The Cloud (10 page)

20

A
cross the street from where I’m parked is a small grocer that carries the staples of modern life: bread and canned goods, cheap liquor and tobacco, and cell phones. A plump woman standing behind the counter, prematurely wearing dentures, sells me a Motorola phone that a decade ago would’ve been among the most powerful mobile computers on the planet. The computational zing wrapped in its dime-a-dozen metallic clamshell would’ve been housed in a block-long warehouse, a veritable state treasure. Now it’s near the lowest rung on the technology ladder—so much so, it’s displayed behind the counter next to boxes of condoms and antihistamine. And it costs only $35, provided that I also load it with one hundred minutes of pre-paid talk time for an additional $23. I don’t have to sign any contracts or sign up under my own name.

I unwrap the phone and then stand momentarily stymied where to toss the disemboweled packaging. Into the black trash bin, the blue recycling one, or the green container for compost? Trash, I conjecture. I turn on the phone. It’s got some battery life, but not much. I offer the woman a dollar if she’ll let me plug my new phone into the wall outlet for five minutes. She shrugs.

“You’re not the first,” she says.

Five minutes later, I’m back in my car with a new pre-paid phone and a meager plan. I tuck the new phone into my pocket and use my existing one to call Faith. When she answers, I say: “Are you ready?”

“With a tall cup of No Doze with your name on it. Let’s go, please.”

“See you in the alley.”

To avoid driving past the man in the Mercedes parked on Polk Street, I drive around the block in the other direction. I slide into the alley behind the café. The alley—lined with dozens of the holy trinities of state-approved garbage, recycling and compost cans—is such a tight fit that Faith must squeeze sideways to get into the car. As she twists her body, I glance at the short brown skirt that comes only to her knee, slit up to her thigh, not the least bit practical unless Faith was expecting a summer day to suddenly break out or she wants attention focused on her legs.

She hands me the coffee. I take a big slug, grimacing as the scalding liquid scorches the roof of my mouth.

“It’s even more exhilarating if you pour the whole thing on your head.” She smiles and my heart skips a beat—either from caffeine or the stimulant created by Faith’s proximity. Maybe it’s the same neurological mechanism.

I’m about to make a comment about the fact that it’s strange to me that Faith is composed enough to joke even though she’s allegedly being stalked, when she says: “Thank you for the rescue.”

I swallow hard. I put the coffee into the center console and drive in silence to the end of the alley. I take a left, drive half a block, take another left and drive two blocks, then take another left heading back toward Polk. Just before the intersection, I park in a red loading zone in front of a neighborhood bar called Leap Year. I feel Faith watching me. I turn to her and then back to Polk; half a block up the street, double-parked as it has been, sits the black Mercedes.

“He’s going to see us.” The anxiety is back in her voice.

“We’re behind him. No streetlight shining on us. If he sees us he’d have to turn the car around and we’d be outta here.” But I’m irritated that maybe she’s right. “You have any tips, Faith?”

“Tips?”

“On doing surveillance. You seem to have the knack.”

“I don’t want to do this. I want to be somewhere safe.”

“You’re free to go at any time.”

“You know he’d see me.”

“Then we’re stuck with each other—for now.”

She doesn’t respond.

“Aren’t you curious who is following you?” I turn to look at her. Her eyes glisten with tears. “What’s going on, Faith?”

She sniffles once, then takes a deep breath. With the tips of her fingers, she wipes moisture from under her right eye. She looks at me, suddenly composed.

“So he’s dead? Alan.”

“I think he had a heart attack. I don’t think he was . . .” I don’t finish because I’m not sure whether he died of natural causes. He’d seemed hurt when he fell into me. Maybe his heart was already giving out. Or maybe someone drugged him, before or after our collision.

Faith interrupts my introspection. “Are you sick too?”

“No, why . . .”

“When you saw Alan, you . . . passed out.”

I don’t respond.

“Then it touched a nerve,” Faith says. “You’ve lost someone.”

