The Cloud (14 page)

31

I
scroll through the recent calls. What stands out are the calls from “Carl_L,” including two last night after midnight. There also are two calls this morning from Mission Day School. If memory serves, it’s the school her nephew attends.

Faith stirs. I lower the phone. She settles back down, and I lift the device again. I check her voice mails. She’s cleared all but one—from last night from “Carl_L.” I lower the phone’s volume, and hit play on the voice mail.

A male voice says: “Stop playing around, Faith. You’re running out of time.” The caller hangs up.

I play it again. I can’t gauge how stern the warning sounds. The hostility of the words, and their brevity, suggest something very threatening, but the voice sounds plaintive, even desperate.

Faith stirs, and rolls toward me, curling into a quasi-fetal position. I feel an intense urge to close my eyes, put my head next to her, wake up on an island.

What or who is haunting you, Faith? Who are you? Why are you running out of time? To do what?

I put down her phone but leave it open. I reach for my phone and into it copy the number for “Carl_L” and hit send to initiate a call, then quickly end it. I close Faith’s phone.

I reach into my wallet. I pull out the number for a different phone—the one I’d placed on the windshield of the Mercedes while it was parked in Chinatown.

In the compartment on the driver’s-side door, I find some old earbuds among the compact discs. I plug them into my phone.

I start the car, drive ten minutes up University Avenue until I wind myself back to Highway 280. At the on ramp, I pause at a yield sign and punch into my phone the number for Buzzard Bill. I roll onto the highway and hit send.

The phone rings and rings. I end the call and hit redial.

It barely rings once when someone picks up. A voice says: “How was Peet’s?”

The café where I met Andrew.

“Fine, but their French roast has too much aftertaste.”

“You didn’t order coffee.”

“You were there?”

“We’re everywhere.”

We.

I look in the rearview mirror. I’m sloping up a hill just past the exit for Atherton, struck by how rural this area can suddenly become. City and suburb one second, endless stretches of Golden State the next. Here, peaceful terrain and powerful sports cars.

I see only one car in the distance but can’t make it out. To the right of the highway, there’s a sharp drop-off that levels off, then widens into a meadow green with tall grass, and then the green terrain begins a gradual climb into the foothills. To my left, a steep ravine covered with bushy green heritage trees opens onto the northbound highway. Peaceful indeed, but if I had to make a quick maneuver on this stretch, I could easily torpedo off the edge.

“Who are you?”

“Like you want my name and stuff?”

“Bill, right? I’ll settle for what you want and why you’re following me.”

“I want you to make sure to get some rest.”

“Buy me a pillow.”

“You really have no idea, do you?”

“I really don’t.”

“You’re not seeing things clearly.”

“Come out in the open and things will get clearer.”

“Okay.”

I check the rearview mirror. The car behind me is gaining. Faith sleeps. I’m nearing the crest of the hill. “Do you work with Alan Parsons?” With a toe tap, I push the car from sixty-five to seventy.

“No. But I liked his style.”

“Liked?”

“As you know, he’s deceased.”

I cruise into a shallow dip that curves right and then begins a long slope upward. The car in my rearview mirror is a sports car, maybe a Ferrari, exploding over the hill, then passing me with ease to my left.

“Did you kill him?”

“Of course not.”

“But he discovered something. He stumbled onto some information. He wanted to give it to me, or maybe he gave it to me. It’s information you don’t want me to know or make public.”

“It doesn’t take an award-winning journalist to figure that out.”

“What does he want me to know?”

“That’s your job. Not mine.”

“What’s your job?”

“To protect you.”

“Protect me from what?”

“Mostly yourself.”

I reach the hilltop. Behind me, I see a flash of light, a silver grill, reflecting sun. The car seems to leap over the top of the hill, one lane to my left. I swerve hard to my right. The car, a sport utility vehicle, speeds past me. A gas guzzler, not Bill.

I hear and feel gravel beneath the tires and swerve hard left to straighten the car and avoid sending me and slumbering Faith to our deaths. I watch the innocuous SUV disappear ahead of us. False alarm, high-risk paranoia at high speeds.

“Mr. Idle?”

“Do you work for Leviathan? Does this have to do with the girl who got hit by a car a decade ago?” I pause, working out my thoughts. “Was it not an accident? Was Leviathan somehow responsible? Is he involved in something with the Chinese? Maybe involving Gils Simons, the old team back together again?”

“You’re confounding things. You’re all over the place. Pointedly, you’re not stable.”

I look down the ravine into the southbound lane. A pack of a half dozen cars pass, tightly packed. Human nature abhors a gap.

“Getting attacked twice in one week has a way of doing that.”

“True, but you haven’t been the same for months.”

“Cut the bullshit.”

“Not since . . .” He pauses.

“You know you’ve got a skin condition. It’s why your scalp gets so oily.”

“Not since your family fell apart.” He matches my non sequitur with one of his own. A hot sensation courses through my body, sizzles my brain in an instant of light. I blink. I’m swerving again to the right onto the gravel at the highway’s edge, and pull the car back to the left.

I feel a hand on my knee. I look down to see Faith, waking up but still half asleep, alarmed.

