Ripper
Isabel Allende
For teenage sleuth Amanda Martín and her friends, Ripper was all just a game. But when security guard Ed Staton is found dead in the middle of a school gym, the murder presents a mystery that baffles the San Francisco police, not least Amanda’s father, Deputy Chief Martín. Amanda goes online, offering ‘The Case of the Misplaced Baseball Bat’ to her fellow sleuths as a challenge to their real-life wits. And so begins a most dangerous obsession.The murders begin to mount up but the Ripper players, free from any moral and legal restraints, are free to pursue any line of enquiry. As their unique powers of intuition lead them ever closer to the truth, the case becomes all too personal when Amanda’s mother suddenly vanishes. Could her disappearance be linked to the serial killer? And will Amanda and her online accomplices solve the mystery before it’s too late?
Copyright (#ulink_14aa7327-e40c-58e8-8eae-6d16696fea02)
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014
Copyright © Isabel Allende 2014
Translation copyright © Isabel Allende
Originally published in Spain in 2014 by Random House Mondadori under the title El juego de Ripper
Isabel Allende asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780007548941
Ebook Edition © January 2014 ISBN: 9780007548965
Version: 2015-02-02
Dedication (#ulink_144089d5-b6f1-56f7-842d-a3a67e8ed125)
To William C. Gordon, my partner in love and crime
Contents
Copyright (#ulink_02cf9edd-c26f-562a-bbba-97bc90fa7724)
Dedication (#ulink_d84a1cd3-e995-5f7f-a6b4-7695b91a226d)
Mom is still alive, but (#ulink_0a432933-fbe8-5d90-88ad-58626d1506f9)
January (#ulink_d82fe2a3-afca-57d3-bf97-e506c725ed32)
Monday, 2 (#ulink_c4879461-847b-5704-8195-d8ea869750af)
Tuesday, 3 (#ulink_c5b9fbd3-a88f-5195-a67e-e72f5b9eedae)
Wednesday, 4 (#ulink_76615159-2b28-5bab-9fbe-13e6ba2106b0)
Thursday, 5 (#ulink_0a693c97-7660-510c-9535-a773017d50ac)
Saturday, 7 (#ulink_f5de7ef6-e362-567d-bcdd-8fd3dc74e5cb)
Sunday, 8 (#ulink_afc7abbd-25fe-5166-af43-aa38fda286e7)
Monday, 9 (#ulink_a73e9e5f-2f39-5f75-b8b5-d0cbbb0d84dd)
Tuesday, 10 (#ulink_62204068-4470-5a8f-84bd-814b33c06cbb)
Wednesday, 11 (#ulink_8079a901-e31a-580a-9e02-fb38cff81413)
Friday, 13 (#ulink_7e705fd2-764f-5f07-8d15-15439c70d620)
Sunday, 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Monday, 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Friday, 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Sunday, 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Wednesday, 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Thursday, 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Saturday, 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Monday, 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Tuesday, 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
February (#litres_trial_promo)
Thursday, 2 (#litres_trial_promo)
Saturday, 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Sunday, 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Tuesday, 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Friday, 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Saturday, 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Monday, 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Tuesday, 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Thursday, 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Friday, 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Saturday, 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Sunday, 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Monday, 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Friday, 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Saturday, 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Tuesday, 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
March (#litres_trial_promo)
Friday, 2 (#litres_trial_promo)
Sunday, 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Monday, 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Friday, 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Sunday, 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Saturday, 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Monday, 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Saturday, 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Monday, 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Saturday, 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
April (#litres_trial_promo)
Sunday, 1 (#litres_trial_promo)
Tuesday, 3 (#litres_trial_promo)
Wednesday, 4 (#litres_trial_promo)
Thursday, 5 (#litres_trial_promo)
Friday, 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
Saturday, August 25, 2012 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Isabel Allende (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Mom is still alive, but (#ulink_e77c4c43-8b45-5f91-90b4-931f68949a93) she’s going to be murdered at midnight on Good Friday,” Amanda Martín told the deputy chief, who didn’t even think to question the girl; she’d already proved she knew more than he and all his colleagues in Homicide put together. The woman in question was being held at an unknown location somewhere in the seven thousand square miles of the San Francisco Bay Area; if they were to find her alive, they had only a few hours, and the deputy chief had no idea where or how to begin.
They referred to the first murder as the Case of the Misplaced Baseball Bat, so as not to insult the victim by giving it a more explicit name. “They” were five teenagers and an elderly man who met up online for a role-playing game called Ripper.
On the morning of October 11, 2011, at 8:15 a.m., the fourth-grade students of Golden Hills Elementary School raced into the gym to whistle blasts from their coach in the doorway. The vast, modern, well-equipped gym—built using a generous donation from a former pupil who had made a fortune in the property market before the bubble burst—was also used for graduation ceremonies, school plays, and concerts. Normally the fourth-graders would run two laps around the basketball court to warm up, but this morning they came to a shuddering halt in the middle of the hall, shocked by the grisly sight of a man sprawled across a vaulting horse, his pants pooled around his ankles, his buttocks bared, and the handle of a baseball bat inserted into his rectum. The stunned children stood motionless around the corpse until one nine-year-old boy, more daring than his classmates, bent down, ran his finger through the dark stain on the floor, and realized that it was not chocolate but congealed blood; a second boy picked up a spent bullet cartridge and slipped it into his pocket, intending to swap it during recess for a porn magazine, while a girl filmed the scene on her cell phone. Just then the coach bounded over to the little group of students, whistle trilling with every breath, and, seeing this strange spectacle—which did not look like a prank—suffered a panic attack. The fourth-graders raised the alarm; other teachers quickly appeared and dragged the children kicking and screaming from the gym, followed reluctantly by the coach. The teachers removed the baseball bat, and as they laid the corpse out on the floor, they noticed a bullet hole in the center of the victim’s forehead. They covered the body with a pair of sweatpants, closed the door, and waited for the police, who arrived precisely nineteen minutes later, by which time the crime scene had been so completely contaminated it was impossible to tell what the hell had happened.
A little later, during the first press conference, Bob Martín announced that the victim had been identified as one Ed Staton, forty-nine, a school security guard. “Tell us about the baseball bat!” a prurient tabloid journalist yelled. Furious to discover that information about the case had been leaked, which was not only humiliating to Ed Staton but possibly damaging to the reputation of the school, the deputy chief snapped that such details would be addressed during the autopsy.
“What about suspects?”
“This security guard, was he gay?”
Deputy Chief Martín ignored the barrage of questions and brought the press conference to a close, assuring those present that the Personal Crimes Division would keep the media informed of all pertinent facts in the investigation now under way—an investigation he would personally oversee.
A group of twelfth-graders from a nearby high school had been in the gym the night before, rehearsing a Halloween musical involving zombies and rock ’n’ roll, but they did not find out what had happened until the following day. By midnight—some hours before the crime was committed, according to police—there was no one in the school building. Three teenagers in the parking lot, loading their instruments into a van, had been the last people to see Ed Staton alive. In their statements they said that the guard had waved to them before driving off in a small car at about twelve thirty. Although they were some way off, and there was no lighting in the parking lot, they had clearly recognized Staton’s uniform in the moonlight, but could not agree on the color or make of the car he was driving or whether anyone had been in the vehicle with him. The police quickly worked out that it was not the victim’s car, since Staton’s silver-gray SUV was parked a few yards from the band’s van. It was suggested that Staton had driven off with someone who was waiting for him, and who came back to the school later to pick up his car.
At a second press conference, the deputy chief of the Personal Crimes Division explained that the guard was not due to finish his shift until 6:00 a.m., and that they had no information about why he had left the school that night, returning later only to find death lying in wait. Martín’s daughter Amanda, who was watching the press conference on TV, phoned her father to correct him: it was not death that had been lying in wait for Ed Staton, but a murderer.
For the Ripper players, this first murder was the start of what would become a dangerous obsession. The questions they were faced with were those that also puzzled the police: Where did the guard go in the brief period between being seen by the band members and the estimated time of death? How did he get back to the school? Why had the guard not tried to defend himself before being shot through the head? What was the significance of a baseball bat being inserted into such an intimate orifice?
Perhaps Ed Staton had deserved his fate, but the kids who played Ripper were not interested in moral issues; they focused strictly on the facts. Up to this point the game had revolved around fictional nineteenth-century crimes in a fog-shrouded London where characters were faced with scoundrels armed with axes and icepicks, archetypal villains intent on disturbing the peace of the city. But when the players agreed to Amanda Martín’s suggestion that they investigate murders in present-day San Francisco—a city no less shrouded in fog—the game took on a more realistic dimension. Celeste Roko, the famous astrologer, had predicted a bloodbath in the city, and Amanda decided to take this unique opportunity to put the art of divination to the test. To do so she enlisted the help of the other Ripper players and her best friend, Blake Jackson—her grandfather, coincidentally—little suspecting that the game would turn violent and that her mother, Indiana Jackson, would number among its victims.
The kids who played Ripper were a select group of freaks and geeks from around the world who had first met up online to hunt down and destroy the mysterious Jack the Ripper, tackling obstacles and enemies along the way. As games master, Amanda was responsible for plotting these adventures, carefully bearing in mind the strengths and weaknesses of the players’ alter egos.
A boy in New Zealand who had been paralyzed by an accident and was confined to a wheelchair—but whose mind was still free to explore fantastical worlds, to live in the past or in the future—created the character of Esmeralda, a cunning and curious gypsy girl. A shy, lonely teenager who lived with his mother in New Jersey, and who for two years now had left his bedroom only to go to the bathroom, played Sir Edmond Paddington, a bigoted, cantankerous retired English colonel—an invaluable character, since he was an expert in weapons and military strategy. A nineteen-year-old girl in Montreal who had spent much of her short life in the hospital suffering from an eating disorder, had created Abatha, a psychic capable of reading minds, manipulating memories, and communicating with the dead. A thirteen-year-old African American orphan with an IQ of 156 and a scholarship to an academy in Reno for gifted children decided to be Sherlock Holmes, since logic and deductive reasoning came effortlessly to him.
In the beginning, Amanda did not have her own character. Her role was simply to oversee the game and make sure players respected the rules; but given the impending bloodbath, she allowed herself to bend those rules a little. She moved the action of the game from London, 1888, to San Francisco, 2011. Furthermore—now in direct breach of the rules—she created for herself a henchman named Kabel, a dim-witted but loyal and obedient hunchback she tasked with obeying her every whim, however ridiculous. It didn’t escape her grandfather’s notice that the henchman’s name was an anagram of his own. At sixty-four, Blake Jackson was much too old for children’s games, but he agreed to participate in Ripper so he and his granddaughter would have something more in common than horror movies, chess matches, and the brainteasers they set each other—puzzles and problems he sometimes managed to solve by consulting a couple of friends who were professors of philosophy and mathematics at Berkeley.
January (#ulink_f0ae5f25-ab22-5868-b18a-2e7375162c1a)
Monday, 2 (#ulink_a5f4b890-736a-5834-bf10-80000153faf1)
Lying facedown on the massage table, Ryan Miller was dozing under the healing hands of Indiana Jackson, a first-degree Reiki practitioner, well versed in the techniques developed by the Japanese Buddhist Mikao Usui in 1922. Having read sixty-odd pages on the subject, Ryan knew that there was no scientific proof that Reiki was actually beneficial, but he figured it had to have some mysterious power, since it had been denounced by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2009 as dangerous to Christian spiritual welfare.
Indiana worked in Treatment Room 8 on the second floor of North Beach’s famous Holistic Clinic, in the heart of San Francisco’s Little Italy. The door to the surgery was painted indigo—the color of spirituality—and the walls were pale green, the color of health. A sign in copperplate script read INDIANA, HEALER, and beneath it was a list of the therapies she offered: intuitive massage, Reiki, magnet therapy, crystal therapy, aromatherapy. One wall of the tiny waiting room was decorated with a garish tapestry, bought from an Asian store, of the Hindu goddess Shakti as a sensual young woman with long raven hair, dressed all in red and adorned with golden jewels. In one hand she held a sword, in another a flower. The goddess was depicted as having many arms, and each hand held one of the symbols of her power—which ranged from a musical instrument to something that looked like a cell phone. Indiana was such a devout disciple of Shakti that she had once considered taking her name until her father, Blake Jackson, managed to convince her that a Hindu goddess’s name was not appropriate for a tall, voluptuous blond American with the looks of an inflatable doll.
Given the nature of his work and his background in the military, Ryan was a skeptic, yet he gratefully surrendered to Indiana’s tender ministrations. He left each session feeling weightless and euphoric—something that could be explained either as a placebo effect combined with his puppyish infatuation with the healer, as his friend Pedro Alarcón suggested, or, as Indiana insisted, by the fact that his chakras were now correctly aligned. This peaceful hour was the most pleasurable in his solitary existence, and Ryan experienced more intimacy in his healing sessions with Indiana than he did in his strenuous sexual gymnastics with Jennifer Yang, the most regular of his lovers. He was a tall, heavyset man with the neck and shoulders of a wrestler, arms as thick and stout as tree trunks, and the delicate hands of a pastry chef. He had dark, close-cropped hair streaked with gray, teeth that seemed too white to be natural, pale gray eyes, a broken nose, and thirteen visible scars, including his stump. Indiana suspected he had other scars, but she hadn’t seen him without his boxer shorts. Yet.
“How do you feel?” the healer asked.
“Great. I’m starving, though—that’s probably because I smell like dessert.”
“That’s orange essential oil. If you’re just going to make fun, I don’t know why you bother coming.”
“To see you, babe, why else?”
“In that case, my therapies aren’t right for you,” Indiana snapped.
“You know I’m just kidding, Indi.”
“Orange oil is a youthful and happy essence—two qualities you seem to lack, Ryan. And I’ll have you know that Reiki is so powerful that second-degree practitioners are capable of ‘distance healing’; they can work without the patient even being present—though I’d probably need to spend twenty years studying in Japan to get to level two.”
“Don’t even think about distance healing. Without you here, this would be a lousy deal.”
“Healing is not a deal!”
“Everyone’s got to make a living. You charge less than your colleagues at the Holistic Clinic. Do you know how much Yumiko charges for a single acupuncture session?”
“I’ve no idea, and it’s none of my business.”
“Nearly twice as much as you,” said Ryan. “Why don’t you let me pay you more?”
“You’re my friend. I’d rather you didn’t pay at all, but if I didn’t let you pay, you probably wouldn’t come back. You won’t allow yourself to be in anyone’s debt. Pride is your great sin.”
“Would you miss me?”
“No, because we’d still see each other as friends. But I bet you’d miss me. Come on, admit it, these sessions have really helped. Remember how much pain you were in when you first came? Next week, we’ll do a session of magnet therapy.”
“And a massage, please. You’ve got the hands of an angel.”
“Okay, and a massage. Now get your clothes on, I’ve got another client waiting.”
“Don’t you find it weird that almost all your clients are men?” asked Ryan, clambering down from the massage table.
“They’re not all men—I treat women too, as well as a few children. And one arthritic poodle.”
Ryan was convinced that if Indiana’s other male clients were anything like him, they paid simply to be near her, not because they had any faith in her healing methods. This was what had first brought him to Treatment Room 8, something he admitted to Indiana during their third session so there would be no misunderstandings, and also because his initial attraction had blossomed into friendship. Indiana had burst out laughing—she was well used to come-ons—and made a bet with him that after two or three weeks, when he felt the results, he would change his mind. Ryan accepted the bet, suggesting dinner at his favorite restaurant. “If you can cure me, I’ll pick up the tab, otherwise dinner is on you,” he said, hoping to spend time with her somewhere more conducive to conversation than these two cramped cubicles, watched over by the omniscient Shakti.
Ryan and Indiana had met in 2009, on one of the trails that wound through Samuel P. Taylor State Park among thousand-year-old, three-hundred-foot-high trees. Indiana had taken her bicycle on the ferry across San Francisco Bay, and once in Marin County cycled the twenty or so miles to the park as part of her training for a long bike ride to Los Angeles she planned to make a few weeks later. As a rule, Indiana thought sports were pointless, and she had no particular interest in keeping fit; but her daughter, Amanda, was determined to take part in a charity bike ride for AIDS, and Indiana was not about to let her go alone.
She had just stopped the bike to take a drink from her water bottle, one foot on the ground, when Ryan raced past with Attila on a leash. She didn’t see the dog until it was practically on top of her; the shock sent her flying, and she ended up tangled in the bike frame. Ryan apologized, helped her to her feet, and tried to straighten the buckled wheel while Indiana dusted herself off. She was more concerned about Attila than with her own bumps and bruises. She’d never before seen such a disfigured animal: the dog had scars everywhere, bald patches on its belly, and two metallic fangs worthy of Dracula in an otherwise toothless maw; one of its ears was missing, as though hacked off with scissors. She stroked the animal’s head gently and leaned down to kiss its snout, but Ryan quickly jerked her away.
“Don’t get your face too close! Attila’s a war dog.”
“What breed is he?”
“Purebred Belgian Malinois. They’re smarter and stronger than German shepherds, and they keep their backs straight, so they don’t suffer from hip problems.”
“What on earth happened to the poor thing?”
“He survived a land-mine explosion,” Ryan said, dipping his handkerchief in the cold water of the river, where a week earlier he’d watched salmon leaping against the current in their arduous swim upstream to spawn. Miller handed Indiana the wet handkerchief to dab the grazes on her legs. He was wearing track pants, a sweatshirt, and something that looked like a bulletproof jacket—it weighed forty-five pounds, he explained, making it perfect for training because when he took it off to race, he felt like he was flying. They sat among the thick, tangled roots of a tree and talked, watched over by Attila, who studied Ryan’s every move as though waiting for an order and from time to time nuzzled Indiana and discreetly sniffed her. The warm afternoon, heady with the scent of pine needles and dead leaves, was lit by shafts of sunlight that pierced the treetops like spears; the air quivered with birdsong, the hum of mosquitoes, the lapping of the creek, and the wind in the leaves; it was the perfect setting for a meeting in a romantic novel.
Ryan had been a Navy SEAL—a former member of SEAL Team Six, the unit that in May 2011 launched the assault on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. In fact, one of Ryan’s former teammates would be the one to kill the Al-Qaeda leader. When he and Indiana met, however, Ryan could not have known this would happen two years later; no one could, except perhaps Celeste Roko, by studying the movement of the planets. Ryan was granted an honorable discharge in 2007 after he lost a leg in combat—an injury that didn’t stop him continuing to compete as a triathlete, as he told Indiana. Up to this point she had scarcely looked at Ryan, focused as she was on the dog, but now she noticed that he wore only one shoe; his other leg ended in a curved blade.
“It’s called a Flex-Foot Cheetah—they model it on the way big cats run in the wild,” he explained, showing her the prosthesis.
“How does it fit?”
He hiked up the leg of his pants, and she studied the contraption fastened to the stump.
“It’s carbon fiber,” Ryan explained. “It’s so light and perfect that officials tried to stop Oscar Pistorius, a South African double amputee, from competing in the Olympics because they said his prostheses gave him an unfair advantage over other runners. This model is designed for running,” he went on, explaining with a certain pride that this was cutting-edge technology. “I’ve got other prosthetics for walking and cycling.”
“Doesn’t it hurt?”
“Sometimes. But there’s other stuff that hurts more.”
“Like what?”
“Things from my past. But that’s enough about me—tell me about you.”
“Sorry, but I haven’t got anything as interesting as a bionic leg,” Indiana confessed, “and I’ve only got one scar, which I’m not going to show you. As a kid, I fell on my butt on some barbed wire.”
