Cloud Atlas

40

The black sea roars in. Its coldness shocks Luisa’s senses back to life. Her VW’s rear struck the water at forty-five degrees, so the seat saved her spine, but the car now swings upside down. She is trussed by her seat belt inches from the windshield. Get out, or die here. Luisa panics, breathes a lungful of water, and struggles into a pocket of air, coughing. Unhook this belt. She squirms and jackknifes up to the belt lock. Release button. It doesn’t click. The car half-somersaults deeper, and with a wrenching noise, a giant squid-shaped air bubble flies away. Luisa stabs the button, frantic, and the strap drifts free. More air. She finds an air pocket trapped beneath a windshield of dark water. The sea’s mass jams the door shut. Roll down the window. It inches halfway and jams, right where it always jams. Luisa shimmies around, squeezes her head, shoulders, and torso through the gap.

Sixsmith’s Report!

She pulls herself back into the sinking vehicle. Can’t see a damn thing. A plastic trash bag. Wedged under the seat. She doubles up in the confined space . . . It’s here. She hauls, like a woman hauling a sack of rocks. She feeds herself feetfirst back out the window, but the report is too fat. The sinking car drags Luisa down. Her lungs ache now. The sodden papers have quadrupled their weight. The trash bag is through the window, but as she kicks and struggles Luisa feels a lightening. Hundreds of pages spin free from the vanilla binder, wheeling wherever the sea will take them, wheeling around her, playing cards in Alice. She kicks off her shoes. Her lungs shriek, curse, beg. Every pulse is a thump in Luisa’s ears. Which way is up? The water is too murky to guess. Up is away from the car. Her lungs will collapse in another moment. Where’s the car? Luisa realizes she has paid for the Sixsmith Report with her life.

41

Isaac Sachs looks down on a brilliant Pennsylvania morning. Labyrinthine suburbs of ivory mansionettes and silk lawns inset with turquoise swimming pools. The executive-jet window is cool against his face. Six feet directly beneath his seat is a suitcase in the baggage hold containing enough C-4 to turn an airplane into a meteor. So, thinks Sachs, you obeyed your conscience. Luisa Rey has the Sixsmith Report. He recollects as many details of her face as he can. Do you feel doubt? Relief? Fear? Righteousness?

A premonition I’ll never see her again.

Alberto Grimaldi, the man he has double-crossed, is laughing at an aide’s remark. The hostess passes with a tray of clinking drinks. Sachs retreats into his notebook, where he writes the following sentences.

The detonator is triggered. The C-4 ignites. The jet is engulfed by a fireball. The jet’s metals, plastics, circuitry, its passengers, their bones, clothes, notebooks, and brains all lose definition in flames exceeding 1200 degrees C. The uncreated and the dead exist solely in our actual and virtual pasts. Now the bifurcation of these two pasts will begin.

42

“Betty and Frank needed to shore up their finances,” Lloyd Hooks tells his breakfast audience in the Swannekke Hotel. A circle of neophytes and acolytes pays keen attention to the Presidential Energy Guru. “So they decide Betty’d go on the game to get a little cash in hand. Night comes around, Frank drives Betty over to Whore Lane to ply her new trade. ‘Hey, Frank,’ says Betty, from the sidewalk. ‘How much should I charge?’ Frank does the math and tells her, ‘A hundred bucks for the whole shebang.’ So Betty gets out, and Frank parks down a quiet alley. Pretty soon this guy drives up in his beat-up old Chrysler and propositions Betty: ‘How much for all night, sugar?’ Betty says, ‘Hundred dollars.’ The guy says, ‘I only got thirty dollars. What’ll thirty buy me?’ So Betty dashes around to Frank and asks him. Frank says, ‘Tell him thirty dollars buys a hand job.’ So Betty goes back to the guy—”

Lloyd Hooks notices Bill Smoke in the background. Bill Smoke raises one, two, three fingers; the three fingers become a fist; the fist becomes a slashing gesture. Alberto Grimaldi, dead; Isaac Sachs, dead; Luisa Rey, dead. Swindler, sneak, snoop. Hooks’s eyes tell Smoke he has understood, and a figment from a Greek myth surfaces in his mind. The sacred grove of Diana was guarded by a warrior priest on whom luxury was lavished but whose tenure was earned by slaying his predecessor. When he slept, it was at the peril of his life. Grimaldi, you dozed for too long.

“So, anyway, Betty goes back to the guy and says his thirty’ll buy a hand job, take it or leave it. The guy says, ‘Okay, sugar, jump in, I’ll take the hand job. Is there a quiet alley around here?’ Betty has him drive around the corner to Frank’s alley, and the guy unbelts his pants to reveal the most—y’ know—gargantuan schlong. ‘Wait up!’ gasps Betty. ‘I’ll be right back.’ She jumps out of the guy’s car and knocks on Frank’s window. Frank lowers the window, ‘What now?’ ” Hooks pauses for the punch line. “Betty says, ‘Frank, hey, Frank, lend this guy seventy dollars!’ ”

The men who would be board members cackle like hyenas. Whoever said money can’t buy you happiness, Lloyd Hooks thinks, basking, obviously didn’t have enough of the stuff.

43

Through binoculars Hester Van Zandt watches the divers on their launch. An unhappy-looking barefoot teenager in a poncho ambles along the beach and pats Hester’s mongrel. “They found the car yet, Hester? Channel’s pretty deep at that point. That’s why the fishing’s so good there.”

“Hard to be sure at this distance.”

“Kinda ironic to drown in the sea you’re polluting. The guard’s kinda got the hots for me. Told me it was a drunk driver, a woman, ’bout four in the morning.”

“Swannekke Bridge comes under the same special security remit as the island. Seaboard can say what they like. No one’ll cross-check their story.”

The teenager yawns. “D’you s’pose she drowned in her car, the woman? Or d’you think she got out and kinda drowned later?”

“Couldn’t say.”

“If she was drunk enough to drive through a railing, she couldn’t have made it to the shore.”

“Who knows?”

“Gross way to die.” The teenager yawns and walks off. Hester trudges back to her trailer. Milton the Native American sits on its step, drinking from a milk carton. He wipes his mouth and tells her, “Wonder Woman’s awake.”

Hester steps around Milton and asks the woman on the sofa how she is feeling.

“Lucky to be alive,” answers Luisa Rey, “full of muffins, and drier. Thanks for the loan of your clothes.”

“Lucky we’re the same size. Divers are looking for your car.”

“The Sixsmith Report, not my car. My body would be a bonus.”

Milton locks the door. “So you crashed through a barrier, dropped into the sea, got out of a sinking car, and swam three hundred yards to shore, with no injuries worse than mild bruising.”

“It hurts plenty when I think of my insurance claim.”

Hester sits down. “What’s your next move?”

“Well, first I need to go back to my apartment and get a few things. Then I’ll go stay with my mother, on Ewingsville Hill. Then . . . back to square one. I can’t get the police or my editor interested in what’s happening on Swannekke without the report.”

“Will you be safe at your mother’s?”

“As long as Seaboard thinks I’m dead, Joe Napier won’t come looking. When they learn I’m not . . .” She shrugs, having gained an armor of fatalism from the events of the last six hours. “Altogether safe, possibly not. An acceptable degree of risk. I don’t do this sort of thing often enough to be an expert.”

Milton digs his thumbs into his pockets. “I’ll drive you back to Buenas Yerbas. Gimme a minute, I’ll go call a friend and get him to bring his pickup over.”

“Good guy,” says Luisa, after he’s left.

“I’d trust Milton with my life,” answers Hester.

