The Cloud Atlas

Gurley's theatrical glee momentarily waned. “Yes, Sergeant?” he said. “And who have you told about that?” I looked away. “No one, I take it?” He waited until I met his gaze. He looked around to see if anyone was close to us, and then threw an arm around my shoulders, hissing into my ear as we walked. “You may think your captain mad, but what have you done about it? Nothing at all, it would seem.”

“Maybe I will do something,” I said. “Sir.”

He hustled me farther from the building before he spoke again. “Maybe you will, Sergeant. But you haven't yet, and I daresay you won't. Because your case is thin, because as scared as you are, you're even more curious, and because…” He let the word hang there while he looked at me, as though waiting for me to finish the sentence. But I couldn't, so he did, speaking slowly and evenly: “…you know that lives, the lives of certain people, depend on the actions you take.” Did I know whom he was referring to? This is what his gaze now asked. I lowered my own eyes; this was my answer.

“Good,” he said, smiling once more. We started to walk. “I admit, we have had our difficulties. But I promise, dear Sergeant, that all that will be forgotten in the excitement of the days ahead.” He darted a quick look behind us, and then replaced his arm around my shoulders. “What did those fools say up at Ladd? Five days? We'd wait five days before searching the tundra for signs of sabotage, or saboteurs?”

I nodded. “Three now, I suppose.”

“Three days,” Gurley said. “Seventy-two hours to beat that major, that galoot Swift, and the rest of the Army to the waning war's greatest prize.”

“Sir,” I started.

“Belk,” Gurley said, but I persisted.

“Sir, the major was right. They probably never got to launch their balloon. And even if they did, they probably did nothing more than make some moose sick. Maybe some mice, or ravens. And that's assuming the infected fleas were able to fight their way through the tundra winds long enough to-”

Gurley put one hand to his lips, another lightly to my chest, and shut his eyes. “Sergeant Belk,” he said, and then opened his eyes. “We are no longer chasing fleas. Your captain's snare may have finally caught a spy.”

GURLEY CONTINUED speaking, with very few interruptions, for the next two hours. At least, I remember it that way. I remember him meeting me at the terminal late that morning, and I remember him dismissing me from the Quonset hut that afternoon, and I remember him talking the entire time.

I don't remember much of what he said, however. Because I learned one important piece of information early on, and after that, found it hard to focus on much of anything else he said.

Lily had told him about Saburo.

Not much, not everything, but enough. Enough to convince Gurley to venture out into the tundra in search of Saburo, and enough to insist Lily accompany him as a guide. I would come along, too, of course- one could never imagine what sort of menial or distasteful tasks might arise. In fact, Gurley wanted me to precede him and Lily to Bethel. He needed a bit of extra time to finagle Lily's passage, but I could make the most of the delay by securing supplies in Bethel and “doing a bit of sleuthing” around town to see if I could come up with any information about Saburo on my own. Gurley and Lily would follow in a day or two. Depending on the weather-and Lily-we would disappear into the bush shortly thereafter.

Replaying these memories, it seems unmistakable now to me how completely mad he was. And I don't mean madness like the kind that doctors like to cure nowadays with dollops of prettily colored pills. I mean old-fashioned, Edgar Allan Poe-type madness, incurable but for a gun placed at the temple. The words fast and steady, the volume rising and falling, the eyes darting this way and that.

Yes, that's precisely how it looks now-insanity-but to have seen it through my eyes then, you would never have thought him so sane. Missing were the theatrics, the powder-keg rage-that way he had of flushing red and trembling like he was his own private earthquake, every extremity poised to fly off in pursuit of the leg that was already gone. In its place was this calm, constant, reasoned stream of language, punctuated every so often with words that almost set me to trembling: Lily, Saburo, Lily.

She had told Gurley about Saburo. She had told him his name. She had told him that he was Japanese, a soldier, a spy. She had told him almost everything that she had told me, except-and I listened carefully-that they were lovers.