Indiana and Ryan sat in the park, chatting about this and that under the watchful eye of Attila. She introduced herself—half joking, half serious—by telling him she was a Pisces, her ruling planet was Neptune, her lucky number 8, her element water, and her birthstones, silver-gray moonstone, which nurtures intuitive power, and aquamarine, which encourages visions, opens the mind, and promotes happiness. Indiana had no intention of seducing Ryan; for the past four years she had been in love with a man named Alan Keller and had chosen the path of fidelity. Had she wanted to seduce him, she would have talked about Shakti, goddess of beauty, sex, and fertility, since the mere mention of these attributes was enough to overcome the scruples of any man—Indiana was heterosexual—if her voluptuous body were not enough. Indiana never mentioned that Shakti was also the divine mother, the primordial life force, the sacred feminine—as these roles tended to put men off.
Usually Indiana didn’t tell men that she was a healer by profession; she had met her fair share of cynics who listened to her talk about cosmic energy with a condescending smirk while they stared at her breasts. But somehow she sensed she could trust this Navy SEAL, so she gave him a brief account of her methods, though when put into words they sounded less than convincing even to her ears. To Ryan it sounded more like voodoo than medicine, but he pretended to be interested—the information gave him a perfect excuse to see her again. He told her about the cramps he suffered at night, the spasms that could sometimes bring him to a standstill in the middle of a race. Indiana prescribed a course of therapeutic massage and a diet of banana and kiwifruit smoothies.
They were so caught up in the moment that the sun had already begun to set when Indiana realized that she was going to miss the ferry back to San Francisco. She jumped to her feet and said good-bye, but Ryan, explaining that his van was just outside the park, offered to give her a ride—after all, they lived in the same city. The van had a souped-up engine, oversize wheels, a roof rack, a bicycle rack, and a tasseled pink velvet cushion for Attila that neither Ryan nor his dog had chosen—Ryan’s girlfriend Jennifer Yang had given it to him in a fit of Chinese humor.
Three days later, unable to get Indiana out of his mind, Ryan turned up at the Holistic Clinic just to see the woman with the bicycle. She was the polar opposite of the usual subjects of his fantasies: he preferred slim Asian women like Jennifer Yang, who besides having perfect features—ivory skin, silken hair, and a bone structure to die for—was also a high-powered banker. Indiana, on the other hand, was a big-boned, curvaceous, good-hearted typical American girl of the type that usually bored him. Yet for some inexplicable reason he found her irresistible. “Creamy and delicious” was how he described her to Pedro Alarcón, adjectives more appropriate to high-cholesterol food, as his friend pointed out. Shortly after Ryan introduced them, Alarcón commented that Indiana, with her ample diva’s bosom, her blond mane, her sinuous curves and long lashes, had the larger-than-life sexiness of a gangster’s moll from a 1970s movie, but Ryan didn’t know anything about the goddesses who’d graced the silver screen before he was born.
Ryan was somewhat surprised by the Holistic Clinic—having expected a sort of Buddhist temple, he found himself standing in front of a hideous three-story building the color of guacamole. He didn’t know that it had been built in 1940 and for years attracted tourists who flocked to admire its art-deco style and its stained-glass windows, inspired by Gustav Klimt, but that in the earthquake of 1989 its magnificent facade had collapsed. Two of the windows had been smashed, and the remaining two had since been auctioned off, to be replaced with those tinted glass windows the color of chicken shit favored by button factories and military barracks. Meanwhile, during one of the building’s many misguided renovations, the geometric black-and-white-tiled floor had been replaced with linoleum, since it was easier to clean. The decorative green granite pillars imported from India and the tall lacquered double doors had been sold to a Thai restaurant. All that remained of the clinic’s former glory was the wrought-iron banister on the stairs and two period lamps that, if they had been genuine Lalique, would probably have suffered the same fate as the pillars and the doors. The doorman’s lodge had been bricked up, and twenty feet lopped off the once bright, spacious lobby to build windowless, cavelike offices. But as Ryan arrived that morning, the sun shimmered on the yellow-gold windows, and for a magical half hour the space seemed suspended in amber, the walls dripping caramel and the lobby fleetingly recovering some of its former splendor.
Ryan went up to Treatment Room 8, prepared to agree to any therapy, however bizarre. He half expected to see Indiana decked out like a priestess; instead she greeted him wearing a white coat and a pair of white clogs, her hair pulled back into a ponytail and tied with a scrunchie. There was nothing of the sorceress about her. She got him to fill out a detailed form, then took him back out into the corridor and had him walk up and down to study his gait. Only then did she tell him to strip down to his boxer shorts and lie on the massage table. Having examined him, she discovered that one of his hips was slightly higher than the other, and his spine had a minor curvature—unsurprising in a man with only one leg. In addition she diagnosed an energy blockage in the sacral chakra, knotted shoulder muscles, tension and stiffness in the neck, and an exaggerated startle reflex. In a word, he was still a Navy SEAL.
Indiana assured him that some of her therapies would be helpful, but that if he wanted them to be successful, he had to learn to relax. She recommended acupuncture sessions with Yumiko Sato, two doors down, and without waiting for him to agree, picked up the phone and made an appointment for him with a Qigong master in Chinatown, five blocks from the Holistic Clinic. It was only to humor her that Ryan agreed to these therapies, but in both cases he was pleasantly surprised.
Yumiko Sato, a person of indeterminate age and gender who had close-cropped hair like his own, thick glasses, a dancer’s delicate fingers, and a sepulchral serenity, took his pulse and arrived at the same diagnosis as Indiana. Ryan was advised that acupuncture could be used to treat his physical pain, but it would not heal the wounds in his mind. He flinched, thinking he had misheard. The phrase intrigued him, and some months later, after they had established a bond of trust, he asked Yumiko what she had meant. Yumiko Sato said simply that only fools have no mental wounds.
Ryan’s Qigong lessons with Master Xai—who was originally from Laos and had a beatific face and the belly of a Laughing Buddha—were a revelation: the perfect combination of balance, breathing, movement, and meditation. It was the ideal exercise for body and mind, and Ryan quickly incorporated it into his daily routine.
Indiana didn’t manage to cure the spasms within three weeks as promised, but Ryan lied so he could take her out and pay for dinner, since by then he’d realized that financially she was bordering on poverty. The bustling yet intimate restaurant, the French-influenced Vietnamese food, and the bottle of Flowers pinot noir all played a part in cementing a friendship that in time Ryan would come to think of as his greatest treasure. He had lived his life among men. The fifteen Navy SEALs he’d trained with when he was twenty were his true family; like him they were inured to rigorous physical exertion, to the terror and exhilaration of war, to the tedium of hours spent idle. Some of his comrades, he had not seen in years, others he had seen only a few months earlier, but he kept in touch with them all; they would always be his brothers.
Before he lost his left leg, the navy vet’s relationships with women had been uncomplicated: sexual, sporadic, and so brief that the features of these women blurred into a single face that looked not unlike Jennifer Yang’s. They were usually just flings, and when from time to time he did fall for someone, the relationship never lasted. His life—constantly on the move, constantly fighting to the death—did not lend itself to emotional attachments, much less to marriage and children. He fought a constant war against his enemies, some real, others imaginary; this was how he had spent his youth.
In civilian life Ryan was awkward, a fish out of water. He found it difficult to make small talk, and his long silences sometimes seemed insulting to people who didn’t know him well. The fact that San Francisco was the center of a thriving gay community meant it was teeming with beautiful, available, successful women very different from the girls Ryan was used to encountering in dive bars or hanging around the barracks. In the right light, Ryan could easily pass for handsome, and his disability—aside from giving him the martyred air of a man who has suffered for his country—offered a good excuse to strike up a conversation. He was never short of offers, but when he was with the sort of intelligent woman he found attractive, he worried so much about making a good impression that he ended up boring them. No California woman would rather spend the evening listening to war stories, however heroic, than go clubbing—no one, that is, except Jennifer Yang, who had inherited not only the infinite patience of her ancestors in the Celestial Empire but also the ability to pretend she was listening when actually she was thinking about something else. Yet from the very first time they met among the sequoias in Samuel P. Taylor State Park, Ryan had felt comfortable with Indiana Jackson. A few weeks later, at the Vietnamese restaurant, he realized he didn’t need to rack his brains for things to talk about; half a glass of wine was all it took to loosen Indiana’s tongue. The time flew by, and when he checked his watch, Ryan saw it was past midnight and the only other people in the restaurant were two Mexican waiters clearing tables with the disgruntled air of men who had finished their shift and were anxious to get home. It was on that night, three years ago, that Ryan and Indiana had become firm friends.
For all his initial skepticism, after three or four months the ex-soldier was forced to admit that Indiana was not just some crazy New Age hippie; she genuinely had the gift of healing. Her therapies relaxed him; he slept more soundly, and the cramps and spasms had all but disappeared. But the most wonderful thing about their sessions together was the peace they brought him: her hands radiated affection, and her sympathetic presence stilled the voices from his past.
As for Indiana, she came to rely on this strong, silent friend, who kept her fit by forcing her to jog the endless paths and forest trails in the San Francisco area, and bailed her out when she had financial problems and couldn’t bring herself to approach her father. They got along well, and though the words were never spoken, she sensed that their friendship might have blossomed into a passionate affair if she wasn’t still hung up on her elusive lover Alan, and Ryan wasn’t so determined to push away love in atonement for his sins.
The summer her mother met Ryan Miller, Amanda Martín had been fourteen, though she could have passed for ten. She was a skinny, gawky girl with thick glasses and a retainer who hid from the unbearable noise and glare of the world behind her mop of hair or the hood of her sweatshirt; she looked so unlike her mother that people often asked if she was adopted. From the first, Ryan treated Amanda with the exaggerated courtesy of a Japanese gentleman. He made no effort to help her during their long bike ride to Los Angeles, although, being an experienced triathlete, he had helped her to train and prepare for the trip, something that won him the girl’s trust.
One Friday morning at seven, all three of them—Indiana, Amanda, and Ryan—set off from San Francisco with two thousand other keen cyclists wearing red AIDS awareness ribbons, escorted by a procession of cars and trucks filled with volunteers transporting tents and provisions. They arrived in Los Angeles the following Friday, their butts red-raw, their legs stiff, and their minds as free of thoughts as newborn babes. For seven days they had pedaled up hills and along highways, through stretches of beautiful countryside and others of hellish traffic. To Ryan—for whom a daily fifteen-hour bike ride was a breeze—the ride was effortless, but to mother and daughter it felt like a century of agonizing effort, and they only got to the finish line because Ryan was there, goading them like a drill sergeant whenever they flagged and recharging their energy with electrolyte drinks and energy bars.
Every night, like an exhausted flock of migrating birds, the two thousand cyclists descended on the makeshift campsites erected by the volunteers along the route, wolfed down five thousand calories, checked their bicycles, showered in trailers, and rubbed their calves and thighs with soothing ointment. Before they went to sleep, Ryan applied hot compresses to Indiana and Amanda and gave them little pep talks about the benefits of exercise and fresh air.
“What has any of this got to do with AIDS?” asked Indiana on the third day, having cycled for ten hours, weeping from sheer exhaustion and for all the woes in her life. “What do I know?” was Ryan’s honest answer. “Ask your daughter.”
The ride may have made only a modest contribution to the fight against AIDS, but it cemented the budding friendship between Ryan and Indiana, while for Amanda it led to something impossible: a new friend. This girl, who looked set to become a hermit, had precisely three friends in the world: her grandfather, Blake Jackson; Bradley, her future boyfriend; and now Ryan Miller, the Navy SEAL. The kids she played Ripper with didn’t fall into the same category; she only knew them within the context of the game, and their relationship was entirely centered around crime.
Tuesday, 3 (#ulink_80c0e220-29d5-5350-9bfd-47bc8f75c8a7)
Amanda’s godmother, Celeste Roko, the most famous astrologer in California, made her “bloodbath” prediction the last day of September 2011. Her daily show aired early, before the morning weather forecast, and repeated after the evening news. At fiftysomething, thanks to a little nip and tuck, Roko looked good for her age. Charming on screen and a dragon in person, she was considered beautiful and elegant by her many admirers. She looked like Eva Perón with a few extra pounds. The set for her TV show featured a blown-up photo of the Golden Gate Bridge behind a fake picture window and a huge model of the solar system, with planets that could light up and be moved by remote control.
Psychics, astrologers, and other practitioners of the mysterious arts tend to make their predictions on New Year’s Eve, but Madame Roko could not bring herself to wait three months before warning the citizens of San Francisco of the horrors that lay in store for them. Her prophecy was of such magnitude that it captured the public imagination, went viral on the Internet. Her pronouncement provoked scathing editorials in the local press and hysterical headlines in the tabloids, speculating about terrible atrocities at San Quentin State Prison, gang warfare between blacks and Latinos, and an apocalyptic earthquake along the San Andreas Fault. But Celeste Roko, who exuded an air of infallibility thanks to a former career as a Jungian analyst and an impressive number of accurate predictions, was adamant that her vision concerned murders. This provoked a collective sigh of relief among devotees of astrology, since it was the least dreadful of the calamities they had feared. In northern California, the chance of being murdered was one in twenty thousand; it was, everyone believed, a crime that happened to other people.
It was on the day of this prediction that Amanda and her grandfather finally decided to challenge the power of Celeste Roko. They were sick and tired of the influence Amanda’s godmother wielded over the family by pretending that she could foretell the future. Madame Roko was a temperamental woman with the unshakable belief in herself common to those who receive direct messages from the universe or from God. She never managed to sway Blake Jackson, who would have no truck with astrology, but Indiana always consulted Celeste before making important decisions, allowing her life to be guided by the dictates of her horoscope. All too often Celeste Roko’s astrological readings thwarted Amanda’s best-laid plans. When she was younger, for example, the planets had deemed it an inauspicious moment to buy a skateboard but a propitious time to take up ballet—which left Amanda in a pink tutu, sobbing with humiliation.
When she turned thirteen, Amanda discovered that her godmother was not in fact infallible. The planets had apparently decided that Amanda should go to a public high school, but Encarnación Martín, her formidable paternal grandmother, insisted she attend a Catholic boarding school. For once Amanda sided with Celeste, since a co-ed school seemed slightly less terrifying than being taught by nuns. But Doña Encarnación triumphed over Celeste Roko—by producing a check for the tuition fees. Little did she suspect that the nuns would turn out to be feminists in pants who challenged the pope, and used science class to demonstrate the correct use of a condom with the aid of a banana.
Encouraged by the skepticism of her grandfather, who rarely dared to directly challenge Celeste, Amanda questioned the relationship between the heavenly bodies and the fates of human beings; to her, astrology seemed as much mumbo-jumbo as her mother’s white magic. Celeste’s most recent prognostication offered grandfather and granddaughter a perfect opportunity to refute the predictive powers of the stars. It is one thing to announce that the coming week is a favorable one for letter-writing, quite another to predict a bloodbath in San Francisco. That’s not something that happens every day.
When Amanda, her grandfather, and her online buddies transformed Ripper from a game into a criminal investigation, they could never have imagined what they were getting themselves into. Precisely eleven days after Celeste Roko’s pronouncement, Ed Staton was murdered. This might have been considered a coincidence, but given the unusual nature of the crime—the baseball bat—Amanda began to put together a case file using information published in the papers, what little she managed to wheedle out of her father, who was conducting the investigation, and whatever her grandfather could dig up.
Blake Jackson was a pharmacist by profession, a book lover, and a frustrated writer until he finally took the opportunity to chronicle the tumultuous events predicted by Celeste Roko. In his novel, he described his granddaughter Amanda as “idiosyncratic of appearance, timorous of character, but magnificent of mind”—his baroque use of language distinguishing him from his peers. His account of these fateful events would end up being much longer than he expected, even though—excepting a few flashbacks—it spanned a period of only three months. The critics were vicious, dismissing his work as magical realism—a literary style deemed passé—but no one could prove he had distorted the events to make them seem supernatural, since the San Francisco Police Department and the daily newspapers documented them.
In January 2012, Amanda Martín was sixteen and a high school senior. As an only child, Amanda had been dreadfully spoiled, but her grandfather was convinced that when she graduated from high school and went out into the world that would sort itself out. She was vegetarian now only because she didn’t have to cook for herself; when she was forced to do so, she would be less persnickety about her diet. From an early age Amanda had been a passionate reader, with all the dangers such a pastime entails. Although the San Francisco murders would have been committed in any case, Amanda would not have been involved if an obsession with Scandinavian crime novels had not developed into a morbid interest in evil in general and premeditated murder in particular. Though her grandfather was no advocate of censorship, it worried him that Amanda was reading books like this at fourteen. His granddaughter put him in his place by reminding him that he was reading them too, so all Blake Jackson could do was give her a stern warning about their content—which of course made her all the more curious. The fact that Amanda’s father was deputy chief of the homicide detail in San Francisco’s Personal Crimes Division fueled her obsession; through him she discovered how much evil there was in this idyllic city, which could seem immune to it. But if heinous crimes happened in enlightened countries like Sweden and Norway, there was no point in expecting things to be different in San Francisco—a city founded by rapacious prospectors, polygamous preachers, and women of easy virtue, all lured by the gold rush of the mid-nineteenth century.
Amanda went to an all-girls boarding school—one of a handful that still remained since America had opted for the muddle of mixed education—at which she had somehow survived for four years by managing to be invisible to her classmates, although not to the teachers and the few nuns who still worked there. She had an excellent grade-point average, although the sainted sisters never saw her open a textbook and knew she spent most nights staring at her computer, engrossed in mysterious games, or reading unsavory books. They never dared to ask what she was reading so avidly, suspecting that she read the very books they enjoyed in secret. Only the girl’s questionable reading habits could explain her morbid fascination for guns, drugs, poison, autopsies, methods of torture, and means of disposing of dead bodies.
Amanda closed her eyes and took a deep breath of fresh winter-morning air. The smell of pine needles told her that they were driving through the park; the stench of dung, that they were passing the riding stables. Thus she could calculate that it was exactly 8:23 a.m. She had given up wearing a watch two years earlier so she could train herself to tell time instinctively, the same way she calculated temperature and distance; she’d also refined her sense of taste so that she could distinguish suspect ingredients in her food. She cataloged people by scent: her grandfather, Blake, smelled of gentleness—a mixture of wool sweaters and chamomile; Bob, her father, of strength—metal, tobacco, and aftershave; Bradley, her boyfriend, of sensuality, sweat and chlorine; and Ryan smelled of reliability and confidence, a doggy aroma that was the most wonderful fragrance in the world. As for her mother Indiana, steeped in the essential oils of her treatment room, she smelled of magic.
After her grandfather’s spluttering ’95 Ford passed the stables, Amanda mentally counted off three minutes and eighteen seconds, then opened her eyes and saw the school gates. “We’re here,” said Jackson, as though this fact might have escaped her notice. Her grandfather, who kept fit playing squash, took Amanda’s heavy schoolbag and nimbly bounded up to the second floor while she trudged after him, violin in one hand, laptop in the other. The dorm room was deserted: since the new semester did not begin until tomorrow morning, the rest of the boarders would not be back from Christmas vacation until tonight. This was another of Amanda’s manias: wherever she went, she had to be the first to arrive so she could reconnoiter the terrain before potential enemies showed up. Amanda found it irritating to have to share the dorm room with others—their clothes strewn across the floor, their constant racket; the smells of shampoo, nail polish, and stale candy; the girls’ incessant chatter, their lives like some corny soap opera filled with jealousy, gossip, and betrayal from which she felt excluded.