44

Milton strides over to the flyblown general store that services the campsite, trailer park, beachgoers, traffic to Swannekke, and the isolated houses hereabouts. An Eagles song comes on a radio behind the counter. Milton feeds a dime into the phone, checks the walls for ears, and dials in a number from memory. Water vapor rises from the Swannekke cooling towers like malign genies. Pylons march north to Buenas Yerbas and south to Los Angeles. Funny, thinks Milton. Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible. The phone is answered. “Yeah?”

“Yeah, Napier? It’s me. Listen, about a woman called Luisa Rey. Well, suppose she isn’t? Suppose she’s still walking around eating Popsicles and paying utility bills? Would her whereabouts be worth anything to you? Yeah? How much? No, you name a figure. Okay, double that . . . No? Nice talking with you, Napier, I gotta go and”—Milton smirks—“the usual account within one working day, if you please. Right. What? No, no one else has seen her, only Crazy Van Zandt. No. She did mention it, but it’s in the bottom of the deep blue sea. Quite sure. Fish food. Course not, my exclusives are for your ears only . . . Uh-huh, I’m driving her back to her apartment, then she’s going to her mother’s . . . Okay, I’ll make it an hour. The usual account. One working day.”

45

Luisa opens her front door to the sounds of a Sunday ball game and the smell of popcorn. “Since when did I say you could fry oil?” she calls through to Javier. “Why are the blinds all down?”

Javier bounces down the hallway, grinning. “Hi, Luisa! Your uncle Joe made the popcorn. We’re watching Giants versus Dodgers. Why are you dressed like an old woman?”

Luisa feels her core sicken. “Come here. Where is he?”

Javier sniggers. “On your sofa! What’s up?”

“Come here! Your mom wants you.”

“She’s working overtime at the hotel.”

“Luisa, it wasn’t me, on the bridge, it wasn’t me!” Joe Napier appears behind him, holding out his palms as if reassuring a scared animal. “Listen—”

Luisa’s voice judders. “Javi! Out! Behind me!”

Napier raises his voice. “Listen to me—”

Yes, I am talking with my own killer. “Why in hell should I listen to a word you say?”

“Because I’m the only insider at Seaboard who doesn’t want you dead!” Napier’s calm has deserted him. “In the parking lot, I was trying to warn you! Think about it! If I was the hit man would we even be having this conversation? Don’t go, for Chrissakes! It’s not safe! Your apartment could be under surveillance still. That’s why the blinds are down.”

Javier looks aghast. Luisa holds the boy but doesn’t know the least dangerous way to turn. “Why are you here?”

Napier is quiet again, but tired and troubled. “I knew your father, when he was a cop. V-J Day on Silvaplana Wharf. Come in, Luisa. Sit down.”

46

Joe Napier calculated that the neighbor’s kid would tether Luisa long enough to make her listen. He’s not proud that his plan paid off. Napier, more a watcher than a speaker, chisels out his sentences with care. “In 1945, I’d been a cop for six years at Spinoza District Station. No commendations, no black marks. A regular cop, keeping his nose clean, dating a regular girl in a typing pool. On the fourteenth of August, the radio said the Japs had surrendered and Buenas Yerbas danced one almighty hula. Drink flowed, cars revved up, firecrackers were set off, people took a holiday even if their bosses didn’t give ’em one. Come nine o’clock or so, my partner and I were called to a hit-and-run in Little Korea. Normally we didn’t bother with that end of town, but the victim was a white kid, so there’d be relatives and questions. We were en route when a Code Eight comes through from your father, calling all available cars to Silvaplana Wharf. Now, the rule of thumb was, you didn’t go snooping around that part of the docks, not if you wanted a career. The mob had their warehouses there, under a city hall umbrella. What’s more, Lester Rey”—Napier decides not to modify his language—“was known as a Tenth Precinct pain-in-the-ass Sunday-school cop. But two officers were down, and that ain’t the same ball game. It could be your buddy bleeding to death on the tarmac. So we flat-outed and reached the wharf just behind another Spinoza car, Brozman and Harkins. Saw nothing at first. No sign of Lester Rey, no sign of a squad car. The dockside lights were off. We drove between two walls of cargo containers, around the corner into a yard where men were loading up an army truck. I was thinking we were in the wrong zone of the docks. Then the wall of bullets hit us. Brozman and Harkins took the first wave—brakes, glass filling the air, our car skidded into theirs, me and my partner rolled out of our car and holed up behind a stack of steel tubes. Brozman’s car horn sounds, doesn’t stop, and they don’t appear. More bullets ack-ack-acking around us, I’m shitting myself—I’d become a cop to avoid war zones. My partner starts firing back. I follow his lead, but our chances of hitting anything are zilch. To be honest with you, I was glad when the truck trundled by. Dumb ass that I was, I broke cover too soon—to see if I could get a license plate.” The root of Napier’s tongue is aching. “Then all this happens. A yelling man charges me from across the yard. I fire at him. I miss—the luckiest miss of my life, and yours too, Luisa, because if I’d shot your father you wouldn’t be here. Lester Rey is pointing behind me as he sprints by, and he kicks an object rolling my way, lobbed from the back of the truck. Then a blinding light fries me, a noise axes my head, and a needle of pain shoots through my butt. I lay where I fell, half conscious, until I was hoisted into an ambulance.”

Luisa still isn’t saying anything.

“I was lucky. A fragment of grenade shrapnel tore through both buttock cheeks. The rest of me was fine. The doctor said it was the first time he’d seen one projectile make four holes. Your dad, of course, was not so fine. Lester was a piece of Swiss cheese. They’d operated but failed to save his eye the day before I left the hospital. We just shook hands and I left, I didn’t know what to say. The most humiliating thing you can do to a man is to save his life. Lester knew it too. But there’s not a day, possibly not an hour, that’s gone by without my thinking about him. Every time I sit down.”

Luisa says nothing for a while. “Why didn’t you tell me this on Swannekke Island?”

Napier scratches his ear. “I was afraid you’d use the connection to squeeze me for juice . . .”

“On what really happened to Rufus Sixsmith?”

Napier doesn’t say yes, doesn’t say no. “I know how reporters work.”

“You are picking holes in my integrity?”

She’s speaking generally—she can’t know about Margo Roker. “If you keep on looking for Rufus Sixsmith’s report”—Napier wonders if he should say this in front of the boy—“you’ll be killed, plain and simple. Not by me! But it’ll happen. Please. Leave town now. Jettison your old life and job, and go.”

“Alberto Grimaldi sent you to tell me that, did he?”

“No one knows I’m here—pray God—or I’m in as much trouble as you.”

“One question first.”

“You want to ask if”—he wishes the kid was elsewhere—“if Sixsmith’s ‘fate’ was my work. The answer is no. That sort of . . . job, it wasn’t my business. I’m not saying I’m innocent. I’m just saying I’m guilty only of looking the other way. Grimaldi’s fixer killed Sixsmith and drove you off the bridge last night. A man by the name of Bill Smoke—one name of many, I suspect. I can’t make you believe me, but I hope you will.”

“How did you know I’d survived?”

“Vain hope. Look, life is more precious than a damn scoop. I’m begging you, one last time, and it will be the last, to drop this story. Now I’ve got to leave, and I wish to Christ you’d do the same.” He stands. “One last thing. Can you use a gun?”

“I have an allergy to guns.”

“How do you mean?”

“Guns make me nauseous. Literally.”

“Everyone should learn to use a gun.”

