David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas

3

The elevator doors close just as Luisa Rey reaches them, but the unseen occupant jams them with his cane. “Thank you,” says Luisa to the old man. “Glad the age of chivalry isn’t totally dead.”

He gives a grave nod.

Luisa thinks, He looks like he’s been given a week to live . She presses G. The ancient elevator begins its descent. A leisurely needle counts off the stories. Its motor whines, its cables grind, but between the tenth and ninth stories a gatta-gatta-gatta detonates then dies with a phzzz-zzz-zz-z . Luisa and Sixsmith thump to the floor. The light stutters on and off before settling on a buzzing sepia.

“You okay? Can you get up?”

The sprawled old man recovers himself a little. “No bones broken, I think, but I’ll stay seated, thank you.” His old-school English accent reminds Luisa of the tiger in The Jungle Book . “The power might restart suddenly.”

“Christ,” mutters Luisa. “A power outage. Perfect end to a perfect day.” She presses the emergency button. Nothing. She presses the intercom button and hollers: “Hey! Anyone there?” Static hiss. “We have a situation here! Can anyone hear us?”

Luisa and the old man regard each other, sideways, listening.

No reply. Just vague submarine noises.

Luisa inspects the ceiling. “Got to be an access hatch …” There isn’t. She peels up the carpet—a steel floor. “Only in movies, I guess.”

“Are you still glad,” asks the old man, “the age of chivalry isn’t dead?”

Luisa manages a smile, just. “We might be here some time. Last month’s brownout lasted seven hours.” Well, at least I’m not confined with a psychopath, a claustrophobe, or Richard Ganga .

4

Rufus Sixsmith sits propped in a corner sixty minutes later, dabbing his forehead with his handkerchief. “I subscribed to Illustrated Planet in 1967 to read your father’s dispatches from Vietnam. Lester Rey was one of only four or five journalists who grasped the war from the Asian perspective. I’m fascinated to hear how a policeman became one of the best correspondents of his generation.”

“You asked for it.” The story is polished with each retelling. “Dad joined the BYPD just weeks before Pearl Harbor, which is why he spent the war here and not in the Pacific like his brother Howie, who got blown to pieces by a Japanese land mine playing beach volleyball in the Solomons. Pretty soon, it became apparent Dad was a Tenth Precinct case, and that’s where he wound up. There’s such a precinct in every city in the country—a sort of pen where they transfer all the straight cops who won’t go on the take and who won’t turn a blind eye. So anyway, on V-J night, Buenas Yerbas was one citywide party, and you can imagine, the police were stretched thin. Dad got a call reporting looting down on Silvaplana Wharf, a sort of no-man’s-land between Tenth Precinct, the BY Port Authority, and Spinoza Precinct. Dad and his partner, a man named Nat Wakefield, drove down to take a look. They park between a pair of cargo containers, kill the engine, proceed on foot, and see maybe two dozen men loading crates from a warehouse into an armored truck. The light was dim, but the men sure weren’t dockworkers and they weren’t in military uniform. Wakefield tells Dad to go and radio for backup. Just as Dad gets to the radio, a call comes through saying the original order to investigate looting has been countermanded. Dad reports what he’d seen, but the order is repeated, so Dad runs back to the warehouse just in time to see his partner accept a light from one of the men and get shot six times in the back. Dad somehow keeps his nerve, sprints back to his squad car, and manages to radio out a Code 8— a Mayday—before his car shivers with bullets. He’s surrounded on all sides except the dockside, so over the edge he dives, into a cocktail of diesel, trash, sewage, and sea. He swims underneath the quay—in those days Silvaplana Wharf was a steel structure like a giant boardwalk, not the concrete peninsula it is today—and hauls himself up a service ladder, soaked, one shoe missing, with his non-functioning revolver. All he can do is observe the men, who are just finishing up when a couple of Spinoza Precinct squad cars arrive on the scene. Before Dad can circle around the yard to warn the officers, a hopelessly uneven gunfight breaks out—the gunmen pepper the two squad cars with submachine guns . The truck starts up, the gunmen jump aboard, they pull out of the yard and lob a couple of hand grenades from the back. Whether they were intended to maim or just to discourage heroics, who knows? but one caught Dad and made a human pincushion of him. He woke up two days later in the hospital minus his left eye. The papers described the incident as an opportunistic raid by a gang of thieves who got lucky. The Tenth Precinct men reckoned a syndicate who’d been siphoning off arms throughout the war decided to shift their stock, now that the war was over and accounting would get tightened up. There was pressure for a wider investigation into the Silvaplana Shootings—three dead cops meant something in 1945—but the mayor’s office blocked it. Draw your own conclusions. Dad did, and they jaded his faith in law enforcement. By the time he was out of the hospital eight months later, he’d completed a correspondence course in journalism.”

“Good grief,” says Sixsmith.

“The rest you may know. Covered Korea for Illustrated Planet , then became West Coast Herald’s Latin America man. He was in Vietnam for the battle of Ap Bac and stayed based in Saigon until his first collapse back in March. It’s a miracle my parents’ marriage lasted the years it did—y’ know, the longest I spent with him was April to July, this year, in the hospice.” Luisa is quiet. “I miss him, Rufus, chronically. I keep forgetting he’s dead. I keep thinking he’s away on assignment, somewhere, and he’ll be flying in any day soon.”

“He must have been proud of you, following in his footsteps.”

“Oh, Luisa Rey is no Lester Rey. I wasted years being rebellious and liberated, posing as a poet and working in a bookstore on Engels Street. My posturing convinced no one, my poetry was ‘so vacuous it isn’t even bad’—so said Lawrence Ferlinghetti—and the bookstore went bust. So I’m still only a columnist.” Luisa rubs her tired eyes, thinking of Richard Ganga’s parting shot. “No award-winning copy from war zones. I had high hopes when I moved to Spyglass , but simpering gossip on celebrity parties is the closest I’ve gotten so far to Dad’s vocation.”

“Ah, but is it well-written simpering gossip?”

“Oh, it’s excellently written simpering gossip.”

“Then don’t bemoan your misspent life quite yet. Forgive me for flaunting my experience, but you have no conception of what a misspent life constitutes.”

5

“Hitchcock loves the limelight,” says Luisa, her bladder now growing uncomfortable, “but hates interviews. He didn’t answer my questions because he didn’t really hear them. His best works, he said, are roller coasters that scare the riders out of their wits but let them off at the end giggling and eager for another ride. I put it to the great man, the key to fictitious terror is partition or containment: so long as the Bates Motel is sealed off from our world, we want to peer in, like at a scorpion enclosure. But a film that shows the world is a Bates Motel, well, that’s … the stuff of Buchenwald, dystopia, depression. We’ll dip our toes in a predatory, amoral, godless universe—but only our toes. Hitchcock’s response was”—Luisa does an above-average impersonation—” ‘I’m a director in Hollywood, young lady, not an Oracle at Delphi.’ I asked why Buenas Yerbas had never featured in his films. Hitchcock answered, ‘This town marries the worst of San Francisco with the worst of Los Angeles. Buenas Yerbas is a city of nowhere.’ He spoke in bons mots like that, not to you, but into the ear of posterity, for dinner-party guests of the future to say, ‘That’s one of Hitchcock’s, you know.’ ”