“My dad thinks that Ed Staton’s murder was some sort of gay revenge killing,” Amanda told her grandfather before he left.
“What’s he basing that theory on?”
“On the baseball bat shoved—you know where,” Amanda said, blushing to her roots as she thought of the video she’d seen online.
“Let’s not jump to conclusions, Amanda. There’s still a lot we don’t know.”
“Exactly. Like, how did the killer get in?”
“Ed Staton was supposed to lock the doors and set the alarm when he started his shift,” said Blake. “Since there was no sign of forced entry, we have to assume the killer hid in the school before Staton locked up.”
“But if the murder really was premeditated, why didn’t the guy kill Staton before he drove off? He couldn’t have known Staton intended to come back.”
“Maybe it wasn’t premeditated. Maybe someone sneaked into the school intending to rob the place, and Staton caught him in the act.”
“Dad says that in all the years he’s worked in homicide, though he’s seen murderers who panicked and lashed out violently, he’s never come across a murderer who took the time to hang around and cruelly humiliate his victim.”
“What other pearls of wisdom did Bob come up with?”
“You know what Dad’s like—I have to surgically extract every scrap of information from him. He doesn’t think it’s an appropriate subject for a girl my age. Dad’s a troglodyte.”
“He’s got a point, Amanda. This whole thing is a bit sordid.”
“It’s public domain, it was on TV, and if you think you can handle it, there’s a video on the Internet some little girl shot on her cell phone.”
“Jeez, that’s cold-blooded. Kids these days are so used to violence that nothing scares them. Now, back in my day . . .” Jackson trailed off with a sigh.
“This is your day! It really bugs me when you talk like an old man. So, have you checked out the juvenile detention center, Kabel?”
“I’ve got work to do—I can’t just leave the drugstore unattended. But I’ll get to it as soon as I can.”
“Well, hurry up, or I might just find myself a new henchman.”
“You can try! I’d like to see anyone else who’s prepared to put up with you.”
“You love me, Gramps?”
“Nope.”
“Me neither,” Amanda said, and flung her arms around his neck.
Blake Jackson buried his nose in his granddaughter’s mane of frizzy hair, which smelled of salad—she washed it with vinegar—and thought about the fact that in a few months she would be off to college, and he would no longer be around to protect her. He missed her already, and she had not even left yet. He flicked through fleeting memories of her short life, back to an image of the sullen, skeptical little girl who would spend hours hiding in a makeshift tent of bedsheets where no one was admitted except Save-the-Tuna, the invisible friend who followed her around for years, her cat Gina, and sometimes Blake himself, when he was lucky enough to be invited to drink make-believe tea from tiny plastic cups.
Where on earth does she get it from? Blake Jackson had wondered when Amanda—aged six—first beat him at chess. It could hardly be from Indiana, who floated in the stratosphere preaching love and peace half a century after the hippies had died out, and it wasn’t from Bob Martín, who had never finished a book in his life. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it,” said Celeste Roko, who had a habit of showing up unannounced, and who terrified Blake Jackson almost as much as the devil himself. “Lots of kids are precocious at that age, but it doesn’t last. Just wait till her hormones kick in, and she’ll nosedive to the usual level of teenage stupidity.”
But in this case the psychic had been wrong: Amanda’s intelligence had continued to develop throughout her teenage years, and the only impact her hormones had was on her appearance. At puberty she grew quickly, and at fifteen she got contact lenses to replace her glasses, had her retainer removed, learned to tame her shock of curly hair, and emerged as a slim young woman with delicate features, her father’s dark hair, and her mother’s pale skin, a young woman who had no idea how beautiful she was. At seventeen she still shambled along, still bit her nails, and still dressed in bizarre castoffs she bought in thrift stores and accessorized according to her mood.
When her grandfather left, Amanda felt, for a few hours at least, that she was master of her own space. Three months from now she’d graduate from high school—where she’d been happy, on the whole, despite the frustration of having to share a dorm room—and soon she’d be heading for Massachusetts, to MIT, where her virtual boyfriend, Bradley, was already enrolled. He’d told her all about the MIT Media Lab, a haven of imagination and creativity, everything she had ever dreamed of. Bradley was the perfect man: he was a bit of a geek, like her, had a quirky sense of humor and a great body. His broad shoulders and healthy tan, he owed to being on the swim team; his fluorescent yellow hair to the strange cocktail of chemicals in swimming pools. He could easily pass for Australian. Sometime in the distant future Amanda planned to marry Bradley, though she hadn’t told him this yet. In the meantime, they hooked up online to play Go, talked about hermetic subjects and about books.
Bradley was a science-fiction fan—something Amanda found depressing; more often than not science fiction involved a universe where the earth had been reduced to rubble and machines controlled the population. She’d read a lot of science fiction between the ages of eight and eleven before moving on to fantasy—imaginary eras with little technology where the difference between heroes and villains was clear—a genre Bradley considered puerile and pernicious. He preferred bleak dystopias. Amanda didn’t dare tell him that she’d read all four Twilight novels and the Millennium trilogy; Bradley had no time for vampires and psychopaths.
Their romantic e-mails full of virtual kisses were also heavily laced with irony so as not to seem soppy; certainly nothing explicit. The Reverend Mother had expelled a classmate of Amanda’s the previous December for uploading a video of herself naked, spread-eagled, and masturbating. Bradley had not been particularly shocked by the story, since some of his buddies’ girlfriends had made similar sex tapes. Amanda had been a little surprised to discover that her friend was completely shaven, and that she’d made no attempt to hide her face, but she was more shocked by the hysterical reaction of the nuns, who had the reputation of being tolerant.
While she messaged Bradley online, Amanda filed away the information her grandfather had managed to dig up on the Case of the Misplaced Baseball Bat, along with a number of grisly press cuttings she’d been collecting since her godmother first broadcast her grim prophecy. The kids who played Ripper were still trying to come up with answers to several questions about Ed Staton, but already Amanda was preparing a new dossier for their next case: the murders of Doris and Michael Constante.
Matheus Pereira, a painter of Brazilian origin, was another of Indiana Jackson’s admirers. But their love was strictly platonic, since Matheus devoted all his energies to his painting. Matheus believed that artistic creativity was fueled by sexual energy, and when forced to choose between painting and seducing Indiana—who didn’t seem interested in an affair—he chose the former. In any case, marijuana kept him in a permanent state of zoned-out bliss that didn’t lend itself to amorous schemes. Matheus and Indiana were close friends; they saw each other most days, and they looked out for each other. He was constantly harassed by the police, while she sometimes had problems with clients who got too fresh, and with Deputy Chief Martín, who felt he still had the right to interfere in his ex-wife’s affairs.
“I’m worried about Amanda,” Indiana said as she massaged Matheus with eucalyptus oil to relieve his sciatica. “Her new obsession is crime.”
“So she’s over the whole vampire thing?”
“That was last year. But this is more serious—she’s fixated on real-life crimes.”
“She’s her father’s daughter.”
“I never know what she’s up to. That’s the problem with the Internet—some pervert could be grooming my daughter right now, and I’d be the last to know.”
“It’s not like that, Indi. They’re just a bunch of kids playing games. By the way, I saw Amanda in Café Rossini last Saturday, having breakfast with your ex-husband. I swear that guy’s got it in for me, Indi.”
“No, he hasn’t. Bob’s pulled strings to keep you out of jail more than once.”
“Only because you asked him. Anyway, like I was saying, Amanda and I chatted for a bit, and she told me about their role-playing game, Ripper. Did you know that in one of the murders, the killer shoved a bat—”
“Yes, Matheus, I do know,” Indiana interrupted. “But that’s just what I mean—do you really think it’s healthy for Amanda to be obsessed with gruesome things like that? Most girls her age have crushes on movie stars.”
Matheus Pereira lived in an unauthorized extension on the flat roof of the Holistic Clinic, and in practice he also acted as the building supervisor. This ramshackle shed that he called his studio got exceptionally good light for painting and for growing marijuana—which was purely for his personal use and that of his friends.
In the late 1990s, after passing through various hands, the building had been sold to a Chinese businessman with a good eye for an investment, who had the idea of turning it into one of the health and wellness centers flourishing all over California. He had the exterior painted and hung up a sign that read HOLISTIC CLINIC to distinguish it from the fishmongers in Chinatown. The people to whom he rented the units on the second and third floors, all practitioners of the healing arts and sciences, did the rest of the work. A yoga studio and an art gallery occupied the two ground-floor units. The former also offered popular tantric dance classes, while the latter—inexplicably called the Hairy Caterpillar—mounted exhibitions of work by local artists. On Friday and Saturday nights, musicians and arty types thronged the gallery, sipping complimentary acrid wine from paper cups. Anyone looking for illicit drugs could buy them at the Hairy Caterpillar at bargain prices right under the noses of the police, who tolerated low-level trafficking as long as it was done discreetly. The two top floors of the Holistic Clinic were subdivided into small consulting suites that comprised a waiting room barely big enough for a school desk and a couple of chairs, and a treatment room. Access to the treatment rooms was somewhat restricted by the fact there was no elevator in the building—a major drawback to some patients, but one that had the advantage of discouraging the seriously ill, who were unlikely to get much benefit from alternative medicine.
Matheus Pereira had lived in the building for thirty years, successfully resisting every attempt by the previous owners to evict him. The Chinese businessman didn’t even try—it suited him to have someone in the building outside office hours, so he appointed Matheus building supervisor, giving him master keys to the units and paying him a notional salary to lock up at night, turn out the lights, and act as a contact for tenants in case of emergency or if any repairs were needed.
Matheus exhibited his paintings—inspired by German Expressionism—at the Hairy Caterpillar from time to time, though they never sold. A few of his canvases also hung in the lobby, and though the anguished, misshapen figures painted in thick angry brushstrokes clashed not only with the Holistic Clinic’s last vestiges of art deco but with its new ethos of promoting physical and emotional well-being in its clients, no one dared suggest taking them down for fear of offending the artist.
“This is all down to your ex-husband, Indi,” Matheus said as he was leaving. “Where else do you think Amanda gets her morbid fascination with crime?”
“Bob’s as worried about Amanda’s new obsession as I am.”
“It could be worse, she could be taking drugs—”
“Look who’s talking!” Indiana laughed.
“Exactly! I’m an expert.”
“If you want, I can give you a ten-minute massage tomorrow between clients,” Indiana offered.
“You’ve been giving me free massages for years now, so I’ve decided—I want you to have one of my canvases!”
“No, no, Matheus!” said Indiana, managing to disguise the rising panic in her voice. “I couldn’t possibly accept. I’m sure one day your paintings will be very valuable.”
Wednesday, 4 (#ulink_7d03d7c2-43bc-5e68-9bc2-4d4e43f80685)
At 10:00 p.m., Blake Jackson finished the novel he’d been reading and went into the kitchen to fix himself some oatmeal porridge—something that brought back childhood memories and consoled him when he felt overwhelmed by the stupidity of the human race. Some novels left him feeling this way. Wednesday evenings were usually reserved for squash games, but his squash partner was on vacation this week. Blake sat down with his bowl of oatmeal, inhaling the delicate aroma of honey and cinnamon, and dialed Amanda’s cell phone number. He wasn’t worried about waking her, knowing that at this hour she would be reading. Since Indiana’s bedroom was some distance from the kitchen, there was no chance that she would overhear, but still Blake Jackson found himself whispering. It was best his daughter didn’t know what he and his granddaughter were up to.
“Amanda? It’s Kabel.”
“I recognized the voice. So, what’s the story?”
“It’s about Ed Staton. Making the most of the unseasonably warm weather—it was seventy degrees today, it felt like summer—”
“Get to the point, Kabel, I don’t have all night to chat about global warming.”
“ . . . I went for a beer with your dad and discovered a few things I thought might interest you.”
“What things?”
“The juvenile detention center where Staton worked before he moved to San Francisco was a place called Boys’ Camp, smack in the middle of the Arizona desert. He worked there for a couple years until he got canned in 2010 in a scandal involving the death of a fifteen-year-old kid. And it wasn’t the first time, Amanda—three boys have died at the facility in the past eight years, but it’s still open. Every time, the judge has simply suspended its license temporarily for the duration of the investigation.”
“Cause of death?”
“A military-style regime enforced by people who were either stupid or sadistic. A catalog of neglect, abuse, and torture. These boys were beaten, forced to exercise until they passed out, deprived of food and sleep. The boy who died in 2010 had contracted pneumonia; he was running a temperature and had collapsed more than once, and still they forced him to go on a run with the other inmates in the blazing, sweltering Arizona heat. When he collapsed, they kicked him while he was on the ground. He spent two weeks in the hospital before he died. Afterward, they discovered he had a couple of quarts of pus in his lungs.”
“And Ed Staton was one of these sadists,” concluded Amanda.
“He had a long record at Boys’ Camp. His name crops up in a number of complaints made against the facility, alleging abuse of inmates, but it wasn’t until 2010 that they fired him. Seems nobody gave a damn what happened to those poor boys. It’s like that Charles Dickens novel—”
“Oliver Twist. Come on, Kabel, cut to the chase.”
“So, anyway, they tried to hush up Staton’s dismissal, but they couldn’t—the boy’s death stirred up a hornet’s nest. But even with his reputation, Staton still managed to get a job at Golden Hills Elementary School in San Francisco. Doesn’t that seem weird to you? I mean, they must have been aware of his record.”
“Maybe he had the right connections.”
“No one took the trouble to look into his background. The principal at Golden Hills liked the guy because he knew how to enforce discipline, but a number of students and teachers I talked to said he was a bully, one of those candy-asses who grovel to their superiors and become viciously cruel the moment they get a little power. The world’s full of guys like that, unfortunately. In the end, the principal put him on the night shift to avoid any trouble. Staton’s shift ran from eight p.m. to six a.m.”
“Maybe he was killed by someone he’d bullied at this Boys’ Camp.”
“Your dad’s looking into the possibility, though he’s still clinging to the theory that the murder is gay-related. Staton was into gay porn, and he used hustlers.”
“What?”
“Hustlers—male prostitutes. Staton’s regular partners were two young Puerto Rican guys—your dad questioned them, but they’ve got solid alibis. Oh, and about the alarm in the school, you can tell the Ripper kids Staton was supposed to set it every night, only on the night in question he didn’t. Maybe he was in a hurry, maybe he planned to set it after he got back.”
“I know you’re still holding out on me,” Amanda said.
“Me?”
“Come on, Kabel, spit it out.”
“It’s something pretty weird—even your dad’s stumped by it,” said Blake Jackson. “The school gym is full of equipment—baseball bats, gloves, balls—but the bat used on Staton didn’t come from the school.”
“Don’t tell me: the bat was from some team in Arizona!”
“Like the Arizona Devils? That would make the connection to Boys’ Camp obvious, Amanda, but it didn’t.”
“So where did it come from?”
“Arkansas State University.”
According to Celeste Roko, who had studied the astrological charts of all of her friends and relatives, Indiana Jackson’s personality corresponded to her star sign, Pisces. This, she felt, explained her interest in the esoteric and her irrepressible need to help out every unfortunate wretch she encountered—including those who neither wanted nor appreciated her help. This made Carol Underwater the perfect focus for Indiana’s indiscriminate bursts of compassion.
The two women had met one morning in December 2011. Indiana was locking up her bike and, out of the corner of her eye, noticed a woman leaning against a nearby tree as though she was about to faint. Indiana rushed over, offered the woman a shoulder to lean on, led her to the Holistic Clinic, and helped her up the two flights of stairs to Treatment Room 8, where the stranger slumped, exhausted, into one of the rickety chairs in the waiting room. After she got her breath back, the woman introduced herself and explained that she was suffering from an aggressive form of cancer and that the chemotherapy was proving worse than the disease. Touched, Indiana offered to let the woman lie down on the massage table and rest for a while. In a tremulous voice, Carol Underwater said she was fine in the chair but that she would be grateful for a hot drink. Indiana left the woman and went down the street to buy a herbal tea, feeling bad that there wasn’t a hot plate in the consulting room so she could boil water. When she got back, she found that the woman had recovered a little and even put on brick-red lipstick in a pathetic attempt to smarten herself up. Pale and ravaged by the cancer, Carol Underwater looked simply grotesque, her eyes standing out like glass buttons on a rag doll. She told Indiana she was thirty-six, but the wig and the deep furrows made her look ten years older.
So began a relationship based on Carol Underwater’s misfortune and Indiana’s need to play the Good Samaritan. Indiana often offered therapies to bolster Carol’s immune system, but she always managed to find some excuse for postponing them. At first, suspecting the woman couldn’t afford to pay, Indiana offered the treatments for free, as she often did with patients in straitened circumstances, but when Carol continued to find excuses, Indi did not insist; she knew better than anyone that many people still distrusted alternative medicine.
The women shared a taste for sushi, walks in the park, and romantic comedies, and were both concerned about animal welfare. Carol—like Amanda—was a vegetarian but made an exception with sushi, while Indiana was happy just to protest against the suffering endured by battery hens and laboratory rats and the fashion industry’s use of fur. One of her favorite organizations was PETA, which a year earlier had petitioned the mayor of San Francisco to change the name of the Tenderloin district: it was inexcusable that a neighborhood should be named after a prime cut from some suffering animal; the area should be renamed after a vegetable. The mayor did not respond.
Despite the things they had in common, Indiana and Carol’s relationship was somewhat strained, with Indiana feeling she had to keep a certain distance, lest Carol stick to her like dandruff. The woman felt helpless and forsaken; her life was a catalog of rejections and disappointments. Carol saw herself as boring, with no charm, no talent, and few social skills, and suspected that her husband had only married her to get a green card. Indiana gently advised that she needed to rewrite this script that cast her as the victim, since the first step toward healing was to rid oneself of negative energy and bitterness. Instead, Indiana suggested, Carol needed a positive script, one that connected her to the oneness of the universe and to the divine light, but still Carol clung to her misfortune. Indiana sometimes worried she might be sucked into the bottomless chasm of this woman’s need: Carol phoned Indiana at all hours to whine, and waited outside her treatment room for hours to bring her expensive chocolates that clearly represented a sizable percentage of her social security check. Indiana would politely eat these, counting every calorie and with no real pleasure, since she preferred the dark chocolates flecked with chili that she shared with Alan.
Carol had no children and no family, but she did have a couple of friends Indiana never met who accompanied her to the chemotherapy sessions. Carol’s only topics of conversation were her cancer and her husband, a Colombian deported for drug dealing whom she was trying to bring back to the States. The cancer itself caused her no pain, but the poison being dripped into her veins was killing her. Carol’s skin was deathly pale, she had no energy, and her voice quavered, but Indiana nurtured the hope that she might recover—her scent was different from that of the other cancer patients Indi had treated. What’s more, Indiana’s customary ability to tune in to other people’s illnesses didn’t work with Carol, something she took as a positive sign.
One day, as they were discussing this at the Café Rossini, Carol talked about her fear of dying and her hopes that Indiana would help her—a burden Indiana felt unable to take on.
“You’re a very spiritual person, Indi,” Carol said.
Indiana laughed. “Don’t call me that! The only people I know who claim to be spiritual are sanctimonious and steal books about the occult from bookstores.”
“Do you believe in reincarnation?” Carol asked.
“I believe in the immortality of the soul.”
“I’ve frittered away this life, so if reincarnation really does exist, I’ll come back as a cockroach.”