“Yeah, you can see crowds of ’em laid out in morgues. Bill Smoke isn’t going to wait politely while I get a gun out of my handbag, is he? My only way out is to get evidence that’ll blow this affair so totally, killing me would be a pointless act.”

“You’re underestimating man’s fondness for petty revenge.”

“What do you care? You’ve paid back your debt to Dad. You’ve salved your conscience.”

Napier gives a morose sigh. “Enjoyed the ball game, Javi.”

“You’re a liar,” says the boy.

“I lied, yes, but that doesn’t make me a liar. Lying’s wrong, but when the world spins backwards, a small wrong may be a big right.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“You’re damn right it doesn’t, but it’s still true.”

Joe Napier lets himself out.

Javier is angry with Luisa, too. “And you act like I’m gambling with my life just because I jump across a couple of balconies?”

47

Luisa’s and Javier’s footsteps reverberate in the stairwell. Javier peers over the handrail. Lower floors recede like the whorls of a shell. A wind of vertigo blows, making him giddy. It works the same looking upward. “If you could see into the future,” he asks, “would you?”

Luisa slings her bag. “Depends on if you could change it or not.”

“S’posing you could? So, say you saw you were going to be kidnapped by Communist spies on the second story, you’d take the elevator down to the ground floor.”

“But what if the spies called the elevator, agreeing to kidnap whoever was in it? What if trying to avoid the future is what triggers it all?”

“If you could seethe future, like you can see the end of Sixteenth Street from the top of Kilroy’s department store, that means it’s already there. If it’s already there, you can’t change it.”

“Yes, but what’s at the end of Sixteenth Street isn’t made by what you do. It’s pretty much fixed, by planners, architects, designers, unless you go and blow a building up or something. What happens in a minute’s time is made by what you do.”

“So what’s the answer? Can you change the future or not?”

Maybe the answer is not a function of metaphysics but one, simply, of power. “It’s a great imponderable, Javi.”

They have reached the ground floor. The Six Million Dollar Man’s bionic biceps jangle on Malcolm’s TV.

“See you, Luisa.”

“I’m not leaving town forever, Javi.”

At the boy’s initiative they shake hands. The gesture surprises Luisa: it feels formal, final, and intimate.

48

A silver carriage clock in Judith Rey’s Ewingsville home tinkles one o’clock in the afternoon. Bill Smoke is being talked at by a financier’s wife. “This house never fails to bring out the demon of covetousness in me,” the fifty-something bejeweled woman confides, “it’s a copy of a Frank Lloyd Wright. The original’s on the outskirts of Salem, I believe.” She is standing an inch too close. You look like a witch from the outskirts of Salem gone fucking crazy in Tiffany’s, Bill Smoke thinks, remarking, “Now, is that so?”

Hispanic maids supplied by the caterers carry trays of food among the all-white guests. Swan-shaped linen napkins bear place cards. “That white-leafed oak tree on the front lawn would have been here when the Spanish missions were built,” the wife says, “wouldn’t you agree?”

“Without doubt. Oaks live for six hundred years. Two hundred to grow, two hundred to live, two hundred to die.”

Smoke sees Luisa enter the lavish room, accepting a kiss on both cheeks from her stepfather. What do I want from you, Luisa Rey? A female guest of Luisa’s age hugs her. “Luisa! It’s been three or four years!” Close-up, the guest’s charm is cattish and prying. “But is it true you’re not married yet?”

“I certainly am not” is Luisa’s crisp reply. “Are you?”

Smoke senses she senses his gaze, refocuses his attention on the wife and agrees that, yes, there are redwoods not sixty minutes from here that were mature when Nebuchadnezzar was on his throne. Judith Rey stands on a footstool brought specially for the purpose and taps a silver spoon on a bottle of pink champagne until everyone is listening. “Ladies, gentlemen, and young people,” she declaims, “I am told dinner is served! But before we all begin, I’d like to say a few words about the wonderful work done by the Buenas Yerbas Cancer Society, and how they’ll use the moneys from our fund-raiser you are so generously supporting today.”

Bill Smoke amuses a pair of children by producing a shiny gold Krugerrand from thin air. What I want from you, Luisa, is a killing of perfect intimacy. For a moment Bill Smoke wonders at the powers inside us that are not us.

49

The maids have cleared the dessert course, the air is pungent with coffee fumes, and an overfed Sunday drowsiness settles on the dining room. The eldest guests find nooks to snooze in. Luisa’s stepfather rounds up a group of contemporaries to see his collection of 1950s cars, the wives and mothers conduct maneuvers of allusion, the schoolchildren go outside to bicker in the leafy sunshine and around the pool. The Henderson triplets dominate the discourse at the matchmaking table. Each is as blue-eyed and gilded as his brothers, and Luisa doesn’t distinguish among them. “What would I do,” says one triplet, “if I was president? First, I’d aim to win the Cold War, not just aim not to lose it.”

Another takes over. “I wouldn’t kowtow to Arabs whose ancestors parked camels on lucky patches of sand . . .”

“. . . or to red gooks. I’d establish—I’m not afraid to say it—our country’s rightful—corporate—empire. Because if we don’t do it . . .”

“. . . the Japs’ll steal the march. The corporation is the future. We need to let business run the country and establish a true meritocracy.”

“Not choked by welfare, unions, ‘affirmative action’ for amputee transvestite colored homeless arachnophobes . . .”

“A meritocracy of acumen. A culture that is not ashamed to acknowledge that wealth attracts power . . .”

“. . . and that the wealthmakers—us—are rewarded. When a man aspires to power, I ask one simple question: ‘Does he think like a businessman?’ ”

Luisa rolls her napkin into a compact ball. “I ask three simple questions. How did he get that power? How is he using it? And how can it be taken off the sonofabitch?”

50

Judith Rey finds Luisa watching an afternoon news report in her husband’s den. “ ‘Bull dyke,’ I heard Anton Henderson say, and if it wasn’t about you, Cookie, I don’t know—it’s not funny! Your . . . rebellion issues are getting worse. You complain about being lonely so I introduce you to nice young men, and you ‘bull-dyke’ them in your Spyglass voice.”

“When did I ever complain about being lonely?”

“Boys like the Hendersons don’t grow on trees, you know.”

“Aphids grow on trees.”

There is a knock on the door, and Bill Smoke peers in. “Mrs. Rey? Sorry to intrude, but I have to leave soon. Hand on heart, today was the most welcoming, best-organized fund-raiser I’ve ever attended.”

Judith Rey’s hand flutters to her ear. “Most kind of you to say so . . .”

“Herman Howitt, junior partner at Musgrove Wyeland, up from the Malibu office. I didn’t get the chance to introduce myself before that superb dinner—I was the last-minute booking this morning. My father passed away over ten years ago—God bless his soul, cancer—I don’t know how my mother and I would have gotten through it without the society’s help. When Olly mentioned your fund-raiser, just out of the blue, I had to call to see if I could replace any last-minute cancellations.”

“We’re very glad you did, and welcome to Buenas Yerbas.” A little short, assesses Judith Rey, but muscular, well-salaried and probably on Luisa’s side of thirty-five. Junior partner sounds promising. “I hope Mrs. Howitt can join you next time?”

Bill Smoke a.k.a. Herman Howitt does a mousy smile. “I’m sorry to say, the only Mrs. Howitt is my ma. So far.”

“Now is that a fact,” responds Judith Rey.

He peers at Luisa, who is not paying attention. “I admired your daughter’s principled stand downstairs. So many of our generation seem to lack a moral compass nowadays.”

