Cloud Atlas (19 page)

“Don’t know, nothing on file. Listen, I don’t want you to—”

“It’s your fucking job to know, Napier.”

So, you’re addressing me like that now?
“Hey! Hold your—”

“Hey yourself.” Bill Smoke hangs up.

Bad, bad, very bad
. Joe grabs his jacket, snuffs his cigarette, leaves his quarters, and strides across the site to Luisa’s hotel. A five-minute walk. He recalls the menace in Bill Smoke’s tone and breaks into a run.

38

A swarm of déjà vu haunts Luisa as she stuffs her belongings into her overnight bag.
Robert Frobisher doing a dine and dash from another hotel
. She takes the stairs down to the empty lobby. The carpet is silent as snow. A radio whispers sweet nothings in the back office. Luisa creeps to the main doors, hoping to leave with no explanation required. The doors are locked to keep people out, not in, and soon Luisa is striding across the hotel lawn to the parking lot. A predawn ocean breeze makes vague promises. The night sky inland is turning dark rose. Nobody else is about, but as she nears her car, Luisa forces herself not to break into a run.
Stay calm, unhurried, and you can say you’re driving along the cape for the sunrise
.

At first glance the trunk is empty, but the carpet covers a bulge. Under the flap Luisa finds a package wrapped in a black plastic trash bag. She removes a vanilla binder. She reads its cover in the semilight:
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
. Some five hundred pages of tables, flowcharts, mathematics, and evidence. A sense of elation booms and echoes.
Steady, this is only the end of the beginning
.

Motion in the middle distance catches Luisa’s eye. A man. Luisa ducks behind Garcia. “Hey! Luisa! Hold it!”
Joe Napier!
As if in a dream of keys and locks and doors, Luisa stows the vanilla binder in its black trash bag under the passenger seat—Napier is running now, his flashlight beam swishing the half darkness. The engine makes a lazy, leonine roar—the VW reverses too fast. Joe Napier thumps into the back, yells, and Luisa glimpses him hopping like a slapstick actor.

She does not stop to apologize.

39

Bill Smoke’s dusty black Chevy skids to a stop by the island checkpoint of Swannekke Bridge. A string of lights dots the mainland across the straits. The guard recognizes the car and is already by its driver’s window. “Good morning, sir!”

“Looking that way. Richter, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Mr. Smoke.”

“I’m guessing Joe Napier has just called you and ordered you not to let an orange VW pass the checkpoint.”

“That’s correct, Mr. Smoke.”

“I’m here to countermand that order, on Mr. Grimaldi’s personal authority. You
will
raise the barrier for the VW and let me follow. You’ll phone your buddy on the mainland checkpoint now and tell him not to let anything through until he sees my car. When Mr. Napier gets here, about fifteen minutes from now, you will tell him Alberto Grimaldi says, ‘Go back to bed.’ Understand, Richter?”

“Understood, Mr. Smoke.”

“You got married this spring, if memory serves?”

“You have an excellent memory, sir.”

“I do. Hoping to start a family?”

“My wife’s four months pregnant, Mr. Smoke.”

“A piece of advice, Richter, on how to succeed in the security business. Would you like to hear this piece of advice, son?”

“I would, sir.”

“The dumbest dog can sit and watch. What takes brains is knowing when to look away. Am I making sense to you, Richter?”

“You’re making absolute sense, Mr. Smoke.”

“Then your young family’s future is secure.”

Smoke reverses his car alongside the guardhouse and slumps low. Sixty seconds later, a choking VW swerves around the headland. Luisa halts, rolls down her window, Richter appears, and Smoke catches the words “family emergency.” Richter tells her to have a safe trip, and the barrier rises.

Bill Smoke puts his car into first, second. The sonic texture of the road surface changes as the Chevy reaches the bridge. Third gear, fourth, pedal down. The clapped-out Beetle’s taillights zoom up, fifty yards, thirty yards, ten … Smoke hasn’t switched his lights on. He swerves into the empty oncoming lane, shifts into fifth gear, and draws alongside. Smoke smiles.
She thinks I’m Joe Napier
. He yanks the wheel sharply, and metal screams as the Beetle is sandwiched between his car and the bridge railing until the railing unzips from its concrete and the Beetle lurches out into space.

Smoke slams the brakes. He gets out into the cool air and smells hot rubber. Back a ways, sixty, seventy feet down, a VW’s front bumper vanishes into the hollow sea.
If her back didn’t snap, she’ll
have drowned in three minutes
. Bill Smoke inspects the damage to his car’s bodywork and feels deflation.
Anonymous, faceless homicides
, he decides,
lack the thrill of human contact
.

The American sun, cranked up to full volume, proclaims a new dawn.

One bright dusk, four, five, no, my God,
six
summers ago, I strolled along a Greenwich avenue of mature chestnuts and mock oranges in a state of grace. Those Regency residences number among London’s costliest properties, but should you ever inherit one, dear Reader, sell it, don’t live in it. Houses like these secrete some dark sorcery that transforms their owners into fruitcakes. One such victim, an ex-chief of Rhodesian police, had, on the evening in question, written me a check as rotund as himself to edit and print his autobiography. My state of grace was thanks in part to this check, and in part to a 1983 Chablis from the Duruzoi vineyard, a magic potion that dissolves our myriad tragedies into mere misunderstandings.

A trio of teenettes, dressed like Prostitute Barbie, approached, drift-netting the width of the pavement. I stepped into the road to avoid collision. But as we drew level they tore wrappers off their lurid ice lollies and just dropped them. My sense of well-being was utterly V-2’d. I mean, we were level with a bin! Tim Cavendish the Disgusted Citizen exclaimed to the offenders: “You know, you should pick those up.”

