Cloud Atlas (59 page)

Luisa checks Joe Napier. He looks on, unhurt, thunderstruck.

The señora wipes her mouth and leans over the motionless, pulp-faced Bisco. “And
don’t
call me ‘wetback’!” She steps over his clotted head and unlocks the exit.

“You might want to tell the other two
I
did that to him,” Napier says to her, retrieving Bisco’s gun.

The señora addresses Luisa.
“Quítatelo de encima, cariño. Anda con gentuza y ¡Dios mío! ese viejo podría ser tu padre.”

65

Napier sits on the graffiti-frescoed subway train, watching Lester Rey’s daughter. She is dazed, disheveled, shaky, and her clothes are still damp from the bank’s sprinkler. “How did you find me?” she asks, finally.

“Big fat guy at your office. Nosboomer, or something.”

“Nussbaum.”

“That’s it. Took a heap of persuading.”

A silence lasts from Reunion Square subway to Seventeenth Avenue. Luisa picks at a hole in her jeans. “I guess you don’t work at Seaboard any longer.”

“I was put out to pasture yesterday.”

“Fired?”

“No. Early retirement. Yes. I was put out to pasture.”

“And you came back from the pasture this morning?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

The next silence lasts from Seventeenth Avenue to McKnight Park.

“I feel,” Luisa hesitates, “that I—no, that
you
—broke some sort of decree back there. As if Buenas Yerbas had decided I was to die today. But here I am.”

Napier considers this. “No. The city doesn’t care. And you could say it was your father who just saved your life, when he kicked away that grenade rolling my way, thirty years ago.” Their compartment groans and shudders. “We’ve got to go via a gun store. Empty guns make me nervous.”

The subway emerges into the sunlight.

Luisa squints. “Where are we going?”

“To see somebody.” Napier checks his watch. “She’s flown in specially.”

Luisa rubs her red eyes. “Can the somebody give us a copy of the Sixsmith Report? Because that dossier is my only way out.”

“I don’t know yet.”

66

Megan Sixsmith sits on a low bench in the Buenas Yerbas Museum of Modern Art and stares back at a giant portrait of an old lady’s ursine face, rendered in interlacing gray and black lines on a canvas otherwise blank. The only figurative in a room of Pollocks, de Koonings and Mirós, the portrait quietly startles.
“Look,” she says
, thinks Megan,
“at your future. Your face, too, will one day be mine.”
Time has knitted her skin into webs of wrinkles. Muscles sag here, tauten there, her eyelids droop. Her pearls are of inferior quality most likely, and her hair is mussed from an afternoon of rounding up grandchildren.
But she sees things I don’t
.

A woman about her own age sits next to her. She could use a wash and a change of clothes. “Megan Sixsmith?”

Megan glances sidelong. “Luisa Rey?”

She nods toward the portrait. “I’ve always liked her. My dad met her, the real lady, I mean. She was a Holocaust survivor who settled in B.Y. Ran a boardinghouse over in Little Lisbon. She was the artist’s landlady.”

Courage grows anywhere
, thinks Megan Sixsmith,
like weeds
.

“Joe Napier said you flew in today from Honolulu.”

“Is he here?”

“The guy behind me, in the denim shirt pretending to look at the Warhol. He’s watching out for us. I’m afraid his paranoia is justified.”

“Yes. I need to know you are who you say you are.”

“I’m happy to hear it. Any ideas?”

“What was my uncle’s favorite Hitchcock movie?”

The woman claiming to be Luisa Rey thinks for a while and smiles. “We talked about Hitchcock in the elevator—I’m guessing he wrote you about that—but I don’t remember him naming a favorite. He admired that wordless passage in
Vertigo
, where Jimmy Stewart trails the mysterious woman to the waterfront with the San Francisco backdrop. He enjoyed
Charade
—I know that’s not Hitchcock, but it tickled him, you calling Audrey Hepburn a bubblehead.”

Megan reclines into the seat. “Yes, my uncle referred to you in a card he wrote from the airport hotel. It was agitated, and worrying, and dotted with phrases like ‘If anything should happen to me’—but it wasn’t suicidal. Nothing could make Rufus do what the police claimed. I’m certain.”
Ask her, and control your trembling, for God’s sake
. “Miss Rey—do
you
think my uncle was murdered?”

