David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas

Luisa still isn’t saying anything.

“I was lucky. A fragment of grenade shrapnel tore through both buttock cheeks. The rest of me was fine. The doctor said it was the first time he’d seen one projectile make four holes. Your dad, of course, was not so fine. Lester was a piece of Swiss cheese. They’d operated but failed to save his eye the day before I left the hospital. We just shook hands and I left, I didn’t know what to say. The most humiliating thing you can do to a man is to save his life. Lester knew it too. But there’s not a day, possibly not an hour, that’s gone by without my thinking about him. Every time I sit down.”

Luisa says nothing for a while. “Why didn’t you tell me this on Swannekke Island?”

Napier scratches his ear. “I was afraid you’d use the connection to squeeze me for juice …”

“On what really happened to Rufus Sixsmith?”

Napier doesn’t say yes, doesn’t say no. “I know how reporters work.”

“You are picking holes in my integrity?”

She’s speaking generally—she can’t know about Margo Roker. “ If you keep on looking for Rufus Sixsmith’s report”—Napier wonders if he should say this in front of the boy—”you’ll be killed, plain and simple. Not by me! But it’ll happen. Please. Leave town now. Jettison your old life and job, and go.”

“Alberto Grimaldi sent you to tell me that, did he?”

“No one knows I’m here—pray God—or I’m in as much trouble as you.”

“One question first.”

“You want to ask if”—he wishes the kid was elsewhere—”if Sixsmith’s ‘fate’ was my work. The answer is no. That sort of … job, it wasn’t my business. I’m not saying I’m innocent. I’m just saying I’m guilty only of looking the other way. Grimaldi’s fixer killed Sixsmith and drove you off the bridge last night. A man by the name of Bill Smoke—one name of many, I suspect. I can’t make you believe me, but I hope you will.”

“How did you know I’d survived?”

“Vain hope. Look, life is more precious than a damn scoop. I’m begging you, one last time, and it will be the last, to drop this story. Now I’ve got to leave, and I wish to Christ you’d do the same.” He stands. “One last thing. Can you use a gun?”

“I have an allergy to guns.”

“How do you mean?”

“Guns make me nauseous. Literally.”

“Everyone should learn to use a gun.”

“Yeah, you can see crowds of ’em laid out in morgues. Bill Smoke isn’t going to wait politely while I get a gun out of my handbag, is he? My only way out is to get evidence that’ll blow this affair so totally, killing me would be a pointless act.”

“You’re underestimating man’s fondness for petty revenge.”

“What do you care? You’ve paid back your debt to Dad. You’ve salved your conscience.”

Napier gives a morose sigh. “Enjoyed the ball game, Javi.”

“You’re a liar,” says the boy.

“I lied, yes, but that doesn’t make me a liar. Lying’s wrong, but when the world spins backwards, a small wrong may be a big right.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“You’re damn right it doesn’t, but it’s still true.”

Joe Napier lets himself out.

Javier is angry with Luisa, too. “And you act like I’m gambling with my life just because I jump across a couple of balconies?”

47

Luisa’s and Javier’s footsteps reverberate in the stairwell. Javier peers over the handrail. Lower floors recede like the whorls of a shell. A wind of vertigo blows, making him giddy. It works the same looking upward. “If you could see into the future,” he asks, “would you?”

Luisa slings her bag. “Depends on if you could change it or not.”

“S’posing you could? So, say you saw you were going to be kidnapped by Communist spies on the second story, you’d take the elevator down to the ground floor.”

“But what if the spies called the elevator, agreeing to kidnap whoever was in it? What if trying to avoid the future is what triggers it all?”

“If you could seethe future, like you can see the end of Sixteenth Street from the top of Kilroy’s department store, that means it’s already there. If it’s already there, you can’t change it.”

“Yes, but what’s at the end of Sixteenth Street isn’t made by what you do. It’s pretty much fixed, by planners, architects, designers, unless you go and blow a building up or something. What happens in a minute’s time is made by what you do.”

“So what’s the answer? Can you change the future or not?”

Maybe the answer is not a function of metaphysics but one, simply, of power . “It’s a great imponderable, Javi.”

They have reached the ground floor. The Six Million Dollar Man’s bionic biceps jangle on Malcolm’s TV.

“See you, Luisa.”

“I’m not leaving town forever, Javi.”

At the boy’s initiative they shake hands. The gesture surprises Luisa: it feels formal, final, and intimate.

48

A silver carriage clock in Judith Rey’s Ewingsville home tinkles one o’clock in the afternoon. Bill Smoke is being talked at by a financier’s wife. “This house never fails to bring out the demon of covetousness in me,” the fifty-something bejeweled woman confides, “it’s a copy of a Frank Lloyd Wright. The original’s on the outskirts of Salem, I believe.” She is standing an inch too close. You look like a witch from the outskirts of Salem gone fucking crazy in Tiffany’s , Bill Smoke thinks, remarking, “Now, is that so?”

Hispanic maids supplied by the caterers carry trays of food among the all-white guests. Swan-shaped linen napkins bear place cards. “That white-leafed oak tree on the front lawn would have been here when the Spanish missions were built,” the wife says, “wouldn’t you agree?”

“Without doubt. Oaks live for six hundred years. Two hundred to grow, two hundred to live, two hundred to die.”

Smoke sees Luisa enter the lavish room, accepting a kiss on both cheeks from her stepfather. What do I want from you, Luisa Rey? A female guest of Luisa’s age hugs her. “Luisa! It’s been three or four years!” Close-up, the guest’s charm is cattish and prying. “But is it true you’re not married yet?”

“I certainly am not” is Luisa’s crisp reply. “Are you?”

Smoke senses she senses his gaze, refocuses his attention on the wife and agrees that, yes, there are redwoods not sixty minutes from here that were mature when Nebuchadnezzar was on his throne. Judith Rey stands on a footstool brought specially for the purpose and taps a silver spoon on a bottle of pink champagne until everyone is listening. “Ladies, gentlemen, and young people,” she declaims, “I am told dinner is served! But before we all begin, I’d like to say a few words about the wonderful work done by the Buenas Yerbas Cancer Society, and how they’ll use the moneys from our fund-raiser you are so generously supporting today.”

Bill Smoke amuses a pair of children by producing a shiny gold Krugerrand from thin air. What I want from you, Luisa, is a killing of perfect intimacy . For a moment Bill Smoke wonders at the powers inside us that are not us.

49

The maids have cleared the dessert course, the air is pungent with coffee fumes, and an overfed Sunday drowsiness settles on the dining room. The eldest guests find nooks to snooze in. Luisa’s stepfather rounds up a group of contemporaries to see his collection of 1950s cars, the wives and mothers conduct maneuvers of allusion, the schoolchildren go outside to bicker in the leafy sunshine and around the pool. The Henderson triplets dominate the discourse at the matchmaking table. Each is as blue-eyed and gilded as his brothers, and Luisa doesn’t distinguish among them. “What would I do,” says one triplet, “if I was president? First, I’d aim to win the Cold War, not just aim not to lose it.”