Cloud Atlas

  “We were trapped in an elevator for ninety minutes. Cool as a cucumber. Unstable just isn’t a word that sticks to the man. Another thing. He shot himself—supposedly—with just about the quietest gun on the market. A Roachford .34 with fitted silencer. Catalog order only. Why would he go to the trouble?”

  “So. The cops got it wrong, the ME got it wrong, everyone got it wrong except Luisa Rey, ace cub reporter, whose penetrating insight concludes the world-famous number cruncher was assassinated just because he’d pointed out a few hitches in some report, a report nobody agrees exists. Am I right?”

  “Half right. More likely, the police were encouraged to arrive at conclusions convenient for Seaboard.”

  “Sure, a utility company buys the cops. Stupid me.”

  “Count in their subsidiaries, Seaboard Corporation is the tenth biggest corporation in the country. They could buy Alaska if they wanted. Give me until Monday.”

  “No! You got this week’s reviews and, yes, the food feature.”

  “If Bob Woodward had told you he suspected President Nixon had ordered a burglary of his political rival’s offices and recorded himself issuing the order, would you have said, ‘Forget it, Bob, honey, I need eight hundred words on salad dressings’?”

  “Don’t you dare give me the I’m-an-outraged-feminist act.”

  “Then don’t give me the listen-I’ve-been-in-the-business-thirty-years act! One Jerry Nussbaum in the building is bad enough.”

  “You’re squeezing size-eighteen reality into a size-eleven supposition. The undoing of many a fine newspaperman. Many a fine anyone.”

  “Monday! I’ll get a copy of the Sixsmith Report.”

  “Promises you can’t keep are not a sound currency.”

  “Apart from getting on my knees and begging you, I don’t have any other currency. C’mon. Dom Grelsch doesn’t snuff out solid investigative journalism just because it doesn’t turn up the goods in one morning. Dad told me you were just about the most daring reporter working anywhere in the mid-sixties.”

  Grelsch swivels and looks over Third Avenue. “Did he bullshit!”

  “He did too bullshit! That exposé on Ross Zinn’s campaign funds in ’sixty-four. You took a bone-chilling white supremacist out of politics for good. Dad called you dogged, cussed, and indefatigable. Ross Zinn took nerve, sweat, and time. I’ll do the nerve and sweat, all I want from you is a little time.”

  “Roping your pa into this was a dirty trick.”

  “Journalism calls for dirty tricks.”

  Grelsch stubs his cigarette and lights another. “Monday, with Sixsmith’s inquiry, and it’s got to be hurricane proof, Luisa, with names, sources, facts. Who squashed this report, and why, and how Swannekke B will turn Southern California into Hiroshima. Something else. If you get evidence Sixsmith was murdered, we’re going to the cops before we print. I don’t want dynamite under my car seat.”

  “ ‘All the news without fear or favor.’ ”

  “Beat it.”

  Nancy O’Hagan makes a not-bad face as Luisa sits at her desk and takes out Sixsmith’s rescued letters.

  In his office, Grelsch lays into his punching bag. “Dogged!” Wham! “Cussed!” Wham! “Indefatigable!” The editor catches his reflection, mocking him.

  22

  A Sephardic romance, composed before the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, fills the Lost Chord Music Store on the northwest corner of Spinoza Square and Sixth Avenue. The well-dressed man on the telephone, pallid for this tanned city, repeats the inquiry: “Cloud Atlas Sextet… Robert Frobisher … As a matter of fact I have heard of it, though I’ve never laid my sticky paws on an actual pressing…. Frobisher was a wunderkind, he died just as he got going…. Let me see here, I’ve got a list from a dealer in San Fran who specializes in rarities…. Franck, Fitzroy, Frobisher… Here we go, even a little footnote…. Only five hundred recordings pressed … in Holland, before the war, my, no wonder it’s rare…. The dealer has a copy of an acetate, made in the fifties … by a liquidated French outfit. Cloud Atlas Sextet must bring the kiss of death to all who take it on…. I’ll try, he had one as of a month ago, but no promises on the sound quality, and I must warn you, cheap it ain’t…. It’s quoted here at … one hundred twenty dollars … plus our commission at ten percent, that makes … It is? Okay, I’ll take your name down…. Ray who? Oh, Miss R-E-Y, so sorry. Normally we ask for a deposit, but you’ve got an honest voice. A few days. You’re welcome now.”