Indiana lent Carol some books she always kept at her bedside, an eclectic mixture of tomes about Sufism, Platonism, Buddhism, and contemporary psychology, though she didn’t tell the woman that she herself had been studying for nine years and had only recently taken the first steps on the long path to enlightenment; for her to attain “plenitude of being,” and rid her soul of conflict and suffering, would take eons. Indiana hoped that her instincts as a healer would not fail her; that Carol would survive her battle with cancer and have time enough in this world to achieve the enlightenment she sought.
On that Wednesday in January, one of Indiana’s clients had canceled a Reiki and aromatherapy session, so she and Carol arranged to meet at the Café Rossini at five. It had been Carol who suggested the meeting, explaining on the phone that she’d just started radiotherapy, having had two weeks’ respite after her last course of chemo. Carol arrived first, wearing one of the usual ethnic outfits that did little to hide her angular figure and terrible posture: a cotton shift and trousers in a vaguely Moroccan style, a pair of sneakers, and lots of African seed necklaces and bracelets. Danny D’Angelo, a waiter who had served Carol on several occasions, greeted her with an effusiveness many of his customers had come to fear. Danny boasted that he was friends with half the population of North Beach—especially the regulars at the Café Rossini, where he’d been a waiter for so long that no one could remember a time before he worked there.
“Hey, girl, I gotta say that turban you got on is a lot better than that fright wig you been wearing lately,” were his first words to Carol Underwater. “Last time you were here, I thought to myself, ‘Danny, you gotta tell that girl to ditch the dead skunk,’ but in the end, I didn’t have the heart.”
“I have cancer,” said Carol, offended.
“ ’Course you do, princess, even a blind man can see that. But you could totally rock the shaved-head look—lots of women do it these days. So what can I get you?”
“A chamomile tea and a biscotti, but I’ll wait till Indiana gets here.”
“Indi’s like Mother fucking Teresa, don’t you think? I tell you, I owe that woman my life,” said Danny. He would happily have sat down and told Carol Underwater stories of his beloved Indiana Jackson, but the café was crowded and the owner was already signaling to him to hurry up and serve the other tables.
Through the window, Danny saw Indiana crossing Columbus Avenue, heading toward the café. He rushed to make a double cappuccino con panna, the way she liked it, so he could greet her at the door, cup in hand. “Salute your queen, plebs!” Danny announced in a loud voice, as he usually did, and the regulars—accustomed to this ritual—obeyed. Indiana planted a kiss on his cheek and took the cappuccino over to the table where Carol was sitting.
“I feel sick all the time, Indi, and I’ve hardly got the strength to do anything.” Carol sighed. “I don’t know what to do—all I want is to throw myself off a bridge.”
“Any particular bridge?” asked Danny as he passed their table, carrying a tray.
“It’s just a figure of speech, Danny,” snapped Indiana.
“Just saying, hon, because if she’s thinking of jumping off the Golden Gate, I wouldn’t advise it. They’ve got railings up and CCTV cameras to discourage jumpers. You get bipolars and depressives come from all over the world to throw themselves off that freakin’ bridge, it’s like a tourist attraction. And they always jump in toward the bay—never out to sea, because they’re scared of sharks.”
“Danny!” Indiana yelped, passing Carol a paper napkin to blow her nose.
The waiter wandered off with his tray, but a couple of minutes later he was hovering again, listening to Indiana try to comfort her hapless friend. She gave Carol a ceramic locket to wear around her neck and three dark glass vials containing niaouli, lavender, and mint. She explained that, being natural remedies, essential oils are quickly absorbed through the skin, making them ideal for people who can’t take oral medication. She told Carol to put two drops of niaouli into the locket every day to ward off the nausea, put a few drops of lavender on her pillow, and rub the peppermint oil into the soles of her feet to lift her spirits. Did she know that peppermint oil was rubbed into the testicles of elderly bulls in order to—
“Indi!” Carol interrupted her. “I don’t even what to think about what that must be like! Those poor bulls!”
Just at that moment the great wooden door with its beveled glass panels swung open—it was as ancient and tattered as everything in the Café Rossini—and in stepped Lulu Gardner, making her daily rounds of the neighborhood. Everyone except Carol Underwater immediately recognized the tiny, toothless old woman. Lulu was as wrinkled as a shriveled apple; the tip of her nose almost touched her chin, and she wore a scarlet bonnet and cape like Little Red Riding Hood. She’d lived in North Beach since the long-forgotten era of the beatniks and was the self-professed official photographer of the area. The curious old crone claimed she had been photographing the people of North Beach since the early twentieth century when Italian immigrants flooded in after the 1906 earthquake, not to mention snapping pictures of every famous resident from Jack Kerouac (an able typist, according to Lulu), Allen Ginsberg, her favorite poet and activist, and Joe DiMaggio, who’d lived here in the 1950s with Marilyn Monroe, to the Condor Club Girls—the first strippers to unionize, in the 1970s. Lulu had photographed them all, the saints and the sinners, watched over by the patron saint of the city, Saint Francis of Assisi, from his shrine down on Vallejo Street. She wandered around with a walking stick almost as tall as she was, clutching the sort of Polaroid camera no one makes these days and a huge photo album tucked under one arm.
There were all sorts of rumors about Lulu, and she never took the trouble to deny them. People said that though she looked like a bag lady, she had millions salted away somewhere; that she was a survivor from a concentration camp; that she’d lost her husband at Pearl Harbor. All anyone knew for certain was that Lulu was Jewish—not that this stopped her celebrating Christmas. The previous year Lulu had mysteriously disappeared, and after three weeks the neighbors gave her up for dead and decided to hold a memorial service in her honor. They set up a large photo of Lulu in a prominent place in Washington Park where people came to lay flowers, stuffed toys, reproductions of her photos, meaningful poems, and messages. At dusk the following Sunday, when a dozen people with candles had gathered to pay a reverent last farewell, Lulu Gardner showed up in the park and promptly began to photograph the mourners and ask them who had died. Feeling that she had mocked them, many of the neighbors never forgave her for still being alive.
Now the photographer stepped into the Café Rossini, weaving between the tables like a dancer to the slow blues from the loudspeakers, singing softly and offering her services. She approached Indiana and Carol, gazing at them with her beady, rheumy eyes. Before anyone could stop him, Danny D’Angelo crouched between the women, hunkering down to their level, and Lulu Gardner clicked the shutter. Startled by the flash, Carol Underwater leaped to her feet so suddenly she knocked over her chair. “I don’t want your fucking photos, you old witch!” she yelled, trying to snatch the camera from a terrified Lulu, who backed away as Danny D’Angelo intervened. Astonished by this overreaction, Indiana tried to calm her friend, while a murmur of disapproval rippled through the café’s customers, including some who had been offended by Lulu’s resurrection. Mortified, Carol slumped back into her chair and buried her face in her hands. “My nerves are shot to shit,” she sobbed.
Thursday, 5 (#ulink_4f4d0fea-4976-5eb5-bcdd-fdf47de3c826)
Amanda waited for her roommates to grow tired of gossiping about Tom Cruise’s impending divorce and go to sleep before calling her grandfather.
“It’s two a.m., Amanda, you woke me up. Don’t you ever sleep, girl?”
“Sure, in class. You got any news for me?”
“I went and talked with Henrietta Post.” Her grandfather yawned.
“The neighbor who discovered the Constantes’ bodies?”
“That’s her.”
“So why didn’t you call?” his granddaughter chided him. “What were you waiting for?”
“I was waiting for sunup!”
“But it’s been weeks since the murders. You know this all happened back in November, right?”
“Yeah, Amanda, but I couldn’t make it out there any earlier. Don’t worry, the woman remembers everything. Got a shock that scared her half to death, but every last detail of what she saw that day is burned into her brain—the most terrifying day of her life, she told me.”
“So give me the lowdown, Kabel.”
“I can’t. It’s late, and your mom will be home any minute.”
“It’s Thursday—Mom’s with Keller.”
“But she doesn’t always spend the night with him. ’Sides, I need my sleep. I can send you the notes from my conversation with Henrietta Post and what I managed to wheedle out of your father.”
“You wrote it all down?”
“One of these days, I’m going to write a novel,” said her henchman. “I jot down anything that interests me, never know what might be useful to me in the future.”
“Write your memoirs,” suggested his granddaughter. “That’s what most old codgers do.”
“Nah—it would bomb, nothing worth writing about has ever happened to me. I’m the most pitifully boring widower in the world.”
“True. Anyway, send me those notes on the Constantes. G’night, Hench. You love me?”
“Nope.”
“Me neither.”
Minutes later, the details of Blake Jackson’s interview with the key witness to the Constantes murder were in Amanda’s in-box.
On the morning of November 11 at about ten fifteen, Henrietta Post, who lived on the same street as the Constantes, was out walking her dog when she noticed that the door to their place was wide open—something unusual in that neighborhood, where they’d had trouble with gangbangers and drug dealers. Henrietta rang the doorbell, intending to warn the Constantes, whom she knew well, and when no one answered she stepped inside, calling to see if anyone was home. She wandered through the living room, where the TV was blaring, through the dining room and the kitchen, then climbed the stairs—with some difficulty, given that she’s seventy-eight and suffers from palpitations. The resounding silence made her uneasy in a house usually so bustling with life; more than once she’d had to complain about the racket.
She found the children’s bedrooms empty and shuffled down the short passageway to the master bedroom, calling out to the Constantes with what little breath she had left. She knocked three times before opening the door and poking her head in. She says the bedroom was in semi-darkness, with the shutters closed and the curtains drawn, and that it was cold and stuffy in there, as though it hadn’t been aired in days. She took a couple steps into the room, her eyes adjusting to the darkness, then quickly retreated with a mumbled apology when she saw the outline of the couple lying in the bed.
She was about to creep out quietly, but instinct told her there was something strange about the stillness of the house, about the fact that the Constantes had not answered when she called and were sound asleep in the middle of a weekday morning. She crept back into the room, fumbling along the wall for the switch, and flicked on the light. Doris and Michael Constante were lying on their backs with the comforter pulled up to their necks, utterly rigid, their eyes wide open. Henrietta Post let out a strangled cry, felt a heavy jolt in her chest, and thought her heart was about to burst. She couldn’t bring herself to move until she heard her dog barking—then she walked back along the corridor, stumbled down the stairs, and, grasping at the furniture for support, tottered as far as the phone in the kitchen.
She dialed 911 at precisely 10:29; her neighbors were dead, she said over and over, until finally the operator interrupted to ask two or three key questions and tell her to stay right where she was and not touch anything, that help was on its way. Six minutes later two patrol officers who happened to be in the neighborhood showed up, followed almost immediately by an ambulance and police backup. There was nothing the paramedics could do for the Constantes, but they rushed Henrietta Post to the emergency room with tachycardia and blood pressure that was going through the roof.
At about eleven, by which time the street had been taped off, Inspector Bob Martín arrived with Ingrid Dunn, the medical examiner, and a photographer from forensic services. Bob pulled on latex gloves and followed the medical examiner upstairs to the Constantes’ bedroom. On seeing the couple lying in the bed, he initially assumed he was dealing with a double suicide, though he would have to wait for a verdict from Dunn, who was meticulously studying those parts of the bodies that were visible, careful not to move anything. Bob let the photographer get on with his job while the rest of the forensics team showed up; then the ME had the gurneys brought up, and the couple was taken to the morgue. The crime scene might belong to the San Francisco Police Department, but the bodies were hers.
The autopsy later revealed that Doris, forty-seven, and Michael, forty-eight, had both died of an overdose of heroin injected directly into the jugular vein, and that both had had their buttocks branded postmortem.
Ten minutes later the phone woke Blake Jackson again.
“Hey, Hench, I’ve got a question.”
“Amanda, that’s it—I’ve had enough!” roared her grandfather. “I resign as your henchman!”
His words were followed by a deathly silence.
“Amanda?” ventured her grandfather after a second or two.
“Yeah?” she said, her voice quavering.
“I’m just kidding. What did you want to ask?”
“Tell me about the burn marks on their butts.”
“They were discovered at the morgue when the bodies were stripped,” her grandfather said. “I forgot to mention in my notes that they found a couple of used syringes with traces of heroin on them in the bathroom, along with a butane blowtorch that was almost certainly used to make the burns. All of it wiped clean of prints.”
“And you’re saying this just slipped your mind?! That’s vital evidence!”
“I meant to put it in, but I got sidetracked. I figure that stuff was left there on purpose, as a taunt—all neatly set out on a tray and covered with a white napkin.”
“Thanks, Kabel.”
“ ’Night, boss.”
“ ’Night, Grandpa. I won’t call again, promise. Sleep tight.”
It was one of those nights with Alan that Indiana looked forward to like a blushing bride, although they had long since established a routine in which there were few surprises, and the rhythms of their sex life were those of an old married couple. They had been together for four years: they were an old married couple. They knew each other intimately, loved each other in a leisurely fashion, and took the time to laugh, to eat, to talk. Alan would have said they made love sedately, like a couple of geriatrics; Indiana felt that for geriatrics they were pretty debauched. They were happy with the arrangement—early on they had tried out some porn-movie acrobatics that had left Indiana peeved and Alan half paralyzed; they had explored more or less everything a healthy imagination could dream up without involving third parties or animals, and had finally settled on a repertoire of four conventional positions with some variations, which they acted out at the Fairmont Hotel once or twice a week as their bodies demanded.
While they waited for the oysters and smoked salmon they had ordered from room service, Indiana recounted the tragic tale of Carol Underwater, and told Alan about Danny D’Angelo’s tactless comments. Alan knew Danny, and not only because he often met Indiana at the Café Rossini. A year ago Danny had flamboyantly thrown up in Alan’s new Lexus while Alan—at Indi’s request—was driving him to the emergency room. He’d had to have the car washed several times to get rid of the stains and the stench.
It had happened that June, after the city’s annual Gay Pride March, during which Danny had disappeared. He didn’t come in to work the next day, and no one heard from him until six days later, when some guy with a Hispanic accent phoned to tell Indiana that her friend was in a bad way, ill and alone in his apartment, and to suggest she go round and look after him, or he could wind up dead. Danny lived in a crumbling building in the Tenderloin, where even the police were afraid to venture after dark, a neighborhood characterized by booze, drugs, brothels, and shady nightclubs that had always attracted drifters and delinquents. “The throbbing heart of Sin City,” Danny called it with a certain pride, as though those living there deserved a medal for bravery. His apartment block had been built in the 1940s for sailors, but over time it had degenerated into a refuge for the destitute, the drugged-up, and the diseased. More than once Indiana had come by to bring food and medication to her friend, who often ended up a wreck after some sleazy binge.
When she got the anonymous call, Indiana once again rushed to Danny’s side. She climbed the five flights of stairs scrawled with graffiti, four-letter words, and obscene drawings, past the seedy apartments of drunkards, doddering lunatics, and rent boys who turned tricks for drugs. Danny’s room was dark and stank of vomit and patchouli oil. There was a bed in one corner, a closet, an ironing board, and a quaint little dressing table with a satin valance, a cracked mirror, and a vast collection of makeup jars. There were a dozen pairs of stilettos and two clothes racks from which the feathery sequined dresses Danny wore as a cabaret singer hung like ugly, lifeless birds. There was little natural light; the only window was caked with twenty years’ worth of grime.
Indiana found Danny sprawled on the bed, filthy and still half dressed in the French maid’s outfit he had worn to Gay Pride. He was burning up and severely dehydrated, a combination of pneumonia and the lethal cocktail of alcohol and drugs he had ingested. Each floor of the building had only one bathroom shared by twenty tenants, and Danny was too weak for Indiana to drag him there. He didn’t respond when Indiana tried to get him to sit up, drink some water, and clean himself up. Realizing she could not deal with him on her own, she called Alan.
Alan was bitterly disappointed to realize Indiana had called him only as a last resort. Her father’s car was in the shop, probably, and that son of a bitch Ryan Miller was off traveling somewhere. The tacit agreement whereby their relationship was limited to a series of romantic encounters suited him, but it somehow offended him to realize that Indiana could happily exist without him. Indiana was constantly broke—a fact she never mentioned—but whenever he offered help, she dismissed the idea with a laugh. Instead she turned to her father for help, and—though he had no proof—Alan was convinced she was prepared to accept help from Miller. “I’m your lover, not some kept woman,” Indiana would say whenever he offered to pay the rent on her consulting rooms or Amanda’s dentist’s bill. He’d wanted to buy her a Volkswagen Beetle for her birthday—a lemon-yellow one, or maybe that deep nail-polish red she loved—but Indiana dismissed the idea: public transport and her bicycle were more environmentally friendly. She refused to allow him to open a bank account in her name or give her a credit card, and she didn’t like it when he gave her clothes, thinking—rightly—that he was trying to make her over. Indiana found the expensive silk and lace lingerie he bought for her faintly ridiculous, but to make him happy she wore it as part of their erotic games. Alan knew that the moment his back was turned, she would give it to Danny, who probably appreciated it more.
Although Alan admired Indiana’s integrity, he was upset that she did not seem to need him. Being with this woman who was happier to give than to receive made him feel small, made him feel cheap. In all their years together, she had rarely asked for his help, so when she called from Danny’s apartment, he rushed to her side.
The Tenderloin district was notorious for Filipino, Chinese, and Vietnamese gangs, for robbery, assault, and murder; Alan had hardly ever set foot there, even though it was in the heart of San Francisco, only a few blocks from the banks, stores, and expensive restaurants he frequented. He still harbored a romantic, antiquated notion of the district: to him it was 1920 there, and the place was still full of gambling dens, speakeasies, boxing rings, brothels, and sundry other lowlife. He vaguely remembered that Dashiell Hammett had set one of his novels in the Tenderloin—maybe The Maltese Falcon. He did not realize that after the Vietnam War, the area had been flooded with Asian refugees drawn by cheap rents and the proximity to Chinatown; that nowadays up to ten people lived in the one-bedroom apartments. Seeing the hobos sprawled on the sidewalk with their sleeping bags and their overstuffed shopping carts, the shifty men hovering on street corners, and the toothless, disheveled women muttering to themselves, Alan realized it was probably best not to park on the street.
It took him a while to find a secure parking lot, and longer still to find Danny’s building; the street numbers had been worn away by time and weather, and he could not bring himself to ask for directions. When he finally did stumble on the place, it was even seedier and more run-down than he had expected. Drunks, drifters, and shady-looking guys lurked in the doorways or shambled along the hallways, and he worried that some thug might jump him. He walked faster, careful to look no one in the eye, suppressing the urge to hold his nose, acutely aware of how ridiculous his Italian suede shoes and his Barbour jacket must look in a place like this. The five-floor climb up to Danny’s room seemed fraught with danger, and when he finally got there, the reek of vomit stopped him in the doorway.
By the light of the bare bulb dangling from the ceiling he could see Indiana leaning over the bed, washing Danny’s face with a damp cloth. “We have to get him to the hospital, Alan,” she said quickly. “I need you to put a shirt and some pants on him.” Alan felt his throat heave and had the urge to retch, but he could not be a coward and give up, not now. Careful not to get dirty, he helped Indiana to wash and dress the delirious man. Danny was skinny, but in his present state he seemed heavy as a horse. Between them they managed to get Danny on his feet and half carried, half dragged him along the hallway to the stairwell, then step by step down to the ground floor to sneering looks from the other tenants. Outside, they sat Danny down on the sidewalk between a couple of garbage cans, and Indiana stayed with him while Alan ran the few blocks to his car. It was while Danny was spraying the backseat of the gold Lexus with vomit that it occurred to Alan they could have called an ambulance. This thought had not even crossed Indiana’s mind; calling an ambulance would cost a thousand dollars, and Danny had no medical insurance.
