The Cloud Atlas

the rest of the meeting went. Gurley was almost flattered to learn he remained the subject of the meeting for several more minutes. The colonel said that Gurley had fallen into a clever trap, set by OSS internal security to catch people who had taken to reading materials that they didn't have the proper classification for. A fictionalized, highly classified memo, designed to be outlandish enough to catch a wayward eye's interest, had been introduced into the office's paper stream. It was only a matter of time before the blue fox nabbed its prey, the colonel said, and he congratulated all those remaining in the room on their now-validated discretion.

“It was a trap?” I asked Gurley.

“A lie,” he said. “To be more precise. An elaborate and admittedly impressive spur-of-the-moment lie by the colonel himself.” The actor was returning. “For this self-proclaimed ‘friend’ of mine could not help but tell me something else. Something he found so funny and cruel, he could hardly bear not to share it. How could I not have known, he asked, that the blue fox was, in fact, quite real?” Gurley paused and looked at me. “My ‘friend’ went on: ‘Blue Fox’ was the nickname of the colonel's mistress.” Gurley closed his eyes and leaned back.

“Sir,” I said.

“Silence, Belk. Let us both agree that there is absolutely nothing adequate that you could say at this point, other than ‘Captain, shall I fetch you a thermos of coffee?’” He nodded toward the door.

“I'm sorry, sir,” I said, because I had to. He was pitiful.

“As I said, Belk: absolutely nothing adequate. Now try again: ‘Captain, shall I fetch you…’”

“Sir, it's just that-”

“Sergeant, ‘it's just that’… I haven't even gotten to the sorry part yet. Be gone.”

WHEN I RETURNED with the thermos, Gurley smiled and brought out a bottle. The label, faded, said “vodka,” but the liquid inside was brown. He asked with raised eyebrows if I wanted any, and when I declined, poured himself some in a chipped mug. He topped off the mug with coffee, and then raised it.

“A toast, then, to the Blue Fox. For it was due to her that I was assigned the crackpot casebook, the file containing letters from every asylum escapee who mails the OSS some deranged idea about how to wage war or defend our homeland.” Gurley rose and studied the map. “Dozens of these letters, Belk. And we read them all. Because buried in every hundredth, every thousandth, letter was something useful. A grandmother in Chicago uncovers a Nazi sympathizer. A lobsterman in Maine hauls up a trap full of codebooks and sabotage plans. And the lone inhabitant of a dot-sized Bering Sea island off the coast of Alaska, an Orthodox hermit with the unspellable name of Father Ioasaph, sends word of Armageddon. After a period of intense fasting and prayer, the good Father-whose isolation has driven him quite mad- witnesses the advance guard of the heavenly host descending in flames to his island. Or so he writes.”

Gurley took a sip from the mug and put it down. Then he walked around the desk and sat on the edge, before me. I think the object was to position his left leg for better viewing. “Some people can lose a limb quickly and efficiently, close by, perhaps in a traffic accident right around the corner,” he said. “I had to travel to the end of the earth.”

Gurley decided to go investigate Father Ioasaph's letter, for a variety of reasons, the most important of which was that it got him far, far away from the office, where he remained the subject of open ridicule. More important, an odd detail in the island hermit's account of Armageddon intrigued Gurley and made him wonder if, just maybe, the flaming angel that Father Ioasaph had reported might have brought redemption as well. For Father Ioasaph wrote that there was a particular, and curious, reason he was sharing this glorious news with Gurley's office: “…it would appear, dear sirs, that God's angels speak Japanese…”

“I KEPT THE LETTER to myself,” Gurley said, rising from his perch to pace. “I took leave. I didn't want to be mocked once again for pursuing folly, and, should anything come of the hermit's claims, I didn't want anyone barging in to steal credit. It took more than a week to get there. Or, rather, to get close. I found myself in a tiny Native village at the mouth of the Kuskokwim River.” Gurley went to the map to show me. “Look, Father Ioasaph's island isn't even on this map.” He studied the spot for a moment. “I don't think it was on anyone's map. But Father Ioasaph was well known in the area. The Russians had set up missions throughout this part of Alaska in the days of the Russian American Trading Company. And Father Ioasaph occasionally journeyed to the mainland to say Mass. In return, the villagers supplied his meager needs. It took some doing to find someone who would take me out to him-they were fiercely protective of their local loon-but I finally prevailed. I paid a generous fare, and promised even more should the boatman return promptly the following day to collect me.”

Ioasaph's island was barren and wet. His hermitage was wedged into the rear of a small ravine and looked as though it had been constructed by an animal. And what with his beard and hair forming a wild corona around his face, he might well have been an animal. He welcomed Gurley gravely, and took him on a five-minute scramble across the island to where God's messenger had landed.

Even someone not in the throes of religious devotion might have ascribed a divine nature to the scene, Gurley said. The earth was scorched; a circle of blackened grass and trees perhaps twenty feet in diameter marked the spot where the “angel” had alighted.

There was a small chance Father Ioasaph had lit this fire himself in a desperate ploy to attract a visitor, Gurley thought, but that seemed unlikely. The devastation was too complete. Gurley pressed him: What do you mean, “angel”? A man with wings? Really now.

Father Ioasaph sighed as though Gurley were hopelessly simple-minded. “No, sir,” he said. “The ways of God are mysterious to us, and this time, his messenger arrived by balloon.”

“Balloon?” Gurley asked. Father Ioasaph described a giant balloon, as big as his hermitage, dirty white in color, plummeting from the sky.

“And the angel was in the balloon? A man, you saw a man-a soldier-in the balloon?” This was the crucial question, Gurley said, and he watched as Father Ioasaph considered his answer.

“No,” Father Ioasaph said. “Not a man like men we know.” He went on to describe what would soon become a familiar sight to Gurley: the multilayered payload, the rings of cylinders and the tangle of wires. But Gurley had never heard of such a thing then, and thus could offer little to counter Father Ioasaph's assertion that this was the being's strange skeleton; whatever corporeal elements might have existed would have been consumed in the fire.

“But you said it spoke Japanese,” Gurley said. Father Ioasaph nodded and led Gurley around a small rise.

Here lay the being's skeleton, or what remained of it, twisted and charred. For all the damage the payload had done, Gurley said, it was surprisingly intact. Dangerously intact, but he didn't know that. Father Ioasaph drew him close and pointed to various elements in the wreckage. Indeed, to judge from the markings, the being did “speak” Japanese.

A sense of wonder, and then, an even greater sense of greed, consumed Gurley. He had found his prize, his ticket back into the OSS 's front ranks. Not even Bob Hope could dismiss this discovery.

Father Ioasaph had a hand at his elbow. “I do not know what this means,” Father Ioasaph said. “Through prayer, I hope to come to know, and I will let you know when I do. But now, we must leave it be.”

“Yes, Father,” Gurley said. “Leave it be. Leave it to me.” Father Ioasaph looked confused.

Gurley said he barked at the man: Leave. And the change in Gurley's demeanor must have been so sudden, so sharp, that the priest did immediately as he was told.