Cloud Atlas

isn’t? Suppose she’s still walking around eating Popsicles and paying utility bills? Would her whereabouts be worth anything to you? Yeah? How much? No, you name a figure. Okay, double that .?.?. No? Nice talking with you, Napier, I gotta go and”—Milton smirks—“the usual account within one working day, if you please. Right. What? No, no one else has seen her, only Crazy Van Zandt. No. She did mention it, but it’s in the bottom of the deep blue sea. Quite sure. Fish food. Course not, my exclusives are for your ears only .?.?. Uh-huh, I’m driving her back to her apartment, then she’s going to her mother’s .?.?. Okay, I’ll make it an hour. The usual account. One working day.”

45

Luisa opens her front door to the sounds of a Sunday ball game and the smell of popcorn. “Since when did I say you could fry oil?” she calls through to Javier. “Why are the blinds all down?”

Javier bounces down the hallway, grinning. “Hi, Luisa! Your uncle Joe made the popcorn. We’re watching Giants versus Dodgers. Why are you dressed like an old woman?”

Luisa feels her core sicken. “Come here. Where is he?”

Javier sniggers. “On your sofa! What’s up?”

“Come here! Your mom wants you.”

“She’s working overtime at the hotel.”

“Luisa, it wasn’t me, on the bridge, it wasn’t me!” Joe Napier appears behind him, holding out his palms as if reassuring a scared animal. “Listen—”

Luisa’s voice judders. “Javi! Out! Behind me!”

Napier raises his voice. “Listen to me—”

Yes, I am talking with my own killer. “Why in hell should I listen to a word you say?”

“Because I’m the only insider at Seaboard who doesn’t want you dead!” Napier’s calm has deserted him. “In the parking lot, I was trying to warn you! Think about it! If I was the hit man would we even be having this conversation? Don’t go, for Chrissakes! It’s not safe! Your apartment could be under surveillance still. That’s why the blinds are down.”

Javier looks aghast. Luisa holds the boy but doesn’t know the least dangerous way to turn. “Why are you here?”

Napier is quiet again, but tired and troubled. “I knew your father, when he was a cop. V-J Day on Silvaplana Wharf. Come in, Luisa. Sit down.”

46

Joe Napier calculated that the neighbor’s kid would tether Luisa long enough to make her listen. He’s not proud that his plan paid off. Napier, more a watcher than a speaker, chisels out his sentences with care. “In 1945, I’d been a cop for six years at Spinoza District Station. No commendations, no black marks. A regular cop, keeping his nose clean, dating a regular girl in a typing pool. On the fourteenth of August, the radio said the Japs had surrendered and Buenas Yerbas danced one almighty hula. Drink flowed, cars revved up, firecrackers were set off, people took a holiday even if their bosses didn’t give ’em one. Come nine o’clock or so, my partner and I were called to a hit-and-run in Little Korea. Normally we didn’t bother with that end of town, but the victim was a white kid, so there’d be relatives and questions. We were en route when a Code Eight comes through from your father, calling all available cars to Silvaplana Wharf. Now, the rule of thumb was, you didn’t go snooping around that part of the docks, not if you wanted a career. The mob had their warehouses there, under a city hall umbrella. What’s more, Lester Rey”—Napier decides not to modify his language—“was known as a Tenth Precinct pain-in-the-ass Sunday- school cop. But two officers were down, and that ain’t the same ball game. It could be your buddy bleeding to death on the tarmac. So we flat-outed and reached the wharf just behind another Spinoza car, Brozman and Harkins. Saw nothing at first. No sign of Lester Rey, no sign of a squad car. The dockside lights were off. We drove between two walls of cargo containers, around the corner into a yard where men were loading up an army truck. I was thinking we were in the wrong zone of the docks. Then the wall of bullets hit us. Brozman and Harkins took the first wave— brakes, glass filling the air, our car skidded into theirs, me and my partner rolled out of our car and holed up behind a stack of steel tubes. Brozman’s car horn sounds, doesn’t stop, and they don’t appear. More bullets ack-ack-acking around us, I’m shitting myself—I’d become a cop to avoid war zones. My partner starts firing back. I follow his lead, but our chances of hitting anything are zilch. To be honest with you, I was glad when the truck trundled by. Dumb ass that I was, I broke cover too soon—to see if I could get a license plate.” The root of Napier’s tongue is aching. “Then all this happens. A yelling man charges me from across the yard. I fire at him. I miss—the luckiest miss of my life, and yours too, Luisa, because if I’d shot your father you wouldn’t be here. Lester Rey is pointing behind me as he sprints by, and he kicks an object rolling my way, lobbed from the back of the truck. Then a blinding light fries me, a noise axes my head, and a needle of pain shoots through my butt. I lay where I fell, half conscious, until I was hoisted into an ambulance.”

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.”