“I so agree. The sixties threw out the baby with the bathwater. Luisa’s departed father and myself separated some years ago, but we always aimed to instill a sense of right and wrong in our daughter. Luisa! Will you tear yourself away from the television set for just a moment, please, dear? Herman will be thinking—Luisa? Cookie, what is it?”

The anchorman intones: “Police confirmed the twelve killed on a Learjet accident over the Allegheny Mountains this morning included Seaboard Power CEO Alberto Grimaldi, America’s highest-paid executive. Preliminary reports from FAA investigators suggest an explosion triggered by a defect in the fuel system. Wreckage is strewn over several square miles . . .”

“Luisa, Cookie?” Judith Rey kneels by her daughter, who stares aghast at pictures of twisted airplane pieces on a mountainside.

“How . . . appalling!” Bill Smoke savors a complex dish, all of whose ingredients even he, the chef, can’t list. “Did you know any of those poor souls, Miss Rey?”

51

Monday morning. The Spyglass newsroom swarms with rumors. One has it the magazine is bust; another, that Kenneth P. Ogilvy, its owner, will auction it off; the bank is giving a fresh transfusion; the bank is pulling the plug. Luisa hasn’t informed anyone that she survived a murder attempt twenty-four hours ago. She doesn’t want to involve her mother or Grelsch, and except for her bruising, it is all increasingly unreal.

Luisa does feel grief over the death of Isaac Sachs, a man she hardly knew. She is also afraid but focuses on work. Her father told her how war photographers refer to an immunity from fear bestowed by the camera lens; this morning it makes perfect sense. If Bill Smoke knew about Isaac Sachs’s defection, his death makes sense—but who wanted Alberto Grimaldi taken down at the same time? The staff writers gravitate into Dom Grelsch’s office as usual for the ten o’clock meeting. Ten-fifteen comes around.

“Grelsch wasn’t this late even when his first wife gave birth,” says Nancy O’Hagan, polishing her nails. “Ogilvy’s got him screwed into an instrument of torture.”

Roland Jakes gouges wax from his ear with a pencil. “I met the drummer who’d done the actual drumming on the Monkees’ hits. He was banging on about tantric sex—I thank you. His favorite position is, uh, called ‘the Plumber.’ You stay in all day but nobody comes.”

Silence.

“Jeez, just trying to lighten the vibes.”

Grelsch arrives and wastes no time. “Spyglass is being sold. We’ll learn later today who’ll survive the sacrificial cull.”

Jerry Nussbaum loops his thumbs through his belt. “Sudden.”

“Damn sudden. Negotiations began late last week.” Grelsch simmers. “By this morning it was a done deal.”

“Must have been, uh, one helluvan offer,” angles Jakes.

“Ask KPO that.”

“Who’s the buyer?” asks Luisa.

“Press announcement later today.”

“Come on, Dom,” wheedles O’Hagan.

“I said, there’ll be a press announcement later today.”

Jakes rolls a cigarette. “Seems like our mystery buyer, uh, really wants Spyglass, and uh, if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.”

Nussbaum snorts. “Who says our mystery buyer doesn’t think we’re broken? When Allied News bought Nouveau last year, they even fired the window cleaners.”

“So.” O’Hagan clicks her compact shut. “My cruise up the Nile is off again. Back to my sister-in-law’s in Chicago for Christmas. Her brats and the frozen-beef capital of the world. What a difference a day makes.”

52

For months, Joe Napier realizes, looking at the coordinated artwork in vice CEO William Wiley’s anteroom, he has been sidelined. Loyalties snaked out of sight, and power was tapped from the known ducts. That was fine by me, Napier thinks, only a year and a half to go. He hears footsteps and feels a draft. But downing an airplane with twelve men onboard isn’t security, it’s multiple homicide. Who gave the order? Was Bill Smoke working for Wiley? Could it just be an aviation accident? They happen. All I understand is that not understanding is dangerous. Napier berates himself for warning off Luisa Rey yesterday, a stupid risk that achieved a big nothing.

William Wiley’s secretary appears at the door. “Mr. Wiley will see you now, Mr. Napier.”

Napier is surprised to see Fay Li in the office. The setting demands an exchange of smiles. William Wiley’s “Joe! How are ya?” is as vigorous as his handshake.

“A sad morning, Mr. Wiley,” replies Napier, taking the seat but refusing the cigarette. “I still can’t take it in about Mr. Grimaldi.” I never liked you. I never saw what you were for.

“None sadder. Alberto can be succeeded, but never replaced.”

Napier permits himself one question under the guise of small talk. “How long will the board leave it before discussing a new appointment?”

“We’re meeting this afternoon. Alberto wouldn’t want us to drift without a helmsman for longer than necessary. You know, his respect for you, personally, was . . . well . . .”

“Devout,” suggests Fay Li.

You have come up in the world, Mister Li.

“Precisely! Exactly! Devout.”

“Mr. Grimaldi was a great guy.”

“He sure was, Joe, he sure was.” Wiley turns to Fay Li. “Fay. Let’s tell Joe about the package we’re offering.”

“In recognition of your exemplary record, Mr. Wiley is proposing to set you free early. You’ll receive full pay for the eighteen months still on your contract, your bonus—then your index-linked pension will kick in.”

Walk the plank! Napier makes a “wow” expression. Bill Smoke is behind this. Wow fits both the retirement offer and Napier’s sense of the seismic shift in his role from insider to liability. “This is . . . unexpected.”

“Must be, Joe,” says Wiley but adds nothing. The telephone rings. “No,” snaps Wiley into the mouthpiece, “Mr. Reagan can wait his turn. I’m busy.”

Napier has decided by the time Wiley hangs up. A golden chance to exit a bloodstained stage. He plays an old retainer speechless with gratitude. “Fay. Mr. Wiley. I don’t know how to thank you.”

William Wiley peers like a jokey coyote. “By accepting?”

“Of course I accept!”

Wiley and Fay Li are all congratulations. “You understand, of course,” Wiley continues, “with a post as delicate as Security, we need for the change to come into force when you leave this room.”

Jesus, you people don’t waste a second, do you?

Fay Li adds, “I’ll have your effects shipped on, plus paperwork. I know you won’t be offended by an escort to the mainland. Mr. Wiley has to be seen to respect protocol.”

“No offense, Fay.” Napier smiles, cursing her. “I wrote our protocol.” Napier, keep your .38 strapped to your calf until you’re off Swannekke, and for a long time after.

53

The music in the Lost Chord Music Store subsumes all thoughts of Spyglass, Sixsmith, Sachs, and Grimaldi. The sound is pristine, riverlike, spectral, hypnotic . . . intimately familiar. Luisa stands, entranced, as if living in a stream of time. “I know this music,” she tells the store clerk, who eventually asks if she’s okay. “What the hell is it?”

“I’m sorry, it’s a customer order, not for sale. I shouldn’t really be playing it.”

“Oh.” First things first. “I phoned last week. My name’s Rey, Luisa Rey. You said you could find an obscure recording for me by Robert Frobisher, Cloud Atlas Sextet. But forget that for a moment. I have to own this music too. I have to. You know what it’s like. What is it?”

The clerk presents his wrists for imaginary handcuffs. “Cloud Atlas Sextet by Robert Frobisher. I listened to it to make sure it’s not scratched. Oh, I lie. I listened to it because I’m a slave to curiosity. Not exactly Delius, is it? Why companies won’t finance recordings of gems like this, it’s criminal. Your record is in the mintest condition, I’m happy to report.”

“Where have I heard it before?”

The young man shrugs. “Can’t be more than a handful in North America.”

“But I know it. I’m telling you I know it.”

