David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas

“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.”

“We were trapped in an elevator for ninety minutes. Cool as a cucumber. Unstable just isn’t a word that sticks to the man. Another thing. He shot himself—supposedly—with just about the quietest gun on the market. A Roachford .34 with fitted silencer. Catalog order only. Why would he go to the trouble?”

“So. The cops got it wrong, the ME got it wrong, everyone got it wrong except Luisa Rey, ace cub reporter, whose penetrating insight concludes the world-famous number cruncher was assassinated just because he’d pointed out a few hitches in some report, a report nobody agrees exists. Am I right?”

“Half right. More likely, the police were encouraged to arrive at conclusions convenient for Seaboard.”

“Sure, a utility company buys the cops. Stupid me.”

“Count in their subsidiaries, Seaboard Corporation is the tenth biggest corporation in the country. They could buy Alaska if they wanted. Give me until Monday.”

“No! You got this week’s reviews and, yes, the food feature.”

“If Bob Woodward had told you he suspected President Nixon had ordered a burglary of his political rival’s offices and recorded himself issuing the order, would you have said, ‘Forget it, Bob, honey, I need eight hundred words on salad dressings’?”

“Don’t you dare give me the I’m-an-outraged-feminist act.”

“Then don’t give me the listen-I’ve-been-in-the-business-thirty-years act! One Jerry Nussbaum in the building is bad enough.”

“You’re squeezing size-eighteen reality into a size-eleven supposition. The undoing of many a fine newspaperman. Many a fine anyone.”

“Monday! I’ll get a copy of the Sixsmith Report.”

“Promises you can’t keep are not a sound currency.”

“Apart from getting on my knees and begging you, I don’t have any other currency. C’mon. Dom Grelsch doesn’t snuff out solid investigative journalism just because it doesn’t turn up the goods in one morning. Dad told me you were just about the most daring reporter working anywhere in the mid-sixties.”

Grelsch swivels and looks over Third Avenue. “Did he bullshit!”

“He did too bullshit! That exposé on Ross Zinn’s campaign funds in ’sixty-four. You took a bone-chilling white supremacist out of politics for good. Dad called you dogged, cussed, and indefatigable. Ross Zinn took nerve, sweat, and time. I’ll do the nerve and sweat, all I want from you is a little time.”

“Roping your pa into this was a dirty trick.”

“Journalism calls for dirty tricks.”

Grelsch stubs his cigarette and lights another. “Monday, with Sixsmith’s inquiry, and it’s got to be hurricane proof, Luisa, with names, sources, facts. Who squashed this report, and why , and how Swannekke B will turn Southern California into Hiroshima. Something else. If you get evidence Sixsmith was murdered, we’re going to the cops before we print. I don’t want dynamite under my car seat.”

“ ‘All the news without fear or favor.’ ”

“Beat it.”

Nancy O’Hagan makes a not-bad face as Luisa sits at her desk and takes out Sixsmith’s rescued letters.

In his office, Grelsch lays into his punching bag. “Dogged!” Wham! “Cussed!” Wham! “Indefatigable!” The editor catches his reflection, mocking him.

22

A Sephardic romance, composed before the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, fills the Lost Chord Music Store on the northwest corner of Spinoza Square and Sixth Avenue. The well-dressed man on the telephone, pallid for this tanned city, repeats the inquiry: “Cloud Atlas Sextet… Robert Frobisher … As a matter of fact I have heard of it, though I’ve never laid my sticky paws on an actual pressing…. Frobisher was a wunderkind, he died just as he got going…. Let me see here, I’ve got a list from a dealer in San Fran who specializes in rarities…. Franck, Fitzroy, Frobisher… Here we go, even a little footnote…. Only five hundred recordings pressed … in Holland, before the war, my, no wonder it’s rare…. The dealer has a copy of an acetate, made in the fifties … by a liquidated French outfit. Cloud Atlas Sextet must bring the kiss of death to all who take it on…. I’ll try, he had one as of a month ago, but no promises on the sound quality, and I must warn you, cheap it ain’t… . It’s quoted here at … one hundred twenty dollars … plus our commission at ten percent, that makes … It is? Okay, I’ll take your name down…. Ray who? Oh, Miss R-E-Y, so sorry. Normally we ask for a deposit, but you’ve got an honest voice. A few days. You’re welcome now.”