I think: Ain’t that the truth. My first true love, Annie Kindle, drowned five years ago in a lake in Nevada. My paternal grandmother, Lane, though still alive, suffers intensifying dementia. Polly, who was going to make it all better, left me. Things I love die or go away.

“I was disoriented.” I finally offer my explanation. “I’ve got a concussion.” So, yeah, I think, sick, in a way.

“It’s not my fault.”

“Why would my concussion be your fault, Faith?”

“I was just doing him a favor. That’s it.” She sounds just a tad defensive but maybe fairly so; a man is dead.

“Hold that thought.”

The man in the Mercedes steps out of the car. He’s tall and thin, more leg than torso. He looks in the direction of the café where I picked up Faith and cocks his head. He closes the car door and starts walking to the café: gangly, awkward strides, long arms, pink head, birdlike. He’s favoring his left leg, but at this distance in the dark I can’t settle on a diagnosis. Maybe lower back pain.

“He knows I’m gone,” says Faith.

The man disappears into the café. I can imagine he’s looking around, checking the bathroom, then asking the tattooed dude behind the counter whether he’s seen a brunette in a brown skirt. At some point, he’ll realize Faith disappeared through the alley or he’ll wonder if he lost focus and missed her wandering out the front.

“There he is,” Faith says.

“Turkey vulture.”

“What?”

“He moves like a bird.”

“Absolutely does. The way he cocks his head, a buzzard. You know your birds of prey.”

Back at his car, he finds a ratty-haired man in decrepit full-length coat looking through the back window and scratching his arms. Crack addict. The buzzard pulls out a wallet. He extracts a bill. He holds it up so that the druggie can see it. He drops the dollar onto the ground behind the car.

The addict shrugs and bends to pick up the money. As he starts to stand, the buzzard launches a soccer-style kick at the druggie’s head. Just before he’s about to make contact, the gangly attacker pulls back, sparing the druggie a terrific blow, causing him to fall to the street in a ball.

“Oh God,” Faith says.

“Mean buzzard.”

He climbs into the Mercedes. No sooner does exhaust start to come from his tailpipe than he is off. He peels into light traffic, cutting off a diminutive European smart car made for parking, not surviving crashes.

I pull out to follow. The Mercedes is separated from us by the smart car and an old-model sedan coughing exhaust.

“Take me to my car,” Faith says.

I don’t answer.

“You’re kidnapping me.”

“You think this guy is just playing around?”

“I . . .”

“Help me find out what’s going on so that we can both feel safe.”

Faith crosses her arms across her chest, resignation. The Mercedes takes a left onto Bush Street, a thoroughfare that heads in the direction of downtown.

“At least tell me what we’re doing.”

“I’m following him to see where he goes and you’re going to continue telling me how you happened to observe my almost murder by subway.”

I take the left onto Bush. I’m now separated from the Mercedes by only the sedan, a Buick. But I doubt he would be able to see us in the darkness and drizzle. The light turns green. We continue toward downtown.

A few blocks later, the Mercedes takes an abrupt, illegal left turn onto Grant Street beneath an enormous green gate with an orange dragon on the top. Chinatown.

I hear a honk and realize I’ve stopped in the middle of the street. The Mercedes is half a block away now but moving slowly; not surprising given Chinatown’s narrow streets and the challenge of navigating a handful of jaywalkers, the very last of the night’s produce, and shoppers toting bags.

The Mercedes’s taillights disappear over a slight hill.

21

I
hate this place. It’s always had a hold on me—not the mysticism of the hole-in-the-wall herbal dispensaries, the wrinkle-faced trinket sellers in their comically costumed conical hats, the bloodied chickens hung by their feet from the rafters of the Chinese butchers. That stuff I love.

It’s the parking. This is the place where parking Karma goes to die. Tiny spaces, seemingly never free, with what seem to me to be the most arcane rules in a city of arcane parking rules. Here, a sign might read:
NO PARKING 8 TO 5 OTHER THAN FIRST TUESDAYS AND THURSDAYS OF MONTH AND AS OTHERWISE NOTED
. Why not add:
PENALTY IS DEATH
. Two spots away, a different rule.