The man says: “You’re dangerous now—to yourself and others. You need to focus. You’ve lost the ability to trust or to know who to trust. Are you honestly trusting that trollop?”

“Who?”

“To get what she wants, she’ll do anything, with anyone.”

Faith sits up, rubs her eyes, looks at me, like, what the hell is going on?

The man presses on: “Can you honestly tell me that your brain is working correctly? Can you tell me you’ve seen things clearly since your utopian fantasies were set ablaze? It’s why you see Wilma, right?”

Wilma. Dr. Jurgenson, a friend and source. I get together with her periodically to talk about life, stories, whatever. What’s she got to do with this?

“Leave my family out of this.” I want it to sound like a threat but it’s plaintive.

“Mr. Idle, you’ve completely lost your grip on reality. You can no longer tell the good from the bad.”

Another hot flash. Isn’t that just what Leviathan said while we were having coffee?

I don’t respond.

“Vello,” the buzzard says. “She’s the key. Find her. Immediately.”

“The key to what?”

“Whatever you do, don’t print anything until you talk to me. I want to help. I’ll be watching, or call me on this phone. I can be a good source but if you print lies you’ll do the world a great disservice, and you’ll make us very, very angry.”

“Us?”

“Vello. Twin Peaks,” he says, “and one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Wave.”

I look in the rearview mirror. No cars. I hear a honk. I look down on the northbound lane. A black Mercedes flies by. The phone goes dead.

I look to my right and see the exit for Edgewood Road. I slam the brakes, fishtail violently, but manage to make the exit.

“Nathaniel, what the hell are you doing?” Faith demands.

I take a quick left at a stop sign, cross under the freeway and speed onto the highway going south.

32

“W
ho was that?”

“Who is Carl?”

I’m flooring it, southbound, chasing a phantom. He’s nowhere to be seen.

The speedometer sneaks to ninety.

“Slow down.”

No sooner has she said it than I see the flashing light in the rearview mirror, a quick end to my high-speed chase. I pull over, put my hands on the wheel, wait for the cop to lumber to Faith’s window. When he pokes his beak through, I see the quarter-inch pink surgical scar across the center of his thick neck—from the removal of a mass of some kind. He asks for my license and registration.

Faith interjects: “It was my fault. I’m so sorry.”

He looks at her. Demurely, she lowers her eyes, then glances up at him, touches her fingertips to her lips. It’s like physical double entendre: on one level, contrite; on another, raw erotica.

“Your fault?”

“I . . . I’m embarrassed.”

“I’ve heard it all. Tell me.” She’s got him.

“I told my brother I had to pee, badly.” She glances at me, then back at the cop. “When I start pleading in the little girl voice, it can be tough to ignore me.” She smiles, then lowers her eyes again. The cop takes my license and registration, pretends to give a long look, doesn’t bother to check his on-board computer, and leaves me with a stern warning.

“There’s a rest stop a mile up,” he says to her. To me, he adds: “Lighten up on the accelerator.” He walks to his car and pulls off.

“I really do have to pee.”

“You’re dangerous.”

“I’m not the one chasing ghosts at high speeds.”

No longer. Ghost long gone. I pull onto the highway.

“Who is Carl?”

“You’ve been going through my phone.”

“He called while you were asleep.” Small lie.

“Did you talk to him?”

I shake my head.

“He’s an ex.”

“Ex-boyfriend, ex-lover?”

“More or less. I don’t want to dwell on the past.”

“If he’s still calling, it doesn’t sound like it’s in the past.”

I see the sign for the rest stop. I decelerate onto the ramp. Just to the right, there’s an enclave nestled against trees with a public restroom in a bland concrete building. I park. Faith grabs her phone and hops out of the car.

I watch her disappear. My head throbs. I unfurl the vanity mirror to see how damaged I look. A folded piece of paper slides from the visor. I unfold it to find a picture of Polly that appeared more than a decade ago in a magazine published by the Wharton School. Polly had been featured among female graduates of the business school with a headline, “Attacking The World With Style.” In the picture, Polly wears that smile of hers that seemed to say: Today, I ran a triathlon and founded an Internet start-up, now let’s go make love all night and don’t you dare tire out on me.

I feel stung with a sensation well beyond sadness.

The door opens, startling me, and I drop the picture on the seat. I look at it, so does Faith.

Where did the picture come from? Did I leave it? Someone’s fucking with me. I toss the picture into the back.

“I’m not interested in dwelling on the past either.”

“Nat.” She kneels on the seat, facing me.

“Sandy Vello.”

“What about her?”

“That’s our present and our immediate future. Give me your phone.”

“Why?”

“I can’t use mine. I want to call Sandy.”

I’m using Faith’s phone because I’m worried that someone is following my activities on mine. It’s also why I’m not using my laptop. Still, I’m sure it can’t be hard to track me. I must continue to assume we’re not alone. Faith hands me her phone.

I plug in Sandy’s number and hit send. As I wait for an answer that doesn’t come, Faith puts her hands on mine, holding my shaking fingers.

“My sister’s a collector,” she says.

I withdraw my hand and end the call.

“A collector of what?”

