David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas

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.