54

Nancy O’Hagan is speaking excitedly on her phone when Luisa returns to the office. “Shirl? Shirl! It’s Nancy. Listen, we may yet spend Christmas in the shadow of the Sphinx. The new owner is Trans Vision Inc.”—she raises her voice—“Trans Vision Inc. . . . Me neither, but”—O’Hagan lowers her voice—“I’ve just seen KPO, yeah, the old boss, he’s on the new board. But listen up, what I’m calling to say is, my job’s safe!” She gives Luisa a frenetic nod. “Uh-huh, almost no jobs are being axed, so phone Janine and tell her she’s spending Christmas alone with her abominable little snowmen.”

“Luisa,” Grelsch calls from his doorway, “Mr. Ogilvy’ll see you now.”

K. P. Ogilvy occupies Dom Grelsch’s temperamental chair, exiling the editor to a plastic stacking seat. In the flesh, Spyglass’s proprietor reminds Luisa of a steel engraving. Of a Wild West judge. “There’s no nice way to say this,” he begins, “so I’ll just say it the blunt way. You’re fired. Orders of the new owner.”

Luisa watches the news bounce off her. No, it can’t compare to being driven off a bridge into the sea in semidarkness. Grelsch can’t meet her eye. “I’ve got a contract.”

“Who hasn’t? You’re fired.”

“Am I the only staff writer to incur your new masters’ displeasure?”

“So it would seem.” K. P. Ogilvy’s jaw flinches once.

“I think it’s fair to ask, ‘Why me?’ ”

“Owners hire, fire, and say what’s fair. When a buyer offers a rescue package of the bounty that Trans Vision offered, one doesn’t nitpick.”

“ ‘A Picked Nit.’ Can I have that on my gold watch?”

Dom Grelsch squirms. “Mr. Ogilvy, I think Luisa’s entitled to some kind of an explanation.”

“Then she can go ask Trans Vision. Perhaps her face doesn’t fit their vision of Spyglass. Too radical. Too feminist. Too dry. Too pushy.”

He’s trying to make a smokescreen. “I’d like to ask Trans Vision a number of things. Where’s their head office?”

“Out east somewhere. But I doubt anyone’ll see you.”

“Out east somewhere. Who are your new fellow board members?”

“You’re being fired, not taking down an affidavit.”

“Just one more question, Mr. Ogilvy. For three magical years of unstinting service, just answer this—what’s the overlap between Trans Vision and Seaboard Power?”

Dom Grelsch’s own curiosity is sharp. Ogilvy hesitates a fraction, then blusters, “I’ve got a lot of work to get through. You’ll be paid until the end of the month, no need to come in. Thank you and good-bye.”

Where there’s bluster, thinks Luisa, there’s duplicity.

55

Life’s okay. Joe Napier shifts his Jeep into cruise control. Life’s good. Seaboard Power, his working life, Margo Roker, and Luisa Rey recede into his past at eighty miles per hour. Life’s great. Two hours to his log cabin in the Santo Cristo mountains. He could catch catfish for supper if he’s not too tired by the drive. He checks his mirror: a silver Chrysler has been sitting a hundred yards behind him for a mile or two, but now it overtakes and vanishes into the distance. Relax, Napier tells himself, you’ve gotten away. Something in his Jeep is rattling. The afternoon reaches its three o’clock golden age. The freeway runs alongside the river for mile after mile, slowly climbing. Upcountry’s gotten uglier in the last thirty years, but show me a place that hasn’t. Either side, housing developments colonize the bulldozer-leveled shelves. Getting out took me all my life. Buenas Yerbas dwindles to a bristling smudge in Napier’s rearview mirror. You can’t stop Lester’s daughter playing Wonder Woman. You gave it your best shot. Let her go. She ain’t a kid. He sifts the radio waves, but it’s all men singing like women and women singing like men, until he finds a hokey country station playing “Everybody’s Talkin’.” Milly was the musical half of his marriage. Napier revisits the first evening he saw her: she was playing fiddle for Wild Oakum Hokum and His Cowgirls in the Sand. The glances musicians exchange, when music is effortless, that was what he wanted from Milly, that intimacy. Luisa Rey is too a kid. Napier turns off at exit eighteen and takes the old gold miners’ road up toward Copperline. That rattling isn’t getting any better. Fall is licking the mountain woods up here. The road follows a gorge under ancient pines to where the sun goes down.

He’s here, all of a sudden, unable to recall a single thought from the last three-quarters of an hour. Napier pulls over at the grocery store, kills the engine, and swings out of his Jeep. Hear that rushing? The Lost River. It reminds him Copperline isn’t Buenas Yerbas, and he unlocks his Jeep again. The store owner greets his customer by name, delivers six months’ gossip in as many minutes, and asks if Napier’s on vacation for the whole week.

“I’m on permanent vacation now. I was offered early”—he’s never used the word on himself before—“retirement. Took it like a shot.”

The store owner’s gaze is all-seeing. “Celebration at Duane’s tonight? Or commiseration at Duane’s tomorrow?”

“Make it Friday. Celebration, mostly. I want to spend my first week of freedom resting in my cabin, not poleaxed under Duane’s tables.” Napier pays for his groceries and leaves, suddenly hungry to be alone. The Jeep’s tires crunch the stony track. Its headlights illuminate the primeval forest in bright, sweeping moments.

Here. Once again, Napier hears the Lost River. He remembers the first time he brought Milly up to the cabin he, his brothers, and his dad built. Now he’s the last one left. They went skinny-dipping that night. The forest dusk fills his lungs and his head. No phones, no CCTV or just TV, no ID clearances, no meetings in the president’s soundproofed office. Not ever again. The retired security man checks the padlock on the door for signs of tampering before he opens the shutters. Relax, for Chrissakes. Seaboard let you go, free, no strings, no comeback.

Nonetheless his .38 is in his hand as he enters the cabin. See? Nobody. Napier gets a fire crackling and fixes himself beans and sausages and sooty baked potatoes. A couple of beers. A long, long piss outdoors. The fizzing Milky Way. A deep, deep sleep.

Awake, again, parched, with a beer-swollen bladder. Fifth time now or sixth? The sounds of the forest don’t lullaby Napier tonight but itch his sense of well-being. A car’s brakes? An elf owl. Twigs snapping? A rat, a mountain quail, I don’t know, you’re in a forest, it could be anything. Go to sleep, Napier. The wind. Voices under the window? Napier wakes to find a cougar crouched on a crossbeam over his bed; he wakes up with a yell; the cougar was Bill Smoke, arm poised to stove Napier’s head in with a flashlight; nothing on the crossbeam. Is it raining this time? Napier listens.

Only the river, only the river.

He lights another match to see if it’s a time worth getting up for: 4:05. No. An in-between hour. Napier nestles down in folded darkness for holes of sleep, but recent memories of Margo Roker’s house find him. Bill Smoke saying, Stand guard. My contact says she keeps her documents in her room. Napier agreeing, glad to reduce his involvement. Bill Smoke switching on his hefty rubber flashlight and going upstairs.

Napier scanning Roker’s orchard. The nearest house was over half a mile away. Wondering why the solo operator Bill Smoke wanted him along for this simple job.

A frail scream. An abrupt ending.

Napier running upstairs, slipping, a series of empty rooms.

Bill Smoke kneeling on an antique bed, clubbing something on the bed with his flashlight, the beam whipping the walls and ceiling, the near-noiseless thump as it lands on the senseless head of Margo Roker. Her blood on the bedsheets—obscenely scarlet and wet.

Napier, shouting for him to stop.

Bill Smoke turned around, huffing. Wassup, Joe?

