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.”
“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.’?”
Sixsmith wrings sweat from his handkerchief. “I saw Charade with my niece at an art-house cinema last year. Was that Hitchcock? She strong-arms me into seeing these things, to prevent me from growing ‘square.’ I rather enjoyed it, but my niece said Audrey Hepburn was a ‘bubblehead.’ Delicious word.”
“Charade’s the one where the plot swings on the stamps?”
“A contrived puzzle, yes, but all thrillers would wither without contrivance. Hitchcock’s Buenas Yerbas remark puts me in mind of John F. Kennedy’s observation about New York. Do you know it? ‘Most cities are nouns, but New York is a verb.’ What might Buenas Yerbas be, I wonder?”
“A string of adjectives and conjunctions?”
“Or an expletive?”
“Megan, my treasured niece.” Rufus Sixsmith shows Luisa a photograph of a bronzed young woman and a fitter, healthier self taken at a sunny marina. The photographer said something funny just before the shutter clicked. Their legs dangle over the stern of a small yacht named Starfish. “That’s my old tub, a relic from more dynamic days.”
Luisa makes polite noises about not being old.
“Truly. If I went on a serious voyage now I’d need to hire a small crew. I still spend a lot of weekends on her, pottering about the marina and doing a little thinking, a little work. Megan likes the sea, too. She’s a born physicist with a better head for mathematics than I ever had, rather to her mother’s chagrin. My brother didn’t marry Megan’s mother for her brain, I’m sorry to say. She buys into feng shui or I Ching or whatever instant-enlightenment mumbo jumbo is top of the charts. But Megan possesses a superb mind. She spent a year of her Ph.D. at my old college at Cambridge. A woman, at Caius! Now she’s finishing her radioastronomy research at the big dishes on Hawaii. While her mother and her stepfather crisp themselves to toast on the beach in the name of Leisure, Megan and I knock around equations in the bar.”
“Any children of your own, Rufus?”
“I’ve been married to science all my life.” Sixsmith changes the subject. “A hypothetical question, Miss Rey. What price would you pay, as a journalist I mean, to protect a source?”
Luisa doesn’t consider the question. “If I believed in the issue? Any.”
“Prison, for example, for contempt of court?”
“If it came to it, yes.”
“Would you be prepared to .?.?. compromise your own safety?”
“Well?.?.?.” Luisa does consider this. “I .?.?. guess I’d have to.”
“Have to? How so?”
“My father braved booby-trapped marshes and the wrath of generals for the sake of his journalistic integrity. What kind of a mockery of his life would it be if his daughter bailed when things got a little tough?”
Tell her. Sixsmith opens his mouth to tell her everything—the whitewashing at Seaboard, the blackmailing, the corruption—but without warning the elevator lurches, rumbles, and resumes its descent. Its occupants squint in the restored light, and Sixsmith finds his resolve has crumbled away. The needle swings round to G.
The air in the lobby feels as fresh as mountain water.
“I’ll telephone you, Miss Rey,” says Sixsmith, as Luisa hands him his stick, “soon.” Will I break this promise or keep it? “Do you know?” he says. “I feel I’ve known you for years, not ninety minutes.”