Luisa Rey replies, “I’m afraid I know he was. I’m sorry.”

The journalist’s conviction is cathartic. Megan takes a deep breath. “I know about his work for Seaboard and the Defense Department. I never saw the whole report, but I checked its mathematics when I visited Rufus back in June. We vetted each other’s work.”

“The Defense Department? You don’t mean Energy?”

“Defense. A by-product of the HYDRA-Zero reactor is weapons-grade uranium. Highest quality, lots of it.” Megan lets Luisa Rey digest the new implications. “What do you need?”

“The report, only the report, will bring Seaboard crashing down in public and legal arenas. And, incidentally, save my own skin.”

Trust this stranger or get up and walk away?

A crocodile of schoolchildren clusters around the portrait of the old woman. Megan murmurs, under the curator’s short speech, “Rufus kept academic papers, data, notes, early drafts, et cetera on
Starfish
—his yacht—for future reference. His funeral isn’t until next week, probate won’t begin until then, so this cache should still be untouched. I would bet a lot he had a copy of his report aboard. Seaboard’s people may have already combed the boat, but he had a thing about not mentioning
Starfish
at work …”

“Where’s
Starfish
moored now?”

67

CAPE YERBAS MARINA ROYALE PROUD HOME OF THE
PROPHETESS
BEST-PRESERVED SCHOONER IN THE WORLD!

Napier parks the rented Ford by the clubhouse, a weatherboarded former boathouse. Its bright windows boast an inviting bar, and nautical flags ruffle stiff in the evening wind. Sounds of laughter and dogs are carried from the dunes as Luisa and Napier cross the clubhouse garden and descend the steps to the sizable marina. A three-masted wooden ship is silhouetted against the dying east, towering over the sleek fiberglass yachts around it. Some people move on the jetties and yachts, but not many.
“Starfish
is moored on the furthest jetty away from the clubhouse”—Luisa consults Megan Sixsmith’s map—”past the
Prophetess.”

The nineteenth-century ship is indeed restored beautifully. Despite their mission, Luisa is distracted by a strange gravity that makes her pause for a moment and look at its rigging, listen to its wooden bones creaking.

“What’s wrong?” whispers Napier.

What
is
wrong?
Luisa’s birthmark throbs. She grasps for the ends of this elastic moment, but they disappear into the past and the future. “Nothing.”

“It’s okay to be spooked. I’m spooked myself.”

“Yeah.”

“We’re almost there.”

Starfish
is where Megan’s map says. They clamber aboard. Napier inserts a clip into the cabin door and slides a Popsicle stick into the gap. Luisa watches for watchers. “Bet you didn’t learn that in the army.”

“You lose your bet. Cat burglars make resourceful soldiers, and the draft board wasn’t choosy …” A click. “Got it.” The tidy cabin is devoid of books. An inset digital clock blinks from 21:55 to 21:56. Napier’s flashlight’s pencil beam rests on a navigation table fitted atop a mini–filing cabinet. “How about in there?”

Luisa opens a drawer. “This is it. Shine here.” A mass of folders and binders. One, vanilla in color, catches her eye.
The HYDRA-Zero Reactor—An Operational Assessment Model—Project Head Dr. Rufus Sixsmith
. “Got it. This is it. Joe? You okay?”

“Yeah. It’s just … about time something went well, so simply.”

So Joe Napier can smile
.

A motion in the cabin doorway; a man blocks out the stars. Napier reads Luisa’s alarm and whirls around. In the flashlight Luisa sees a tendon in the gunman’s wrist twitch, twice, but no gunfire sounds.
Jammed safety catch?

Joe Napier makes a hiccuping sound, slumps to his knees, and cracks his head on the steel foot of the navigation table.

He lies inert.

Luisa loses all but the dimmest sense of being herself. Napier’s flashlight rolls in the gentle swell, and its beam rotates to show his shredded torso. His lifeblood spreads obscenely quickly, obscenely scarlet, obscenely shiny. Rigging whistles and twangs in the wind.

The killer closes the cabin door behind him. “Put the report on the table, Luisa.” His voice is kindly. “I don’t want blood on it.” She obeys. His face is hidden. “Well, you get to make peace with your maker.”

Luisa grips the table. “You’re Bill Smoke. You killed Sixsmith.”

The darkness answers, “Bigger forces than me. I just dispatched the bullet.”

