The Cloud (12 page)

27

I
slither into my clothes as she sprints over and kneels by the bed onto a dull purplish carpet the color of an interred spleen. She peers and reaches under the bed and retrieves a charm bracelet.

I lean down and snag the coffee and high-tops. Hustling back, she takes my hand and pulls me toward the door. She looks at my shoeless feet. “They’ll dry. Let’s go.”

She opens the door to show the washed-out light of mid-morning in wintry San Francisco—fog central, punctuated by a drizzle. We’re on the second floor of a two-floor shithole, blue chipped paint covering the floorboards and railing. I have a vision of being here before that feels something like déjà vu and something like nausea. I’m seized by extreme vertigo and I wobble, looking down at a parking lot with a single car—mine.

“Let’s go, Nathaniel.” With a free hand, she grabs me and starts to walk quickly to the stairs.

“The sprint of shame.”

On the stairs, I feel a sharp pain on my right foot, a splinter nicking my slippery arch. I’m hobbling two steps behind Faith when we reach the Audi.

“Where and who is the mysterious stalker forcing me to leave the warm and dry place?”

“I’ll drive.” She pulls out my keys and clicks open the doors, we climb in. “Faith . . .”

“The Mercedes guy. I don’t know how, but he found me when I went out for coffee. I took a couple of quick turns and got away from him and came back for you.” She starts the car and pulls to the exit, looks left, pulls onto the street. “Maybe I should’ve left you and come back later. He’s lurking.”

“Take the one to the 280.”

“What?”

“South.”

W
e don’t speak until we hit the exit for Pacifica, a lower-rent coastal town on a hillside that waits patiently for global warming. When it comes, the fog-soaked apartment complexes will become shoreline properties and their long-suffering owners and Al Gore will be vindicated.

“Pull off,” I say.

“I thought you said . . .”

“Please.”

She exits the highway. I gesture with a nod of my head to stop by the side of the highway. I open the heavy Audi door and I dry heave. I sit with my elbows on my knees.

“I should take you to the hospital.”

I pat the tender skin around my eye. If the orbital bone is broken, there’s not a damn thing I can do about it other than trying not to continue to use my head to deflect things.

“Earth clown?” I mutter.

“What?”

I inhale coffee—instant energy, semi-clarity. A deep breath, more caffeine. I reach into my back pocket and I pull out the paper I found on Alan Parsons’s desk. On it, I locate the Chinese characters the pizza maker couldn’t quite make sense of.

I pull out my phone and call Bullseye, barmate and personal IT guy. Predictably, he doesn’t answer. He loves using devices, just not to communicate with other human beings. I leave a message. “I’ve got a mission for you. Text me a place I can fax you something.”

I bring up the menu of my voice mails and return a call to Sandy Vello. She doesn’t pick up either. I text her. “c u at the Ramp.”

A text pops onto my screen. It’s just a number, with no pleasantries. Bullseye’s fax. When I get a chance, I’ll send along the Chinese, and let him scour the Internet for an explanation.

In my phone directory, I call up the number for the offices of Andrew Leviathan. I wonder if he has any idea of the identity of a man with a sleek bald head who attended the awards luncheon, cocks his head like a buzzard, circles like one too.

I dial. A curt woman answers: “Mr. Leviathan’s office.”

“Hi. My name is Nat Idle.”

“Yes.”

“I’m a journalist who . . .”

“I’m sorry to cut you off but I refer all journalist calls to . . .”

“And I’m sorry to cut you off. Andrew just gave me an award and instructed me to call him if I had any questions.” I leave vague whether or not I am referring to questions related to the award.

“Yes, Mr. Idle. Let me take a number.”

I give the info and we hang up.

“Not to the hospital, I take it,” Faith says.

“Menlo Park.”

W
e drive in silence, in drizzle, unless I’m going nuts and seeing only phosphenes—lots of them. Consistent with a down economy, the highway isn’t crowded; it’s only bumper-to-bumper here during midday stretches when venture capitalists are funding start-ups faster than they can come up with clever names. A solid fifteen minutes pass before I speak.

“What are you doing, Faith?”

“Driving you to Menlo Park, like you asked.”

“Why are you with me right now? What could possibly be compelling you to join in a goose chase with a near stranger who keeps getting into extremely bad situations and has suffered two head wounds?”

“Your memory is really that bad?”

“It’s seen better days.”

“You don’t remember what we talked about last night?”