Danny D’Angelo spent a week in the hospital while doctors struggled to get his pneumonia, stomach infection, and blood pressure under control. Then he spent a second week staying with Indiana’s father, who reluctantly played nursemaid until Danny was strong enough to manage on his own and go back to his rathole and his job. Blake Jackson barely knew Danny D’Angelo at the time, but he collected the man from the hospital because his daughter asked him to, and gave him a bed and took care of him for the same reason.
Alan Keller had first been attracted by Indiana Jackson’s looks: a healthy, well-fed mermaid. Later he was captivated by her optimistic personality; in fact, he liked her precisely because she was the polar opposite of the skinny, neurotic women he usually dated. He would never have admitted that he was “in love”—that would be tasteless, he felt no need to put a name on what he felt. It was enough that he enjoyed the carefully prearranged, slightly predictable times they spent together. During the weekly sessions with his analyst, who, like most therapists in California, was a New York Jew and a practicing Zen Buddhist, Alan had acknowledged that he was “very fond” of Indiana, a euphemism that allowed him to avoid using the word passion, something he appreciated only in opera, where violent emotions shaped the destinies of tenor and soprano. Indiana’s beauty inspired in him an aesthetic pleasure more constant than sexual desire, her freshness moved him, and her admiration for him had become an addictive drug he would find difficult to give up. And yet he was constantly reminded of the gulf that separated them. She was from a lower class. The curvaceous body and shameless sensuality he so loved in private was embarrassing when they were in public. Indiana ate with relish, sopped up sauce with her bread, licked her fingers, and always ordered second helpings of dessert, to Alan’s astonishment—he was used to the women of his own class who thought anorexia was a virtue and death was preferable to the terrible shame of a few extra pounds. You could tell a woman was rich if you could see her bones. Though Indiana was far from overweight, Alan knew his friends would not appreciate that unsettling beauty she had, like a Flemish milkmaid’s, nor the bluntness that sometimes bordered on vulgarity, so he avoided taking her to places where they might run into anyone he knew. On those rare occasions when this was likely—at a concert or at the theater—he would buy her a suitable dress and ask her to pin her hair up. Indiana always acquiesced with the playfulness of a child dressing up, but over time these tasteful little black dresses began to constrict her body and sap her soul.
Alan’s most thoughtful present had been the weekly flowers—an elegant ikebana arrangement from a florist in Japantown—delivered punctually to her treatment room at the Holistic Clinic every Monday by a young man with hayfever who wore gloves and a surgical mask. Another extraordinary gift had been a gold pendant—an apple encrusted with diamonds—to replace the studded collar she usually wore. Every Monday, Indiana waited impatiently for her ikebana; she loved the minimal arrangements—a gnarled twig, two leaves, a solitary flower. The diamond-encrusted apple, however, she had worn only once or twice to please Alan before storing it in the velvet case in her dressing-table drawer, since in the voluminous topography of her cleavage it looked like a stray insect. Besides, she had once seen a documentary about blood diamonds and the horrifying conditions in African mines. In the early days, Alan had tried to change her wardrobe, to teach her to be more respectable, instruct her in etiquette, but Indiana had obstinately refused. Given how much work it would take for her to become the woman he wanted, she argued, he would be better off looking for a woman more to his taste.
With his urbane sophistication and his aristocratic English looks, Alan was something of a catch. His female friends considered him the most eligible bachelor in San Francisco because, aside from his charm, he was rumored to be extremely wealthy. The precise extent of his fortune was a mystery, but he lived well, though not to excess: he rarely spent extravagantly and wore the same shabby suits year in, year out; not for him the quirks of fashion or the designer labels worn by the nouveau riche. Money bored him precisely because he had always had it. Thanks to his family name, maintaining his social standing required no effort on his part, and he had no need to worry about the future. Alan lacked the entrepreneurial acumen of his grandfather, who had made the family’s fortune during Prohibition; the pliable morality of his father, who had added to it through shady dealings in Asia; and the visionary greed of his siblings, who maintained it by speculating on the stock market.
Here in his suite at the Fairmont, amid the honey-colored silk curtains, the antique, intricately carved furniture, the crystal lampshades, and the elegant French lithographs, Alan shuddered as he thought back to that unpleasant episode with Danny D’Angelo, which had further reinforced his belief that he and Indiana could never live together. He had no patience with promiscuous people like Danny, with ugliness and poverty, nor with Indiana’s indiscriminate generosity, which at first had seemed like a virtue, but over time came to be an irritation. That night, as Indiana wallowed in the jacuzzi, Alan sat in an armchair, still dressed, holding a glass of chilled white wine—a sauvignon blanc produced in his own vineyard solely for his pleasure, and that of a few friends, and three exclusive San Francisco restaurants—while he waited for room service to arrive.
From where he sat, he could see Indiana’s naked body in the water, her unruly shock of curly blond hair pinned on top of her head with a pencil, stray wisps framing her face. Her skin was flushed, her cheeks red, and her eyes sparkled with the pleasure of a little girl on a merry-go-round. Whenever they met at the hotel, the first thing she always did was turn on the hot tub, which seemed to her the height of decadence and luxury. Alan never joined her—the hot water would only raise his blood pressure, and his doctor had warned him to be careful—preferring to watch her from his armchair as she recounted some story involving Danny D’Angelo and some woman called Carol, a cancer victim who had joined the ranks of Indiana’s weird friends. He could not really hear her over the swirling water. Not that he was particularly interested in the story; he simply wanted to gaze at her body reflected in the large beveled mirror behind the bathtub, waiting for the moment the oysters and smoked salmon would arrive, when he would uncork a second bottle of sauvignon and she would emerge from the water like Venus born out of the sea; then he would swathe her in a towel, wrap his arms around her, nuzzle her warm, wet, youthful skin. And so it would begin, the slow, familiar dance of foreplay. This was what he loved most in life: anticipated pleasure.
Saturday, 7 (#ulink_8fe41877-2ab0-55db-9c49-36effb4f7ab8)
The Ripper players, including Kabel—a humble henchman with no role in the game beyond carrying out his mistress’s orders—had agreed to meet up on Skype. At the appointed time, they were all sitting in front of their computers, with the games master holding the dice and the cards. For Amanda and Kabel in San Francisco, and for Sherlock Holmes in Reno, it was 8:00 p.m.; for Sir Edmond Paddington in New Jersey and Abatha in Montreal, it was 11:00 p.m.; and for Esmeralda, who lived in the future, in New Zealand, it was already 3:00 p.m. the next day. When the game first started, they had played in a private text-based chat room, but when—at Amanda’s suggestion—they started to investigate real crimes, they decided to use video chat. They were so used to dealing with each other in character that every time they logged on there would be an astonished pause when they saw each other in person. It was difficult to see this boy confined to a wheelchair as the tempestuous gypsy Esmeralda, to imagine the black kid in the baseball cap as Conan Doyle’s celebrated detective, or this scrawny, acne-ridden, agoraphobic teenager as a retired English colonel. Only the anorexic girl in Montreal looked a little like her character—Abatha, the psychic, a skeletal figure more spirit than substance. They said hello to the games master and aired their concern that they had made little progress in the Ed Staton case during the previous session.
“Let’s discuss what’s come up in the Case of the Misplaced Baseball Bat before moving on to the Constantes,” suggested Amanda. “According to my dad, Ed Staton made no attempt to defend himself. There were no signs of a struggle, no bruises or contusions on the body.”
“Which could mean he knew his killer,” said Sherlock Holmes.
“But it doesn’t explain why Staton was kneeling or sitting when he was shot in the head,” said the games master.
“How do we know that he was?” asked Esmeralda.
“From the bullet’s angle of entry. The shot was fired at close range—about fifteen inches—and the bullet lodged inside the skull; there was no exit wound. The weapon was a small semiautomatic pistol.”
“That’s a pretty common handgun,” interrupted Colonel Paddington, “small, easy to conceal in a pocket or a handbag; it’s not a serious weapon. A hardened criminal would use something more lethal than that.”
“Maybe, but it was lethal enough to kill Staton. Afterward the murderer pitched him over the vaulting horse and . . . well, we all know what he did with the baseball bat. . . .”
“It can’t have been easy to get his pants down and position him over the vaulting horse; Staton was tall, and he was heavy. Why do it?”
“A message,” murmured Abatha. “A sign, a warning.”
“Statistically, a baseball bat is often used in cases of domestic violence,” said Colonel Paddington in his affected British accent.
“And why would the killer bring a bat rather than just using one he found at the school?”
“Maybe he didn’t know there would be bats in the gym and brought one along,” suggested Abatha.
“Which would indicate that the killer has some connection to Arkansas,” said Sherlock. “Either that, or the bat has a particular significance.”
“Permission to speak?” said Kabel.
“Go ahead.”
“The weapon was an ordinary thirty-two-inch aluminum bat, the kind used by high school kids—light, powerful, durable.”
“Hmm . . . the mystery of the baseball bat,” mused Abatha. “I suspect the killer chose it for sentimental reasons.”
“Ha! So you’re saying our killer’s a romantic?” mocked Sir Edmond Paddington.
“No one practices sodomy for sentimental reasons,” said Sherlock, the only one who did not resort to euphemisms.
“How would you know?” asked Esmeralda.
“Surely it depends on the sentiment?” said Abatha.
They spent fifteen minutes debating the various possibilities until the games master, deciding they had spent long enough on Ed Staton, moved on to what they called the Case of Branding by Blowtorch, committed on November 10. Amanda asked her henchman to outline the facts. Kabel read from his notes, embellishing the tale with a few choice details like any aspiring writer would.
Starting from this scenario, they began to play. Ripper, the kids agreed, had evolved into something much more gripping than the original game, and the players no longer wanted to be limited by the dice and the cards that had previously dictated their moves. It was therefore decided that players could only use logic to solve cases, with the exception of Abatha, who was allowed to use her psychic powers. Three players were tasked with working up a detailed analysis of the murders; Abatha would appeal to the spirit world, and Kabel would continue his offline investigation, while Amanda would coordinate their efforts and plan a course of action.
Unlike his granddaughter, who had no time for the man, Blake Jackson liked Alan Keller and hoped that his affair with Indiana might end in marriage. His daughter needed some stability in her life, a levelheaded man to protect and care for her, he thought. She needed a second father, since he was not going to be around forever. Alan was only nine years younger than Blake, and he clearly had a number of irritating quirks that, as with anyone, would probably only get worse with age. But compared with the men in Indiana’s past he was Prince Charming. He was the only one Blake could really talk to about books, or about culture in general. Indiana’s previous boyfriends—beginning with Bob Martín—had all been jocks: strong as a bull and about as smart. His daughter did not usually appeal to intellectuals, so Alan’s arrival had been a godsend.
As a little girl, Amanda had pestered Blake with questions about her parents; she was much too intelligent to believe the fairy-tale version told to her by her grandmother Encarnación. Amanda had been only three years old when Indiana and Bob split up, and could not remember a time when they had all lived under the same roof. In fact—despite Doña Encarnación’s eloquence—Amanda found it difficult to imagine her parents together at all.
The fifteen years since her son’s divorce had been agony for Encarnación, a devout Catholic who said the rosary every day and regularly prayed to Saint Jude—the patron saint of hopeless causes—lighting votive candles in the hope the couple would be reconciled.
Blake loved Bob Martín like the son he’d never had. He could not help himself: he found himself moved by his former son-in-law’s spontaneous displays of affection, his utter devotion to Amanda, his loyal friendship for Indiana. But he did not want Saint Jude to miraculously bring them back together. The only thing they had in common was their daughter. Apart, they behaved like brother and sister; together, they would inevitably have come to blows.
They had met in high school when Indiana was fifteen, and Bob twenty. Officially, he should have already graduated, and any other school would have thrown him out when he turned eighteen, but Bob was the captain of the football team and the coach’s blue-eyed boy; to the other teachers he was a nightmare they tolerated only because he was the finest athlete to play for the school since its founding in 1956. Good-looking and arrogant, Bob aroused violent passions in the girls, who plagued him with propositions and threats of suicide, while inspiring a mixture of fear and admiration in the boys, who bragged about his sporting prowess and his daring pranks but kept a wary distance, since, if his mood changed, Bob could knock them down with his little finger. Indiana, who had the face of an angel, the body of a grown woman, and a tendency to wear her heart on her sleeve, rivaled the football captain in popularity. She was a picture of innocence, while he had a reputation as the devil incarnate: no one was surprised when they fell in love, but anyone who hoped she would be a good influence on him was sorely disappointed. The opposite happened: Bob went right on being the bonehead he had always been, while Indiana plunged headfirst into love, alcohol, and pot.
Soon afterward, Blake noticed that his daughter’s clothes suddenly seemed too tight, and she was often in tears. He questioned her relentlessly until finally she confessed that she hadn’t had her period in three or four months, maybe five—she wasn’t sure, since she’d always been irregular. Blake buried his face in his hands. His only excuse for missing the obvious signs that Indiana was pregnant, just as he had turned a blind eye when she stumbled home drunk or floating in a marijuana haze, was the fact that his wife, Marianne, was seriously ill, and he spent all his time taking care of her. He grabbed his daughter by the arm and took her first to a gynecologist, who confirmed that the pregnancy was too far advanced to consider a termination; next, to the school principal; and finally to confront the lothario responsible for her condition.
The Martín house in the Mission district came as a surprise to Blake, who was expecting something more modest. Indiana had told him only that Bob’s mother had a business making tortillas, so Blake had naturally expected to find an immigrant family in straitened circumstances. When Bob heard that Indiana and her father were coming to visit, he disappeared, leaving his mother to defend him. Blake found himself face-to-face with a beautiful middle-aged woman dressed all in black save for her fingernails and her lips, which were painted flame red. She introduced herself as Encarnación, widow of the late Señor Martín. The house was warm and welcoming, with heavy furniture, threadbare carpets, toys strewn over the floor, family photographs, a cabinet filled with football trophies, and two plump cats lounging on the green plush sofa. Enthroned on a high-backed chair with carved lion’s-paw feet, Bob’s grandmother sat ramrod straight, dressed in black like her daughter, her gray hair pulled back into a bun so tight that from the front she looked almost bald. The old woman looked Blake and Indiana up and down without a word.
“I am devastated by my son’s actions, Señor Jackson,” the widow began. “I have failed as a mother, failed to instill in Bob a sense of responsibility. What good are all these shiny trophies if the boy has no sense of decency?” she wondered rhetorically, gesturing to the cabinet.
Blake accepted the small cup of strong coffee brought by a maid from the kitchen and sat down on the sofa, which was covered in cat hair. Indiana remained standing, her cheeks flushed with embarrassment, her hands clasped over her blouse to hide her bump, while Doña Encarnación proceeded to give them a potted family history.
“My mother here—God preserve her—was a schoolteacher in Mexico, and my father—God forgive him—was a bandido who abandoned her just after they got married to seek his fortune here in America. At first she got one or two letters, but then months went by with no news. Meanwhile, I was born—Encarnación, at your service—and my mother sold what little she had and, with me in her arms, set off to find my father. She traveled all over California, and we stayed with Mexican families who took pity on us. Finally we arrived in San Francisco, and my mother found out that her husband was in jail for killing a man in a brawl. She visited him only once, told him to take care, then rolled up her sleeves and got to work. In America, she had no future as a schoolteacher, but she knew how to cook.”
Since her daughter spoke of her as though she were dead, or a character in some myth, Blake took it for granted that the grandmother seated on her ceremonial throne spoke no English. Doña Encarnación went on to explain that she had grown up tied to her mother’s apron strings and working from a very early age. Fifteen years later, when her father was released from prison, wizened, sickly, and covered in tattoos, he was duly deported. His wife did not go back with him to Mexico; by then her love for him had withered, and besides, she had a successful business selling tacos in the heart of the Mission district. Not long afterward, young Encarnación met José Manuel Martín, a second-generation Mexican who had a voice like a nightingale, a mariachi band, and American citizenship. They were married, and he joined his mother-in-law’s thriving business. By the time of Señor Martín’s untimely death, the Martíns had succeeded in amassing five children, three restaurants, and a tortilla factory.
“When it came, death found José Manuel—may God enfold him in his holy breast—singing rancheras,” said the widow. Her two daughters, she added, now ran the Martín family business, while her two eldest sons had respectable jobs in their professions; all of them were devout Christians and devoted to their family. The only child who had ever caused her heartache was her youngest son, Bob, who had been only two years old when she was widowed and had therefore grown up without a father’s firm hand.
“I’m sorry, Señora.” Blake sighed. “To tell the truth, I’m not sure why we came. There is nothing anyone can do. My daughter’s pregnancy is already too far advanced.”
“What do you mean, nothing anyone can do, Señor Jackson? Bob must accept his responsibilities. In this family, a man does not go around fathering bastards. Pardon my language, but there is no other word, and I feel it best to be absolutely clear. Bob will have to marry the girl.”
“Marry her?” Blake leaped to his feet. “But Indiana is barely fifteen!”
“I’ll be sixteen in March,” his daughter corrected him in a whisper.
“You shut your mouth!” roared her father, though he had never before raised his voice to her.
“My sainted mother has six great-grandchildren—my grandchildren,” said the widow. “Together we have helped to raise them, just as we will help to raise this child when it comes along, by the grace of God.”
In the silence that followed this pronouncement, the great-grandmother rose from her throne, walked over to Indiana, studied her coldly, and said in perfect English:
“What is your name, child?”
“Indi—Indiana Jackson.”
“I don’t much care for the name. Is there a Saint Indiana?”
“I’m not sure. My mom called me that because that’s where she was born.”
“Ah!” murmured the old lady, speechless. She stepped closer and stroked the girl’s swollen belly. “The baby you are carrying is a girl. Make sure you give her a good Catholic name.”
The following day, Bob Martín appeared at the Jackson house on Potrero Hill wearing a dark suit and a funereal tie, carrying a bunch of moribund flowers. He was flanked by his mother and by one of his brothers, who gripped the boy’s arm like a prison warden. Indiana did not come downstairs—she had spent the whole night crying, and was in a terrible state. By now Blake was resigned to the idea of marriage, having failed to persuade his daughter that there were less permanent solutions. He had tried all the usual arguments, though he stopped short of threatening to have Bob charged with statutory rape. The couple was quietly married at City Hall, having promised Doña Encarnación that they would have a church wedding as soon as Indiana—who had been raised by agnostics—could be baptized.
Four months later, on May 30, 1994, Indiana gave birth to a little girl, just as Bob’s grandmother had predicted. After hours of excruciating labor, the child emerged from her mother’s belly and was dropped into the hands of Blake Jackson, who cut the umbilical cord using scissors given him by the duty doctor. Blake quickly took his granddaughter, swaddled in a pink blanket, a woolly cap pulled down over her eyebrows, to introduce her to the Martín family and to Indiana’s school friends, who had flocked to the hospital, bringing balloons and cuddly toys. When she saw her only granddaughter, Doña Encarnación sobbed as though she were at a funeral—her other grandchildren counted for little, since all were boys. She had spent months preparing, had bought a traditional bassinet with a starched white canopy, two suitcases full of pretty dresses, and a pair of pearl earrings that she planned to put in the little girl’s ears as soon as her mother’s back was turned. Bob’s brothers spent hours searching for him, trying to make sure he was present for the birth of his daughter, but it being Sunday, the new father was off celebrating another win with his football team and did not show up until the early hours.
As soon as Indiana could hobble out of the delivery room and sit in a wheelchair, her father took her and her newborn upstairs to the fourth floor, where Marianne, the child’s other grandmother, lay dying.
“What are you going to call her?” asked Marianne, her voice scarcely audible.
