“You’ve got twenty minutes to get away, max. Go!”
Dial tone, a droning eternity.
14
Jerry Nussbaum rotates his office chair, straddles it, places his folded arms on its back, and rests his chin on them. “Picture the scene, me and six dreadlocked freaks of the negroid persuasion, a handgun tickling my tonsils. Not talking dead-of-night Harlem here, I’m talking Greenwich goddamn Village in broad goddamn daylight after a sixteen-pound steak with Norman goddamn Mailer. So there we were, this black bro’ frisks me down with his bitonal paw and relieves me of my wallet. ‘Wassis? Alligator skin?’ ” Nussbaum does a Richard Pryor accent. “ ‘No fuckin’ class, Whitey!’ Class? Those bums made me turn out my pockets for my every last cent—literally. But Nussbaum had the last laugh, you bet he did. In the cab back to Times Square, I wrote my now-classic ‘New Tribes’ editorial—no point in false modesty—and got it syndicated thirty times by the end of the week! My muggers turned me into a household name. So, Luey-Luey, what say you take me to dinner and I teach you how to extract a little gold from the Fangs of Fate?”
Luisa’s typewriter pings. “If the muggers took your every last cent—literally—what were you doing in a cab from Greenwich Village to Times Square? Sell your body for the fare?”
“You”—Nussbaum shifts his mass—”have a genius for missing the point.”
Roland Jakes drips candle wax onto a photograph. “Definition of the Week. What’s a conservative?”
The joke is old by summer 1975. “A mugged liberal.”
Jakes, stung, goes back to his picture-doctoring.
Luisa crosses the office to Dom Grelsch’s door. Her boss is speaking on the phone in a low, irate voice. Luisa waits outside but overhears. “No—no, no, Mr. Frum, it is black-and-white, tell me—hey, I’m talking now—tell me a more black-and-white ‘condition’ than leukemia? Know what I think? I think my wife is just one piece of paperwork between you and your three o’clock golf slot, isn’t she? Then prove it to me. Do you have a wife, Mr. Frum? Do you? You do. Can you imagine your wife lying in a hospital ward with her hair falling out? … What? What did you say? ‘Getting emotional won’t help’? Is that all you can offer, Mr. Frum? Yeah, buddy, you’re damn right I’ll be seeking legal counsel!” Grelsch slams the receiver down, lays into his punching bag gasping “Frum!” with each blow, collapses into his chair, lights a cigarette, and catches sight of Luisa hesitating in his doorway. “Life. A Force Ten shitstorm. You hear any of that?”
“The gist. I can come back later.”
“No. Come in, sit down. Are you young, healthy, and strong, Luisa?”
“Yes.” Luisa sits on boxes. “Why?”
“Because what I gotta say about your article on this unsubstantiated cover-up at Seaboard will, frankly, leave you old, sick, and weak.”
15
At Buenas Yerbas International Airport, Dr. Rufus Sixsmith places a vanilla binder into locker number 909, glances around the crowded concourse, feeds the slot with coins, turns the key, and slips this into a padded khaki envelope addressed to Luisa Rey at Spyglass, Klugh Bldg. 12F, 3rd Avenue, BY. Sixsmith’s pulse rises as he nears the postal desk. What if they get me before I reach it? His pulse rockets. Businessmen, families with luggage carts, snakes of elderly tourists all seem intent on thwarting his progress. The mailbox slot looms closer. Just yards away now, just inches.
The khaki envelope is swallowed and gone. Godspeed.
Sixsmith next lines up for an airplane ticket. News of delays lulls him like a litany. He keeps a nervous eye out for signs of Seaboard’s agents coming to pick him up at this late hour. Finally, a ticket clerk waves him over.
“I have to get to London. Any destination in the United Kingdom, in fact. Any seat, any airline. I’ll pay in cash.”
“Not a prayer, sir.” The clerk’s tiredness shows through her makeup. “Earliest I can manage”—she consults a teleprinted sheet—”London Heathrow … tomorrow afternoon, three-fifteen departure, Laker Skytrains, change at JFK.”
“It’s terribly important that I leave sooner.”
“I’m sure it is, sir, but we got air-traffic-control strikes and acres of stranded passengers.”
Sixsmith tells himself that not even Seaboard could arrange aviation strikes to detain him. “Then tomorrow it shall have to be. One-way, business class, please, nonsmoking. Is there overnight accommodation anywhere in the airport?”