I remember getting slugged, going black, experiencing a drunken state, sweaty and light, realizing I was having sex—for the first time since Polly.

Faith waits for me, then continues. “You told me the man in the Mercedes is dangerous. You told me there was a connection between him and Alan, and a big Chinese company and some reality-TV burnout, and that your computer had been hacked into. You said I’m not safe and shouldn’t be alone.”

“One of my cheapest-ever pickup lines.”

“I don’t like being taken advantage of.”

“I didn’t . . .”

“Not by you. I make my own decisions about who I sleep with. You’re right about being unsafe, and I don’t like being taken advantage of by whoever is making me feel that way and I have just as much of a right as you to figure out what’s happening as you do.”

Fair enough.

“Did I say anything else of value or interest?”

“Ouch.”

“What?”

“You said ‘ouch.’ I got a little aggressive with my fingernails.”

She smiles. It would seem shy, demure, if not for the subject matter, which she’s raised.

“Sorry.” She laughs lightly. I look out the passenger-side window at the blurring greenery on the hillsides of Atherton. I don’t want her to see the degree to which she has me off balance.

“Next exit,” I say.

She pulls onto Sand Hill Road, a freeway exit that can’t but help make you feel poor. Literally seconds from the off-ramp stand a series of modest, nondescript offices that house this region’s barons, the investors who seeded Google and Facebook and the rest.

“What happened last night, Faith?”

“I told you.”

“How did we wind up together at the world-class motel?”

She explains that she watched the bald man come out from the alley and climb into his Mercedes. Fearing he’d see her, she took off, intending to return for me. And she did, but it took longer than expected because of the one-way streets in the area. Plausible enough. When she finally pulled up, she says, she saw me knocked down. She honked and watched a husky Asian man disappear into the alley.

“When I got to you, you were mumbling stuff that didn’t make sense.”

“About conspiracy?”

“About Isaac. You said you were sorry for hugging him too hard.”

She helped me to the car. It was her idea to go somewhere we couldn’t be easily tracked. She says it didn’t dawn on her until we got near the motel that I was definitely not all there.

“You talked about the first time you’d seen a dead body.”

In the present, I look out the car window and see we’re passing the Stanford Shopping Center.

“Take a left on El Camino.”

I have a vague recollection of telling her about my first anatomy class. The woman whose body we dissected had died at eighty-six years old with an interesting backstory. She’d suffered bone cancer and intended to take her own life by parachuting from a plane. Before she climbed into the airplane, she took a sedative, went to sleep and never woke up. It shook me that death can be so cruel that, even when you plan to embrace it on your terms, it can wrestle away the upper hand.

“Why would I tell you about that?”

“You were telling me you understood why I got so shaken when I saw Alan’s body.”

We pass a bookstore, a furniture store, a salad place I’ve been for a work lunch where they pride themselves on serving sixteen variations of lettuce. They frown upon the use of salad dressings, which, the menu notes, dilute the fresh, earthy flavors of the greens.

Faith says: “You don’t remember.”

I shake my head. “We’re going two blocks up on the right.”

Traffic’s thin. Faith drives cautiously; she uses her blinker to switch from the middle to the right lane, even though the nearest car, a beige Jaguar, is four car lengths ahead of us. Dull sun peeks through light clouds, a temperate winter day in the sixties.

“What did
you
tell
me
, Faith?”

“I revealed all. You don’t remember my extraordinary revelations?”

I manage a laugh. “Refresh me just a little.”

“I told you about my fascination with going to the zoo, and with the anteaters.”

“This I absolutely don’t recall. You’re sure you were talking to the guy with the head wound?”

“They can suck up thirty thousand ants a day. Nature’s vacuum.”

“That’s why they fascinate you? Bad experience at a picnic with ants?”

She clears her throat. “Because everyone’s got a purpose. No matter how different they seem.”

Oddly, something does ring familiar about the zoo, maybe because the motel was directly across the street. There’s something deeply familiar too in the way we’re talking, an emotional accord.

“I’ll give you a recap later. Do you remember telling me about your ex?”

I shake my head. Does she mean Annie or Polly?

“You told me about the night she ended it—over Chinese food and two empty fortune cookies.”

I wince. The night my life careened off the rails at a restaurant in Pacific Heights. I can see the waiter with the injured ankle limping back to our table, holding a big white plate with a fortune cookie. It’s Polly’s second cookie, the first having been devoid of a fortune. Polly, usually so composed, has tears in her eyes. I shiver at the thought of the ensuing conversation, and because I can’t remember describing it to Faith.