“Amanda. It means bright, clever, deserving to be loved.”
“That’s pretty. In what language?”
“Sanskrit,” explained her daughter, who had dreamed of India ever since she was a little girl, “or it could be Latin. But the Martíns think it’s a Catholic name.”
Marianne only just lived long enough to see her granddaughter. With her dying breath, she offered Indiana one last piece of advice. “You’re going to need a lot of support to raise your daughter, Indi. You can rely on your papa and on the Martín family, but don’t let Bob wash his hands of her. Amanda will need a father, and though he’s a little immature, Bob is a good boy.” She was right.
Sunday, 8 (#ulink_b8901795-81ab-5811-88e4-bc407de05130)
Thank God for the Internet, thought Amanda as she got ready, because if I’d had to ask the girls at school, I’d look like a complete idiot. Amanda had heard about raves, those secret hedonistic gatherings of teenagers, but could not picture what they were actually like until she looked up the term online and discovered everything she needed to know, including the appropriate dress code. She hunted down what she needed from her wardrobe, ripped the sleeves from an old T-shirt, shortened a skirt with irregular scissor slashes, and bought a tube of luminous paint. The idea of asking her father whether she could go to a rave was so absurd that it did not even occur to her. He would never have agreed; in fact, had he known, he would have shown up with a whole battalion of officers and ruined the party. She told him she didn’t need a ride, that a friend would drop her back at school, and he didn’t seem to notice that she looked more like she was heading to a carnival than back to boarding school—this was how his daughter usually dressed.
Amanda caught a cab that dropped her at Union Square at 6:00 p.m., prepared to wait for some time. By now she should already have been back at school, but she had taken the precaution of letting the teachers know she would not get back until Monday morning so no one would call her parents. She had left her violin in the dorm, but there was nothing she could do to get rid of her heavy backpack. She spent fifteen minutes watching the square’s newest attraction: a young man smeared from head to foot in gold paint who stood frozen like a statue while tourists posed to have their picture taken. She strolled around Macy’s and, in one of the restrooms, painted luminous stripes on her arms. Outside, it was dark now. To kill time, she went to a hole-in-the-wall that served Chinese food, and at nine arrived back at Union Square, by now empty but for a few dawdling tourists and the beggars who came from colder climates to winter in California, settling in their sleeping bags for the night.
She sat underneath a streetlamp, playing chess on her cell phone, wrapped in one of her grandfather’s old cardigans, something that always soothed her. She checked the time every five minutes, anxiously wondering whether Cynthia and her friends would pick her up as promised. Cynthia was a girl from school who had bullied her for three years and then suddenly, without explanation, invited her to this rave, even offering her a ride to Tiburon, forty minutes’ drive from San Francisco. Somewhat skeptical, since this was the first time they had included her, Amanda nevertheless immediately accepted.
If only Bradley, her childhood friend and future husband, were here, she would feel more confident. She had spoken to him a couple of times earlier in the day, though she said nothing about her plans for the evening, afraid that he might try to dissuade her from going. With Bradley, as with her father, it was best to recount the facts after the disaster had occurred. She missed the boy that Bradley had once been, someone warmer and funnier than the straitlaced young man he had become almost as soon as he started to shave. As children they had played at being married and found other convoluted ways to satisfy their childish curiosity, but barely had Bradley reached his teens—a couple of years before she did—than their beautiful friendship began to flounder. In high school Bradley was a high flyer: he was captain of the swim team, and when he discovered he could attract girls whose anatomy was more exciting, he began to treat Amanda like a little sister. But Amanda had a good memory, and had not forgotten the secret games they played at the bottom of the garden, something she planned to remind Bradley about when she went to MIT in September. In the meantime, she did her best not to worry him with minor details like this rave.
Her mom’s fridge usually contained a few “magic brownies,” gifts from Matheus Pereira, which Indiana would leave there for months until they were covered with green mold and fit only for the garbage. Amanda had tried them just to be in tune with the rest of her generation, but she could not see what was so entertaining about wandering around out of her head. To her it was time wasted that might be better spent playing Ripper. But that Sunday evening, wrapped in her grandfather’s threadbare cardigan, sitting beneath the streetlamp on Union Square, she thought nostalgically about Pereira’s “space cakes”; they would have calmed her down.
By half past ten Amanda was on the point of crying, convinced that Cynthia had made a fool of her out of sheer spite. When word got around about her humiliation, she would be the laughingstock of the school. I will not cry, I will not cry, she said to herself. Just as she picked up her cell phone to call her grandfather and ask him to come and get her, a van pulled up on the corner of Geary and Powell and someone leaned halfway out the window, waving frantically to her.
Amanda rushed over, her heart pounding. Inside the van were three boys wreathed in clouds of smoke, all high as kites, including the driver. One of them got out of the passenger seat and gestured for her to sit next to the driver, a young guy with black hair who was very handsome in a Goth sort of way. “Hey, I’m Clive, Cynthia’s brother,” he introduced himself, flooring the accelerator before Amanda even had time to close the door. Amanda recalled that Cynthia had introduced them at the school Christmas concert. Clive had shown up with his parents, wearing a blue suit, white shirt, and patent leather shoes, a very different look from this guy sitting next to her with his deathly pale complexion and bags under his eyes that looked like bruises. After the school concert Clive, with mocking, overstated formality, had congratulated her on her violin solo. “See you soon, I hope,” he said, winking, as he left. Amanda was sure that she had misheard; as far as she was aware, until that moment no boy had ever looked at her twice. She decided that this must have something to do with Cynthia’s unexpected invitation. This new, ghostly version of Clive, to say nothing of his erratic driving, worried her somewhat, but at least he was someone she knew, someone she could ask to drop her off tomorrow at school in time.
Clive drove on, letting out eerie howls and drinking from a hip flask the boys were passing around, but he managed to find the Golden Gate Bridge and get onto Route 101 without crashing the car or attracting the attention of the police. In Sausalito, Cynthia and another girl climbed into the van, settled into their seats, and immediately joined in the drinking without so much as glancing at Amanda or acknowledging her greeting. With a peremptory gesture, Clive passed the hip flask to Amanda, who didn’t dare refuse. Hoping it might relax her a little, she took a sip that left her throat on fire and her eyes welling with tears; she felt foolish and out of place, as she often did when she was in a group. Worse still, she felt ridiculous, as neither of the girls had dressed up like she had. It was too late now to try and cover up her paint-streaked forearms, since she’d put her grandfather’s cardigan into her backpack before getting into the van. She tried to ignore the sarcastic whispers from the backseat. Clive took the exit at Tiburon Boulevard and drove down the long road that hugged the shore of Richardson Bay, then turned up a hill and glanced around, trying to get his bearings. When they finally arrived at their destination, Amanda saw that it was a private residence shielded from the neighboring houses by a high, seemingly impenetrable wall. Dozens of cars and motorbikes were parked out on the street. She climbed out of the van, knees trembling, and followed Clive through a dark garden. At the foot of the steps leading up to the house, she hid her backpack under a bush, but she clung to her cell phone like a life raft.
Inside were throngs of teenagers, some dancing to the deafening thump of the music, others drinking, and a few sprawled on the stairs amid bottles and beer cans. There were no lasers, no psychedelic colors, just a deserted house stripped of furniture, with a few packing cases in the living room; the air was thick with smoke, and there was a rancid stench, a mixture of paint, dope, and garbage. Amanda froze, unable to move, but Clive hugged her to his body and began to twitch to the frenetic rhythm of the music, dragging her into the living room, where everyone was dancing alone, each lost in a private little world. Someone handed her a paper cup of rum and pineapple juice, and her mouth felt so dry she drained it in three gulps. She felt herself choke with fear and claustrophobia, something that used to happen to her when, as a little girl, she would hide in her makeshift tent to escape the terrible perils of the world, the crushing presence of human beings, their oppressive odors and booming voices.
Clive kissed her neck, searching for her lips, and she responded with a smack from her cell phone that almost broke his nose but did little to discourage him. Desperate, she extricated herself from the hands slipping into the neckline of her T-shirt and up her short skirt, trying to elbow her way out. Amanda tolerated physical contact only from her immediate family and some animals; finding herself being mauled, invaded, hemmed in by other bodies, she began to howl, but the blaring music drowned out her screams. She felt as though she were at the bottom of the sea, with no air, no voice, slowly drowning.
Amanda, who usually prided herself on knowing the time without needing a watch, had no idea how long she’d spent in the house. She didn’t know whether she’d seen Cynthia and Clive again that night, or how she had managed to force her way through the crowd to hide among the packing cases on which music equipment had been set up. For what seemed an eternity, she stayed huddled inside one of the crates, doubled up like an acrobat and trembling uncontrollably, her eyes tight shut, her hands clasped over her ears. It did not occur to her to run into the street, to call her grandfather or phone her parents.
At some point the police arrived in a deafening wail of sirens, surrounded the property, and burst in, but by then Amanda was in such a state that it was twenty minutes before she realized that the chatter of teenagers and the thump of music had been replaced by the sound of orders, by whistles and screams. She steeled herself, opening her eyes and peering between the planks of her hiding place to see flashlight beams and the legs of people being rounded up by uniformed officers. A few kids tried to make a run for it, but most meekly obeyed the order to go out and line up in the street, where they were frisked for weapons and drugs and questioned, those underage being separated from the rest. They all gave the same story—they had received an invitation from a friend by SMS or on Facebook, and did not know whose house it was, or that it was unoccupied and currently up for sale, nor could they explain how they had entered the premises.
Amanda remained deathly silent inside her shelter, and no one thought to look among the crates, though two or three officers searched the rest of the house from top to bottom, opening doors and checking alcoves to make sure there were no stragglers. Gradually the interior of the house became calm, the silence broken only by the muffled sound of voices from the street, and Amanda was able to think clearly. In the silence, without the menacing presence of the partygoers, she felt the walls retreating, and she could breathe again. She had decided to wait until everyone had left before she emerged from her hiding place when suddenly she heard an officer’s commanding voice giving orders that the house be locked and guarded until a technician could come to reset the alarm system.
An hour and a half later, the police had arrested all the intoxicated kids, taken details of the others and let them go, and ferried those who were underage down to the station to wait for their parents. Someone from the security company bolted the windows and doors and turned on the alarm and motion sensors. Locked up in this dark abandoned mansion where the sickening stench of the party still lingered, Amanda was unable to move or even open a window without triggering the alarm. After the arrival of the police, she’d felt that there was no way out; she could hardly ask her mother, who did not have a car, to come pick her up; her father would have been humiliated in front of his colleagues through his daughter’s stupidity; and she certainly could not call her grandfather, who would never forgive her for going to such a place without telling him. She could think of only one person who would help her without asking questions. She rang the number until her battery was dead, but every time she reached voice mail. Come and get me, come and get me. Shivering with cold, she curled up in the packing case once more and waited for dawn, praying that someone would come to let her out.
Sometime between two and three in the morning, Ryan’s cell phone vibrated several times. It was far from his bed, plugged in to charge. It was bitterly cold in the loft, a vast, sparsely furnished open-plan apartment in a former printworks with exposed brick walls, cement floors, and a tangle of aluminum pipes running across the ceiling, with no curtains, no carpets, and no heating. Ryan slept in his boxer shorts, covered with an electric blanket, a pillow over his head. At 5:00 a.m., Attila, who found the winter nights too long, jumped up on the bed to let him know that it was time to begin his morning rituals.
Ryan sat bolt upright, acting on military instinct, his head still swimming with images from a disturbing dream. In the darkness, he groped on the floor for his prosthetic leg and strapped it on. Attila was nudging him with his snout, and Ryan responded to this greeting by patting the dog’s back once or twice; then he flicked on the light, pulled on sweatpants and thick socks, and padded to the bathroom. Emerging again, he found Attila waiting with feigned indifference, betrayed by his irrepressibly wagging tail. The routine was the same every morning. “I’m coming, fella,” said Ryan, drying his face with a towel. “Just hold on a second.” He began measuring out food into the dog’s bowl, at which point Attila, abandoning all pretense, began the complicated little dance with which he always greeted breakfast, though he did not approach the bowl until Ryan gave him the signal.
Before beginning the slow Qigong exercises, his daily half hour of meditation in movement, Ryan glanced at his cell, at which point he noticed that he had a long list of missed calls from Amanda. Please come get me, I’m hiding, don’t say anything to Mom, please come get me. . . . He dialed and dialed her number, and when he could not get through, he felt his heart lurch in his chest before his habitual calm kicked in again, the calmness learned as part of the toughest military training anywhere in the world. Indiana’s daughter was in trouble, he realized, but it was not serious: she had not been kidnapped, nor did she seem to be in any real danger, though she had to be very scared, given that she seemed unable to explain what was happening or where exactly she was.
He dressed in a matter of seconds and sat down in front of his computers. He had systems and software as sophisticated as any used by the Pentagon, making it possible for him to work remotely. Triangulating the location of a cell phone that had rung him eighteen times was easy. He called the station house in Tiburon, rattled off his CIA badge number, requested he be put through to the chief, and asked whether there had been any callouts during the night. The officer, assuming Ryan was concerned about one of the teenagers who had been arrested, told him about the rave, mentioning the address but downplaying the incident—this was not the first time something like this had happened, and there had been no vandalism. Everything was fine now, he said; the alarm had been switched on, and they had been in touch with the real estate agents selling the property so they could send round a cleaning crew. In all probability, charges would not be brought against the kids, but that decision was not a police matter. Ryan thanked him, and a moment later he had an aerial view of the property on his computer screen and a map of how to get there. “C’mon, Attila!” he called, and though the dog could not hear, he knew from Ryan’s manner that they weren’t going for a walk around the block: this was a call to action.
As he raced down to his truck, Ryan phoned Pedro Alarcón, who at this hour was probably preparing for class and sipping maté. His friend still clung to old habits from his native Uruguay, such as drinking this bitter greenish concoction, which Ryan personally thought tasted foul. He was punctilious about the ritual: he would only use the maté gourd and the silver straw he had inherited from his parents, yerba imported directly from Montevideo, and filtered water heated to a precise temperature.
“Get some clothes on—I’ll be there to pick you up in eleven minutes,” Ryan said by way of greeting, “and bring whatever you need to disable an alarm.”
“It’s early, man. . . . What’s the deal?”
“Unlawful entry.”
“What kind of an alarm system?”
“It’s a private house, shouldn’t be too complicated.”
Pedro sighed. “At least we’re not robbing a bank.”
It was still dark, and Monday-morning rush hour had not yet started when Ryan, Pedro, and Attila crossed the Golden Gate Bridge. Yellowish floodlights lit the red steel structure, which looked as though it were suspended in midair, and from the distance came the wail of the lighthouse siren that guided vessels safely through the dense fog. By the time they reached the house in Tiburon, the sky was beginning to pale, a few stray cars were circulating, and the early-morning joggers were just setting out.
Assuming that the residents of such an elegant neighborhood would be suspicious of strangers, the Navy SEAL parked his truck a block from the house and pretended to be walking his dog while he reconnoitered the terrain.
Pedro Alarcón walked briskly toward the house as though he had been sent by the owner, slipped a picklock into the padlock securing the gate—child’s play to this Houdini who could crack a safe with his eyes closed—and in less than a minute had it open. Security was Ryan’s area of expertise; he worked with military and governmental agencies who hired him to protect their information. His job was to get inside the head of the person who might want to steal such data—think like the enemy, imagine all the possible ways of gaining access—and then design a system to prevent it from happening. Watching Alarcón at work with his picklock, it occurred to Ryan that one man, with the necessary skills and determination, could break even the most sophisticated security codes. This was the danger of terrorism: it pitted the cunning of a single individual hiding in a crowd against the colossal might of the most powerful nations on earth.
Now fifty-nine, Pedro Alarcón had been forced to leave Uruguay during the bloody dictatorship in 1976. At eighteen he had joined the tupamaros, an urban Communist guerrilla organization waging an armed struggle against the government, convinced that only by violence could they change Uruguay’s prevailing regime of abuse, corruption, and injustice. The tupamaros planted bombs, robbed banks, and kidnapped people before being crushed by the army: some had died fighting, some were executed, others captured and tortured, the rest forced into exile. Alarcón, who had begun his adult life assembling homemade bombs and forcing locks, still had a framed poster from the 1970s, now yellowed with age, showing him with three of his tupamaro comrades and offering a reward from the military for their capture. The pallid boy in the photo, with his long, shaggy hair, his beard, and his astonished expression, was very different from the man Ryan knew, a short, wiry gray-haired man, all bones and sinew, intelligent and imperturbable, with the manual dexterity of an illusionist.
These days Alarcón was professor of artificial intelligence at Stanford University and competed as a triathlete with Ryan, who was twenty years his junior. Aside from their shared passion for technology and sport, both were men of few words, which was why they got along so well. They both lived frugal lives and were bachelors; if anyone asked, they’d claim they’d seen too much of life to believe in schmaltzy love stories or to be tied down to one woman when there were so many willing beauties in the world, but deep down they suspected that they had ended up alone out of sheer bad luck. According to Indiana Jackson, growing old alone meant dying of heartache, and though they would never have admitted it, secretly they agreed.
Within minutes Pedro Alarcón had picked the lock on the main door and managed to disable the alarm, and both men stepped into the house. Ryan used his cell phone as a flashlight, keeping a tight grip on Attila, who was ready to do battle—straining at the leash, panting, teeth bared, a low growl coming from deep in his throat.
In a sudden flash, as had so often happened at the most inopportune moments, Ryan found himself back in Afghanistan. Part of his brain could process what was happening: post-traumatic stress disorder, the symptoms of which were flashbacks, night terrors, depression, and fits of crying or rage. Ryan had struggled to overcome the temptation to commit suicide, recovered from the addictions to alcohol and drugs that a few years earlier had all but killed him, but he knew they could come back at any time. He could never let his guard down; these symptoms were his enemy now.
He could hear his father’s voice: no man fit to wear the uniform would bitch about having carried out orders or blame the navy for his nightmares, war is for the brave and the strong, if you’re scared of blood, get a different job. Another part of his brain reeled off the statistics he knew by heart: 2.3 million American combatants in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade, 6,179 dead, 47,000 wounded, most with devastating injuries, 210,000 war vets being treated for the same syndrome he suffered from, to say nothing of the epidemic that had devastated the armed forces: an estimated 700,000 soldiers suffering psychological problems or with brain damage.
And still there was a small, dark corner of Ryan’s mind—a part he could not control—that was trapped in the past, in that night in Afghanistan.
A group of Navy SEALs advances through the desert terrain, heading for a village in the foothills of the mountains. Their orders are to conduct a house-to-house search, dismantle the terrorist cell apparently operating in the region, and bring prisoners back for interrogation. Their ultimate objective is the elusive phantom of Osama bin Laden himself. It is a nocturnal mission, aiming to surprise the enemy and minimize collateral damage: at night there will be no women in the market, no children playing in the dust. This is a secret mission requiring speed and discretion, a specialty of SEAL Team Six, trained to operate in desert heat, in arctic cold, to deal with underwater currents, soaring peaks, the pestilential miasma of the jungle. The night is cloudless, moonlit; Ryan can make out the village silhouetted in the distance and, as they move closer, a dozen or so mud huts, a well, and some livestock pens. The bleating of a goat breaks the spectral silence of the night, making him start. He feels a tingling in his hands, in the back of his neck; he feels adrenaline course through his veins, his every muscle tense; he can sense the men advancing through the shadows with him, who are a part of him: sixteen brothers but a single beating heart. This was what the instructor had hammered home during BUD/S training, the infamous Hell Week during which they were pushed beyond the limits of human endurance, an ordeal that only 15 percent of men come through; they are the invincibles.