“Yes, sir, third level. Hotel Bon Voyage. You’ll be comfortable there. If I can just see your passport, please, so I can process your ticketing?”
16
A stained-glass sunset illuminates the velveteen Hemingway in Luisa’s apartment. Luisa is buried in Harnessing the Sun: Two Decades of Peacetime Atomic Power, chewing a pen. Javier is at her desk doing a sheet of long-division problems. Carole King’s Tapestry LP is playing at a low volume. Drifting through the windows comes the dim roar of automobiles heading home. The telephone rings, but Luisa lets it. Javier studies the answering machine as it clunks into action. “Hi, Luisa Rey can’t come to the phone right now, but if you leave your name and number, I’ll get back to you.”
“I loathe these contraptions,” complains the caller. “Cookie, it’s your mother. I just heard from Beatty Griffin, who told me you split up with Hal—last month? I was dumbstruck! You didn’t breathe a word at your father’s funeral, or at Alphonse’s. This bottling-up worries me so much. Dougie and I are having a fund-raiser for the American Cancer Society, and it’d mean the sun, the moon, and the stars to us if you’d abandon your poky little nest just for one weekend and come stay, Cookie? The Henderson triplets will be here, that’s Damien the cardiologist, Lance the gynecologist, and Jesse the … Doug? Doug! Jesse Henderson, what does he do? A lobotomist? Oh, funny. Anyway, daughter of mine, Beatty tells me by some freak of planetary alignment all three brothers are unattached. On the hoof, Cookie, on the hoof! So call the moment you get this. All my love now.” She ends with a suction kiss, “Mmmmchwaaa!”
“She sounds like the mother on Bewitched.” Javier lets a little time go by. “What’s ‘dumbstruck’?”
Luisa doesn’t look up. “When you’re so amazed you can’t speak.”
“She didn’t sound very dumbstruck, did she?”
Luisa is engrossed in her work.
“ ‘Cookie’?”
Luisa flings a slipper at the boy.
17
In his hotel room at the Bon Voyage, Dr. Rufus Sixsmith reads a sheaf of letters written to him nearly half a century ago by his friend Robert Frobisher. Sixsmith knows them by heart, but their texture, rustle, and his friend’s faded handwriting calm his nerves. These letters are what he would save from a burning building. At seven o’clock precisely, he washes, changes his shirt, and sandwiches the nine read letters in the Gideon’s Bible—this he replaces in the bedside cabinet. Sixsmith slips the unread letters into his jacket pocket for the restaurant.
Dinner is a minute steak and strips of fried eggplant, with a poorly washed salad. It deadens rather than satisfies Sixsmith’s appetite. He leaves half on his plate and sips carbonated water as he reads Frobisher’s last letters. He witnesses himself through Robert’s words searching Bruges for his unstable friend, first love, and if I’m honest, my last.
In the hotel elevator Sixsmith considers the responsibility he put on Luisa Rey’s shoulders, wondering if he’s done the right thing. The curtains of his room blow in as he opens the door. He calls out, “Who’s in here?”
No one. No one knows where you are. His imagination has been playing tricks on him for weeks now. Sleep deprivation. “Look,” he tells himself, “in forty-eight hours you’ll be back in Cambridge on your rainy, safe, narrow island. You’ll have your facilities, your allies, your contacts, and you can plan your broadside on Seaboard from there.”
18
Bill Smoke watches Rufus Sixsmith leave his hotel room, waits five minutes, then lets himself in. He sits on the rim of the bathtub and flexes his gloved fists. No drug, no
religious experience touches you like turning a man into a corpse. You need a brain, though. Without discipline and expertise, you’ll soon find yourself strapped into an electric chair. The assassin strokes a lucky Krugerrand in his pocket. Smoke is wary of being a slave to superstition, but he isn’t about to mess with the amulet just to prove a point. A tragedy for loved ones, a big fat nothing to everyone else, and a problem solved for my clients. I’m just the instrument of my clients’ will. If it wasn’t me it’d be the next fixer in the Yellow Pages. Blame its user, blame its maker, but don’t blame the gun. Bill Smoke hears the lock. Breathe. The pills he took earlier clarify his perception, terribly, and when Sixsmith shuffles into the bedroom, humming “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” the hit man could swear he can feel his victim’s pulse, slower than his own. Smoke sights his prey through the door crack. Sixsmith flumps onto the bed. The assassin visualizes the required motions: Three steps out, fire from the side, through the temple, up close. Smoke darts from the doorway; Sixsmith utters a guttural syllable and tries to rise, but the silenced bullet is already boring through the scientist’s skull and into the mattress. The body of Rufus Sixsmith falls back, as if he has curled up for a postprandial nap.