“Take a right here.”

Set back off El Camino, there’s a gated building made of fashionable concrete and steel. It’s accessible from the side street we’ve turned onto. On the gate, a stately sign reads: “Woodland Learning Center.” In the yard stands a woman, arms crossed, studying me.

28

“P
lease pick me up in an hour.”

Faith pulls over. She puts the car in park. “I’m joining you.”

“Nope.”

She blinks several times quickly, and bites the inside of her cheek. I smile tightly, trying not to betray how much I want to make her laugh or feel comfortable. Based on my track record with the opposite sex, whatever is going on with this enigmatic beauty, it ends very badly.

“An hour.”

“Don’t use your cell phone.”

“What?”

“Last night. Did I say anything about how someone might be monitoring our calls and emails?”

“Something to that effect.”

“If you need to call me, or someone, speak in generalities.”

I’m thinking about the evident surveillance skills of whoever hacked into my computer to suggest the premature death of Sandy Vello and, also, the man in the Mercedes. It should just be common practice nowadays: assume someone is monitoring you and act accordingly.

I step out of the car. The woman in the yard now holds open the gate. She wears a dress with flower patterns, something modest but from a bygone era of feminine attire. She’s got shoulder-length blonde hair and a tic in her right eye.

I hear Faith pull away. The woman’s eye twitches three times. She juts her chin toward the street. “That’s where Kathryn died.”

I
walk into a yard that looks like the miniaturization of an Ivy League campus. A stone walkway bisects grassy patches, the one on the right planted with a massive oak. On the side of the two-story school grow vines that are at once overgrown and chaotic and pruned to look this way. It’s no wonder this elementary school harks to hallowed institutions; in Silicon Valley, parents expect kids to matriculate directly from sixth grade to Harvard or Stanford, or else.

Jill gestures for me to sit on a bench cut from stone. It looks out on the street.

“We’re a pair.” She sits. “My nervous tic and your black eye. Did you upset someone with tough reporting?”

“Journalists are the most distrusted profession, after lawyers. It’s really not fair. Lawyers get paid so much more and can afford reconstructive eye surgery.”

The crow’s-feet beside her eyes crinkle with a slight perfunctory smile. She smoothes her dress and folds her hands on her lap.

“I’ve read about you and I trust you. But there’s not very much to tell and I can’t imagine why you or anyone would care after all these years.”

“Would you mind indulging me? I’d be much obliged.”

“She walked into the street.”

I don’t respond. It’s one of the hardest skills to learn in journalism: waiting through the moment a source wants to be prodded to the more important moment when they start to express themselves on their own terms.

“Volvo,” she finally whispers. “I never cared about cars. I could barely tell one from the next. But I had this idea that I’d like a black Volvo. They looked so sleek with a spaceship dashboard and they have this reputation for being so safe, so heavy, filled up with air bags. But that was the catch, I guess.”

I wait.

“It came around the corner. It wasn’t even going that fast.” She swallows hard. “They’re just so heavy.”

“Volvos.”

“This wasn’t a school then. It was a private home. Kathryn’s girlfriend lived here. They were playing. They weren’t chaperoned but the mom was inside, generally keeping tabs, and they were plenty old enough to know not to run into the street.”

The picture starts to form in my head and I’m both fascinated and desperate to push it away. As if she’s at a far distance, I hear Jill’s voice, faint, describe how seven-year-old Kathryn opened the swinging gate of the white picket fence, then ran into the street. A witness on the corner said the girl was laughing, carefree.

“As near as we could figure out, it was a totally impulsive act, like Kathryn was a baby again.” Jill looks at me. “You know how little kids can be, just acting on a whim, exploring their space, totally unaware of the consequences. They can take on the most terrible risks with such complete innocence.”

I feel a terrible weight on my chest, like I could suffocate. I see the phosphenes—dancing static.

“I got to talk to her before she died,” I hear Jill say. “I mean, she was alive in the hospital, but not conscious. I’m sure she heard me.”

I feel a tear slide down my right cheek, then one on my left, and I let them be.

“Are you okay?”

“I haven’t been getting much sleep.”

“There wasn’t anyone to blame. The family who lived here was so devastated and apologetic they moved to the East Coast, their own penance. The Volvo driver, a nice young man studying engineering at Stanford, refused to drive for years. There wasn’t a bad actor. Maybe that’s why my marriage fell apart; Hank and I had no common enemy, no proverbial fall guy.”

