Cloud Atlas

  “Felix f*****g Finch! That c*** who shat on my book in his poncy f*****g mag?”

  “It wasn’t your best review, but—”

  “It was my only f*****g review!”

  “It really didn’t read so badly—”

  “Yeah? ‘None-hit wonders like Mr. Hoggins are the roadkills of modern letters.’ Notice how people insert the ‘Mr.’ before sinking the blade in? ‘Mr. Hoggins should apologize to the trees felled for his bloated “autobio-novel.” Four hundred vainglorious pages expire in an ending flat and inane quite beyond belief.’ ”

  “Steady now, Dermot, nobody actually reads the Trafalgar.”

  “’Scuse!” My author collared a waiter. “Heard of the Trafalgar Review of Books?”

  “Why, sure,” the East European waiter replied. “My entire faculty swears by the TRB, they’ve got the smartest reviewers.”

  Dermot flung his glass over the railing.

  “Come now, what’s a reviewer?” I reasoned. “One who reads quickly, arrogantly, but never wisely …”

  The jazz sextet finished their number, and Dermot left my sentence dangling. I was drunk enough to justify a taxi and was about to leave when a Cockney town crier soundalike silenced the entire gathering: “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury! Your attention, please!”

  Saints preserve us, Dermot was clanging a couple of trays together. “We have an additional award tonight, fellow book fairies!” he bellowed. Ignoring arch chuckles and “Oooooo!”s, he produced an envelope from his jacket pocket, slit it open, and pretended to read: “Award for Most Eminent Literary Critic.” His audience looked on, cockatooed, booed, or turned away in embarrassment. “Competition was fierce, but the panel was unanimous in choosing His Imperial Majesty of the Trafalgar Review of Books, Mr.—beg pudding, Sir—Felix Finch O, B, and E, come—on—darn!”

  Stirrers crowed. “Bravo, Felix! Bravo!” Finch wouldn’t have been a critic if he didn’t love unearned attention. Doubtless he was already composing copy in his head for his Sunday Times column, “A Finch About Town.” For his part, Dermot was all sincerity and smiles. “What might my prize be, I wonder?” Finch smirked as the applause subsided. “A signed copy of an unpulped Knuckle Sandwich? Can’t be many of those left!” Finch’s coterie chorused hooty laughter, spurring on their commissar. “Or do I win a free flight to a South American country with leaky extradition treaties?”

  “Yeah, lovie”—Dermot winked—”a free flight is exactly what you won.”

  My author grabbed Finch’s lapels, rolled backwards, sank his feet into Finch’s girth, and judo-propelled the shorter-than-generally-realized media personality high into the night air! High above the pansies lining the balcony railing.

  Finch’s shriek—his life—ended in crumpled metal, twelve floors down.

  Someone’s drink poured onto the carpet.

  Dermot “Duster” Hoggins brushed his lapels, leaned over the balcony, and yelled: “So who’s expired in an ending flat and inane quite beyond belief now?”

  The dumbstruck crowd parted as the murderer made his way to the nibblies table. Several witnesses later recalled a dark halo. He selected a Belgian cracker adorned with Biscay anchovies and parsley drizzled with sesame oil.

  The crowd’s senses flooded back. Gagging noises, oh-my-Gods, and a stampede for the stairs. The most frightful hullabaloo! My thoughts? Honestly? Horror. Assuredly. Shock? You bet. Disbelief? Naturally. Fear? Not really.

  I will not deny a nascent sense of a silver lining to this tragic turn. My Haymarket office suite housed ninety-five unsold shrink-wraps of Dermot Hoggins’s Knuckle Sandwich, impassioned memoir of Britain’s soon to be most famous murderer. Frank Sprat—my stalwart printer in Sevenoaks, to whom I owed so much money I had the poor man over a barrel—still had the plates and was ready to roll at a moment’s notice.

  Hardcovers, ladies and gentlemen.

  Fourteen pounds ninety-nine pence a shot.

  A taste of honey!

  As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory. I make no apology, however, for (re)starting my own narrative with my version of that shocking affair. You see, it paved my first good intention on the road to Hull, or rather Hull’s hinterland, where my ghastly ordeal is fated to unfold. My fortune took the glorious turn I had foreseen after Felix Finch’s Final Fling. On the wings of sweet, free publicity, my Knuckle Sandwich turkey soared up the bestseller charts, where it roosted until poor Dermot was sentenced to fifteen of the best in Wormwood Scrubs. The trial made the Nine O’Clock News at every turn. In death Sir Felix changed from a smug-scented pomposity with a Stalinist grip on Arts Council money into, oh, Britain’s best-loved arts guru since the last one.