Blood soaks into the thirsty eiderdown.
Fulfillment throbs in Bill Smoke’s brain. Look what I did.
19
Wednesday morning is smog-scorched and heat-hammered, like the last hundred mornings and the next fifty. Luisa Rey drinks black coffee in the steamy cool of the Snow White Diner on the corner of Second Avenue and Sixteenth Street, a two-minute walk from the Spyglass offices, reading about a Baptist ex–naval nuclear engineer from Atlanta called James Carter, who plans to run for the Democratic nomination. Sixteenth Street traffic moves in frustrated inches and headlong stampedes. The sidewalks blur with hurrying people and skateboarders. “Nothin’ for breakfast this mornin’, Luisa?” asks Bart, the fry cook.
“Only news,” replies his very regular customer.
Roland Jakes trips over the doorway and makes his way to Luisa. “Uh, this seat free? Didn’t eat a bite this morning. Shirl’s left me. Again.”
“Features meeting in fifteen minutes.”
“Bags of time.” Jakes sits down and orders eggs over easy. “Page nine,” he says to Luisa. “Right-hand bottom corner. Something you should see.”
Luisa turns to page nine and reaches for her coffee. Her hand freezes.
SCIENTIST SUICIDE AT B.Y. INT’L. AIRPORT HOTEL
Eminent British scientist Dr. Rufus Sixsmith was found dead Tuesday morning in his room at Buenas Yerbas International Airport’s Hotel Bon Voyage, having taken his own life. Dr. Sixsmith, former head of the Global Atomic Commission, had been employed as a consultant for Seaboard Corporation at the blue-chip utility’s Swannekke Island installation outside Buenas Yerbas City for ten months. He was known to have had a lifelong battle with clinical depression, and for the week prior to his death had been incommunicado. Ms. Fay Li, spokeswoman for Seaboard, said, “Dr. Sixsmith’s untimely death is a tragedy for the entire international scientific community. We at Seaboard Village on Swannekke Island feel we’ve lost not just a greatly respected colleague but a very dear friend. Our heartfelt condolences go to his own family and his many friends. He shall be greatly missed.” Dr. Sixsmith’s body, discovered with a single gunshot wound to the head by hotel maids, is being flown home for burial in his native England. A medical examiner at BYPD confirmed there are no suspicious circumstances surrounding the incident.
“So”—Jakes grins—”is your exposé of the century screwed up now?”
Luisa’s skin prickles and her eardrums hurt.
“Whoops.” Jakes lights up a cigarette. “Were you close?”
“He couldn’t”—Luisa fumbles her words—”wouldn’t have done it.”
Jakes approximates gentleness. “Kinda looks like he did, Luisa.”
“You don’t kill yourself if you have a mission.”
“You might if your mission makes you crazy.”
“He was murdered, Jakes.”
Jakes represses a here-we-go-again face. “Who by?”
“Seaboard Corporation. Of course.”
“Ah. His employer. Of course. Motive?”
Luisa forces herself to speak calmly and ignore Jakes’s mock conviction. “He’d written a report on a reactor type developed at Swannekke B, the HYDRA. Plans for Site C are waiting for Federal Power Commission approval. When it’s approved, Seaboard can license the design for the domestic and overseas market—the government contracts alone would mean a stream of revenue in the high tens of millions, annually. Sixsmith’s role was to give the project his imprimatur, but he hadn’t read the script and identified lethal design flaws. In response, Seaboard buried the report and denied its existence.”
“And your Dr. Sixsmith did what?”
“He was getting ready to go public.” Luisa slaps the newspaper. “This is what the truth cost him.”
Jakes pierces a wobbly dome of yolk with a toast soldier. “You, uh, know what Grelsch is going to say?”
“ ‘Hard evidence,’ ” says Luisa, like a doctor making a diagnosis. “Look, Jakes, will you tell Grelsch … just tell him I had to go somewhere.”