Focus
. “You followed us, from the bank, in the subway, to the art museum …”

“Does death always make you so verbose?”

Luisa’s voice trembles. “What do you mean ‘always’?”

68

Joe Napier drifts in a torrential silence.

The ghost of Bill Smoke hovers over his dark vision.

More than half of himself has gone already.

Words come bruising the silence again.
He’s going to kill her
.

That .38 in your pocket
.

I’ve done my duty, I’m dying, for Chrissakes
.

Hey. Go tell Lester Rey about duty and dying
.

Napier’s right hand inches to his buckle. He wonders if he is a baby in his cot or a man dying in his bed. Nights pass, no, lifetimes. Often Napier wants to ebb away, but his hand refuses to forget. The butt of a gun arrives in his palm. His finger enters a loop of steel, and a flare of clarity illuminates his purpose.
The trigger, this, yes. Pull her out. Slowly now …

Angle the gun
. Bill Smoke is just yards away.

The trigger resists his index finger—then a blaze of incredible noise spins Bill Smoke backwards, his arms flailing like a marionette’s.

In the fourth to last moment of his life, Napier fires another bullet into the marionette silhouetted by stars. The word
Silvaplana
comes to him, unasked for.

In the third to last moment, Bill Smoke’s body slides down the cabin door.

Second to last, an inset digital clock blinks from 21:57 to 21:58.

Napier’s eyes sink, newborn sunshine slants through ancient oaks and dances on a lost river.
Look, Joe, herons
.

69

In Margo Roker’s ward in Swannekke County Hospital, Hester Van Zandt glances at her watch. 21:57. Visiting hours end at ten o’clock. “One more for the road, Margo?” The visitor glances at her comatose friend, then leafs through her
Anthology of American Poetry
. “A little Emerson? Ah, yes. Remember this one? You introduced it to me.

If the red slayer thinks he slays
,
Or if the slain think he is slain
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again
.

Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanish’d gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame
.

They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt
,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings
.

The strong gods pine for my abode
,
And pine in vain
—

“Margo? Margo? Margo!” Margo Roker’s eyelids vibrate as if in REM. A groan squirms in her larynx. She gulps for air, then her eyes are wide open, blinking in confusion and alarm at the tubes in her nose. Hester Van Zandt is also panicky, but with hope. “Margo! Can you hear me? Margo!”

The patient’s eyes settle on her old friend, and she lets her head sink into her pillow. “Yes, I can hear you, Hester, you’re shouting in my goddamn ear.”

70

Luisa Rey surveys the October 1 edition of the
Western Messenger
amid the steamy clatter of the Snow White Diner.

LLOYD HOOKS SKIPS $250,000 BAIL PRESIDENT FORD VOWS TO “ROOT OUT CROOKS WHO BRING IGNOMINY TO CORPORATE AMERICA”
A BYPD spokesman confirmed the newly appointed CEO of Seaboard Power Inc. and former Federal Power Commissioner Lloyd Hooks has fled the country, forfeiting the quarter-million-dollar bail posted Monday. The latest twist to “Seaboardgate” comes a day after Hooks swore to “defend my integrity and the integrity of our great American company against this pack of nefarious lies.” President Ford entered the fray at a White House press conference, condemning his former adviser and distancing himself from the Nixon appointee. “My administration makes no distinction between lawbreakers. We will root out the crooks who bring ignominy to corporate America and punish them with the utmost severity of the law.”

Lloyd Hooks’s disappearance, interpreted by many observers as an admission of guilt, is the latest twist in a series of revelations triggered by a Sept. 4 incident at Cape Yerbas Marina Royale in which Joe Napier and Bill Smoke, security officers at Seaboard Inc.’s controversial Swannekke Island atomic power stations, shot each other. Eyewitness Luisa Rey, correspondent to this newspaper, summoned police to the crime scene, and the subsequent investigation has already spread to last month’s killing of British atomic engineer and Seaboard consultant Dr. Rufus Sixsmith, the crash of former Seaboard CEO Alberto Grimaldi’s Learjet over Pennsylvania two weeks ago, and an explosion in Third Bank of California in downtown B.Y. which claimed the lives of two people. Five directors at Seaboard Power have been charged in connection with the conspiracy, and two have committed suicide. Three more, including Vice CEO William Wiley, have agreed to testify against Seaboard Corporation.