The Night Listener : A Novel

really…”
    “C’mon. It’ll be fun.”
    I followed her up to the office, where, as predicted, there were no less than seventeen messages stored in the machine. “This is so cool,” said Anna, rubbing her hands together. “I feel like Inspector Tennison. Where should I look?”
    “I don’t know if they’re even on there,” I said. “I’ve mostly been calling them lately.”
    “So I’ll start at the beginning, okay?”
    “Fine. Whatever.”
    She skipped past three messages—one from my agent in New York, one from Jess, one from a nearby Thai restaurant confirming my order—before arriving at Pete’s distinctively chirpy voice. I had picked up the phone immediately, so all you could hear was a sassy fragment: “Hey, Dicksmoker, I was wondering if you were…” Anna turned and frowned at me. “That’s it?” I nodded. “Piece o’ cake, huh? All we have to do is get his mother to say ‘dicksmoker.’” Anna frowned, still poking the forward button. “It doesn’t have to be the exact same word.”
    “You’re sure about that?”
    “That’s what Edgar said.”
    “There’s nothing else on there,” I told her, indicating the machine.
    “At least not from her. I know she hasn’t called in the last ten days.”
    “But you said you talked to her.”
    “Yeah. But I called her .”
    “Okay, then…call her now and tape your conversation.”
    “I can’t do that.”
    “Why not?”
    “For starters I don’t have a tape recorder.”
    “You can do it off the machine, dummy. The tape recorder’s built right in.”
    For someone in radio, I’m unusually technophobic, but I had never been more so than at that moment. As soon as I located its record button, that machine became something lethal to me, a nuclear device that would detonate with the slightest mishandling. “I still can’t do it,” I told Anna. “Not now. It would feel too weird and cold-blooded.”
    “Why?”
    “They’re waiting for an answer about Pete’s book. They’re expecting me to fix things.”
    “So? It doesn’t matter what you talk about.”
    “It does to me, Anna. I can’t break their heart and record it.”
    “ Their heart?”
    “His heart. Her heart. Whoever’s.”
    My bookkeeper gave me a long, soulful look. “You need help,” she said sweetly.
    Later, when Anna was gone, I took Hugo on his walk. It was already dark. I would have to call Henzke Street as soon as I got home; I knew I’d never sleep knowing that Pete might still be awake, still expecting that sandbar. But I mustn’t get tense about the call, or let myself feel guilty in the least. It was Ashe Findlay, after all, who had rejected Pete, and the greater part of the damage had already been done. My sad little report would just be a postscript at worst, an unpleasant aftertaste.
    But I would try to make it easier for him. I’d be funny and warm and sympathetic and pissed off as hell at those bastards in New York. I’d tell him that having a book published was not really that big a deal, not the transcendent chest-thumping thrill it’s often cracked up to be. The real reward, I’d say, sounding as if I meant it, was in the writing itself, in the truthful setting down of things.
    Whether your words had an audience of one or one million, their merit lay only in their artful placement on the page.
    And after we’d talked for a while, I’d ask to speak to Donna.
    Unless, of course, it was Donna who answered the phone.
    In either case I would not be nervous about the machine. I would simply push the record button as soon as I got a dial tone and leave it on for the duration of the call. Even for me, that was foolproof enough.
    Unless it made a noise of some sort. Like an intermittent beep, or one of those disembodied voices—God forbid—that would bark out the word recording and betray me on the spot.
    I consulted the owner’s manual when I got home to ensure that there were no telltale sounds when the recorder was on. Then I took a long shower and headed for the office. I would have preferred the bedroom, where I could stretch out on the bed and feel less formal, but the phone there was only an extension and lacked the necessary equipment.
    I sat at Jess’s desk and took a deep breath, then dialled the number I knew by heart. After one ring I pushed the record button, but what I heard shortly thereafter was so bewildering I was sure I had made a mistake.
    So I dialled again.
    And heard the same thing: “We’re sorry. The number