20
The manager at the Hotel Bon Voyage is having a bad day. “No, you may not see his room! The specialized carpet cleaner has removed all traces of the incident. Who, I add, we had to pay from our own pocket! What kind of ghoul are you, anyway? A reporter? A ghost hunter? A novelist?”
“I’m”—Luisa Rey buckles with sobs from nowhere—”his niece, Megan Sixsmith.”
A stony matriarch enfolds the weeping Luisa in her mountainous bust. Random bystanders shoot the manager foul looks. The manager goes pale and attempts damage control. “Please, come through to the back, I’ll get you a—”
“Glass of water!” snaps the matriarch, knocking the man’s hand away.
“Wendy! Water! Please, through here, why don’t you—”
“A chair, for goodness’ sake!” The matriarch supports Luisa into the shady side office.
“Wendy! A chair! This instant!”
Luisa’s ally clasps her hands. “Let it out, honey, let it out, I’m listening. I’m Janice from Esphigmenou, Utah, and here is my story. When I was your age, I was alone in my house, coming downstairs from my daughter’s nursery, and there on the halfway landing stood my mother. ‘Go check the baby, Janice,’ she said. I told my mother I’d checked her one minute ago, she was sleeping fine. My mother’s voice turned to ice. ‘Don’t argue with me, young lady, go check the baby, now!’ Sounds crazy, but only then I remembered my mother had died the Thanksgiving before. But I ran upstairs and found my daughter choking on the cord from the blind, wound around her neck. Thirty seconds, that would have been it. So you see?”
Luisa blinks tearfully.
“You see, honey? They pass over, but they ain’t gone.”
The chastened manager returns with a shoe box. “Your uncle’s room is occupied, I’m afraid, but the maid found these letters inside the Gideon’s Bible. His name is on the envelope. Naturally, I was going to have them forwarded to your family, but since you’re here …”
He hands her a sheaf of nine time-browned envelopes, each addressed to “Rufus Sixsmith, Esq. c/o Caius College, Cambridge, England.” One is stained by a very recent tea bag. All are badly crumpled and hastily smoothed out.
“Thank you,” says Luisa, vaguely, then more firmly. “Uncle Rufus valued his correspondence, and now it’s all I have left of him. I won’t take up any more of your time. I’m sorry I fell to pieces out there.”
The manager’s relief is palpable.
“You’re a very special person, Megan,” Janice from Esphigmenou, Utah, assures Luisa, as they part in the hotel lobby.
“You’re a very special person, Janice,” Luisa replies and returns to the parking level, passing within ten yards of locker number 909.
21
Luisa Rey has been back
at Spyglass’s offices for under a minute when Dom Grelsch roars over the newsroom chatter, “Miss Rey!”
Jerry Nussbaum and Roland Jakes look up from their desks, at Luisa, at each other, and mouth, “Ouch!” Luisa puts the Frobisher letters into a drawer, locks it, and walks into Grelsch’s office. “Dom, sorry I couldn’t make the meeting, I—”
“Spare me the woman’s trouble excuse. Shut the door.”
“I’m not in the habit of making any excuses.”
“Are you in the habit of making meetings? You’re paid to be.”
“I’m also paid to follow up stories.”
“So you flew off to the crime scene. Did you find hard evidence missed by the cops? A message, in blood, on the tiles? ‘Alberto Grimaldi did it’?”
“Hard evidence isn’t hard evidence if you don’t break your back digging for it. An editor named Dom Grelsch told me that.”
Grelsch glares at her.
“I got a lead, Dom.”
“You got a lead.”
I can’t batter you, I can’t fool you, I can only hook your curiosity. “I phoned the precinct where Sixsmith’s case was processed.”
“There is no case! It was suicide! Unless we’re talking Marilyn Monroe, suicides don’t sell magazines. Too depressing.”
“Listen to me. Why did Sixsmith buy an airplane ticket if he was going to put a bullet through his head later that day?”
Grelsch extends his arms to show the size of his disbelief that he is even having this conversation. “A snap decision.”
“Then why would he have a typed suicide note—and no typewriter—ready and waiting for this snap decision?”
“I don’t know! I don’t care! I got a publication deadline Thursday night, a dispute with the printers, a delivery strike in the offing, and Ogilvy holding the Sword of What’s-’is-name over my head. Hold a séance and ask Sixsmith yourself! Sixsmith was a scientist. Scientists are unstable.”
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