The door to his office was open, and Cohn stood in the middle of the room in his stocking feet. He was a short, wiry man to begin with and, shoeless, seemed even smaller, but the lack of size only served to enhance his intensity. The eyes were the same, fanatical and charming and vaguely wicked, but Abatangelo sensed something different, too. Immaculately groomed, meticulously dressed, he looked well-tuned but joyless. A winter tan helped obscure the weariness in his face. He held a fistful of paper, puzzling at another pile of paper on the floor.
Abatangelo announced himself with a knock on the door frame, saying as Cohn glanced up, “Back from the dead.” He came forward, shook the lawyer’s hand and smiled, feeling the architecture of thin bones, the ropy muscles, thinking—tennis. True sign of the arriviste; he’s taken up tennis.
Cohn stared dumbfounded. In time he managed to say, “Mirabile visu.”
Cohn was known to throw the Latin around. Jewish lads of his generation, he’d tell you, primed for a career in medicine or law, had little use for French or Spanish. This particular phrase meant: A wonder to be seen.
Abatangelo glanced around the room. “Same could be said for your digs.”
Buddhist phalluses and other fertility charms littered the shelves of a tea cabinet. A temple dragon, chiseled from sandalwood and large as an Airedale, glared from the corner. Above it hung a wool and burlap thing that looked like a french-fried bedspread.
“Apologize to Joanna for me,” Abatangelo said. “I think I frightened her.”
“You’re bigger than you used to be,” Cohn acknowledged, looking him up and down. He gestured as though to convey bulk. “And to be honest, you look a little harder than I remember.”
“Same old me,” Abatangelo assured him.
Cohn smiled. “If that’s so, prison ain’t what it’s cracked up to be.”
They shared a spate of uneasy laughter.
“You busy?” Abatangelo asked, gesturing to the clutter of papers across the floor.
“Labor omnia vincit,” Cohn replied. Latin again: Work vanquishes all.
Sensing an air of impatience, Abatangelo said, “I’ve got some pictures here. A bit of business, I guess. Shel Beaudry, you remember?”
Cohn flinched a little. “How could I forget,” he said. “You haven’t been in touch with her, of course.” On his desk, a small gold clock chimed discreetly.
“Through an intermediary,” Abatangelo lied. “She took it a little hard the other night.”
Cohn emitted an awkward laugh and sat down. “I suppose I’m going to hear about it.”
Abatangelo took out the pictures of Shel and set them down on the desk. Cohn reached out to collect them, wearing an expression of weary disgust. And yet there was an eagerness about him, too. A curiosity that helped Abatangelo come to a decision.
Driving over, he’d felt half-inclined to give up the notion of making Frank pay for what he’d done to Shel. There were already plenty of hounds out for the kill, though that guaranteed nothing, of course. He’d gathered from what Shel had told him that Frank had an unearthly knack for skating away from his own disasters. But so what? The argument went back and forth in his mind, and as it did he sensed, beneath the abstract moralities at issue, a vaguely sadistic urgency. Seeing Frank suffer, having a hand in it, would feel good. It would scratch a particularly fierce itch. Your motives are hardly pure, he told himself. Think about that.
He was struggling to sort all this out when he looked up and saw Cohn’s hand, strengthened by tennis, reaching across his desk for the photographs. A world came to life in that moment. It was a world in which men such as Cohn—educated, well connected, money in the bank—men who’ve suffered little more than frustration in their lives, enjoy the privilege of viewing photographs of a half-naked, brutally battered woman, doing so as they sit in a lavishly decorated room devoted to costly argument and filled with Third World kitsch. Men like that, they inhabited a realm devoted to one premise: It Isn’t Me. The luckless, the poor, the battered and preyed-upon. The Shel Beaudrys of the world, yearning for a break. They make bad choices. They show poor judgment. Pity the poor fuckers, tsk tsk, but never forget: It isn’t me.
Abatangelo responded to this insight with a bitter sense of helplessness that quickened into fury. The fury told him, in answer to his moral qualms: Do what has to get done. No one else will.
He embellished the story of the dead twins with freakish insinuations. Realizing he was overplaying his hand, he throttled back a little as he described Jill Rosemond, going bar to bar in east CoCo County with her handbills. “Double homicide,” he said, “for starters.” Piecing together what Shel had told him during one of her hourly rousts, he raised the possibility that Frank had been put up to another hit as well, this one on some Mexicans, a sort of disciplinary bang-in from his cranker pals. Shel had gone back to Frank one last time to reason with him, Abatangelo said. She’d tried to get him to find a lawyer, turn himself in. The beating she took was his response. He’d meant to kill her.