You said she was out tonight!

No, no, you heard wrong. I said my contact said the old woman was out tonight. Reliable staff, hard to find.

Christ, Christ, Christ, is she dead?

Better safe than sorry, Joe.

A neat little setup, Joe Napier admits in his sleepless cabin. A shackle of compliance. Party to the clubbing of a defenseless, elderly activist? Any dropout law student with a speech impediment could send him to prison for the rest of his life. A blackbird sings. I did a great wrong by Margo Roker, but I’ve left that life. Four small shrapnel scars, two in each buttock, ache. I went out on a limb to get Luisa Rey wised up. The window is light enough to discern Milly in her frame. I’m only one man, he protests. I’m not a platoon. All I want out of life is life. And a little fishing.

Joe Napier sighs, dresses, and begins reloading the Jeep.

Milly always won by saying nothing.

56

Judith Rey, barefoot, fastens her kimono-style dressing gown and crosses a vast Byzantine rug to her marble-floored kitchen. She takes out three ruby grapefruits from a cavernous refrigerator, halves them, then feeds the snow-cold dripping hemispheres into a juicer. The machine buzzes like trapped wasps, and a jug fills with pulpy, pearly, candy-colored juice. She pours herself a heavy blue glass and slooshes the liquid around every nook of her mouth.

On the striped veranda sofa, Luisa scans the paper and chews a croissant. The magnificent view—over Ewingsville’s moneyed roofs and velveteen lawns to downtown Buenas Yerbas, where skyscrapers rear from sea mist and commuter smog—has an especial otherworldliness at this hour.

“Not sleeping in, Cookie?”

“Morning. No, I’m going to collect my stuff from the office, if you don’t mind me borrowing one of the cars again.”

“Sure.” Judith Rey reads her daughter. “You were wasting your talents at Spyglass, Cookie. It was a squalid little magazine.”

“True, Mom, but it was my squalid little magazine.”

Judith Rey settles on the arm of the sofa and shoos an impertinent fly from her glass. She examines a circled article in the business section.

“Is this a project you were working on?” asks Judith.

“Still am.”

“On whose behalf?”

“On behalf of the truth.” Her daughter’s irony is sincere. “I’m freelance.”

“Since when?”

“Since the moment KPO fired me. Firing me was a political decision, Mom. It proves I was onto something big. Mammoth.”

Judith Rey watches the young woman. Once upon a time, I had a baby daughter. I dressed her in frilly frocks, enrolled her for ballet classes, and sent her to horse-riding camp five summers in a row. But look at her. She turned into Lester anyway. She kisses Luisa’s forehead. Luisa frowns, suspiciously, like a teenager. “What?”

57

Luisa Rey drops into the Snow White Diner for the last coffee of her Spyglass days. The only free seat is adjacent to a man hidden behind the San Francisco Chronicle. Luisa thinks, A good paper, and takes the seat. Dom Grelsch says, “Morning.”

Luisa feels a flare of territorial jealousy. “What are you doing here?”

“Even editors eat. I’ve come here every morning since my wife’s . . . y’ know. Waffles I can make in the toaster but . . .” His gesture at his platter of pork chops implies, Need I say more?

“I never saw you in here once.”

“That’s ’cause he leaves,” says Bart, performing three tasks at once, “an hour before you arrive. Usual, Luisa?”

“Please. How come you never told me, Bart?”

“I don’t talk about your comings and goings to no one else either.”

“First one into the office”—Dom Grelsch folds the newspaper—“last one out at night. Editor’s lot. I wanted a word with you, Luisa.”

“I have a distinct memory of having been fired.”

“Can it, willya? I want to say why—how—I’m not resigning over how Ogilvy crapped on you. And since my confessions are rolling out, I knew you were in for the ax since last Friday.”

“Nice of you to let me know beforehand.”

The editor lowers his voice. “You know about my wife’s leukemia. Our insurance situation?”

Luisa decides to grant him a nod.

Grelsch steels himself. “Last week, during the takeover negotiations . . . it was intimated, if I stayed on at Spyglass and agreed I’d never heard . . . of a certain report, strings could be pulled at my insurers.”

Luisa maintains her composure. “You trust these people to keep their word?”

“On Sunday morning my claims man, Arnold Frum, phones. Apologies for disturbing us, blah-blah, but he thought we’d want to know Blue Shield reversed their decision and will be handling all my wife’s medical bills. A reimbursement check for past payments is in the mail. We even get to keep our house. I’m not proud of myself, but I won’t be ashamed for putting my family ahead of the truth.”

“The truth is radiation raining on Buenas Yerbas.”

“We all make choices about levels of risk. If I can protect my wife in return for playing a bit part in the chance of an accident at Swannekke, well, I’ll have to live with that. I sure as hell wish you’d think a little more about the risk you’re exposing yourself to by taking these people on.”

Luisa’s memory of sinking under water returns to haunt her, and her heart lurches. Bart places a cup of coffee in front of her.

Grelsch slips a typewritten page over the counter. It contains two columns of seven names per column. “Guess what this list is.” Two names jump out: Lloyd Hooks and William Wiley.

“Board members of Trans Vision Inc.?”

Grelsch nods. “Almost. Board membership is a matter of public knowledge. This is a list of unlisted corporate advisers who receive money sourced in Trans Vision Inc. The circled names should interest you. Look. Hooks and Wiley. Lazy, damning, just plain greedy.”

Luisa pockets the list. “I should thank you for this.”

“Nussbaum the Foul did the digging. One last thing. Fran Peacock, at the Western Messenger, you know her?”

“Just to say hi at superficial media parties.”

“Fran and me go back a ways. I dropped by her office last night, mentioned your story’s salient points. I was noncommittal, but once you’ve got battleworthy evidence she’d like to say more than just hi.”

“Is this in the spirit of your understanding with Trans Vision Inc.?”

Grelsch stands up and folds his newspaper. “They never said I couldn’t share my contacts.”

58

Jerry Nussbaum returns the car keys to Luisa. “Dear God in Heaven, let me be reincarnated as your mother’s sports car. I don’t care which one. That’s the last of the boxes?”

“Yep,” says Luisa, “and thanks.”

Nussbaum shrugs like a modest maestro. “The place’ll sure feel empty without a real woman to crack chauvinist jokes on. Nance is actually a man after so many decades in a newsroom.”

Nancy O’Hagan thumps her jammed typewriter and gives Nussbaum the finger.

“Yeah, like”—Roland Jakes surveys Luisa’s empty desk, glumly—“I still don’t believe how, y’ know, the new guys’d give you the high jump but keep on a mollusk like Nussbaum.”

Nancy O’Hagan hisses, cobralike, “How can Grelsch”—she jabs her cigar at his office—“just roll over waving his feet in the air and let KPO stiff you like that?”

“Wish me luck.”

“Luck?” Jakes scoffs. “You don’t need luck. Don’t know why you stayed with this dead shark for so long. The seventies is gonna see satire’s dying gasp. It’s true what Lehrer said. A world that’ll award Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize throws us all out of a job.”

“Oh,” Nussbaum remembers, “I came back via the mailroom. Something for you.” He hands Luisa a padded khaki envelope. She doesn’t recognize the crabbed, looping script. She slits open the envelope. Inside is a safety-deposit key, wrapped in a short note. Luisa’s expression intensifies as her eyes move down the note. She double-checks the label on the key. “Third Bank of California, Ninth Street. Where’s that?”

“Downtown,” answers O’Hagan, “where Ninth crosses Flanders Boulevard.”

“Catch you all next time.” Luisa is going. “It’s a small world. It keeps recrossing itself.”