  On the steps of the Old Bailey, his widow told reporters fifteen years was “disgustingly lenient,” and the very next day a “Duster Hoggins, Rot in Hell!” campaign was launched. Dermot’s family counterattacked on chat shows, Finch’s offending review was pored over, BBC2 commissioned a special documentary in which the lesbian who interviewed me edited my witticisms wholly out of context. Who cared? The money pot bubbled away—no, it boiled over and set the entire ruddy kitchen alight. Cavendish Publishing—Mrs. Latham and I, that is—didn’t know what had hit us. We had to take on two of her nieces (part-time, of course, I wasn’t getting clobbered for National Insurance). The original Knuckle Sandwich shrink-wraps vanished within thirty-six hours, and Frank Sprat was reprinting on a near-monthly basis. Nothing in my four decades in the publishing game had geared us for such success. Running costs had always been recouped from author donations—not from actual ruddy sales! It seemed almost unethical. Yet here I was with a bestseller of one-in-a-decade proportions on my lists. People ask me, “Tim, how do you account for its runaway success?”

  Knuckle Sandwich was actually a well-written, gutsy fictional memoir. Culture vultures discussed its sociopolitical subtexts first on late-night shows, then on breakfast TV. Neo-Nazis bought it for its generous lashings of violence. Worcestershire housewives bought it because it was a damn fine read. Homosexuals bought it out of tribal loyalty. It shifted ninety thousand, yes, ninety thousand copies in four months, and yes, I am still talking hardcover. The feature film should be in production as I write. At the Frankfurt Book love-in I was feted by people who until then had never so much as paused to scrape me off their shoes. That odious label “Vanity Publisher” became “Creative Financier.” Translation rights fell like territories in the final round of Risk. The American publishers, glory glory Hallelujah, they loved the Limey-Aristo-Gets-Comeuppance-from-Downtrodden-Gaelic-Son hook, and a transatlantic auction skyrocketed the advance to giddy heights. I, yes, I, had exclusive rights to this platinum goose with a bad case of the trots! Money entered my cavernously empty accounts like the North Sea through a Dutch dike. My “personal banking consultant,” a spiv named Elliot McCluskie, sent me a Christmas card photo of his Midwich Cuckoo offspring. The primates on the Groucho Club door greeted me with a “Pleasant evening, Mr. Cavendish,” instead of an “Oy, you got to be signed in by a member!” When I announced that I would be handling the paperback release myself, the Sundays’ book pages ran pieces depicting Cavendish Publishing as a dynamic, white-hot player in a cloud of decrepit gas giants. I even made the FT.

  Was it any wonder Mrs. Latham and I were overstretched—just a smidge—on the bookkeeping front?

  Success intoxicates rookies in the blink of an eye. I got business cards printed up: Cavendish-Redux, Publishers of Cutting-Edge Fiction. Well, I thought, why not sell publications instead of publication? Why not become the serious publisher that the world lauded me as?

  Alackaday! Those dinky little cards were the red flag waved at the Bull of Fate. At the first rumor that Tim Cavendish was flush, my saber-toothed meerkat creditors bounded into my office. As ever, I left the gnostic algebra of what to pay whom and when to my priceless Mrs. Latham. So it was, I was mentally and
financially underprepared when my midnight callers visited, nearly a year after the Felix Finch Night. I confess that since Madame X left me (my cuckold was a dentist, I shall reveal the truth no matter how painful) Housekeeping Anarchy had reigned o’er my Putney domicile (oh, very well, the bastard was a German), so my porcelain throne has long been my de facto office seat. A decent Cognac sits under the ball-gowned lavatory-roll cover, and I leave the door open so I can hear the kitchen radio.

  The night in question, I had put aside my perpetual lavatory read, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, because of all the manuscripts (inedible green tomatoes) submitted to Cavendish-Redux, my new stable of champions. I suppose it was about eleven o’clock when I heard my front door being interfered with. Skinhead munchkins mug-or-treating?

  Cherry knockers? The wind?

  Next thing I knew, the door flew in off its ruddy hinges! I was thinking al-Qaeda, I was thinking ball lightning, but no. Down the hallway tramped what seemed like an entire rugby team, though my intruders numbered only three. (You’ll notice, I am always attacked in threes.) “Timothy,” pronounced the gargoyliest, “Cavendish, I presume. Caught with your cacks down.”

