London Noir

MAD SEATTLE WOMAN SLAYS BRITISH AUTHOR

A Kirkland librarian who had been corresponding for some time with a British author was discovered yesterday by a neighbour in a catatonic state. The body of English bookseller and writer Maxim Jakubowski, 48, was found in her bedroom. He had been sexually mutilated.

Katherine Macher, 28, when interrogated later, after recovering from her state of shock, confessed ‘his sexual demands were too bizarre’.

A Seattle Times reporter later contacted mystery critic Marvin Lachman about the deceased, ‘His crime stories were so violent they were like the literary equivalent of a snuff movie’.

Seriously, though, it’d be great if you could visit (I’d defrost the fridge beforehand to avoid temptation!).

Some time back, you recommended James Crumley to me, but I never did get around to him. Here’s a cutting (a real one) from our local paper; he’s reading at the Elliott Bay Bookshop next month. Do you know Crumley personally?

Yours,

Kate

Dear Kate,

Yes, I did meet Crumley some years back at a crime festival in the French Alps. He’s a terrific guy, drinks mightily, a bit like a Hemingway of the crime world. A rather frantic life, so The Mexican Tree Duck is his first novel in a decade. A genuine event. You must attend the reading, and if you have the opportunity give Jim my best regards.

Sexually mutilated? Tell me more. Morbid, moi? Not at all. Well, in London we’re used to that sort of thing, you know. After all, Jack the Ripper, shrouded in his Dickensian fog, was the first modern serial killer of note. In the shop, we also sell a lot of true crime books, not by personal choice I assure you, but there are bills to pay. The interesting thing is that so many of the more gruesome volumes, those with all the gory details about the killings and mutilations inflicted on women by psychos (mostly American) are bought by women. And don’t ask me why. I don’t think I wish to know.

By the way, I want a photograph of you. My imagination is running out.

Yours, stoically impatient.

Maxim

Dear Maxim,

Here you are.

Is this what you expected? Is this what you want?

Kate

Dear Kate,

So this is you.

I don’t know what I truly expected. Really.

Yes. You.

Allow me to imagine the shape of your body under the long skirt of many colours that you are wearing (is that Seattle in the background, or Portland?), daringly guess the pallor of your breasts, the feel of your skin under my fingers skipping a gentle light fandango, how your body would feel naked against mine, flesh pressed against flesh, the smell of your skin, my tongue tasting you, the ineffable sensation of entering you for the first time.

I read in a book the other day that it rains in Seattle nine days out of ten.

Oh, how your wet cascading hair falls over your shoulders. A mental movie against the screen of my mind, raging images of bodies aflame as the storm invades my teacup of a brain and heart. Soft, invisible to the eye, blonde down in the small of your back. A dark beauty spot just below the lower curve of your right buttock. A brown mole where your small breasts take birth. Not opulent is the way you describe them.

If you were right now in London, we would be having an affair. Sneaking into cheap hotels, hunting for lies and excuses to the deception. Stealing brief evenings, weekends in search of always more forbidden joy. Would the sex be good? Impossible to say. Feverish, sweaty, shockingly intimate.

Come to think of it, there must also be a London of lovers. A London most of us know little about. A city where the geography is human as well as physical, where I should discover bars which are quiet and discreet, and I could take your hand in mine, without acquaintances spying. Where there are dark streets where I might slip my hand under your shirt and caress your shadowy nipples to hardness, alleys where our crotches might rub against each other with impunity.

Strange how the vision, the topology of a city can change according to circumstances, like a parallel world that exists contiguous to the one we know as normal, invisible but so close. In this one I sell books and write you foolish letters where I reveal the worst of my hidden self, in the other London, we fuck wondrously, mingle juices and sweat in unknown beds and awake blearily in the grey morning with my cock still embedded in you, a familiar geometry of desire and lazy friction binding our bodies together in adulterous ardour (you are married, aren’t you? Somehow I guess you must be, and of course you know I am too).

Kate, sweet sweet Kate, what are we to do?

With much affection.

