Francis Hotel.“I thought you might need this,”she said, laughing quietly, as she handed me a steaming cup of black coffee.The night before, the top had been up on her green Jaguar convertible, but this morning she had taken it down. Her hair was wrapped in a dark red silk scarf and her eyes were hidden behind a pair of dark glasses. We drove through the deserted streets of the city and out onto the Golden Gate Bridge, where for a moment we were almost blinded by the sun rising above the low-lying hills on the far side of the bay. The pale blue high-arching sky was streaked pink and scarlet and gold. The cool moving air rushed past my face, while down below the bay glistened silver-smooth, as still and shiny as glass. I turned up the collar of my jacket and slouched down until my head was resting against the top of the leather seat.She was driving in the outside lane, next to the railing, keeping a steady pace. In the morning light, all the thousands of buildings that curled their way around the farther reaches of the bay looked like an enormous Bedouin encampment, just arrived after a long night's journey, that would be gone again when the sun slipped down below the far horizon.“Do you know,”she said when we were halfway across, “that more than a thousand people have jumped off the bridge, and not one of them ever did it from the other side?”We were so close that our shoulders touched, but her voice, though clear and distinct, seemed to come from a distance.“They always jump facing the city,”she went on.