  The store clerk scribbles himself a to-do note and lifts the stylus back to the start of “¿Por qué lloras blanca niña?,” lowers the needle onto shimmering black vinyl, and dreams of Jewish shepherd boys plucking their lyres on starlit Iberian hillsides.

  23

  Luisa Rey doesn’t see the dusty black Chevy coasting by as she enters her apartment building. Bill Smoke, driving the Chevy, memorizes the address: 108, Pacific Eden Apartments.

  Luisa has reread Sixsmith’s letters a dozen times or more in the last day and a half. They disturb her. A university friend of Sixsmith’s, Robert Frobisher, wrote the series in the summer of 1931 during a prolonged stay at a château in Belgium. It is not the unflattering light they shed on a pliable young Rufus Sixsmith that bothers Luisa but the dizzying vividness of the images of places and people that the letters have unlocked. Images so vivid she can only call them memories. The pragmatic journalist’s daughter would, and did, explain these “memories” as the work of an imagination hypersensitized by her father’s recent death, but a detail in one letter will not be dismissed. Robert Frobisher mentions a comet-shaped birthmark between his shoulder blade and collarbone.

  I just don’t believe in this crap. I just don’t believe it. I don’t.

  Builders are remodeling the lobby of Pacific Eden Apartments. Sheets are on the floor, an electrician is prodding a light fitting, an unseen hammerer hammers. Malcolm the super glimpses Luisa and calls out, “Hey, Luisa! An uninvited guest ran up to your apartment twenty minutes ago!” But the noise of a drill drowns him out, he has a man from city hall on the phone about building codes, and anyway, Luisa has already stepped into the elevator.

  24

  “Surprise,” says Hal Brodie, drily, caught in the act of taking books and records from Luisa’s shelves and putting them into his gym bag. “Hey,” he says, to hide a jab of guilt, “you’ve had your hair cut short.”

  Luisa isn’t very surprised. “Don’t all dumped women?”

  Hal clicks in the back of his throat.

  Luisa is angry with herself. “So. Reclamation Day.”

  “Just about done.” Hal brushes imaginary dust off his hands. “Is the selected Wallace Stevens yours or mine?”

  “It was a Christmas present from Phoebe to us. Phone Phoebe. Let her decide. Or else rip out the odd pages and leave me the even. This is like a no-knock raid. You could’ve phoned.”

  “I did. All I got was your machine. Junk it, if you never listen to it.”

  “Don’t be stupid, it cost a fortune. So what brings you up to town, apart from your love of modernist poetry?”

  “Location scouting for Starsky and Hutch.”

  “Starsky and Hutch don’t live in Buenas Yerbas.”

  “Starsky gets kidnapped by the West Coast Triad. There’s a gunfight on Buenas Yerbas Bay Bridge, and we’ve got a chase scene scripted with David and Paul running over car roofs at rush hour. It’ll be a headache to okay it with the traffic cops, but we need to do it on location or we’ll lose any semblance of artistic integrity.”

  “Hey. You’re not taking Blood on the Tracks.”

  “It’s mine.”

  “Not anymore.” Luisa is not joking.

  With ironic deference, Brodie takes out the record from the gym bag. “Look, I was sorry to hear about your dad.”

  Luisa nods, feels grief rise and her defenses stiffen. “Yeah.”

  “I guess it was … a release, of sorts.”

  True, but only the bereaved can actually say so. Luisa resists
the temptation to say something acidic. She remembers her father ribbing Hal, “the TV Kid.” I am not going to start crying. “So, you’re doing okay?”

  “I’m doing fine. And you?”

  “Fine.” Luisa looks at the new gaps in her old shelves.

  “Work’s good?”

  “Work’s fine.” Put us both out of our misery. “I believe you have a key that belongs to me.”

  Hal zips up his gym bag, fishes in his pocket, and drops the door key onto her palm. With a flourish, to underline the symbolism of the act. Luisa smells an alien aftershave and imagines Her splashing it on him this morning. He didn’t own that shirt eight weeks ago, either. The cowboy boots they’d bought together the day of the Segovia concert. Hal steps over a pair of Javier’s filthy sneakers, and Luisa watches him think better of making a funny about her new man. Instead, he just says, “So long, then.”

  Shake hands? Hug him? “Yeah.”