A snorted “What
chyoo
gonna do ‘bou’ it?” glanced off my back.

Ruddy she-apes. “I have no intention of
doing
anything about it,” I remarked, over my shoulder, “I merely said that you—”

My knees buckled and the pavement cracked my cheek, shaking loose an early memory of a tricycle accident before pain erased everything but pain. A sharp knee squashed my face into leaf mold. I tasted blood. My sixtysomething wrist was winched back through ninety degrees of agony, and my Ingersoll Solar was unclasped. I recall a pick ‘n’ mix of obscenities ancient and modern, but before my muggers could filch my wallet, the chimes of an ice-cream van playing “The Girl from Ipanema” scattered my assailants, like vampiresses the minute before dawn.

“And you didn’t report them? You dolt!” Madame X sprinkled synthetic sugar over her breakfast bran the next morning. “Phone the police for Christ’s sake. What are you waiting for? The trail’ll go cold.” Alas, I had already amplified the truth and told her my muggers were five louts with swastikas shaved onto their skulls. How could I now file a report saying three prepubescent lollipop girls had bested me so effortlessly? The boys in blue would have choked on their Penguin biscuits. No, my assault was not added to our nation’s wishfully fulfilled crime statistics. Had my purloined Ingersoll not been a love present from a sunnier era of our now-Arctic marriage, I would have kept mum about the entire incident.

Where was I?

Odd how the wrong stories pop into one’s head at my age.

It’s not odd, no, it’s ruddy scary. I meant to begin this narrative with Dermot Hoggins. That’s the problem with inking one’s memoirs in longhand. You can’t go changing what you’ve already set down, not without botching things up even more.

Look, I was Dermot “Duster” Hoggins’s
editor
, not his shrink or his ruddy astrologer, so how
could
I have known what lay in store for Sir Felix Finch on that infamous night? Sir Felix Finch, Minister of Culture and El Supremo at the
Trafalgar Review of Books
, how he blazed across the media sky, how visible he remains to the naked eye even now, twelve months later. Tabloidoids read all about it across the front page; broadsheeters spilt their granola when Radio 4 reported who had fallen and how. That aviary of vultures and tits, “the columnists,” eulogized the Lost King of Arts in tribute after twittering tribute.

I, by contrast, have maintained a dignified counsel until now. I should warn the busy reader, however, that the after-dinner mint of Felix Finch is merely the aperitif of my own peripatetic tribulations. The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish, if you will. Now
that
is a snappy title.

’Twas the Night of the Lemon Prize Awards, held in Jake’s Starlight Bar, grandly reopened atop a Bayswater edifice with a rooftop garden thrown in for good measure. The whole ruddy publishing food chain had taken to the air and roosted at Jake’s. The haunted writers, the celebrity chefs, the suits, the goateed buyers, the malnourished booksellers, packs of hacks and photographers who take “Drop dead!” to mean “Why, I’d love to!” Let me scotch that insidious little rumor implying Dermot’s invitation was
my
doing, that, oh, yes, Timothy Cavendish knew his author was lusting for a high-profile revenge, QED, the entire tragedy was a publicity stunt. Tosh dreamt up by jealous rivals! No one ever owned up to sending Dermot Hoggins’s invitation, and she is hardly likely to step forward now.

Anyway, the winner was announced, and we all know who got the fifty-K prize money. I got sloshed. Guy the Guy introduced me to a cocktail called “Ground Control to Major Tom.” Time’s Arrow became Time’s Boomerang, and I lost count of all my majors. A jazz sextet kicked off a rumba. I went onto the balcony for a breather and surveyed the hubbub from without. Literary London at play put me in mind of Gibbon on the Age of the Antonines. “A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste.”

Dermot found me; bad news inexorably does. Let me reiterate, bumping into Pope Pius XIII would have surprised me less. In fact, His Infallibility would have blended in better—my malcontent author wore a banana suit over a chocolate shirt and a Ribena tie. I hardly need remind the curious reader that
Knuckle Sandwich
was yet to take the book world by storm. It was yet to enter a bookshop, in fact, except the sage John Sandoe’s of Chelsea, and those hapless newsagents, once Jewish, then Sikh, now Eritrean, located in the Hoggins Bros.’ East End parish. Indeed, it was matters of publicity and distribution that Dermot wished to discuss on the roof garden.

I explained to him for the hundredth time how an author-partnership setup like Cavendish Publishing simply cannot fritter away money on fancy catalogs and team-building go-karting weekends for sales forces. I explained, yet again, that my authors derived fulfillment from presenting their handsomely bound volumes to friends, to family, to posterity. I explained, yet again, that the gangster-chic market was saturated; and that even
Moby-Dick
bombed in Melville’s lifetime, though I did not deploy that particular verb. “It
is
a truly fabulous memoir,” I assured him. “Give it time.”

Dermot, drunk, doleful, and deaf, looked over the railings. “All them chimneys. Long way down.”

The menace, I trusted, was imaginary. “Quite.”

“Mum took me to
Mary Poppins
when I was a nipper. Chimney sweeps dancing on rooftops. She watched it on video, too. Over and over. In her nursing home.”

“I remember when it came out. That dates me.”

“Here.” Dermot frowned and pointed into the bar through the French windows. “Who’s that?”

“Who’s who?”

“Him in the bow tie chatting up the tiara in the bin liner.”

“The presenter fellow, Felix … oh, Felix whatizzit?”

“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. “Br
a
vo, Felix! Brav
o
!” 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?”