Waxman looked up from the map. “If your intent is to frighten me, consider your work well done.”
“No,” Abatangelo said, putting his new shirt on. Stiff from sizing, it felt like butcher paper against his skin. “That’s not my intent.”
Waxman nodded. He went to the phone, called his editor, left a VoiceMail message and returned to the bed. He sat there looking toward the window. The curtains were drawn; there was no view to invite his gaze.
“This is going to sound odd,” he said finally, not turning around. “But ever since the explosion, and our walking around the flames and the debris? I’ve been unable to keep this image out of my head. It’s a schoolbook illustration, from some reader I had in grade school. It’s a picture of Icarus. He’s fallen in flames from the sky.” Waxman chuckled disconsolately. “I can’t seem to chase it from my mind.”
Abatangelo regarded him for a moment, then said, “That wasn’t a fable out there.”
Waxman looked at him finally. “Do you actually believe that these people are going to go ahead with this bizarre exchange? I mean, what has Felix Randall got to trade now?”
“It’s not about that,” Abatangelo said, pulling on his trousers. “I doubt it ever was.”
Waxman turned around to face him squarely, hands folded in his lap. “Then explain it to me.”
Abatangelo sighed. “The trick, Wax, is not to think too hard. God knows they don’t. Just a bunch of hoods, out to save their reputations.” Buckling his belt, he added, “Christ, we were fluff compared to these guys.”
“One would suppose,” Waxman said, “that no one knows that better than they do.”
“I wasn’t trying to claim privilege. Okay? I simply meant, as I recall, it was decidedly not the issue to kill anyone.”
“I think it reasonable to conclude that matters have gotten out of hand.”
Abatangelo laughed. “You’re a big help.”
“What do you want me to say? We were the blissful children of Aquarius? We were hippies and humanists, we got suckered into the concept of progress on the one hand and noble savagery on the other. Didn’t dawn on us the two conflicted just a bit. History was one grand push toward our own irrefutable excellence, except we were excellent to begin with before progress got in the way. That and a few other snags fucked up an otherwise nifty philosophy. Ergo, we learned the usual way, the ugly way, that life indeed is nasty, brutish and short, human nature is in a rut, and noble it ain’t. Basically, we’re pigs.”
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
“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