“Hey, Ryan, what’s up, buddy?”
The voice came from far away, and had called his name twice before he managed to come back from the remote village in Afghanistan to the deserted mansion in Tiburon, California. Pedro Alarcón was shaking his shoulder. Ryan snapped out of his trance and sucked in a lungful of air, trying to dispel the memories and focus on the present. He heard Pedro calling to Amanda a couple of times, careful to keep his voice low so as not to scare her, and then he realized he had let Attila off the leash. He searched for him in the beam from his cell phone and saw the dog dashing around, nose pressed to the floor, bewildered by the combination of smells. Attila was trained to sniff out explosives or bodies, whether alive or dead. With two taps on his collar, Ryan let the dog know they were looking for a person. He had no need to use words; he simply picked up the leash, and as soon as he tugged, Attila stopped, attentive, his intelligent eyes questioning. Ryan signaled for him to stay, waiting until the dog was a little calmer. Then they resumed the search, Ryan following a still restive Attila, keeping a tight grip on the leash, through the kitchen, the laundry room, and finally the living room, while Alarcón kept watch at the front door. Attila quickly led him to the packing crates, snuffling between the planks, teeth bared.
Shining his flashlight between the crates at which Attila was pawing, Ryan saw a huddled figure and was immediately plunged into the past again. For a moment he could see two trembling children huddled in a trench—a girl of four or five with a scarf tied around her head, her huge green eyes wide with terror as she clutched a baby. Attila growled and tugged at the leash, jolting Ryan back to the reality, to this moment, this place.
Exhausted from crying, Amanda had fallen asleep inside the packing crate, curled up like a cat in an attempt to keep warm. Attila immediately recognized the familiar scent of the girl and sat back on his hindquarters, waiting for instructions while Ryan woke Amanda. Awkwardly she straightened her cramped body, blinded by the light shining into her eyes, not knowing where she was. It took a few seconds for her to remember what had happened. “It’s me, Ryan,” he whispered, helping her out of the crate. “Everything’s fine.” When she recognized him, she threw her arms around his neck and buried her face in his broad chest while he stroked her back reassuringly, murmuring words of affection that he had never said to anyone, his heart aching as though it were not this spoiled little girl wetting his shirt with her tears but the other girl, the girl with green eyes and her little brother, the children he should have rescued from the dugout, carefully shielding them with his arms so that they would not see what had happened. He wrapped Amanda up in his leather jacket and held her up as they cut through the garden, collecting the backpack she had left under one of the bushes, and headed back to his truck, where they waited for Pedro Alarcón to lock up the house.
Amanda was choked with tears, and with a cold that had been brewing for some days before viciously flaring up that night. Ryan and Alarcón thought she was in no fit state to go back to school, but when she insisted, they stopped by a drugstore, where they bought a cold remedy and rubbing alcohol to remove the fluorescent paint from her arms. They stopped for breakfast at the only café they could find open—linoleum floor, plastic chairs and tables. The room was warm, and the air was filled with the delicious smell of fried bacon. The only other customers were four men wearing overalls and hard hats. A girl with hair gelled into porcupine spikes, blue nail polish, and a sleepy expression took their order, looking as though this was the end of an all-night shift.
While they waited for their food, Amanda made her saviors promise they would not say a word to anyone about what had happened. She, master of Ripper, expert in defeating evildoers and plotting dangerous adventures, had spent the night in a packing crate, a mass of snot and tears. With a couple of aspirin, a cup of hot chocolate, and a stack of pancakes and syrup in front of her, the escapade she recounted to them sounded pathetic, but Ryan and Alarcón did not make fun or scold her. The former methodically tucked into his eggs and sausage, while the latter buried his nose in a cup of coffee—a poor substitute for maté—to hide his smile.
“Where are you from?” Amanda asked Alarcón.
“From here.”
“You sound foreign.”
“He’s from Uruguay,” Ryan interrupted.
“A tiny little country in South America,” Alarcón explained.
“This semester I have to do a project on a country for my social justice class. Do you mind if I use yours?”
“I’d be honored, but you’d be better off picking somewhere in Africa or Asia—nothing ever happens in Uruguay.”
“That’s why I want to use it—it’ll be easy. For part of the presentation, I have to interview someone from the country I’ve chosen, probably on video. Would that be okay?”
They swapped phone numbers and e-mail addresses and agreed to meet up in late February or early March to film the interview. At seven thirty that miserable morning, the two men dropped the girl off in front of the gates of her school. She said good-bye, shyly kissing each of them on the cheek, hiked her backpack onto her shoulder, and walked away, head down, dragging her feet.
Monday, 9 (#ulink_2b11f7d4-26d0-58f8-be86-0b0354dddba7)
Alan Keller’s best-kept secret was that from a young age he had suffered from erectile dysfunction, a constant humiliation that made him avoid intimacy with women he found attractive, for fear of failing, and with prostitutes, because the experience left him depressed and angry. He and his psychoanalyst had spent years discussing the Oedipus complex until they were both thoroughly bored and moved on to other subjects. To compensate, he set himself the task of gaining an exhaustive knowledge of feminine sensuality, the things they should have taught at school if, as he liked to put it, the educational system dealt less with the reproduction of fruit flies and more with human sexuality. He learned ways of making love without having to rely on his erection, skillfully making up for what he lacked in potency. Later, by which time he had already developed a reputation as a ladies’ man, Viagra came along, and the problem ceased to torment him. He was on the point of turning fifty when Indiana blew into his life like a spring gale, ready to sweep away any trace of insecurity. He dated her for several weeks, never progressing beyond slow, lingering kisses, laying the groundwork with commendable patience until finally she tired of foreplay, unceremoniously grabbed his hand, and firmly took him to her bed—a four-poster with a preposterous silk canopy hung with little bells.
Indiana lived in an apartment above her father’s garage, in an area of Potrero Hill that had never become fashionable, close to the drugstore where, for twenty-nine years, Blake Jackson had earned his living. From here, she could cycle to work by a route that was almost completely level—there was only one hill in between—a major advantage in San Francisco, a city built on hills. At a brisk walking pace, the journey took her an hour; by bike it was just twenty minutes. Her apartment had two separate entrances, a spiral staircase that connected to Blake’s house and a door that opened directly onto the street via a steep flight of worn timber steps that were slippery in winter, and which every year her father suggested replacing. The apartment comprised two good-size rooms, a balcony, a half bath, and a tiny kitchenette set into a closet. It was more studio than apartment, and the family called it “the witch’s cave,” since aside from the bed, the bathroom, and the kitchen, every inch of space was taken up with art and aromatherapy equipment. The day she took Alan to her bed, they had the place to themselves; Amanda was at boarding school, and Blake was playing squash, as he did every Wednesday night. There was no danger of him coming home early; after a game, he and his buddies would always go out for sauerkraut and beer at some decrepit Bierkeller, where they carried on drinking until they were thrown out at dawn.
After five minutes in bed, Alan, who had not thought to bring a magic blue pill with him, was so intoxicated by the smell of essential oils that he could hardly think. He surrendered to the hands of this youthful, joyous woman, who performed a miracle, managing to get him aroused with no drugs, just a playful tenderness. Gone were his doubts and fears. Amazed, he followed her lead, and at the end of the journey he returned to earth deeply grateful. And Indiana, who had had many lovers and was in a position to judge, was also grateful: this was the first man interested in her pleasure rather than his own. From that moment, it was Indiana who sought out Alan, who called him up, taunting him with her desire and her humor, suggesting they meet up at the Fairmont, flattering and praising him.
Alan never detected any falseness or scheming on her part. Indiana was outspoken. She seemed utterly in love, happy and beguiled. It was easy to love her, yet he did not allow himself to be tied down, considering himself a wayfarer in this world, a traveler who did not take the time to look more deeply into anything except art, which alone seemed to offer permanence. He had had his share of conquests, but no serious lover until he happened on Indiana, the only woman ever to captivate him. He was convinced their relationship worked precisely because they kept it separate from the rest of their lives. Indiana made do with little, and this selflessness suited him, though he considered it somewhat suspect; he believed that all human relationships were a trade-off in which the cleverest came out on top. They had been together for four years and never mentioned the future, and though he had no intention of getting married, it offended Alan that Indiana had not raised the subject. He thought of himself as a good catch—especially for a woman of no means like her. There was still the problem of the difference in their ages, but Alan knew a lot of men in their fifties who dated women twenty years their junior. The only thing Indiana had insisted on from the beginning, from that first unforgettable night spent beneath the Indian silk canopy, was fidelity.
“You make me really happy, Indi,” he said in an uncharacteristic surge of honesty, mesmerized by what he had just experienced without recourse to pills. “I hope we can go on seeing each other.”
“As a couple?” she asked.
“As lovers.”
“Meaning we’d be exclusive. . . .”
“You mean monogamous?” He laughed.
Alan was a social animal; he enjoyed the company of interesting, sophisticated people, particularly of the women who naturally gravitated toward him because he knew how to make them feel special. He was the must-have guest at the parties that appeared in the society pages. He knew everyone, was up-to-date on all the latest gossip, the celebrities and their scandals. Although he deliberately strutted like a playboy to provoke desire among the women and jealousy among the men, he found that sexual relationships merely complicated his life, giving him less pleasure than good conversation or an entertaining show. Indiana Jackson had just proved there were exceptions.
“Let’s agree on one thing, Alan,” she proposed with unexpected seriousness. “Whatever this is, it has to be mutual—that way neither of us will feel betrayed. When I was married, I was very hurt by my husband’s affairs, by his lies—it’s something I don’t want to go through again.”
He readily agreed to monogamy—he had no intention of telling her that sleeping around was the least of his priorities. She agreed, but warned that if he did cheat on her, everything would be over between them.
“And you don’t need to worry about me,” she added. “When I’m in love, I have no problem being faithful.”
“Then I’ll have to make sure you stay in love with me.”
Lit by the faint glow of candles in the darkened bedroom, Indiana sat naked on the bed, her legs drawn up, her hair tousled, a work of art open to Alan’s expert gaze. He thought of The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich—the rounded breasts and pale nipples, the broad hips; the childlike dimples at the elbows and the knees—except that this woman had lips that were swollen with kisses and the unmistakable look of sated desire. Voluptuous was the word, he decided, surprised by the reaction of his own body, which had responded with a swiftness and a stiffness he could not remember ever experiencing.
A month later he began to spy on her. He could not believe that in the hedonistic atmosphere of San Francisco, this beautiful young woman would be faithful to him simply because she had given her word. He was so eaten up with jealousy that he hired a private detective, a man named Samuel Hamilton Jr., and instructed him to keep tabs on Indiana and a record of the men she met, including her patients at the Holistic Clinic. Hamilton was a short little man with the innocuous air of a vacuum cleaner salesman, but he had inherited the nose of a bloodhound from his father, a journalist who had solved a number of crimes in San Francisco back in the 1960s and was immortalized in the detective novels of William C. Gordon. The son was the spitting image of his father: short, red-haired, balding, keen-eyed. He was dogged and persistent in his fight against the criminal underworld but, overshadowed by his father’s legend, had never managed to truly develop his potential and so scraped by as best he could. Hamilton tailed Indiana for a month without discovering anything of interest, and for a while, Alan was reassured, but his calm was short-lived; soon he would call the detective again, the cycle of mistrust repeating itself with shameful regularity. Fortunately, Indiana knew nothing about these machinations, though she ran into Samuel Hamilton so often, and in such unexpected situations, that after a while they would say hello to one another.
Tuesday, 10 (#ulink_47b7a59d-f9f3-5e52-94c4-b43824f91fc5)
Bob Martín arrived at the Ashton residence in Pacific Heights at 8:55 a.m. that Tuesday morning. At thirty-six, he was young to be deputy chief of homicide in the Personal Crimes Division, but no one questioned his competence. Shortly after he graduated from high school—with great difficulty, having distinguished himself only on the sports field—he had spent a week partying with his buddies, forgetting that he was recently married and that his wife had just given birth to a baby girl. So his mother and grandmother forced him to wash dishes in one of the family restaurants, working shoulder to shoulder with the poorest Mexican immigrants—half of them illegals—to teach him what earning a living was like with no qualifications and no profession. Four months under the tyrannical regime of these twin matriarchs had been enough to shake him out of his idleness: he did two years of college before enrolling in the police academy. Bob Martín had been born to wear a uniform, to carry a gun, to wield authority. He learned to be disciplined; he was incorruptible, courageous, and stubborn, with a physique capable of intimidating any criminal and an absolute loyalty to the department and to his fellow officers.
As he drove to the crime scene, Bob punched the number of his trusty assistant Petra Horr into his cell phone and she gave him the lowdown on the victim. Richard Ashton was a psychiatrist, famous for two books he had written in the 1990s—Sexual Disorders in Pre-Adolescents and Treating the Juvenile Sociopath—and more recently for his participation at a conference where he demonstrated the advantages of hypnosis in the treatment of autistic children. A video of the conference had gone viral on the Internet, since it coincided with the news that the incidence of autism had risen at an alarming rate in recent years, and because Ashton’s stunt had been worthy of Svengali. To silence the skeptical whisperings from the audience and to prove how susceptible we are to hypnotism, he asked all the delegates to clasp their hands behind their heads. Moments later, though they tugged and twisted, two-thirds of those in the audience were unable to unclasp their hands until Ashton broke the hypnotic trance. Bob could not recall ever having heard of the man, still less his books. To his admirers Ashton was a leading figure in child and adolescent psychiatry, Petra Horr told Bob, and to his detractors he was a neo-Nazi who distorted facts to support his theories and used unlawful methods on underage, mentally challenged patients. The man frequently appeared on television and in the papers to discuss controversial subjects, Petra added, and sent him a link to a video that the deputy chief watched on his cell phone.
“Check it out,” said Petra. “It’s a video of Ashton’s third wife, Ayani.”
“Who?”
“Aw, come on, chief, don’t tell me you’ve never heard of Ayani! She’s one of the most famous supermodels in the world. She was born in Ethiopia. She’s the one who campaigned against female genital mutilation.”
On the screen of his smartphone, Bob recognized the woman with the high cheekbones, the languid eyes, the long neck, from the covers of various magazines. He let out a low, admiring whistle.
“Shame I didn’t get to meet her before!” he quipped.
“Well, now she’s a widow you can try your luck. You’re not a bad-looking guy—if you’d just shave off that drug-dealer mustache of yours, you might even be handsome.”
“Are you flirting with me, Ms. Horr?”
“Don’t sweat it, Chief, you’re not my type.”
The car drew up outside the Ashton residence, and the deputy chief ended the call. The house was hidden behind a tall, whitewashed wall above which he could see the tops of evergreen trees. From the outside, there was nothing ostentatious about the house, but the Pacific Heights address itself was a clear indication of its owners’ elevated social status. The high wrought-iron gates allowing access to cars were locked, but the door for pedestrians was wide open. Bob noticed a fire truck parked on the street and silently cursed the efficiency of the paramedics, who were frequently the first to arrive, blundering in to offer first aid without waiting for police backup. One of the officers led him through an overgrown garden to the house itself, an eyesore composed of concrete and glass cubes jumbled together as though dislodged by an earthquake.
In the garden, a number of police officers and first responders waited for orders, but the deputy chief had eyes only for the ethereal figure coming toward him, a dark-skinned nymph floating on a cloud of blue veils—the woman he had just seen on his cell phone. Ayani was almost as tall as he was, and everything about her was vertical. She had a complexion the color of cherrywood, a body lithe and supple as a bamboo stem, the undulating movements of a giraffe—three similes that immediately sprang to Bob’s mind, though he was a man little given to poetic flights of fancy. As he gazed at her, dumbfounded, she glided toward him in bare feet, wearing a silk shift the color of the sky reflected in a lake, and proffered a slim, elegant hand whose fingernails were unvarnished.
“Mrs. Ashton, I presume. . . . I’m Deputy Chief Bob Martín of the Personal Crimes Division.”
“You can call me Ayani, Deputy Chief,” the model said, sounding remarkably calm. “I called the police.”
“Tell me what happened, Ayani.”
“Richard didn’t come back to the house last night, so early this morning, I went to his study and brought him some coffee—”
“How early?”
“Between eight fifteen and eight twenty-five.”
“Why didn’t your husband come back to the house to sleep?”
“Richard would often spend the night reading or working in his study. He was a night owl, so I wasn’t worried if he didn’t come back to the house—sometimes I didn’t even notice, since we have separate bedrooms. Today was our anniversary—we’ve been married one year today—so I wanted to give him a surprise. That’s why I brought the coffee to him instead of Galang, who usually takes it.”
“Galang?”
“The butler—he’s Filipino, he lives on the property. We also have a cook and a maid who work part-time.”
“I’ll need to talk to all three. Please, carry on.”
“It was dark, the curtains were drawn. I turned on the light and . . . and then . . . I saw him. . . .” The beautiful woman’s voice quavered, and for a moment her perfect poise faltered, but she quickly composed herself and gestured for Bob to follow her.
The deputy chief told the patrol officers to call for backup and to set up a cordon around the house to keep away rubberneckers and the media, who, given the victim’s celebrity, would probably descend on the place very soon. He followed Ayani along one of the side paths to a building adjoining the main house, built in the same ultramodern style. She explained that her husband used the study as a consulting room for his private patients, since it had a separate entrance and there was no connecting door with the house.
“You’ll catch cold, Ayani,” said Bob. “Go and find something to wrap up warm, and put some shoes on—”
“I grew up with no shoes—I’m used to it.”
“Well, then, wait outside, please. There’s no need for you to have to see this again.”
“Thank you, Deputy Chief.”
Bob watched as she glided away across the garden and adjusted his pants, embarrassed by his ill-timed and deeply unprofessional reaction, which unfortunately he experienced quite often. He shook his head to dispel the images provoked by this African goddess and stepped into the annex, which was made up of two large rooms. In the first, the walls were lined with bookshelves and the windows screened by thick linen curtains; there was an armchair, a brown leather sofa, and an antique carved wood table. On top of the wall-to-wall cream carpet lay two well-worn Persian rugs whose quality was evident even to someone as inexperienced in interior design as Bob. Making a mental note of the coverlet and the pillow on the sofa—it must be here that the psychiatrist slept—he scratched his head; why would Ashton rather sleep here than in Ayani’s bed? Now if it were me . . . He pulled himself out of his daydream and returned his attention to his duties.
On the table rested a tray with a coffeepot and a clean cup; when Ayani set it down, she must not yet have seen her husband. Bob stepped into the other room, which was dominated by a large mahogany desk. He was relieved to see that the first responders had not actually set foot in the studio itself but had assessed the situation at a glance and withdrawn so as not to contaminate the crime scene. He had a few minutes before his forensics team arrived in force. He pulled on a pair of latex gloves and began a preliminary inspection.
Richard Ashton’s body lay supine on the floor next to the desk, bound and gagged with duct tape. He was dressed in gray pants and a pale blue shirt; his blue cashmere cardigan was unbuttoned, and he was barefoot. The wild, staring eyes bore a look of sheer terror, but there were no signs that the man had struggled: everything was neat and tidy except that some papers and books were damp. The ink from the documents had run a little, and Bob carefully moved them away from the spilled liquid. He studied the body, careful not to touch it; it had to be photographed and examined by Ingrid Dunn before he was allowed to lay a hand on it. He could see no visible wounds, no blood. He glanced around for a weapon, but since the cause of death was not yet known, it was a superficial glance.
