The Cloud Atlas

someone with you. A man. Not a ‘customer’? I thought we had an agreement. I thought I'd taken care of that for you. You should have enough now, enough to get by without-God, Lily, we've talked about this. You know what I've said, what I'm planning for you, for us-”

“Not a customer,” Lily said. She told me now that she had been stalling, frantically trying to come up with a plausible scenario. He'd been watching her grow upset, and suddenly decided he knew what had happened.

“No, Lily-you-you were attacked,” Gurley said, grabbing her arm. “My God. My God: he hurt you. And me, limping along after you, your helpless defender. Did he-did he-my God, Lily, did he- rape-?”

Lily said she started crying: she could see no way out. He'd taken over her story-now rape was involved; should she admit to that, peg it on some random thug? One of those brawling sailors, unexpectedly returned? Lost and distraught, she blurted out-because it was true- “He was a friend.”

She gasped, destroyed now because she'd thought she'd revealed once and for all that it was me.

But I was apparently gone from Gurley's mind, and he pressed in on this new quarry: “‘Was’?” he asked. “Who was he? A friend? Why would you cry if it was a friend? What kind of friend is that?”

And that was all Lily needed. Because when he asked the question, the obvious answer, the real answer, came to mind, immediately. What friend had she cried over, again and again?

Saburo.

She started telling Gurley before she'd even planned it all out, but the longer she talked, and the more fascinated she saw him become, the more she realized how it could all work, how well it could work. Saburo was the man who'd accosted her in the street, not Louis. Saburo was the reason she'd run from Gurley, not to him: she told Gurley that she couldn't admit, not then, that she knew-that, long before she'd met Gurley, she'd befriended-a Japanese soldier, a spy.

And there it was: Saburo was the reason Gurley needed to take her to Bethel. Saburo had run off after her, into the dark, had begged her to leave with him, that night, told her he was going back to Japan, that he would take her with him, if only she would come, right then. “Someone sympathetic to the cause” had a floatplane waiting, would fly them west, as far west as he could. Then there would be a ship, or a submarine…

I was awestruck. First, by the facility of Lily's storytelling, and second, by the slow realization that this story might have been, must have been, at one time, true. There had never been a midnight race through Anchorage with Saburo, but there had been promises of an airplane, of a ship, of a home across the ocean.

“More than a friend” is how Gurley answered all this, both mollified and roused, and Lily nodded, as though he had broken her, and because he had.

“More than a friend,” Lily repeated to Gurley. “That's what he thought,” she said, and then fell to Gurley's chest. She didn't have to say it: the spy asked and I did not go. “I don't know what he thinks now,” she told Gurley then.

“I do,” I told Lily now.

IT DID NOT LOOK LIKE its nickname-“Paris of the Tundra”-not from the air, not from the river, which I had to cross to get from the airfield to the town, not from my walk up its main street, nor the walk I took back down that same street, having quickly run out of road. But Bethel must have looked like Paris to the communities that dotted the tundra around it. If a clock hand began its circumnavigation of Alaska at Anchorage -about five o'clock-it would find little to interrupt its sweep west and then north to Nome, at nine o'clock. Little, except Bethel.

Bethel sits at around seven or eight on that clock face, smack on the banks of the Kuskokwim River. The Kuskokwim shares the duty of draining western Alaska with the Yukon. The two rivers conspire each summer to turn the tundra into a vast delta so soggy and remote that, even as tourism booms elsewhere in Alaska today, it sometimes seems there are fewer humans in this corner of the continent now than there were during the war.

When I first arrived in Bethel, however, it wasn't bustling, even then. There weren't many people around, almost no cars, just a few jeeps. I later learned that vehicles were something of an extravagance-you couldn't drive to Bethel from anywhere; you could only drive around in Bethel, or, when the weather was right, around the wide unbroken tundra that surrounded the town. In the winter, you could drive down the frozen river when they plowed it. In Anchorage or Fairbanks, if you ever get a hankering and the road's open, you can drive right out of Alaska, into Canada, and hell, on to Miami. But in Bethel, you always have to turn around eventually and come back.

The flight from Anchorage had lasted long enough for me to work out a plan, or as I think of it now, a kind of essential theology. Gurley represented evil, a powerful, but not unbeatable, foe. Lily was Eve, of course. Lovely, and susceptible. Did that make me Adam, or did Saburo have more claim to that title? Maybe I was Adam after he'd eaten the apple. Maybe I was the snake.

DEALING WITH THE LOCAL military authorities was easier than I had expected. The same frenzied culture of secrecy permeated Bethel as it did Anchorage; the soldiers I met at Bethel 's Todd Field were so interested in keeping their mission a secret that they were scarcely interested in mine.

But Lily had kept another secret from just about everyone, as I was soon to discover.

I was standing on the long, low porch in front of the optimistically named Bethel Emporium of Everything, sleuthing. After a short walk around town, I'd been unable to find Lily's old store, Sam's Universal Supply, and was starting to wonder if she'd told me the truth-about that, or about anything.

Four men were on the porch. One heavyset white fellow, standing, and three men I took to be Yup'ik, all sitting, all watching the white man like they were waiting for him to leave.

“Jap Sam, sure,” the white man said. “Good fella,” he said. “Never went there much, but heard he was a good fella.” He looked to the others on the porch, and so did I. “Mind you, the man had products of inferior quality.”

“Good prices,” one of the Yup'ik men said to the empty street. “Good man,” another said.

“‘Good prices,’” the white man repeated. “Not if you're buying junk. Mind you, that's what I thought at first, when I saw them come up in the jeep and take him off: I thought, there you go, he's getting arrested for selling inferior products. But no, wasn't that at all.” He looked again at the Yup'ik men, all of whom stared at me.

“Where'd you take him?” one of the Yup'ik men said.

“I don't know,” I tried, taking a moment to figure out what he was asking. “Some soldiers took him?” My questioner turned away.

“Now, boys,” the white man said. “Not every soldier knows every other soldier. See here, he's not from that kind of a unit.” Instead of pointing to my bomb disposal insignia, he pointed to my sergeant's stripes. “No, the government took Jap Sam down to California, I hear, for his capital-S safety. Mind you, he was Japanese, and I'm sure we're all safer, too, knowing all them Japanese are safe in that camp.”

“No one's never heard from Sam,” one of the Yup'ik men said. “Never since.”

“Mind you, boys,” the white man said. “There's a war on.” He looked out into the street. “Good day, Captain,” the man said to me, and left.

I stood there a minute, trying to decide what to do next, growing tense under the collective stare of the men. “What you want Jap Sam for, anyway?” said the one who'd spoken up earlier.

“Met a friend of his down in Anchorage,” I said.

“Jap friend?” the man said.