“We were trapped in an elevator for ninety minutes. Cool as a cucumber. Unstable just isn’t a word that sticks to the man. Another thing. He shot himself—supposedly—with just about the quietest gun on the market. A Roachford .34 with fitted silencer. Catalog order only. Why would he go to the trouble?”
“So. The cops got it wrong, the ME got it wrong, everyone got it wrong except Luisa Rey, ace cub reporter, whose penetrating insight concludes the world-famous number cruncher was assassinated just because he’d pointed out a few hitches in some report, a report nobody agrees exists. Am I right?”
“Half right. More likely, the police were encouraged to arrive at conclusions convenient for Seaboard.”
“Sure, a utility company buys the cops. Stupid me.”
“Count in their subsidiaries, Seaboard Corporation is the tenth biggest corporation in the country. They could buy Alaska if they wanted. Give me until Monday.”
“No! You got this week’s reviews and, yes, the food feature.”
“If Bob Woodward had told you he suspected President Nixon had ordered a burglary of his political rival’s offices and recorded himself issuing the order, would you have said, ‘Forget it, Bob, honey, I need eight hundred words on salad dressings’?”
“Don’t you dare give me the I’m-an-outraged-feminist act.”
“Then don’t give me the listen-I’ve-been-in-the-business-thirty-years act! One Jerry Nussbaum in the building is bad enough.”
“You’re squeezing size-eighteen reality into a size-eleven supposition. The undoing of many a fine newspaperman. Many a fine anyone.”
“Monday! I’ll get a copy of the Sixsmith Report.”
“Promises you can’t keep are not a sound currency.”
“Apart from getting on my knees and begging you, I don’t have any other currency. C’mon. Dom Grelsch doesn’t snuff out solid investigative journalism just because it doesn’t turn up the goods in one morning. Dad told me you were just about the most daring reporter working anywhere in the mid-sixties.”
Grelsch swivels and looks over Third Avenue. “Did he bullshit!”
“He did too bullshit! That exposé on Ross Zinn’s campaign funds in ’sixty-four. You took a bone-chilling white supremacist out of politics for good. Dad called you dogged, cussed, and indefatigable. Ross Zinn took nerve, sweat, and time. I’ll do the nerve and sweat, all I want from you is a little time.”
“Roping your pa into this was a dirty trick.”
“Journalism calls for dirty tricks.”
Grelsch stubs his cigarette and lights another. “Monday, with Sixsmith’s inquiry, and it’s got to be hurricane proof, Luisa, with names, sources, facts. Who squashed this report, and why, and how Swannekke B will turn Southern California into Hiroshima. Something else. If you get evidence Sixsmith was murdered, we’re going to the cops before we print. I don’t want dynamite under my car seat.”
“ ‘All the news without fear or favor.’ ”
“Beat it.”
Nancy O’Hagan makes a not-bad face as Luisa sits at her desk and takes out Sixsmith’s rescued letters.
In his office, Grelsch lays into his punching bag. “Dogged!” Wham! “Cussed!” Wham! “Indefatigable!” The editor catches his reflection, mocking him.
22
A Sephardic romance, composed before the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, fills the Lost Chord Music Store on the northwest corner of Spinoza Square and Sixth Avenue. The well-dressed man on the telephone, pallid for this tanned city, repeats the inquiry: “Cloud Atlas Sextet . . . Robert Frobisher . . . As a matter of fact I have heard of it, though I’ve never laid my sticky paws on an actual pressing. . . . Frobisher was a wunderkind, he died just as he got going. . . . Let me see here, I’ve got a list from a dealer in San Fran who specializes in rarities. . . . Franck, Fitzroy, Frobisher . . . Here we go, even a little footnote. . . . Only five hundred recordings pressed . . . in Holland, before the war, my, no wonder it’s rare. . . . The dealer has a copy of an acetate, made in the fifties . . . by a liquidated French outfit. Cloud Atlas Sextet must bring the kiss of death to all who take it on. . . . I’ll try, he had one as of a month ago, but no promises on the sound quality, and I must warn you, cheap it ain’t. . . . It’s quoted here at . . . one hundred twenty dollars . . . plus our commission at ten percent, that makes . . . It is? Okay, I’ll take your name down. . . . Ray who? Oh, Miss R-E-Y, so sorry. Normally we ask for a deposit, but you’ve got an honest voice. A few days. You’re welcome now.”
The store clerk scribbles himself a to-do note and lifts the stylus back to the start of “¿Por qué lloras blanca niña?,” lowers the needle onto shimmering black vinyl, and dreams of Jewish shepherd boys plucking their lyres on starlit Iberian hillsides.
23
Luisa Rey doesn’t see the dusty black Chevy coasting by as she enters her apartment building. Bill Smoke, driving the Chevy, memorizes the address: 108, Pacific Eden Apartments.
Luisa has reread Sixsmith’s letters a dozen times or more in the last day and a half. They disturb her. A university friend of Sixsmith’s, Robert Frobisher, wrote the series in the summer of 1931 during a prolonged stay at a château in Belgium. It is not the unflattering light they shed on a pliable young Rufus Sixsmith that bothers Luisa but the dizzying vividness of the images of places and people that the letters have unlocked. Images so vivid she can only call them memories. The pragmatic journalist’s daughter would, and did, explain these “memories” as the work of an imagination hypersensitized by her father’s recent death, but a detail in one letter will not be dismissed. Robert Frobisher mentions a comet-shaped birthmark between his shoulder blade and collarbone.
I just don’t believe in this crap. I just don’t believe it. I don’t.
Builders are remodeling the lobby of Pacific Eden Apartments. Sheets are on the floor, an electrician is prodding a light fitting, an unseen hammerer hammers. Malcolm the super glimpses Luisa and calls out, “Hey, Luisa! An uninvited guest ran up to your apartment twenty minutes ago!” But the noise of a drill drowns him out, he has a man from city hall on the phone about building codes, and anyway, Luisa has already stepped into the elevator.
24
“Surprise,” says Hal Brodie, drily, caught in the act of taking books and records from Luisa’s shelves and putting them into his gym bag. “Hey,” he says, to hide a jab of guilt, “you’ve had your hair cut short.”
Luisa isn’t very surprised. “Don’t all dumped women?”
Hal clicks in the back of his throat.
Luisa is angry with herself. “So. Reclamation Day.”
“Just about done.” Hal brushes imaginary dust off his hands. “Is the selected Wallace Stevens yours or mine?”
“It was a Christmas present from Phoebe to us. Phone Phoebe. Let her decide. Or else rip out the odd pages and leave me the even. This is like a no-knock raid. You could’ve phoned.”
“I did. All I got was your machine. Junk it, if you never listen to it.”
“Don’t be stupid, it cost a fortune. So what brings you up to town, apart from your love of modernist poetry?”