“I’m sorry.” I look down and see my fists balled tightly.

“Maybe some good came of it. This school, after all.”

“School?”

“It’s done wonders helping kids in this area who don’t have the same resources as the ritzy set. I’ll put a fine point on it: the children from East Menlo and East Palo Alto get world-class instruction, generally a free ride, and the first batch have gone on to colleges. It’s been a success story. We all couldn’t be more thankful to Andrew.”

“Andrew. Sorry, I’m having trouble keeping up.”

“I thought that’s why you were here.”

“Sorry, I’m . . .”

“Oh,” she says with some recognition. “Maybe you don’t realize the connection. I’d been working for Andy, Andrew, about two years when Kathryn was killed.”

She studies me and can see I’m still lost. A look crosses her face that suggests she’s getting lost too. My lack of comprehension is starting to unnerve her.

“Andrew Leviathan.”

“Andrew,” I repeat. “You worked for him when Kathryn . . . when it all happened.”

“I was an executive assistant. Maybe overqualified for the job. But he paid so well. He became a mentor to me, really to all of us.”

I’m swimming, the miasma of concussion mixed with shock. How did Andrew Leviathan become part of this mystery? How does the magnate who just gave me a magazine award connect to a woman and her run-down daughter and to a dead man who nearly shoved me in front of a subway?

My phone rings, a timely interruption. I look at the screen; it’s a number in the 650 area code, nearby.

“Go ahead.” Jill waves a hand.

“Hello, this is Nat.”

“Hi, this is Andrew. Leviathan. Sorry for the delay in getting back to you.”

I hold my breath, miasma swirling.

“Nathaniel?”

“Hi, Andrew.” I look at Jill as if to say speak of the devil. “This is a long shot, but I’m in the area and I’m wondering if I might have a few minutes of your time.”

“Everything okay?”

“Just ten minutes would be great.”

He pauses. “I get my afternoon mocha at Peet’s on University. I’ll be there a little after three. What’s it about? Did my check bounce?”

I force a thin laugh. “I just need to pick your brain for a story. It’ll be quick and painless and you’ll feel like your brain was hardly picked.”

“That’s remarkably vague.”

I laugh again, this time genuinely. “Being obtuse is part of my award-winning technique.”

“See you there.”

I turn to Jill. She looks at me with concern. “I hope you won’t make a big deal of this with him, with Andrew. He’s built a half dozen schools but he’s modest about his work. So if you wind up writing about his contributions, please don’t make him out to be a hero. He hates that kind of thing. Is that what you’re writing about?”

I nod, albeit absently. I look across the street. Faith sits in the Audi, reading something in her lap. I glance at my clock phone. It’s 2:15. Plenty of time to get to Andrew but there’s a stop we need to make first.

I stand. “Can we play the name game?”

She shrugs, not sure what I mean.

“Alan Parsons. Know him?”

She blinks twice, rapidly. She scratches her right shoulder. She bites the inside of her cheek.

“It rang a bell for a second but I can’t place it.” She cocks her head. “Maybe it’ll come to me. When I start talking about what happened here—the accident—it tends to override the rest of my brain.”

“Totally understandable. May I contact you again?”

“Of course.”

I turn to her, as she stands. “Can you remind me when Kathryn died?”

“Two thousand. March eleventh.”

“And how long after that did the school open?”

“In the fall. Remarkable, right? Andrew makes up his mind and he can change the world.”

She takes a few steps and opens the gate for me. “You never quite feel like you’re out of the woods—with kids.”

“How so?”

She’s distant and doesn’t respond.

“Jill?”

“Those suicides—over at Los Altos High School.”

“I don’t know about . . .”

“Three kids last year—copycats, I guess. They stepped in front of trains.”

I remember reading the speculation that the children, coming from highly educated upper-middle-class families, couldn’t cope with the intense pressure to succeed.

She says: “When I saw it, I thought: as a parent, you can never pause to celebrate. You never know when they’ll do something . . . childlike.”

She looks away. This is too much for her.

I turn back to Faith. She glances up, catches my eye, then looks down herself. I’m surrounded by people who cannot look me in my darkening, purplish eye. I doubt it’s because of the oddity I’ve become, with the swelling.

It’s because too many people in my life are lying to me, and not for the first time.