  The door closes.

  Luisa puts the chain on and replays the encounter. She turns on the shower and undresses. Her bathroom mirror is half-hidden by a shelf of shampoos, conditioners, a box of sanitary napkins, skin creams, and gift soaps. Luisa shunts these aside to get a clearer view of a birthmark between her shoulder blade and collarbone. Her encounter with Hal is displaced. Coincidences happen all the time. But it is undeniably shaped like a comet. The mirror mists over. Facts are your bread and butter. Birthmarks can look like anything you choose, not only comets. You’re still upset by Dad’s death, that’s all. The journalist steps into the shower, but her mind walks the passageways of Zedelghem château.

  25

  The Swannekke Island protesters’ camp lies on the mainland between a beach and a marshy lagoon. Behind the lagoon, acres of citrus orchards rise inland to arid hills. Tatty tents, rainbow-sprayed camper vans, and trailer homes look like unwanted gifts the Pacific dumped here. A strung banner declares: PLANET AGAINST SEABOARD. On the far side of the bridge sits Swannekke A, quivering like Utopia in a noon mirage. White toddlers tanned brown as leather paddle in the lazy shallows; a bearded apostle washes clothes in a tub; a couple of snaky teenagers kiss in the dune grass.

  Luisa locks her VW and crosses the scrub to the encampment. Seagulls float in the joyless heat. Agricultural machinery drones in the distance. Several inhabitants approach but not in a friendly manner. “Yeah?” challenges a man, with a hawkish Native American complexion.

  “I presumed this was a public park.”

  “You presumed wrong. It’s private.”

  “I’m a journalist. I was hoping to interview a few of you.”

  “Who do you work for?”

  “Spyglass magazine.”

  The bad weather lightens a little. “Shouldn’t you be writing about the latest adventures of Barbra Streisand’s nose?” says the Native American, adding a sardonic “No disrespect.”

  “Well, sorry, I’m not the Herald Tribune, but why not give me a chance? You could use a little positive coverage, unless you’re seriously planning to dismantle that atomic time bomb across the water by waving placards and strumming protest songs. No disrespect.”

  A southerner growls: “Lady, you’re full of it.”

  “The interview’s over,” says the Native American. “Get off this land.”

  “Don’t worry, Milton”—an elderly, white-haired, russet-faced woman stands on her trailer’s step—”I’ll see this one.” An aristocratic mongrel watches from beside his mistress. Clearly, her word carries weight, for the crowd disperses with no further protest.

  Luisa approaches the trailer. “The love and peace generation?”

  “Nineteen seventy-five is nowhere near 1968. Seaboard has informers in our network. Last weekend the authorities wanted to clear the site for the VIPs, and blood was spilled. That gave the cops an excuse for a round of arrests. I’m afraid paranoia pays. Come in. I’m Hester Van Zandt.”

  “I was very much hoping to meet you, Doctor,” says Luisa.

  26

  An hour later Luisa feeds her apple core to Hester Van Zandt’s genteel dog. Van Zandt’s bookshelf-lined office is as neat as Grelsch’s is chaotic. Luisa’s host is finishing up. “The conflict between corporations and activists is that of narcolepsy versus remembrance. The corporations have money, power, and influence. Our sole weapon is public outrage. Outrage blocked the Yuccan Dam, ousted Nixon, and in part, terminated the monstrosities in Vietnam. But outrage is unwieldy to manufacture and handle. First, you need scrutiny; second, widespread awareness; only when this reaches a critical mass does public outrage explode into being. Any stage may be sabotaged. The world’s Alberto Grimaldis can fight scrutiny by burying truth in committees, dullness, and misinformation, or by intimidating the scrutinizers. They can extinguish awareness by dumbing down education, owning TV stations, paying ‘guest fees’ to leader writers, or just buying the media up. The media—and not just The Washington Post—is where democracies conduct their civil wars.”

  “That’s why you rescued me from Milton and his compatriots.”

  “I wanted to give you the truth as we see it, so you can at least make an informed choice about which side you’ll back. Write a satire about GreenFront New Waldenites in their mini-Woodstock and you’ll confirm every Republican Party prejudice and bury truth a little deeper. Write about radiation levels in seafood, ‘safe’ pollution limits set by polluters, government policy auctioned for campaign donations, and Seaboard’s private police force, and you’ll raise the temperature of public awareness, fractionally, toward its ignition point.”