I work through a small crowd and crest the hill in time to see the Mercedes slide into a spot. I can’t tell whether it’s legal, but it nevertheless puts us in a pickle. I can’t stop and double-park in these narrow streets.

“Duck,” I say.

“What?”

“Lower your head.”

She understands. We’re about to pass the buzzard. She bends to the left so she’s lying on the seat, out of sight. To stabilize herself, she reaches across the center of the car and her fingers brush my knee.

To avoid having him see me, I instinctively contract my neck, trying to pull my head inside my body. I also slow to keep from getting too far ahead of the Mercedes, but even at this pace, we’re a full block ahead of our prey. Faith sits up.

“He’s just sitting there.” I report. “Lights off.”

I hit a stop sign at an intersection that marks Chinatown’s innards, the place where tourists gawk but no longer buy. The shops here cater to Chinese restaurateurs and residents. At the corner, a thin Chinese man in a suit holds an umbrella, its outline framed by the neon sign in the window of the dessert shop behind him.

I flash back to the reason I hate Chinese food.

I’m sitting across from Polly at Golden Lucky Duck. It’s the night she got an empty fortune cookie. Cracked in her hand, it looks dry, like an egg without an embryo. She tells me she’s got something important to discuss. Uncharacteristically, she stutters. Polly, the polished entrepreneur with the Wharton street cred, can’t get her presentation out.

“Say something, Polly.”

The waiter returns with a replacement fortune cookie. Polly takes it and smiles sadly. “Let’s open it and find out our fate.”

Back in the present, I hear a voice: “Nathaniel?”

I look up at the neon dessert sign and it looks like it’s bending. I exhale through pursed lips.

The man with the umbrella crosses the street. After he passes, I pull over to the side, essentially parking in the crosswalk. I feel Faith’s gaze on me as I turn around to look at the Mercedes.

“Start talking. You said Alan asked you to come to the subway. You did him a favor.”

She sighs. “He asked me to make sure that you got his message. That’s it.”

“Message?”

The buzzard in the Mercedes opens his door and extends out a long leg but doesn’t get out. He’s getting air, or can’t decide his next move.

“He told me you were a journalist,” Faith continues. “He said he wanted to get your attention.”

“Why didn’t he send me an email?”

But as I’m asking, I’m struck by a theory. Maybe he tried to send an email. Maybe he had originally tried to contact me using a fake account under the name Sandy Vello. On my computer, I’d found several emails from the address [email protected]. But the emails went to spam, or I ignored them. So did Alan then jack up his efforts?

Then another theory. On the piece of paper I found on Alan’s desk, I’d seen the date 2/15. That’s two weeks from now. But it’s a month after I received an anonymous email from an account bearing Sandy Vello’s name. And that email had read, “We have one month to stop the launch.”

“Faith, what’s happening in two weeks?”

“What do you mean?”

“What’s happening February fifteenth?”

“I don’t know. And to answer your other question—about why Alan tracked you down in the subway: I got the sense he wanted to reach you anonymously but also that he thought you were more likely to respond to dramatic overture.”

“Like getting pushed under a subway?”

“I didn’t expect that. I thought he was going to hand you something or whisper something to you and then run off. I was supposed to . . . intercept you . . . to get your attention so you didn’t follow him.”

I’m looking at the shops and buildings around the Mercedes. Why did the man come here? Is he merely looking for authentic take-out dumplings or something else? What’s interesting around here?

“It’s an awfully big favor you did. You must have known him well.”

Directly next to the Mercedes, on the same side of the street, a trinket vendor closes up for the day, using a pole with a hook on the end to remove inflatable dragons from an awning dripping with drizzle. To the shop’s right is a thin three-story office building or apartment complex, or maybe a combination. Its windows are dark, except for one on the second story with blinds. To the shop’s left is a storefront with a banner written in Chinese with some English: Safe Happy Travel Agency.

“I didn’t know him well. Just a little from the café.” Faith turns in her seat so now she’s facing me and the Mercedes. I glance at her silhouetted profile.

