Cloud Atlas

by David Mitchell

  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 L
uisa, 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, cariño. 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

  CAPE YERBAS MARINA ROYALE PROUD HOME OF THE PROPHETESS BEST-PRESERVED SCHOONER IN THE WORLD!

  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 clubhous
e”—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.