59

Waiting for the lights to change, Luisa glances once more at Sixsmith’s letter to triple-check she hasn’t missed anything. It was written in a hurried script.

Angry horns blast as Luisa fumbles with the unfamiliar transmission. After Thirteenth Street the city loses its moneyed Pacific character. Carob trees, watered by the city, give way to buckled streetlights. Joggers do not pant down these side streets. The neighborhood could be from any manufacturing zone in any industrial belt. Bums doze on benches, weeds crack the sidewalk, skins get darker block by block, flyers cover barricaded doors, graffiti spreads across every surface below the height of a teenager holding a spray can. The garbage collectors are on strike, again, and mounds of rubbish putrefy in the sun. Pawnshops, nameless laundromats, and grocers scratch a lean living from threadbare pockets. After more blocks and streetlights, the shops give way to anonymous manufacturing firms and housing projects. Luisa has never even driven through this district and feels unsettled by the unknowability of cities. Was Sixsmith’s logic to hide his report and then hide the hiding place? She comes to Flanders Boulevard and sees the Third Bank of California dead ahead, with a customers’ parking lot around the side. Luisa doesn’t notice the battered black Chevy parked across the street.

60

Fay Li, in visor sunglasses and a sunhat, checks her watch against the bank’s clock. The air-conditioning is losing its battle against the midmorning heat. She dabs perspiration from her face and forearms with a handkerchief, fans herself, and assesses recent developments. Joe Napier, you look dumb but you’re deep-down smart, smart enough to know when to bow out. Luisa Rey should be here any time now, if Bill Smoke was on the money. Bill Smoke, you look smart but you’re deep-down dumb, and your men aren’t as loyal as you think. Because you don’t do it for the money, you forgot how easily lesser mortals can be bought.

Two well-dressed Chinese men walk in. A look from one tells her Luisa Rey is coming. The three converge at a desk guarding a side corridor: SAFETY DEPOSIT BOXES. This facility has had very little traffic all morning. Fay Li considered getting a plant in place, but a minimum-wage rent-a-guard’s natural laxness is safer than giving Triad men a sniff of the prize.

“Hi”—Fay Li fires off her most intolerable Chinese accent at the guard—“brothers and I want get from strongbox.” She dangles a deposit-box key. “Looky, we got key.”

The bored youth has a bad skin problem. “ID?”

“ID here, you looky, ID you looky.”

The Chinese ideograms repel white scrutiny with their ancient tribal magic. The guard nods down the corridor and returns to his Aliens! magazine. “Door’s not locked.” I’d fire your ass on the spot, kid, thinks Fay Li.

The corridor ends at a reinforced door, left ajar. Beyond is the deposit-box room, shaped like a three-pronged fork. One associate joins her up the left prong, and she orders the other down the right. About six hundred boxes in here. One of them hides a five-million-dollar, ten-thousand-bucks-per-page report.

Footsteps approach down the corridor. Clipping, female heels.

The vault door swings open. “Anyone here?” calls Luisa Rey.

Silence.

As the door clangs shut, the two men rush the woman. Luisa is gripped with a hand over her mouth. “Thank you.” Fay Li prizes the key from the reporter’s fingers. Its engraved number is 36/64. She wastes no words. “Bad news. This room is soundproof, unmonitored, and my friends and I are armed. The Sixsmith Report isn’t destined for your hands. Good news. I’m acting for clients who want the HYDRA strangled at birth and Seaboard discredited. Sixsmith’s findings will hit the news networks within two or three days. Whether they want to pursue the corporate executions is their business. Don’t look at me like that, Luisa. Truth doesn’t care who discovers it, so why should you? Even better news. Nothing bad will happen to you. My associate will escort you to a holding location in B.Y. By evening, you’ll be a free woman. You won’t cause us any trouble”—Fay Li produces a photo of Javier from Luisa’s bulletin board and waves it an inch from her face—“because we’d reciprocate in kind.”

Submission replaces defiance in Luisa’s eyes.

“I knew you had a fine head on your shoulders.” Fay Li addresses the man holding Luisa in Cantonese. “Take her to the lockup. Nothing dirty before you shoot her. She may be a reporter, but that doesn’t make her a total whore. Dispose of the body in the usual way.”

They leave. The second associate remains by the door, holding it ajar.

Fay Li locates strongbox 36/64 at neck height, at the tip of the middle prong.

The key turns, and the door swings open.

Fay Li pulls out a vanilla binder. The HYDRA-Zero Reactor—An Operational Assessment Model—Project Head Dr. Rufus Sixsmith—Unauthorized Possession Is a Federal Crime Under the Military & Industrial Espionage Act 1971. Fay Li permits herself a jubilant smile. The land of opportunity. Then she sees two wires trailing from inside the binder to the back of the strongbox. She peers in. A red diode blinks on a neat four-by-two bundle of taped cylinders, wires, components.

Bill Smoke, you goddamn—

61

The blast picks Luisa Rey up and throws her forward, irresistibly, like a Pacific breaker. The corridor rotates through ninety degrees—several times—and pounds into Luisa’s ribs and head. Petals of pain unfold across her vision. Masonry groans. Chunks of plaster, tile, and glass shower, drizzle, stop.

An ominous peace. What am I living through? Calls for help spring up in the dust and smoke, screams from the street, alarm bells drill the burnt air. Luisa’s mind reactivates. A bomb. The rent-a-guard croaks and moans. Blood from his ear trickles into a delta flooding his shirt collar. Luisa tries to pull herself away, but her right leg has been blown off.

The shock dies; her leg is just jammed under her unconscious Chinese escort. She pulls free and crawls, stiff and hurting, across the lobby, now transformed into a movie set. Luisa finds the vault door, blown off its hinges. Must have missed me by inches. Broken glass, upended chairs, chunks of wall, cut and shocked people. Oily black smoke belches from the ducts, and a sprinkler system kicks in—Luisa is drenched and choked, slips on the wet floor and stumbles, dazed, bent double, into others.

A friendly hand takes Luisa’s wrist. “I got you, ma’am, I got you, let me help you outside, there may be another explosion.”

Luisa allows herself to be led into congested sunlight, where a wall of faces looks on, hungry for horror. The fireman guides her across a road blocked with gridlocked cars, and she is reminded of April’s war footage from Saigon. Smoke still spills in senseless quantities. “Get away! Over here! Get back! Over there!” Luisa the journalist is trying to tell Luisa the victim something. She has grit in her mouth. Something urgent. She asks her rescuer, “How did you get on the scene so soon?”

“It’s okay,” he insists, “you have a concussion.”

A fireman? “I can make my own way now—”

“No, you’ll be safe this way—”

The door of a dusty black Chevy swings open.

“Let go of me!”

His grip is iron. “In the car now,” he mutters, “or I’ll blow your fucking brains out.”

The bomb was supposed to get me, and now—

Luisa’s abductor grunts and falls forward.

62

Joe Napier grabs Luisa Rey’s arm and swings her away from the Chevy. Christ, that was close! A baseball bat is in his other hand. “If you want to live to see the day out, you’d better come with me.”

Okay, thinks Luisa. “Okay,” she says.

Napier pulls her back into the jockeying crowd to block Bill Smoke’s line of fire, hands the baseball bat to a bewildered boy, and marches toward Eighty-first Avenue, away from the Chevy. Walk discreetly; or run for it and break your cover?

“My car’s next to the bank,” says Luisa.

“We’ll be sitting ducks in this traffic,” says Napier. “Bill Smoke’s got two more ape-men, they’ll just fire through the window. Can you walk?”

