Abatangelo sat down beside him on the bed, pulling on his socks. “I remember not feeling like a pig,” he said.
“Absent the grace of God,” Waxman intoned, “we are the scum of the universe. Satan’s little chancres. And, from all available evidence, God has been stingy with the grace of late.”
“Echo,” Abatangelo said.
Waxman regarded him quizzically. “I beg your pardon?”
“Echo. It’s Kierkegaard’s term for grace. Men of virtue perform good acts, it creates an echo of grace upon them and other men who follow their example.”
Waxman grimaced. “Metaphors do not constitute theology.”
Abatangelo stood up. “Yeah, well, back to your point about pigs. I gotta tell you, Wax. I’ll cop to what I’ve done. But the first time I came close to wanting to kill somebody was the past few days. And it had nothing to do with business.”
Waxman reflected on this and after a moment offered a diffident shrug. “The drugs are different. I’ll grant you that.”
Abatangelo shook his head. “There’ve been treacherous assholes all along. If you were smart, they were no big problem. They could be fooled, or avoided. Or bought off. But there’s a different wind these days. Maybe it’s all the crank, the crack, the nasty edgy shit they make people want. Maybe it’s just the money, I don’t know. But there’s so much blood in the air it’s almost sacrificial.”
Waxman rubbed his knees. “There are those who would consider your nostalgia for innocence wildly self-deluded.”
“ ‘Innocent’ isn’t the term I used. I never said ‘innocent.’ ”
“Not explicitly, no,” Waxman conceded. “But crank didn’t show up yesterday. When I was in high school I prowled the Haight for acid like a crazed lab rat. I was a poster child for the scene. But then all that bad product hit the street. They laced the tabs with speed, whoever ‘they’ were, and there were delicious rumors over that, too. Things turned very nasty almost overnight. Even an idiot could have predicted it, given what freaks like me were ingesting.”
Abatangelo studied him. Crazed lab rat, he thought. Freaks like me. “Getting kinda chatty there, Wax.”
Waxman nodded, staring at the curtains again. “I’m frightened.”
Abatangelo went over and placed his hand on Waxman’s shoulder. “Me too. That any consolation?”
Waxman looked up at him. “No.”
They laughed uneasily.
“Anyway,” Abatangelo said, searching for his shoes, “bad acid, speed. What’s your point?”
“My point,” Waxman said, “is that was all a quarter of a century ago. It’s not a question of where have all the flowers gone. The question is, how did characters like you, the ones out to prove what a joke it all was, how did you outlast the scene as long as you did?”
Abatangelo shrugged. “Steered clear of bad acid.”
“No. Be serious. How did you drag out that ridiculous dream for so many more years?”
“What dream? Wax, come down out of your tree, will you? I was a pig, remember? I was venal. I had larceny in my heart. I suffered from bad genes.”
“What charm did you think protected you?”
“Wax, I was lucky. That’s it.”
“You enjoyed the mysterious good fortune of the blind,” Waxman countered. From the sound of the phrase, he’d been working up to it all along. He got up from the bed, went to the sink, unwrapped the cellophane from a plastic drinking cup and drew himself a glass of tapwater. He drank the whole glass down and then another. Avoiding his reflection in the mirror above the sink, he turned around and said, “You are an incredibly proud man, do you realize that? It’s not a criticism. Just an observation. But I’ll tell you a little something I’ve learned, all right? Pride is just a way of thinking you deserve what you want. And in that regard, pride is a sort of cowardice. It takes a lot of courage to simply want something.”
His eyes were strangely kind. Forgiving.
“So tell me what I want, Wax.”
“You want to be with the woman you love,” Waxman said. “But the more I think it through, the less confidence I have she is alive, or will remain alive, no matter what we accomplish by going out there tonight. I wish that weren’t true.”
“Then stop talking about it,” Abatangelo said. He collected his jacket, wallet and keys. “You ready?” Not waiting for an answer, he went to the door, calling out over his shoulder, “Bring the map.”
Abatangelo headed out to the car and checked the trunk. He still had all of Mannion’s equipment with him from the night before. There were two spare cameras, stocked with both infrared film and 3200 black and white. There were flash guns, two tripods, the Passive Light Intensifier, and an infrared focus beam, not to mention a canvas bag to carry it all. He closed the trunk and told Waxman, “All aboard.”
As they drove, Waxman returned to the article from the local social column about the quinceañera. “The daughter’s name is Larissa,” he said, reading aloud. “She’s fifteen. From the sounds of it, her father’s spared no expense.” Rain began to fall, heavily at first, then easing back into a drizzle. Waxman looked out at the verdant fields, then returned to the article in his lap. “Relatives are coming up from Mexico,” he said. “And Papa Rolando is addressing a civic group tonight, too. The Sacramento Valley Mexican-American Cultural Exchange.”
“That’s a mouthful. Speech all by itself.”
“It means there may be other reporters there,” Waxman said hopefully. “The ones covering the speech, they can join the party and add a little color to their coverage.” He folded the newspaper over. “We should blend in, at least to begin with.”
They continued on toward Suisun and turned east along the road to Rio Vista until prominent signs, in English and Spanish, designated the turnoff to the hotel. A trio of men wearing orange reflective vests and bearing flashlights stood out in the rain at the corner of the cross-county highway and the hotel road. The men waved them south toward the river.
The hotel lay beyond a range of treeless hills, and every hundred yards a torch decorated with flowers and gold and white bunting stood at the roadside. The rain had extinguished all but a handful of the torch flames, and the waterlogged bouquets sagged.
The El Parador was a massive hacienda in the Mission style. A searchlight stationed in the parking light scoured the low clouds with its beam. Music echoed festively from the hotel’s bright interior. Abatangelo pulled into a parking lot crowded with limousines and directed the car into an isolated space on the periphery that would be easy to find when it came time to leave. He killed the motor, reached behind his seat for his camera and asked Waxman to retrieve several rolls of film he’d stored in the glove compartment. “Ready or not,” he said, opening the door. They crossed the distance from the car to the hotel portico on a run and shook off the rain once safely inside.
Upon stepping beyond the lobby doors, they entered an extravagant chaos of white-clad revelers, celebratory ornament and antiquarian decor. Abatangelo likened the effect as half Porfirian Gothic, half an acid-laced reverie of Frida Kahlo giving birth to a zoo.
Gold and white bunting, like that tied to the roadside torches, hung in long coiling festoons from every wall. As many as a hundred piñatas, fashioned from a rainbow of bright feathery paper- donkeys, elephants, clowns, angels, gauchos, a princess, a bandit, a whale, sombreros, cacti- hung by ribbons at various heights from the vaulted lobby ceiling. Beneath them as many as four dozen children, varying in age from four to sixteen and dressed in white tuxedos and brocaded gowns, wandered blindfolded, bearing sticks, to the cheers and proddings of manic adults- women crying out and clapping, men holding bottles of Chanaco and bellowing praise.