Ripper

“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

  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 i
t 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.