  “My business hours are eleven to two, gentlemen,” Bogart would have said, “with a three-hour break for lunch. Kindly leave.” All I could do was blurt, “Oy! My door! My ruddy door!”

  Thug Two lit a cigarette. “We visited Dermot today. He’s a bit frustrated. Who wouldn’t be?”

  The pieces fell into place. I fell into pieces. “Dermot’s brothers!” (I’d read all about them in Dermot’s book. Eddie, Mozza, Jarvis.)

  Hot ash burnt my thigh, and I lost track of which face uttered what. It was a Francis Bacon triptych come to life. “Knuckle Sandwich is doing nicely, by the looks of things.”

  “Piles of it in the airport bookshops.”

  “You must at least of suspected we’d come calling.”

  “A man of your business acumen.”

  The London Irish unnerve me at the best of times. “Boys, boys. Dermot signed a copyright-transfer contract. Look, look, it’s industry standard, I have a copy in my briefcase here …” I did indeed have the document to hand. “Clause eighteen, about copyright … means Knuckle Sandwich, legally, is … er …” It wasn’t easy to tell them this with my briefs around my ankles. “Er, legally the property of Cavendish Publishing.”

  Jarvis Hoggins scanned the contract for a moment but tore it up when it proved longer than his concentration span. “Dermot signed this f*****g pants when his book was just a f*****g hobby.”

  “A present to our sick old mam, God rest her soul.”

  “A souvenir of Dad’s heyday.”

  “Dermot never signed no f*****g contract for the event of the f*****g season.”

  “We paid your printer, Mr. Sprat, a little visit. He went through the economics for us.”

  Contract confetti showered. Mozza was close enough for me to smell his dinner. “Quite a hill of Hoggins Bros.’ cash you’ve raked in, it seems.”

  “I’m sure we can agree on a, um, um, funds flowchart, which will—”

  Eddie cut in: “Let’s make it three.”

  I feigned a wince. “Three thousand pounds? Boys, I don’t think—”

  “Don’t be a silly billy.” Mozza pinched my cheek. “Three—o’— clock. Tomorrow afternoon. Your office.”

  I had no choice. “Perhaps we might … er … moot a provisional sum to conclude this meeting, as a basis for … ongoing negotiation.”

  “Okeydokey. What sum did we moot earlier, Mozza?”

  “Fifty K sounded reasonable.”

  My cry of pain was unfeigned. “Fifty thousand pounds?”

  “For starters.”

  My intestines bubbled, toiled and troubled. “Do you really think I keep that kind of money lying around in shoe boxes?” I pitched my voice for Dirty Harry, but it was more Lisping Baggins.

  “I hope you keep it lying around somewhere, Grandpops.”

  “Cash.”

  “No bollocks. No checks.”

  “No promises. No deferments.”

  “Old-fashioned money. A shoe box will do fine.”

  “Gentlemen, I’m happy to pay a negotiated consideration, but the law—”

  Jarvis whistled through his teeth. “Will the law help a man of your years bounce back from multiple spinal fractures, Timothy?”

  Eddie: “Men of your age don’t bounce. They splat.”

  I fought with all my might, but my sphincter was no longer my own and a cannonade fired off. Amusement or condescension I could have borne, but my tormentors’ pity signified my abject defeat. The toilet chain was pulled.

  “Three o’clock.” Cavendish-Redux went down the pan. Out trooped the thugs, over my prostrate door. Eddie turned for a last word. “Dermot did a nice little paragraph in his book. On loan defaulters.”

  I refer the curious reader to this page of Knuckle Sandwich, available from your local bookshop. Not on a full stomach.

  Outside my Haymarket office suite taxis inched and sprinted. Inside my inner sanctum, Mrs. Latham’s Nefertiti earrings (a gift from me to mark her tenth year with Cavendish Publishing, I found them in a British Museum Gift Shop bargain bin) jingled as she shook her head, no, no, no. “And I am telling you, Mr. Cavendish, that I cannot find you fifty thousand pounds by three o’clock this afternoon. I cannot find you five thousand pounds. Every Knuckle Sandwich penny has already been Hoovered up by long-standing debts.”

  “Doesn’t anybody owe us money?”

  “I always keep on top of the invoicing, Mr. Cavendish, do I not?”