She explains that over the last year or so, she often saw Alan hunched over his laptop, intent, sometimes even muttering to himself, not with insanity but intensity. One day, a few months ago, when they were at adjoining tables, he struck up a conversation by offering to bet her a doughnut that he could guess what she wanted to do with her life.

“It was funny, not sleazy like you sometimes get.” Left unsaid: she often gets hit on. “His guess was that I wanted to be a meteorologist.”

“Not a bad line.”

“I bought him a doughnut. My first mistake.”

I turn to look at her and find her looking right back. Shade darkens the left third of her, as if lit by a bad movie director wanting to suggest her inner darkness.

“You want to predict the weather?”

Her face softens. She blinks and smiles with her cheeks and eyes, her lips barely moving. Even in dim light, they look full and pink.

“I filled in on Channel 4 for a few weeks when the meteorologist was sick. Alan also guessed that I wanted to be a singer, which was close too. I wanted to be an actress. It kind of took it out of me when I did a few commercials for bug spray. I was supposed to be a dispirited housewife with a cockroach infestation.”

“Faith . . .”

“He called me Valerie.” She explains she reminded him of a younger Valerie Bertinelli, the actress from
One Day at a Time
. She says Alan liked the reference because it reminded him of his efforts to stay sober—one day at a time.

“So you are an actor.”

“A hobbyist. I make my living as a transition specialist.”

“Explain.”

“I help people make transitions—one job to the next, one life situation to the next. It’s a bit of a New Age gig but it paid well when things were booming here. People wanted to assess their options and make sure that they made the right choice to fit their goals. When the economy tanked, I helped people come to terms with lowered expectations.”

“Paid well, past tense.”

“Things aren’t booming. In fact, they’re so dead that people can’t afford to cope with lowered expectations.”

“You liked him. Alan?”

She clears her throat. She pulls her jacket closed. “He seemed to know a lot about me. He was uncanny that way.”

“So you followed me because he was nice and geeky and lonely and needed a favor.”

“No. Because he promised to pay me one thousand dollars and I need the money. And he kind of freaked me out, because he knew so much about me. He presented both opportunity and a subtle kind of threat; I can’t fully explain it, but it’s the truth. I’m obviously not getting paid and I don’t care. I’m sorry this happened, that you got hurt, and I’m very sorry that I just want this to all go away and to not have this man bothering me, or . . .” She pauses, and then stops altogether.

“What’s an Earth clown?”

“What?”

“Kathryn Gilkeson? Who is that?”

“I have no idea.”

“Alley.”

I’m looking across the street from the Mercedes. There is a butcher’s shop closing up for the day and a Chinese bookstore already closed. Between them is an alley with a man standing at its entrance, cupping his hands around his mouth, maybe blowing in them to keep warm. Next to the man on the side of the alley is a sign that is too distant for me to read, if it’s even in English.

The man scopes the street and takes two steps backward and disappears into the alley.

We fall into silence. I want her to continue the story but it feels like she’s said her peace or maybe we’re just tired or comfortable. Five minutes pass, then ten, more. I’m wondering why I’m not cold. I should be cold but I know concussion can mess with internal temperature regulation. We watch our buzzard. The already thin sidewalk traffic thins further. The butcher turns off his light.

I’m shaken by a buzzing noise. Faith reaches into a small purse and pulls out a phone. She looks at the bright green-and-white square of the screen, her caller ID. She clenches her jaw. She hits a button, sending the caller to voice mail. “It’s almost eight.” She puts the phone back in her purse. A second later, it buzzes again. She ignores it.

“Do you need me to step outside so you can take a call?” I’m looking at her in the pinkish light from the neon sign on the dessert store.

She cocks her head. “You’re kind.”

She leans forward, pauses, then she kisses me on the cheek. I’m flooded with a sensation that moves from the top of my concussed skull to my Achilles’ heels ragged from basketball and then zips up and settles in my loins. She pulls back, reorients slightly, and she kisses my lips, lightly, like the brush of a fingertip.

“I trust you.” Her words hover just above a whisper.

“Faith . . .”

“I just wanted to get that out of the way.”

But I’m thinking about something else. The buzzard is out of the car and walking to the alley.