Maxim

Dear Maxim,

We meet in London. Certainly it must be London, the dark London of my imagination, the one from all the books full of fog and dread, the city of a thousand chimneys and unending parks where all policemen are polite like in a novel by Agatha Christie, where all the freaks fix you with mad, staring eyes like in the Factory books of Derek Raymond.

So we come together at last.

Six o’clock in a private club in Soho. We order drinks, make small talk and barely hear each other over the din of the regulars. Drinks over, you suggest we eat. We find a nearby Indian restaurant. The food is truly delicious. Then, a million things still unsaid, we move on to a pub. I imagine it’s in a basement. Clumsily, we try to explain our feelings, how we arrived at this crazy situation. Fleetingly you touch my thigh through the fabric of my dress. I buy the next round. What I don’t say is that you’re not quite the man I expected. Your hair is flecked with grey, you readily admit you’re slightly overweight. You’re probably thinking, she never said she was so tall, and your eyes can’t keep away from the small brown mole there at the onset of her cleavage.

‘I’ll drive you back to your hotel,’ he suggests as closing time approaches. ‘My car’s in a car park just round the corner.’

‘Yeah,’ she answers. ‘That’s no problem.’

The West End theatre crowds were in the midst of their daily exodus and it took another fifteen minutes to climb the serpentine path up the concrete bunker. At one stage, she gently put her hand on his, but the vehicle in front moved a yard or two, and he had to move his hand to disengage the handbrake.

Strange how odd moments live forever in your memory.

A touch of affection.

The blinding sound of yearning, of longing.

Outside the hotel, she kissed him lightly, between lips and cheek.

‘We’ll have to talk again,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he agreed.

And here my imagination fails me. How do we end the story, Maxim? Does Kate pull a knife from her handbag and stab him to death, blood spurting in all directions over the wet, shiny London street? Or, in a fit of despair, knowing they have nowhere else to go from here, does Maxim gently put his fingers around Kate’s neck and strangle her? It’s what characters in his stories would do, isn’t it?

We both know too well there can be no happy ending, no desperate thrashing of bodies in hotel beds, sheets strewn to all poles, shrieks of orgasm equalling cries of death, no postcoital tenderness as fingers now explore opposite orfices with gentle care rather than brutal passion.

Tell me. Write me another ending.

Send me a mystery book where you don’t come to Seattle to camp on my doorstep, quarrel with my jealous husband and end up badly beaten up by the younger man. Where I arrive in London to see you and learn you were killed when two black armed robbers attacked the store on a Monday morning, looking for the Saturday takings.

No, you will not come to Seattle and I will not go to London.

And delete my name and address from the shop’s mail order records (and thank Thalia and the staff for the excellent service this past year).

So be it.

Kate

Wondrous Kate,

So farewell then. By the way, I never did find out what colour were your eyes.

Sadly.

Maxim

A cool morning in the American Northwest. Kate moves lazily from bedroom to bathroom, her long white nightdress trailing behind her on the wooden floor. Somehow, she senses that her state of mind is at last serene, appeased. She looks up at the small, square mirror of the medicine cabinet. She appears tired, she thinks. Her mind wanders, aimlessly. Her husband is away on a business trip; he is a financial journalist. She has the whole apartment to herself. She can’t remember the last time this happened. Today is a day off from the library. There are pale, darker shadows under her eyes, she peers closer into the cabinet mirror. Her eyes are dark brown. Soon, she and her husband (who often sleeps on the sofa at night after they have pointless rows) will move into their new house.

In London, eight hours time difference, Maxim wearily moves from bathroom to study, sighing, more flecks of grey in his daily growth of beard. The hell with it, today he doesn’t want to shave. Downstairs, the sounds of the kids readying for school. He pulls the old red Atlas out from one of the bulging shelves. America. Washington State. Oh yes, north of Oregon. Seattle, there it is. He gazes absently at the colours on the map, the blue of the Pacific, immense all the way to Russia, the brown and white of the mountains, the green of the Montana open country. Christ, it’s so far, he thinks. Far, much too far from London.