The Confession Read Online Free PDF Page A

descended over the water.
    Sara, I thought.
    I saw her face. Other women I have known. All their taces tumbling into the darkness. I shut the box.
    What do people really know of themselves? I wondered.
    I sat for a while in the lotus position but it did not change my feeling. I was still restless.
    I called Golden Hinde to check my messages, but there was nothing. I got in the Audi, still not knowing what I meant to do. I felt a black desire, I confess, a certain need.
    Rooted in the body chemistry, in the old hunter instincts, maybe, or metaphysical despair, I don’t know. I wanted Elizabeth then, I told myself, but she was far away. I thought I might go see Sara, but the way things had gone last time, it made me hesitant. I headed down 101 but I did not take the Sausalito exit. Instead I headed over the grade toward the city—catching a glimpse of the bridge from high ground, then the peninsula beyond with its financial towers, its pyramid, its hills—all glittering like Oz across the dark water. I drove into SOMA then, to the club district. I drank in the DNA lounge for a while, then went to another place around the comer. It was Friday, and the bridge-and-tunnelers were out mingling with the city types, though you couldn’t tell the difference. Techies and new wave hipsters. Women in black. They smoked thin cigars and drank and posed like decadent bourgeoisie on a Parisian boulevard. They had ugly faces and beautiful faces smeared with cosmetics and white faces as innocent as the moon and tired faces that glistened with the first blush of alcohol after a long week of tending computer screens and dreaming of secret encounters in places like this.
    Inside the dancing and lights could get pretty vicious. I needed a little bit of escape, a way out of myself. Out on the floor, I met a girl in a loose-fitting dress who had a sheen on her face and threw her arms out wildly as she danced. I didn’t ask her name. We got lost in the moment.
    Then, across the room, I saw a man I recognized, one of those people you meet in my line of work but you don’t really want to see on the street. An extortion artist. Accused murderer. His name was Tony Grazzioni, and I’d interviewed him once, in a professional capacity, down in the San Bernardino County Jail.
    I turned back to the girl then and pulled her toward me. We got a little wilder. She had brown hair and hazel eyes, and she wore a green shift that stopped at mid-thigh and also black jet beads that swung about her neck. Given the way she hugged and thrust, and her dreamy eyes, I guessed she was on ecstasy or one of its variants: MDMA, or gamma, or good old-fashioned chloral. They were all popular in the clubs here. We did the bump and grind, and drank, and I began to feel high, higher than I should, and libidinous, and I began to think maybe she had spiked my drink, because that was the kind of thing people were doing then, casual acquaintances who worried you might otherwise find them a bit drab. I went to the bar to get us a couple more drinks.
    A voice came at me from behind. A hand nudged my shoulder.
    “Hi, doc, remember me?”
    “No,” I said.
    I was lying. I knew who it was, even before I turned and looked. I’d recognized the high-throated voice. Tony Grazzioni.
    Back when I knew him, he’d been charged with murder. A for-hire job. Involving an oil executive’s wife, and a coat hanger tightened with baling pliers about the neck.
    He put his face close to mine. He was a big man, with a big face, acne-scarred, ugly like a dog. He wore a cologne that smelled like the inside of a roadside motel.
    “I see you’re working the scene—again,” he said. “Nice looking girl.”
    “Go fuck yourself, Tony.”
    After he’d been acquitted, Grazzioni had made a clumsy effort at blackmailing me, based on some things I’d told him in a psychiatric session. It was a professional hazard, running into guys like Grazzioni, and sometimes the only way to handle it was to just walk