“I can run, Napier.”

They advance a third of the way down the block, but then Napier makes out Bill Smoke’s face ahead, his hand hovering around his jacket pocket. Napier checks behind him. A second goon is the second pincer. Across the road is a third. There won’t be any cops on the scene for minutes yet, and they have mere seconds. Two killings in broad daylight: risky, but the stakes are high enough for them to chance it, and there’s so much chaos here, they’ll get away with it. Napier is desperate: they are level with a windowless warehouse. “Up these steps,” he tells Luisa, praying the door opens.

It does.

A sparse reception area, shady and lit by a single tube, a tomb of flies. Napier bolts the door behind them. From behind a desk, a young girl in her Sunday best and an aged poodle in a cardboard box bed watch, unperturbed. Three exits at the far end. The noise of machinery is monolithic.

A black-eyed Mexican woman swoops from nowhere and flutters in his face: “No ’llegals here! No ’llegals here! Bossaway! Bossaway! Come back ’notherday!”

Luisa Rey addresses her in very battered Spanish. The Mexican woman glares, then jerks a savage thumb at the exits. A blow crunches the outer door. Napier and Luisa run across the echoing chamber. “Left or right?” demands Napier.

“Don’t know!” gasps Luisa.

Napier looks back for guidance from the Mexican, but the street door shudders under one blow, splinters under the next, and flies open with the third. Napier pulls Luisa through the left exit.

63

Bisco and Roper, Bill Smoke’s sidemen, body-charge the door. In the courtroom of his head, Bill Smoke finds William Wiley and Lloyd Hooks guilty of gross negligence. I told you! Joe Napier couldn’t be trusted to pack up his conscience and pick up his fishing rods.

The door is in pieces.

A spidery Mexican woman inside is having hysterics. A placid child and a bedecked poodle sit on an office desk. “FBI!” Bisco yells, flourishing his driver’s license. “Which way did they go?”

The Mexican woman screeches: “We care our workers! Very good! Very much pay! No need union!”

Bisco takes out his gun and blasts the poodle against the wall. “Which way did they fucking go?”

Jesus Muhammad Christ, this is why I work alone.

The Mexican woman bites her fist, shudders, and launches a rising wail.

“Brilliant, Bisco, like the FBI kills poodles.” Roper leans over the child, who hasn’t responded in any way to the death of the dog. “Which exit did the man and the woman take?”

She gazes back as if he is nothing but a pleasant sunset.

“You speak English?”

A hysteric, a mute, a dead dog—Bill Smoke walks to the three exits—and a pair of fuckups royale. “We’re losing time! Roper, right door. Bisco, left. I’m the middle.”

64

Rows, aisles, and ten-box-high walls of cardboard conceal the true dimensions of the storeroom. Napier wedges the door shut with a cart. “Tell me you’ve gotten over your gun allergy since yesterday,” he hisses.

Luisa shakes her head. “You?”

“Only a popgun. Six shots. C’mon.”

Even as they run, she hears the door being forced. Napier blocks the line of vision with a tower of boxes. Then again, a few yards down. A third tower topples ahead of them, however, and dozens of Big Birds—Luisa recognizes the dimwit yellow emu from the children’s program Hal used to watch between jobs—spill free. Napier gestures: Run with your head down.

Five seconds later a bullet rips through cardboard three inches shy of Luisa’s head, and Big Bird stuffing poofs into her face. She trips and collides with Napier; a rod of noise sears the air above them. Napier draws his gun and fires twice around Luisa. The noise makes her curl into a ball. “Run!” barks Napier, grabbing her upright. Luisa obeys—Napier starts knocking down walls of boxes to impede their pursuer.

Ten yards later Luisa gets to a corner. A plywood door is marked EMERGENCY EXIT.

Locked. Breathless, Joe Napier reaches her. He fails to force the door.

“Give it up, Napier!” they hear. “It’s not you we’re after!”

Napier fires point-blank at the lock.

The door still won’t open. He empties three more bullets into the lock: each bang makes Luisa flinch. The fourth bang is an empty click. Napier kicks the door with the sole of his boot.

An underworld sweatshop clattering with five hundred sewing machines. Flakes of textile are suspended in the viscous heat, haloing the naked bulbs hanging over each machinist. Luisa and Napier skirt the outer walkway in a rapid semicrouch. Limp Donald Ducks and crucified Scooby-Doos have their innards stitched, one by one, row by row, pallet by pallet. Each woman keeps her eyes fixed on the needle plates, so Luisa and Napier cause little commotion.

But how do we get out of here?

Napier runs, literally, into the Mexican woman from the makeshift reception. She beckons them down a semiblocked unlit side passage. Napier turns to Luisa, yelling over the metallic din, his face saying, Do we trust her?

Luisa’s face replies, Any better ideas? They follow the woman between reams of fabric and wire, split boxes of teddy-bear eyes and assorted sewing-machine body shells and innards. The passage corners right and stops at an iron door. Day filters in through a grimy grille. The Mexican fumbles with her key ring. It’s 1875 down here, thinks Luisa, not 1975. One key won’t fit. The next fits but won’t turn. Even thirty seconds on the factory floor has affected her hearing.

A war cry from six yards away: “Hands in the air!” Luisa spins around. “I said, Hands in the fuckin’ air!” Luisa’s hands obey. The gunman keeps his pistol trained on Napier. “Turn around, Napier! Slow! Drop your gun!”

The señora shrills: “No shoot I! No shoot I, Señor! They force I show door! They say they kill—”

“Shuddup, you crazy fuckin’ wetback! Scram! Outa my way!”

The woman creeps around him, pressing herself against the wall, shrieking, “¡No dispares! ¡No dispares! ¡No quiero morir!”

Napier shouts, through the funneled factory noise, “Easy now, Bisco, how much you being paid?”

Bisco hollers back, “Don’t bother, Napier. Last words.”

“I can’t hear you! What did you say?”

“What—are—your—last—words?”

“Last words? Who are you? Dirty Harry?”

Bisco’s mouth twitches. “I got a book of last words, and those were yours. You?” He looks at Luisa, keeping the gun trained on Napier.

A pistol shot punches a hole in the din, and Luisa’s eyes clench shut. A hard thing touches her toe. She forces her eyes open. It is a handgun, skidded to a stop. Bisco’s face is contorted into inexplicable agony. The señora’s monkey wrench flashes and crumples the gunman’s lower jaw. Ten or more blows of extreme ferocity follow, each one making Luisa flinch, punctuated by the words, “Yo! Amaba! A! Ese! Jodido! Perro!”

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, cariña. 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

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.

“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.

“Front page!” Bart pours Luisa’s coffee. “Lester would be mighty proud.”

“He’d say I’m just a journalist doing my job.”

“Well, exactly, Luisa!”

Seaboardgate is no longer her scoop. Swannekke swarms with reporters, Senate investigators, FBI agents, county police, and Hollywood scriptwriters. Swannekke B is in mothballs; C is suspended.

Luisa gets Javier’s postcard out again. It shows three UFOs zooming under the Golden Gate Bridge:

The other item of mail is an airmailed package from Megan Sixsmith, sent in response to Luisa’s request. It contains the final eight letters Robert Frobisher wrote to his friend Rufus Sixsmith. Luisa uses a plastic knife to slit the package open. She removes one of the yellowed envelopes, postmarked October 10, 1931, holds it against her nose, and inhales. Are molecules of Zedelghem Château, of Robert Frobisher’s hand, dormant in this paper for forty-four years, now swirling in my lungs, in my blood?

Who is to say?