, hands flat on either side of his plate. She couldn’t tell if he recognized the man, so before she had a chance to think through the stupidity of her actions she said, “Who are you?”
The man turned to her, though his pistol remained on Emmett. He frowned, as if she were an unexpected variable in an equation he’d spent weeks calculating. Then he turned back to Emmett and said, “I here for you.”
Mute, Emmett shook his head.
Behind the man, the restaurant was clearing out. It was surprising how quietly so many people could retreat, the only sound a low rhubarb-rhubarb rumbling through the place. Men were snatching phones from their tables and holding women by the elbows, heading toward the door. They crouched as they walked. She hoped that at least one of them was calling the police. A waitress stood by the wall, tray against her hip, confused.
Sophie said, “Why are you here?”
Again, the look, and this time she could read irritation in his features. Instead of answering, he glanced at the gold wristwatch on his free hand and muttered something in a language she didn’t recognize. Something sharp, like a curse. He looked back at Emmett and, his arm stiffening, pulled the trigger.
Later, she would hate herself for staring at the gunman rather than at her husband. She should have been looking at Emmett, giving him a final moment of commiseration, of tenderness, of love. But she hadn’t been, because she hadn’t expected this. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, she hadn’t actually expected the man to shoot Emmett twice, once in the chest and, after a step forward, once through the nose, the explosion of each shot cracking her ears. She supposed it was because she was still dealing with the shock of Zora Balašević, of Stan, and the novelty of a gun in a restaurant. It was so much to deal with that she couldn’t have expected more novelty to come so quickly. Not that night.
Yet there it was. She turned to see Emmett leaned back against the wall, his hazel, bloodshot eyes open but unfocused, sliding out of his chair, his face unrecognizable, blood and organic matter splashed across the wall and a sepia city scene. Screams made the restaurant noisy again, but she didn’t look around. She just stared at Emmett as his body slid down, disappearing gradually behind the table and his plate of half-eaten steak. She didn’t even notice that the gunman had jogged out of the restaurant, pushing past the remaining witnesses—this was something she would be told later.
For the moment, it was just Sophie, the table with their wine and blood-spattered food, and Emmett slipping away. His chest disappeared, then his shoulders, his chin pressed down against the knot of his tie, then his face. The gory face that was missing the short, almost pug nose that, more than his hair or his clothes, always defined her husband’s look. The table rocked as he fell off the chair, leaving a mess on the wall. She didn’t hear him hit because her ears were ringing from the gunshots, and she felt as if she were going to vomit. There was more screaming and the distant sound of weeping, but she soon learned that all of it was coming from herself.
3
She had never imagined that it would be like this. Not that she’d ever imagined this, but whenever she’d imagined something terrible happening before her eyes, her imagination would take in the event itself, that first taste of horror, and then … cut: to the next day, or the next week. Her brain worked like a film editor, even dicing up actual memories, jump-cutting over hours, balking at the grimy minutes and hours that stretched between the initial shock and the final passing out, when a night’s sleep would come along to wash away a little of the metallic taste of disaster.
Yet it became abundantly clear that this in-between time was the event. The adrenaline and the endless replay of her husband’s pink bits splattering across the wallpaper, the contradictory calm voice of some restaurant customer, an American who thought she could relate to Sophie, the barely intelligible grunts of Hungarian policemen who seemed, more than anything else, baffled by what their role was supposed to be, and then the trained, cool, faux-comforting voice of a skinny, pink-cheeked young man from the embassy who arrived with a doctor and introduced himself as Gerry Davis. Gerry Davis told her that the doctor was going to take a look at her—nothing to worry about—and maybe give her a little something to take the edge off. They brought her to an empty table in another room so she wouldn’t have to see her husband anymore. Someone gave her a real silk handkerchief that smelled faintly of vinegar. She focused for a long time on a cigarette burn in the tablecloth. This was all the event.
Gerry Davis said, “Do you have a phone?”