“Everything. Stuff she buys on the shopping channel, or gets at garage sales, junk mail, containers from places she gets take-out food, everything. In her flat, you literally have to wade through crap to get from room to room.”

I start the car. Faith untucks her legs, sits, fastens her seat belt. Time to head onto the highway, heading north again, in the direction of the Twin Peaks Youth Guidance Center, where some buzzard turned self-proclaimed guardian angel has urged me to track down a TV diva. Beats dwelling on the past.

I’ve heard of this psychological collecting condition, if not a neuro-chemical one. They tend to believe that the things they collect might someday come in handy and so they don’t toss anything. The condition, like so many that humans suffer, isn’t that hard for most of us to connect to, if we really think about it. Who among us hasn’t struggled over whether to hang on to an old wallet or ragged T-shirt, wondering whether it might provide some future use?

I hit the accelerator and we pull out of the rest stop.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“She, my sister—Melanie—has trouble taking care of her son, my nephew, Timothy.”

“Okay.”

“Pull the car over.” Pointed.

“Why?”

“I’m trying to tell you something.”

“So tell me.”

“I’m trying to tell you about me.”

“I need to pull the car over for that?”

I do the opposite, I merge onto the highway. She doesn’t speak for a moment. I look over at her, head slightly hung, exasperated. I feel at once like I’m on my first date with this woman and like I’ve dated her for years. I can read her emotions, and feel desperate to connect to them. And just as desperate to escape them.

I look in the rearview mirror at the thickening highway traffic. Where’s Bill? Does he have a crew, a team? In the yellow roadster? Or the pickup truck jacked two feet off the ground, or the white van with tinted windows and no front license plate?

“Faith?”

“You don’t trust anything, or anybody.”

I laugh. “You set me up at a subway, haven’t been totally clear on why that is or how it happened, lead me to a dead man, then manage to be lingering when I get knocked unconscious, pick up the pieces and seduce me into saying and doing who knows what while I’m still half dead.”

“Jesus. What happened to you?”

“What’s that mean?”

“What happened that you lost all your trust in people?”

The blood drains from my face. I can feel it, the cells slipping from my ears and cheek and neck and draining into my aching stomach. I want to tell her to fuck herself when I feel my phone buzz.

“Hold the wheel.”

“What?”

I withdraw my hands from the wheel and pull out my phone. Faith takes the wheel and I read my text. It’s from Bullseye. It reads: “Chinese characters = interesting.”

I tap back: Means what?

I take back the wheel. “How’s that for trust? I let you drive.”

She sighs.

“Nathaniel, when I first saw you on the subway you looked at me and I thought: Encyclopedia Brown.”

I glance behind me at the cluster of cars. The van with the tinted windows flies out of it and passes me. Its side reads: “Broom Town—Floor Care Specialists.” Maybe.

“You’ve got curious eyes, passionate, but they’re boyish and innocent. Even if I’d not been asked to intercept you, I’d have wished we’d met. Every woman wants to meet a man who wants to understand her and will dig deep to do it.”

“You’re an actress with an unusual relationship with someone named Carl.”

“I’m a transition specialist who is low on work.”

I take the exit into Glen Park, a former working-class-neighborhood-abutting-the-freeway-turned-trendy-San-Francisco-enclave. I turn up O’Shaughnessy, heading to Twin Peaks and Sandy. As we wind tree-cornered hillsides on the city’s southern edge, patchy cloud cover gives way to a foggy carpet.

“You think you can’t trust an actress? I’ve done a few commercials, and do you know why I started acting?”

It’s rhetorical, but I shake my head. She says that when she discovered her nephew’s struggles with learning, she did a bunch of reading and learned the best way to focus kids is with pretend play. The idea, it seems, is that kids get so entranced in a pretend world—whether acting like they’re tossing a ball to one another or pretending to be animals on an adventure—that it teaches the brain to stay on a single subject and develops neural networks accordingly.

She decided to take an acting class. A director who would drop in occasionally spotted her and asked her to be in a commercial.

“Yeah, well, we could use an actress right about now.”

“What?”

“Can you play a delivery driver, or an aggrieved mom so desperate to see her incarcerated son that it distracts the guards and gets me inside this place?”

We’re at the entrance of juvenile hall. To our left, the high-gate of the maximum-security entrance, a cop again parked out front. To our right, the driveway to the learning annex, dominated by a white wide-load delivery truck lurching just in front of us. It continues through the parking lot, along an access road that abuts the right side of the annex.

I park between a roadster with a roadrunner painted on the door and a school bus, probably ferrying students to afternoon programs here.

“Where are we?”

Figuratively, we’re at the point where I take Sandy by the neck and start to demand answers. I step from the car, smooth down my shirt, a reflexive maneuver I imagine enhances my professionalism. I pull sunglasses from a shirt pocket and don them.

“I’ll stay in the car.”

“Join me.”

Faith sighs. She steps from the car, lips pursed. Each time she accedes to go along with me, I trust her less. But this time she’s going to come in handy. She can be partner and decoy to allow me to find and focus on Sandy.

Just then, a better option for breaching the learning annex presents itself. The building explodes.