Peter Maravelis - San Francisco Noir

And since then she watched herself through her father’s eyes.

Jude looked into the mirror through his eyes and tried to grasp what it was about the curves and angles of her body that made her father uneasy. She stared at herself through the pool boy’s eyes, through the eyes of men she passed on the street, studying her body for its strengths and weaknesses and trying to see precisely what these men saw, to access the rush of desire they felt when confronted with her flesh. She tried to conjure their secret, violent thoughts, staring at herself until she grew dizzy and her image wavered and she thought she might fall into the mirror and drown.

But this was not the mirror in her bedroom, where it was safe to sink below the surface. She could not afford the chance that the image of herself naked and bruised in a strange bathroom would make her feel small, because when her four minutes expired she was going to kill the man in the next room, and she was afraid that if she felt small she might be unable to. Jude had to kill him not because he had so ravaged her with his hands and mouth that she bled, not because he had abruptly shoved her from the bed and told her in a soft cold voice that her pussy tasted of rot and to go wash herself, but because she knew he wasn’t finished with her.

Drugged and disoriented though she had been, she had noticed the pink cell phone on the mantle, the rollerblades in the corner. The red cowboy boots on an end table, the baseball glove in a box, the tiny black T-shirt nailed to a wall. These were trophies of past kills. And there was a faint smell in his kitchen that made her think of maggots.

She calculated that two minutes remained.

The washcloth was white again. Jude turned away from the sink and gathered the remains of her clothes, the plaid skirt and thin white tank top. She had chosen not to wear a bra today, a move she made breezily in the rosy light of her room a half day ago that now felt like a lifetime stuck in amber, and while she remembered being satisfied this morning by how snugly the cotton tank fit her, she was less thrilled about it now. And as she pulled it over her head, she could smell him. She shrugged this away and concentrated on the task of fastening her skirt at her hips. She only wished she were wearing her shoes. Jude felt more vulnerable when barefoot, which she supposed qualified as irony. She hazily remembered kicking off her shoes upon entering the apartment, and knew she had done so because she was aware that men preferred that she appear small. A vaguely defined business associate of her father’s had seized her and lifted her up once, without warning, in their kitchen when she was fifteen, his hands gripping her firmly and touching more of her chest than she liked, and he remarked that it was like holding a doll. His face had flushed brightly as he released her.

She had left her damp socks on the radiator by the window, and by then she had been truly dizzy, the room warped and turned sideways, the building tipping on an axis that wasn’t there. Jude remembered the man had removed her underwear without her help, and without asking if she minded, after she sat down, or collapsed, in a leather armchair. He had pulled the pale pink boy shorts over her thighs and down with care, not ripping them as she expected but handling them as if they were a captured butterfly he was reluctant to crush. She thought it inaccurate to call that moment a memory because she had seen it happen from a faraway overhead view, as if she had briefly vacated her body and climbed to higher, safer ground. She had no idea what he had done with her shorts after that, whether he had stuffed them into his pocket for luck, or calmly eaten them.

Jude had seen but not touched her white shirt on her way to the bathroom, crushed at the base of a wall like rejected flowers, splashed with blood and one sleeve torn from the body. The blood had puzzled her, because she didn’t remember spilling it. But now she saw another wide-angle bird’s eye shot of herself on top of him, rising and falling in slow motion and underwater light, and remotely she was aware that he was inside her and she saw that her nose was bleeding, not because he hit her but because some critical piece of wiring had come unmoored in her head. The disconnected wiring and foreign, splintered memories that came with it were the result of an unknown drug in a cup of hot chocolate that she had lifted to her own lips. These broken memories and disturbing out-of-body images of herself were never intended for her, because the hot chocolate had not been hers. She had taken the cup in place of another, and as she drank she heard her father’s voice telling her to be unafraid.

Jude had spent the day shopping, or hunting, in the Castro. The easiest pockets to pick were those belonging to tourists, and the easiest of these were the gay men in their fifties who came to San Francisco on vacation from Atlanta or Denver or anywhere that the same-sex culture was kept hidden from view. These men tended to be soft and unaware, with pink faces and eyes milky behind rose lenses. They were either very thin or shaped like pears and wore khakis or jeans that were too tight with new sneakers, and their T-shirts were always tucked in. They traveled in couples, one of them carrying a city guide, the other an umbrella, and sometimes they wore those Velcro travel wallets around their necks. They walked around the Castro with eyes so wide they might have been exploring the far side of the moon, and they were such easy targets that Jude generally made a game of it, following them for a block or two after she hit them and then slipping up to put their wallet or sunglasses back into their pockets. It had been raining today, but warm, and the streets smelled of urine.

And even though animal and human prey alike tended to huddle together and become more wary of others in adverse weather, and their pockets that much harder to reach, Jude had grown bored of her shadow practice and resolved to work the financial district the next day, where the men deserved to have their pockets emptied and where it was infinitely more difficult for her to be a shadow, especially wearing the uniform. And she had by now come to understand that her father had not taught her to lift wallets as a means of supplementing her allowance. The object had been to learn stealth.

Jude saw the man as she entered a coffeehouse called Last Drop, a long narrow place that had a cheerful plastic art deco-meets- The Jetsons feel, with Japanese nudes on the walls and funky details like barbers’ chairs. He was in a booth with two white girls. Jude scanned them as she crossed the room. The man had blond hair that just fell in his eyes. Long nose and a crescent scar on one cheek, narrow red mouth. He was thin and looked British, but that might have been a false echo of his clothes, a mint-green teddy boy suit and boots with pointed toes. His hands flashed silver as he made a point and Jude saw he wore rings on both thumbs. He sat in the corner with his back against the wall. He kept his hands and mouth at a safe distance that posed no threat, then lunged forward as he said something that made the girls laugh, and Jude saw his thin lips pull back for a heartbeat to show his teeth, sharp and white, as he palmed and disappeared the plastic envelope and flicked the crystals into the blond girl’s coffee cup while she laughed and wiped tears from her eyes.

The girls didn’t seem to notice.

Jude marked them in the space of one breath as nineteen or twenty, second-year students at the art institute or New College, who lived in a flat with three other people in the Haight. They had come to California after boarding schools in New Hampshire, where they had gone into the city on weekends and listened to Velvet Underground in their rooms and done a lot of ecstasy and experimented with being bisexual, though both were straight. The one with the tainted cup was pale and blond with fragile cheekbones and black eye shadow, Sylvia Plath gone to heroin. The other was rich-girl punk with a pierced nose and shocked blue hair, and they were both perfect targets for the man because they thought of themselves as streetwise but were not. They were rabbits in dark woods, and one or both of them would be hanging upside down with her skin removed before morning.