Cloud Atlas

fabric and wire, split boxes of teddy-bear eyes and assorted sewing-machine body shells and innards. The passage corners right and stops at an iron door. Day filters in through a grimy grille. The Mexican fumbles with her key ring. It’s 1875 down here, thinks Luisa, not 1975. One key won’t fit. The next fits but won’t turn. Even thirty seconds on the factory floor has affected her hearing.

A war cry from six yards away: “Hands in the air!” Luisa spins around. “I said, Hands in the fuckin’ air!” Luisa’s hands obey. The gunman keeps his pistol trained on Napier. “Turn around, Napier! Slow! Drop your gun!”

The senora shrills: “No shoot I! No shoot I, Senor! They force I show door! They say they kill—”

“Shuddup, you crazy fuckin’ wetback! Scram! Outa my way!”

The woman creeps around him, pressing herself against the wall, shrieking, “?No dispares! ?No dispares! ?No quiero morir!”

Napier shouts, through the funneled factory noise, “Easy now, Bisco, how much you being paid?”

Bisco hollers back, “Don’t bother, Napier. Last words.”

“I can’t hear you! What did you say?”

“What—are—your—last—words?”

“Last words? Who are you? Dirty Harry?”

Bisco’s mouth twitches. “I got a book of last words, and those were yours. You?” He looks at Luisa, keeping the gun trained on Napier.

A pistol shot punches a hole in the din, and Luisa’s eyes clench shut. A hard thing touches her toe. She forces her eyes open. It is a handgun, skidded to a stop. Bisco’s face is contorted into inexplicable agony. The senora’s monkey wrench flashes and crumples the gunman’s lower jaw. Ten or more blows of extreme ferocity follow, each one making Luisa flinch, punctuated by the words, “Yo! Amaba! A! Ese! Jodido! Perro! ”

Luisa checks Joe Napier. He looks on, unhurt, thunderstruck.

The senora wipes her mouth and leans over the motionless, pulp-faced Bisco. “And don’t call me ‘wetback’!” She steps over his clotted head and unlocks the exit.

“You might want to tell the other two I did that to him,” Napier says to her, retrieving Bisco’s gun.

The senora addresses Luisa. “Quitatelo de encima, carina. Anda con gentuza y ?Dios mio! ese viejo podria ser tu padre.”

65

Napier sits on the graffiti-frescoed subway train, watching Lester Rey’s daughter. She is dazed, disheveled, shaky, and her clothes are still damp from the bank’s sprinkler. “How did you find me?” she asks, finally.

“Big fat guy at your office. Nosboomer, or something.”

“Nussbaum.”

“That’s it. Took a heap of persuading.”

A silence lasts from Reunion Square subway to Seventeenth Avenue. Luisa picks at a hole in her jeans. “I guess you don’t work at Seaboard any longer.”

“I was put out to pasture yesterday.”

“Fired?”

“No. Early retirement. Yes. I was put out to pasture.”

“And you came back from the pasture this morning?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

The next silence lasts from Seventeenth Avenue to McKnight Park.

“I feel,” Luisa hesitates, “that I—no, that you—broke some sort of decree back there. As if Buenas Yerbas had decided I was to die today. But here I am.”

Napier considers this. “No. The city doesn’t care. And you could say it was your father who just saved your life, when he kicked away that grenade rolling my way, thirty years ago.” Their compartment groans and shudders. “We’ve got to go via a gun store. Empty guns make me nervous.”

The subway emerges into the sunlight.

Luisa squints. “Where are we going?”

“To see somebody.” Napier checks his watch. “She’s flown in specially.”

Luisa rubs her red eyes. “Can the somebody give us a copy of the Sixsmith Report? Because that dossier is my only way out.”

“I don’t know yet.”

66

Megan Sixsmith sits on a low bench in the Buenas Yerbas Museum of Modern Art and stares back at a giant portrait of an old lady’s ursine face, rendered in interlacing gray and black lines on a canvas otherwise blank. The only figurative in a room of Pollocks, de Koonings and Miros, the portrait quietly startles. “Look,” she says, thinks Megan, “at your future. Your face, too, will one day be mine.” Time has knitted her skin into webs of wrinkles. Muscles sag here, tauten there, her eyelids droop. Her pearls are of inferior quality most likely, and her hair is mussed from an afternoon of rounding up grandchildren. But she sees things I don’t.

A woman about her own age sits next to her. She could use a wash and a change of clothes. “Megan Sixsmith?”

Megan glances sidelong. “Luisa Rey?”

She nods toward the portrait. “I’ve always liked her. My dad met her, the real lady, I mean. She was a Holocaust survivor who settled in B.Y. Ran a boardinghouse over in Little Lisbon. She was the artist’s landlady.”

Courage grows anywhere, thinks Megan Sixsmith, like weeds.

“Joe Napier said you flew in today from Honolulu.”

“Is he here?”

“The guy behind me, in the denim shirt pretending to look at the Warhol. He’s watching out for us. I’m afraid his paranoia is justified.”

“Yes. I need to know you are who you say you are.”

“I’m happy to hear it. Any ideas?”

“What was my uncle’s favorite Hitchcock movie?”

The woman claiming to be Luisa Rey thinks for a while and smiles. “We talked about Hitchcock in the elevator—I’m guessing he wrote you about that—but I don’t remember him naming a favorite. He admired that wordless passage in Vertigo, where Jimmy Stewart trails the mysterious woman to the waterfront with the San Francisco backdrop. He enjoyed Charade—I know that’s not Hitchcock, but it tickled him, you calling Audrey Hepburn a bubblehead.”

Megan reclines into the seat. “Yes, my uncle referred to you in a card he wrote from the airport hotel. It was agitated, and worrying, and dotted with phrases like ‘If anything should happen to me’—but it wasn’t suicidal. Nothing could make Rufus do what the police claimed. I’m certain.” Ask her, and control your trembling, for God’s sake. “Miss Rey—do you think my uncle was murdered?”

Luisa Rey replies, “I’m afraid I know he was. I’m sorry.”

The journalist’s conviction is cathartic. Megan takes a deep breath. “I know about his work for Seaboard and the Defense Department. I never saw the whole report, but I checked its mathematics when I visited Rufus back in