Indiana’s peculiar ability to heal by her mere presence and to somatize the ills of others first manifested itself when she was a child, and she bore it like a cross until she finally found a way to put it to practical use. She studied the basics of anatomy, earned a license as a physiotherapist, and four years later opened her consulting rooms at the Holistic Clinic with the help of her father and her ex-husband, who subsidized her rent until she acquired a client base. According to her father, Indiana’s instinctive ability to distinguish the precise site and severity of a patient’s pain was like the echolocation of a bat. Using this sonar system, she made her diagnosis, decided on a course of treatment, and verified the results, but in healing, what served her best was her kindness and her common sense.
Her ability to somatize was capricious and manifested itself in different ways; sometimes it worked, sometimes it did not, but when it didn’t she resorted to intuition, which never failed her when it came to the health of others. Two or three sessions were enough for her to determine whether a patient was making progress, and if not, she referred them to colleagues at the Holistic Clinic who practiced acupuncture, homeopathy, herbal medicine, visualization, reflexology, hypnotherapy, music therapy, dance therapy, natural nutrition, yoga—and a host of other disciplines popular in California. Only rarely did she refer patients to a doctor; those who came here had usually exhausted all the possibilities of traditional medicine.
Indiana began by listening to new patients’ histories, thereby giving them the opportunity to unburden themselves, and sometimes this in itself was enough: an attentive ear can work miracles. Then she would proceed to the laying on of hands. She believed that people need to be touched; she had cured patients of loneliness, of grief, and of regret simply through massage. If an illness is not fatal, she would say, the body almost always heals itself. Her role was to give the body time, and facilitate the process; her therapy was not for those in a hurry. She employed a combination of approaches that she called holistic healing and which her father called witchcraft—a term that would have frightened off clients even in a city as easygoing as San Francisco. Indiana relieved symptoms, bargained with pain, tried to eliminate negative energy and imbue the patient with new strength. This was what she was currently doing with Gary Brunswick.
The man lay on his back on the massage table. A sheet was draped over him, half a dozen powerful magnets were strategically placed on his torso, his eyes were closed, and he was half dozing, lulled by the restful scent of vetiver and the almost inaudible murmur of lapping waves, soft breezes, and bird calls. Feeling the pressure of Indiana’s hands on his head, he realized with some sadness that the session was drawing to a close. Today more than ever he needed the healing power of this woman. The previous night had been exhausting. He had woken with the sort of hangover one might get from a bender, though in fact he never touched alcohol, and by the time he arrived in Indiana’s consulting room, he had a blinding headache; but her magic touch had managed to relieve it. For an hour, she had visualized a stream of sidereal dust falling from some distant point in the cosmos and passing through her fingers to envelop Gary.
Since the first visit the previous November, Indiana had used a variety of approaches with scant results, and she was beginning to lose heart. He insisted that the sessions with her relieved his pain, yet still she could visualize it with the certainty of an X ray. Believing as she did that wellness depended on a harmonious balance of body, mind, and spirit, and unable to detect anything physically wrong with Gary, she attributed his symptoms to a tormented mind and an imprisoned soul. Gary assured her that he’d had a happy childhood and a normal adolescence, so it was possible that this was related to some past life. Indiana was waiting for the opportunity to delicately broach the idea that he needed to cleanse his karma. She knew a Tibetan who was an expert on the subject.
Indiana realized from the start, before Gary even uttered a word at his first session, that he was a complicated guy. She could sense a metal band pressing in on his skull and a sack of stones on his back: the poor man was carrying around some terrible burden. Chronic migraine, she guessed, and he, astonished by what seemed like clairvoyance, explained that his headaches had grown so bad over the past year that they made it impossible for him to continue his work as a geologist. The profession required him to be in good health, he explained; he had to crawl through caves, climb mountains, and camp out under the stars. At twenty-nine years of age, he had a pleasant face and a puny body, his hair cropped short to disguise his premature baldness and his gray eyes framed by thick black glasses that made him seem insipid. He came to Treatment Room 8 every Tuesday, always arriving punctually, and if he was particularly in need, he would request a second session later in the week.
He always brought Indiana little gifts, flowers or books or poetry. He was convinced that women preferred poetry that rhymed, particularly on the subject of nature—birds, clouds, rivers. This had in fact been true of Indiana before she met Alan, who was ruthless in matters of art and literature. Her lover had introduced her to the Japanese tradition of haiku, particularly the modern variant gendai haiku, though in secret she still enjoyed sentimental verse.
Gary always wore jeans, boots with thick rubber soles, and a metal-studded leather jacket, an outfit that contrasted starkly with his rabbitlike vulnerability. As with all her clients, Indiana had tried to get to know him well so that she could discover the source of his anxiety, but the man was like a blank page. She knew almost nothing about him, and what little she managed to find out, she forgot as soon as he left.
At the end of the session that Tuesday, Indiana handed him a vial of oil of geranium to help him remember his dreams.
“I don’t dream,” said Gary in his taciturn manner, “but I’d like to dream about you.”
“We all dream, but not many people attach any importance to their dreams,” she said, ignoring the innuendo. “In some cultures—the Australian aborigines, for example—the dream world is as real as their waking life. Have you ever seen aboriginal art? They paint their dreams—the paintings are amazing. I always keep a notepad on my nightstand, and I jot down my dreams as soon as I wake up.”
“What for?”
“So I’ll remember them,” she explained. “They can guide me, help me in my work, dispel my doubts.”
“Have you ever dreamed about me?”
“I dream about all my patients,” she said, ignoring the implication once again. “I suggest you write down your dreams, Gary, and do some meditation.”
When he first came, Indiana had devoted two whole sessions to teaching Gary about the benefits of meditation, how to empty his mind of thoughts, to breathe deeply, drawing the air into every cell in his body and exhaling his tension. Whenever he felt a migraine coming on, she suggested, he should find a quiet spot and meditate for fifteen minutes to relax, curiously observing his own symptoms rather than fighting them. “Pain, like our other feelings, is a doorway into the soul,” she had told him. “Ask yourself what you are feeling and what you are refusing to feel. Listen to your body. If you focus on that, you’ll find that the pain changes and opens out inside you, but I should warn you, your mind will not give up without a fight; it will try to distract you with ideas, images, memories, because it’s happy in its neurosis, Gary. You have to give yourself time to get to know yourself, learn to be alone, to be quiet, with no TV, no cell phone, no computer. Promise me you’ll do that, if only for five minutes every day.” But no matter how deeply Gary breathed, no matter how deeply he meditated, he was still a bundle of nerves.
Indiana said good-bye to the man, listened as his boots padded down the corridor toward the stairwell, then slumped into a chair and heaved a sigh, feeling drained by the negative energy that radiated from him, and by his romantic insinuations, which were beginning to seriously irritate her. In her job, compassion was essential, but there were some patients whose necks she longed to wring.
Wednesday, 11 (#ulink_9540f5dc-0806-5c74-87af-26e080d814fb)
Blake Jackson received half a dozen missed calls from his granddaughter while he was running around like a lunatic after a squash ball. After he had finished his game, he caught his breath, showered, and got dressed. By now it was past nine at night, and his buddy was hungry for Alsatian food and beer.
“Amanda? That you?”
“Who were you expecting? You called me!”
“Did you call?”
“You know I called, Grandpa, that’s why you’re calling me back.”
“Okay, jeez!” Blake exploded. “What the hell do you want, you little brat?”
“I want the lowdown on the shrink.”
“The shrink? Oh, the psychiatrist who was murdered today.”
“It was on the news today, but he was murdered the night before last or early yesterday morning. Find out everything you can.”
“How am I supposed to do that?”
“Talk to Dad.”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
“I will, as soon as I see him, but in the meantime you could get a head start on the investigation. Call me tomorrow with the details.”
“I have to work tomorrow, and I can’t be calling your dad all the time.”
“You want to carry on playing Ripper or not?”
“Uh-huh.”
Blake Jackson was not a superstitious man, but he suspected that the spirit of his late wife had somehow managed to pass to Amanda. Before she died, Marianne had told him that she would always watch over him, that she would help him find comfort in his loneliness. He had assumed she was referring to him marrying again, but in fact she was talking about Amanda. Truth be told, he’d had little time to grieve for the wife he loved so much—he spent the first months of widowhood feeding his granddaughter, putting her to bed, changing her diapers, bathing her, rocking her. Even at night he did not have time to miss the warmth of Marianne’s body in his bed, since Amanda had colic and was screaming at the top of her lungs. The child’s frantic sobbing terrified Indiana, who ended up crying with her while he paced up and down in his pajamas, cradling his granddaughter while reciting chemical formulae he had learned back at pharmacy school. At the time Indiana was a girl herself, barely sixteen years old, inexperienced in her new role as mother, depressed because she was still as fat as a whale and because her husband was worse than useless. No sooner had Amanda stopped suffering from colic than she began cutting her first teeth; then she had chickenpox, with a burning fever and a rash that extended even to her eyelids.
This levelheaded grandfather was surprised to hear himself talking aloud to the ghost of his dead wife, asking what he could do with this impossible creature, and the answer arrived in the form of Elsa Domínguez, a Guatemalan immigrant sent to him by Bob’s mother, Doña Encarnación Martín. Elsa already had more than enough work, but she took pity on Blake Jackson, whose house was like a pigsty, whose daughter couldn’t cope, whose son-in-law was never there, and whose granddaughter was a spoiled crybaby, and so she gave up her other clients and devoted herself to this family. From Monday to Friday, while Blake Jackson was working at the pharmacy and Indiana was at high school, Elsa would show up in her clapped-out car, wearing sweatpants and carpet slippers, to impose order on the chaos—and she managed to transform the screaming ball of fury that was Amanda into a more or less normal little girl. She talked to the child in Spanish, made sure she cleaned her plate, taught her to take her first steps and, later, to sing, to dance, to use a vacuum cleaner and lay the table. On Amanda’s third birthday, when her parents finally separated, Elsa gave her a tabby cat to keep her company and build up her strength. In her village in Guatemala, she said, children grew up with animals, they drank dirty water, but they didn’t get sick like Americans, who succumbed to every germ that came along. And her theory proved to be correct; Gina, the cat, cured Amanda of her asthma and her colic.
Friday, 13 (#ulink_f3a05bd0-a583-5b96-b51c-3a336dded7c5)
Indiana finished with her last patient of the week, an arthritic poodle that broke her heart and that she treated for free because it belonged to one of her daughter’s schoolteachers, who was mired in debt, thanks to her gambling-addict husband. Indiana closed Treatment Room 8 at six o’clock and headed for the Café Rossini, where her father and daughter were waiting for her.
Blake Jackson had gone to pick up his granddaughter from school, as he did every Friday. He looked forward all week to the moment he’d have Amanda as a captive audience in his car, and he would eke out the time by choosing routes where the traffic was heaviest. Grandfather and granddaughter were buddies, comrades—partners in crime, as they liked to say. They talked on the phone almost every day the girl spent at the boarding school, and made the most of any spare time to play chess or Ripper. They talked about the tidbits of news that he passed on to her, with the emphasis always on the oddball stories: the two-headed zebra born in a Beijing zoo; the fat guy from Oklahoma suffocated by his own farts; the mentally disabled people who had been kept locked in a basement for years while their captors collected their social security. Recently, their talk had been only about local crimes.
When she got to the café, Indiana noticed with a disapproving glance that Blake and Amanda were sharing a table with Gary Brunswick—the last person she expected to see sitting with her family. Coffeehouse chains had been banned in North Beach to save local businesses from a slow death, to stop the character being sapped from Little Italy—so it was still possible to get excellent coffee at a dozen old-fashioned spots. Neighborhood residents would choose a café and stay loyal to it; it was part of their identity. Gary didn’t live in North Beach, but he had stopped by the Café Rossini so often recently that they already thought of him as a regular. He spent much of his spare time hunched over his computer at a table by the window, not talking to anyone except Danny D’Angelo, who—as he admitted to Indiana—flirted shamelessly with Gary just to enjoy the look of terror on his face. He liked watching the guy shrink with embarrassment as Danny put his lips to his ear to ask in a lewd whisper what he could get him.
Danny had noticed that whenever Gary was in the café, Indiana drank her cappuccino standing by the bar and left in a hurry. She didn’t want to offend a patient by sitting at another table, but she didn’t always have time for a proper conversation. In any case they weren’t conversations so much as interrogations, in which Gary bombarded her with inane questions and Indiana answered distractedly: she’d be thirty-four in July; she’d been divorced at nineteen; her ex-husband was a cop; she’d once been to Istanbul and had always wanted to go to India; her daughter Amanda played the violin and wanted to get a new cat because hers had died. Gary would listen with exaggerated interest as Indiana stifled a yawn. This man lived behind a kind of veil, she thought—he was a smudged figure in a washed-out watercolor. And now here he was, having a friendly get-together with her family, playing blindfold chess with Amanda.
It was Danny who had introduced them: Indiana’s father and daughter on the one hand, and one of her patients on the other. Gary had figured that grandfather and granddaughter would be waiting at least an hour for Indiana to finish her session with the poodle, and since he knew Amanda liked board games (her mother had told him), he challenged her to a game of chess. Blake timed them with a chess clock he always put in his pocket when he was going out with Amanda. “This girl here can take on multiple opponents at once,” he warned Gary.
“So can I,” said Gary. And sure enough, he turned out to be a much more astute and aggressive player than his timid appearance suggested.
Folding her arms impatiently, Indiana looked around for another table, but they were all taken. In one corner she saw a man who looked familiar—although she couldn’t say from where—with his nose in a book, and asked if she could share his table. The guy got such a fright that he leaped up from his seat and the book fell on the floor. Indiana picked it up: a William C. Gordon detective novel that she had seen among all the books, of variable quality, on her father’s shelves. The man, who was now the beetroot color particular to embarrassed redheads, gestured to the empty seat.
“We’ve seen each other before, right?” said Indiana.
“I haven’t had the pleasure of an introduction, but our paths have crossed on a number of occasions. Samuel Hamilton Jr. at your service.”
“Indiana Jackson. Sorry, I don’t mean to interrupt your reading.”
“It’s no interruption at all, ma’am.”
“Are you sure we don’t know each other?”
“Quite sure.”
“Do you work around here?”
“From time to time.”
They carried on with their small talk while she sipped her coffee and waited for her father and daughter to finish—only a matter of minutes, since Amanda and Gary were playing against the clock. When the game finished, Indiana was shocked to realize that that jerk had beaten her daughter. “You owe me a rematch,” Amanda said a little bitterly to Gary as she left—she was not used to losing.
The old Cuore d’Italia restaurant, established in 1886, was famous for its authentic cuisine—and for the gangland massacre that had taken place there in 1926. The local Mafia had met in the large dining room to taste the best pasta in the city, drink good bootleg wine, and cordially divide up California between them; then one gang pulled out their machine guns and blew the others away. In a matter of minutes twenty capos lay dead, and the place was a grisly mess. Though the distasteful incident was soon just a memory, that had never put off the tourists, who flocked there out of morbid curiosity to sample the pasta and take photos of the crime scene, until the Cuore d’Italia burned down and was rebuilt in a new location. A persistent rumor around North Beach had it that the owner had doused it in gasoline and set a match to it to get back at her cheating husband, but the insurance company couldn’t prove a thing. The new Cuore d’Italia boasted brand-new furniture but retained the atmosphere of the original, with huge paintings of idyllic Tuscan landscapes, painted terra-cotta vases, and plastic flowers.
By the time Blake, Indiana, and Amanda arrived, Ryan and Pedro Alarcón were already waiting for them. Ryan had invited them all along to celebrate a lucrative new business contract—it was a good excuse for spending time with Indiana, whom he had not seen for some days. He had just come back from Washington, DC, where he had met with Defense Department officials to discuss the security programs he and Pedro were working on. He did not actually mention his friend’s name, though. Thirty-five years ago Pedro had been a guerrilla; for some still stuck in a Cold War mentality, guerrilla was synonymous with Communist, and for those more up-to-date, guerrilla with terrorist.
Seeing Indiana dressed in her ridiculous boots, jeans that were threadbare at the knees, a boxy jacket over a tight-fitting blouse that barely contained her breasts, Ryan felt the curious mixture of desire and tenderness she always aroused in him. She was clearly tired, having come straight from work, with no makeup and her hair pulled back into in a ponytail, and still the joy she exuded at simply being alive and comfortable in her own body was so palpable that several men instinctively turned to look her over. It’s that sexy walk, thought Ryan, irritated by their primitive male response—only women in Africa have that sort of brazen sensuality. Not for the first time, he wondered how many men must be wandering the world still troubled by memories of Indiana, still secretly loving her; how many still craved her affection, longed for the spells of this good witch to relieve their pain and guilt.
No longer able to bear the doubts, the agony, the sudden bursts of hope that keeping his feelings secret demanded, Ryan had finally confessed everything to Pedro. His friend listened with a look of amusement, then asked Ryan why he had put off telling the only person in the world likely to care about his pathetic crush. This was not just a crush, Ryan insisted; this time it was serious. He had never felt like this about anyone before.
“I thought you and I agreed long ago that love is just an unnecessary risk,” said Pedro.
“I know, I know—that’s why I’ve spent three years trying to stamp out my feelings for Indiana—but, well, sometimes Cupid’s arrow really hits home.”
Pedro shuddered to hear his friend utter such words in a serious tone. He took off his glasses and wiped them with his shirttail.
“You screwed her yet?”
“No!”
“There’s your problem.”
“You don’t get it, Pedro. This isn’t about sex—I can get that anywhere. This is about love. Besides, Indiana’s already in a relationship—some guy called Keller, they’ve been together a few years.”
“So?”
“So if I try to get her into bed, I’d lose her as a friend. Faithfulness is really important to her—we’ve talked about it. She’s not the kind of woman who dates one guy and flirts with others—actually, that’s one of the things I admire about her.”
“Jesus, Ryan, you sound like a faggot. Long as she’s single, you’ve got a hunting license. That’s the deal. I mean, you and Jennifer Yang aren’t exclusive. The moment you take your eye off the ball, some guy who’s paying more attention can come in and take her from you. You can do the same to this Keller guy.”
Ryan realized that this was probably not the best time to tell his friend that his relationship with Jennifer was over. At least, he hoped it was: she was still perfectly capable of pulling some spiteful stunt. She was a vengeful woman—it was her only flaw as far as he could tell, and in every other respect she stood out as his finest conquest. Jennifer was beautiful, intelligent, a modern woman who didn’t have the slightest wish to get married and have kids; she earned a good salary and had a kinky desire to be a sex slave. Strange as it seemed, this young Wells Fargo executive got her kicks from bondage, humiliation, and restraint. Jennifer was a dream for any red-blooded male, but Ryan, a man of simple tastes, had had so much trouble learning the rules and codes that she had to lend him a recent book so he could learn more about it, something with beige in the title—or maybe it was gray, he couldn’t remember. It was apparently very popular with women, being the usual vapid love story with a dose of soft porn: the tale of a sadomasochistic relationship between an innocent virgin with bee-stung lips and a handsome, domineering millionaire. In the copy she gave him, Jennifer had underlined the “binding contract” that specified the various forms of abuse that the virgin—as soon as she stopped being a virgin—was obliged to endure: “whippings, floggings, spankings, caning, paddling or any other discipline the Dominant should decide to administer”—as long as he didn’t leave any scars or splatter the walls too much. Ryan could not understand what exactly the “Submissive” got out of what—in his eyes—amounted to extreme domestic violence, but Jennifer spelled it out for him: through pain, the ex-virgin could experience guilt-free paroxysms of pleasure.
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