  Desperation makes me wheedle. “This is the age of ready credit!”

  “This is the age of credit limits, Mr. Cavendish.”

  I retired to my office, poured myself a whiskey, and slooshed down my dicky-ticker pills before tracing Captain Cook’s last voyage on my antique globe. Mrs. Latham brought in the mail and left without a word. Bills, junk, moral muggings from charity fund-raisers, and a package addressed “FAO The Visionary Editor of Knuckle Sandwich,” containing a MS titled Half-Lives—lousy name for a work of fiction—and subtitled The First Luisa Rey Mystery. Lousier and lousier. Its lady author, one dubiously named Hilary V. Hush, began her covering letter with the following: “When I was nine my mom took me to Lourdes to pray for my bed-wetting to be cured. Imagine my surprise when not Saint Bernadette but Alain-Fournier appeared in a vision that night.”

  Nutcase ahoy. I threw the letter away into my “Urgent Business” tray and switched on my spanking new fat-gigabyte computer for a game of Minesweeper. After getting blown up twice I telephoned Sotheby’s to offer Charles Dickens’s own, original, authentic writing desk for auction with a reserve price of sixty thousand. A charming evaluator named Kirpal Singh commiserated that the novelist’s desk was already accounted for by the Dickens House museum and hoped I’d not been fleeced too painfully. I confess, I do lose track of my little elaborations. Next I called Elliot McCluskie and asked after his delightful kiddies. “Fine, thank you.” He asked after my delightful business. I asked for a loan of eighty thousand pounds. He began with a thoughtful “Right …” I lowered my ceiling to sixty. Elliot pointed out that my performance-linked credit stream still had a twelve-month flow horizon before resizing could be feasibly optioned. Oh, I miss the days when they’d laugh like a hyena, tell you to go to hell, and hang up. I traced Magellan’s voyage across my globe and longed for a century when a fresh beginning was no further than the next clipper out of Dept-ford. My pride already in tatters, I gave Madame X a bell. She was having her A.M. soak. I explained the gravity of my situation. She laughed like a hyena, told me to go to hell, and hung up. I spun my globe. I spun my globe.

  Mrs. Latham eyeballed me like a hawk watching a bunny as I stepped outside. “No, not a loan shark, Mr. Cavendish. It just isn’t worth it.”

  “Never fear, Mrs. Latham, I’m just going to pay a call on the one man in this world who believes in me, fair weather or foul.�
�� In the lift I reminded my reflection, “Blood is thicker than water,” before spiking my palm on the spoke of my telescopic umbrella.

  “Oh, Satan’s gonads, not you. Look, just get lost and leave us in peace.” My brother glared across his swimming pool as I stepped down his patio. Denholme’s never swum in his pool, as far as I know, but he does all the chlorinating and whatnot every week just the same, even in blustery drizzle. He trawled for leaves with a big net on a pole. “I’m not lending you a ruddy farthing until you pay back the last lot. Why must I forever be giving you handouts? No. Don’t answer.” Denholme scooped a fistful of soggy leaves from the net. “Just get back in your taxi and bugger off. I’ll only ask you nicely once.”

  “How’s Georgette?” I brushed aphids off his shriveled rose petals.

  “Georgette’s going bonkers surely and steadily, not that you ever evince an ounce of genuine interest when you don’t want money.”

  I watched a worm return to soil and wished I was it. “Denny, I’ve had a minor run-in with the wrong sort. If I can’t get my hands on sixty thousand pounds, I’m going to take an awful beating.”

  “Get them to video it for us.”

  “I’m not joking, Denholme.”

  “Nor am I! So, you’re shoddy at being duplicitous. What of it? Why is this my problem?”

  “We’re brothers! Don’t you have a conscience?”

  “I sat on the board of a merchant bank for thirty years.”

  An amputated sycamore tree shed once green foliage like desperate men shed once steadfast resolutions. “Help, Denny. Please. Thirty grand would be a start.”

  I had pushed too hard. “Damn it to hell, Tim, my bank crashed! We were bled dry by those bloodsuckers at Lloyd’s! The days when I had that kind of spondulics at my beck and call are gone, gone, gone! Our house is mortgaged, twice over! I’m the mighty fallen, you’re the minuscule fallen. Anyway, you’ve got this ruddy book flying out of every bookshop in the known world!”

  My face said what I had no words for.

  “Oh, Christ, you idiot. What’s the repayment schedule?”