The khaki envelope is swallowed and gone. Godspeed.
Sixsmith next lines up for an airplane ticket. News of delays lulls him like a litany. He keeps a nervous eye out for signs of Seaboard’s agents coming to pick him up at this late hour. Finally, a ticket clerk waves him over.
“I have to get to London. Any destination in the United Kingdom, in fact. Any seat, any airline. I’ll pay in cash.”
“Not a prayer, sir.” The clerk’s tiredness shows through her makeup. “Earliest I can manage”—she consults a teleprinted sheet—“London Heathrow . . . tomorrow afternoon, three-fifteen departure, Laker Skytrains, change at JFK.”
“It’s terribly important that I leave sooner.”
“I’m sure it is, sir, but we got air-traffic-control strikes and acres of stranded passengers.”
Sixsmith tells himself that not even Seaboard could arrange aviation strikes to detain him. “Then tomorrow it shall have to be. One-way, business class, please, nonsmoking. Is there overnight accommodation anywhere in the airport?”
“Yes, sir, third level. Hotel Bon Voyage. You’ll be comfortable there. If I can just see your passport, please, so I can process your ticketing?”
16
A stained-glass sunset illuminates the velveteen Hemingway in Luisa’s apartment. Luisa is buried in Harnessing the Sun: Two Decades of Peacetime Atomic Power, chewing a pen. Javier is at her desk doing a sheet of long-division problems. Carole King’s Tapestry LP is playing at a low volume. Drifting through the windows comes the dim roar of automobiles heading home. The telephone rings, but Luisa lets it. Javier studies the answering machine as it clunks into action. “Hi, Luisa Rey can’t come to the phone right now, but if you leave your name and number, I’ll get back to you.”
“I loathe these contraptions,” complains the caller. “Cookie, it’s your mother. I just heard from Beatty Griffin, who told me you split up with Hal—last month? I was dumbstruck! You didn’t breathe a word at your father’s funeral, or at Alphonse’s. This bottling-up worries me so much. Dougie and I are having a fund-raiser for the American Cancer Society, and it’d mean the sun, the moon, and the stars to us if you’d abandon your poky little nest just for one weekend and come stay, Cookie? The Henderson triplets will be here, that’s Damien the cardiologist, Lance the gynecologist, and Jesse the . . . Doug? Doug! Jesse Henderson, what does he do? A lobotomist? Oh, funny. Anyway, daughter of mine, Beatty tells me by some freak of planetary alignment all three brothers are unattached. On the hoof, Cookie, on the hoof! So call the moment you get this. All my love now.” She ends with a suction kiss, “Mmmmchwaaa!”
“She sounds like the mother on Bewitched.” Javier lets a little time go by. “What’s ‘dumbstruck’?”
Luisa doesn’t look up. “When you’re so amazed you can’t speak.”
“She didn’t sound very dumbstruck, did she?”
Luisa is engrossed in her work.
“ ‘Cookie’?”
Luisa flings a slipper at the boy.
17
In his hotel room at the Bon Voyage, Dr. Rufus Sixsmith reads a sheaf of letters written to him nearly half a century ago by his friend Robert Frobisher. Sixsmith knows them by heart, but their texture, rustle, and his friend’s faded handwriting calm his nerves. These letters are what he would save from a burning building. At seven o’clock precisely, he washes, changes his shirt, and sandwiches the nine read letters in the Gideon’s Bible—this he replaces in the bedside cabinet. Sixsmith slips the unread letters into his jacket pocket for the restaurant.
Dinner is a minute steak and strips of fried eggplant, with a poorly washed salad. It deadens rather than satisfies Sixsmith’s appetite. He leaves half on his plate and sips carbonated water as he reads Frobisher’s last letters. He witnesses himself through Robert’s words searching Bruges for his unstable friend, first love, and if I’m honest, my last.
In the hotel elevator Sixsmith considers the responsibility he put on Luisa Rey’s shoulders, wondering if he’s done the right thing. The curtains of his room blow in as he opens the door. He calls out, “Who’s in here?”
No one. No one knows where you are. His imagination has been playing tricks on him for weeks now. Sleep deprivation. “Look,” he tells himself, “in forty-eight hours you’ll be back in Cambridge on your rainy, safe, narrow island. You’ll have your facilities, your allies, your contacts, and you can plan your broadside on Seaboard from there.”
18
Bill Smoke watches Rufus Sixsmith leave his hotel room, waits five minutes, then lets himself in. He sits on the rim of the bathtub and flexes his gloved fists. No drug, no religious experience touches you like turning a man into a corpse. You need a brain, though. Without discipline and expertise, you’ll soon find yourself strapped into an electric chair. The assassin strokes a lucky Krugerrand in his pocket. Smoke is wary of being a slave to superstition, but he isn’t about to mess with the amulet just to prove a point. A tragedy for loved ones, a big fat nothing to everyone else, and a problem solved for my clients. I’m just the instrument of my clients’ will. If it wasn’t me it’d be the next fixer in the Yellow Pages. Blame its user, blame its maker, but don’t blame the gun. Bill Smoke hears the lock. Breathe. The pills he took earlier clarify his perception, terribly, and when Sixsmith shuffles into the bedroom, humming “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” the hit man could swear he can feel his victim’s pulse, slower than his own. Smoke sights his prey through the door crack. Sixsmith flumps onto the bed. The assassin visualizes the required motions: Three steps out, fire from the side, through the temple, up close. Smoke darts from the doorway; Sixsmith utters a guttural syllable and tries to rise, but the silenced bullet is already boring through the scientist’s skull and into the mattress. The body of Rufus Sixsmith falls back, as if he has curled up for a postprandial nap.
Blood soaks into the thirsty eiderdown.
Fulfillment throbs in Bill Smoke’s brain. Look what I did.
19
Wednesday morning is smog-scorched and heat-hammered, like the last hundred mornings and the next fifty. Luisa Rey drinks black coffee in the steamy cool of the Snow White Diner on the corner of Second Avenue and Sixteenth Street, a two-minute walk from the Spyglass offices, reading about a Baptist ex-naval nuclear engineer from Atlanta called James Carter, who plans to run for the Democratic nomination. Sixteenth Street traffic moves in frustrated inches and headlong stampedes. The sidewalks blur with hurrying people and skateboarders. “Nothin’ for breakfast this mornin’, Luisa?” asks Bart, the fry cook.
“Only news,” replies his very regular customer.
Roland Jakes trips over the doorway and makes his way to Luisa. “Uh, this seat free? Didn’t eat a bite this morning. Shirl’s left me. Again.”
“Features meeting in fifteen minutes.”
“Bags of time.” Jakes sits down and orders eggs over easy. “Page nine,” he says to Luisa. “Right-hand bottom corner. Something you should see.”