  Luisa asks, “Did you know Rufus Sixsmith?”

  “I certainly did, God rest his soul.”

  “I’d have put you on opposing sides … or no?”

  Van Zandt nods at Luisa’s tactics. “I met Rufus in the early sixties at a think tank in D.C., connected with the Federal Power Commission. I was in awe of him! Nobel laureate, veteran of the Manhattan Project.”

  “Might you know anything about a report he wrote condemning the HYDRA-Zero and demanding Swannekke B be taken off-line?”

  “Dr. Sixsmith? Are you totally sure?”

  “ ‘Totally sure’? No. ‘Pretty damn sure’? Yes.”

  Van Zandt looks edgy. “My God, if GreenFront could get its hands on a copy …” Her face clouds over. “If the Dr. Rufus Sixsmith wrote a hatchet job on the HYDRA-Zero, and if he threatened to go public, well, I no longer believe he shot himself.”

  Luisa notices they are both whispering. She asks the question she imagines Grelsch asking: “Doesn’t it smack of paranoia to believe Seaboard would assassinate a man of Sixsmith’s stature, just to avoid negative publicity?”

  Van Zandt removes a photograph of a woman in her seventies from a corkboard. “A name for you. Margo Roker.”

  “I saw her name on a placard the other day.”

  “Margo’s been a GreenFront activist since Seaboard bought Swannekke Island. She owns this land and lets us operate here as a thorn in Seaboard’s side. Six weeks ago her bungalow—two miles up the coast—was burgled. Margo has no money, just a few scraps of land, land she’s refused to part with, whatever inducements Seaboard dangled. Well. The burglars beat her senseless, left her for dead, but took nothing. It’s not actually a murder case, because Margo’s still in a coma, so the police line is that it was a poorly planned heist with an unfortunate end.”

  “Unfortunate for Margo.”

  “And pretty damn fortunate for Seaboard. The medical bills are burying her family. A few days after the assault, an L.A. real estate company, Open Vista, steps up and makes an offer to Margo’s cousin for these acres of coastland scrub at quadruple its market value. To make a private nature reserve. So I ask GreenFront to do some research on Open Vista. It was registered just eight weeks ago, and guess whose name heads the list of corporate donors?” Van Zandt nods in the direction of Swannekke Island.

  Luisa weighs all this. “You’ll be hearing from me, Hester.”

  “I hope I will.”

&nb
sp; 27

  Alberto Grimaldi enjoys his Extracurricular Security Briefings with Bill Smoke and Joe Napier in his Swannekke office. He likes the no-nonsense demeanor of both men, in contrast to the retinue of courtiers and petitioners. He likes sending his secretary into the reception area where company heads, union leaders, and government men are made to wait, ideally for hours, and hear her say, “Bill, Joe, Mr. Grimaldi has a slot for you now.” Smoke and Napier let Grimaldi indulge the J. Edgar Hoover side of his character. He thinks of Napier as a steadfast bulldog whose New Jersey childhood is unsoftened by thirty-five years of Californian living; Bill Smoke is his familiar, who passes through walls, ethics, and legality to execute his master’s will.

  Today’s meeting is enhanced by Fay Li, summoned by Napier for the last item on their unwritten agenda: a journalist visiting Swannekke this weekend, Luisa Rey, who may or may not pose a security risk. “So, Fay,” asks Grimaldi, balancing on the edge of his desk, “what do we know about her?”

  Fay Li speaks as if from a mental checklist. “Reporter at Spyglass—I presume we all know it? Twenty-six, ambitious, more liberal than radical. Daughter of the Lester Rey, foreign correspondent, recently died. Mother remarried an architect after an amicable divorce seven years ago, lives in uptown Ewingsville, B.Y. No siblings. History and economics at Berkeley, summa cum laude. Started on the L.A. Recorder, political pieces in the Tribune and Herald. Single, lives alone, pays her bills on time.”

  “Dull as ditch water,” comments Napier.

  “Then remind me why we’re discussing her,” says Smoke.

  Fay Li addresses Grimaldi: “We caught her wandering around Research on Tuesday, during the launch. She claimed to have an appointment with Dr. Sixsmith.”

  “About?”

  “A commissioned piece for Spyglass, but I think she was fishing.”