“She’s in hiding now,” he said, starting with the truth to ease his uneasiness concerning the lie to follow. “She’s willing to talk to this woman P.I. about the murder of these twins, the other stuff, too, but only through a third party.”
“Me,” Cohn surmised.
“No,” Abatangelo said. “Me. I’m here for my protection, not hers. But yeah, she won’t testify. She won’t dicker with the law. She’ll disappear first. But after what she’s been through I think, she thinks rather, it’s time this Frank guy was brought to task.”
Cohn said nothing. He continued studying the photographs one by one, doing so with an expression of pained indifference.
“For the record,” he asked finally, “you wearing a wire?”
Abatangelo went cold, thinking: Mirabile visu my ass. There’d been a lot written of late about lawyers bankrupted, imprisoned, disbarred or divorced in the wake of a grand jury indictment—typically centered around the testimony of a former client. He figured Cohn was worried he was being set up in some trade for Shel, her freedom in exchange for a lawyer—a lawyer the feds, with their obsessive minds and long memories, would love to destroy. It was nonsense, of course, even insulting. He laughed.
Cohn looked up. “Is that a no?” He wasn’t smiling.
“Yes,” Abatangelo said. “I mean, yes, it’s a no.” He spread his jacket open to reveal its interior. He patted his midriff.
“Don’t be offended,” Cohn said, looking away.
“I read the papers.” Abatangelo let his coattails drop. “I know the trend between attorneys and clients these days.”
“Sorry. I mean that,” Cohn insisted. He shuffled the pictures into a neat stack. “Incidentally, what’s Miss Beaudry doing for money these days?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She back in the trade?”
“She’s unemployed.”
“For someone like her,” Cohn said, “that’s a distinction without a difference. As for getting beaten up, you bed down with a speed freak, I’d call that assumption of risk.”
“Bed down?”
“Apparent consent.”
“Look, Tony, I said she wasn’t going to testify.”
“You just want me to pass along information I have no way of knowing is true or even accurate. But I do have a pretty good inkling it’s motivated by revenge.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Is that you talking or this intermediary of yours?”
Abatangelo glanced uneasily toward the dragon in the corner again. He almost imagined it saying: Distinction Without a Difference.
“You shouldn’t even be talking to this woman,” Cohn went on. “Let alone this. Given all you’ve been through, you are a very slow study, mister.”
“You saw the pictures,” Abatangelo said. “Is a little revenge so out of order?”
“On my bar card?” Cohn got up, moved toward the door. “Look, it’s a story. Even a good story—”
“
I’m not asking for a Supreme Court appearance.”
“No. I know what you’re asking.” Cohn grabbed one of the Buddhist phalluses from his tea cabinet. Not the largest one, not the smallest one. He clutched it like a rabbit’s foot. “You should hear yourself. Do you have any idea how many guys come out of the joint totally fixated on doing damage to the clown who shacked up with the little woman?”
“That’s not what this is about.”
“No fooling. What is this, you miss prison?”
“This guy’s out of control, Tony, he’s overdue. He’s a sociopath.”
“He’s a skank, a tweak. He’s got bad companions. The rest is hearsay, three times removed. And you’re a convicted felon. Credibility zip. Christ, if you’re so bent about it, why not just go out there and whack him yourself?”
“That’d be poetic, wouldn’t it?”
“Oh good God.” Cohn turned away, rubbed the phallus clean of dust and put it back. He went to the door and pushed it open. “I didn’t hear that, all right? There, you came for a favor, you just got one. Look, I’m not brushing you off, but I’ve been bumped up from second chair in a deposition tomorrow. You know how it is.”
Abatangelo ran his hands through his hair. A jet of bile lodged in his chest.
“Tony,” he began. “Look, what I just said, I didn’t mean anything. After what he did to her, sure, I wouldn’t cry too hard if he ended up on the bloody end of a stick. But I’m not about to run on out and clip the guy. You know that, right?”
His voice was quieter than he wanted it to be. It made him sound insincere.
“Prison did something to you,” Cohn said. “You’ve changed, know that? You used to be smarter.” He gestured to the doorway, and for that moment seemed precisely, again, the newfound man.
Abatangelo picked up the photographs from the desk and put them back in his pocket. “Yeah,” he said. “So I’m told.”
He dragged himself through the door and down the hall. As he reached the stair, Cohn called out from his office doorway. He sounded vaguely apologetic.
“One last piece of advice?” he said. “Stay clear of friends in trouble. They never want to hear the truth. Not from you.”
To work off his rage, Abatangelo drove south through China Basin then back downtown, weaving among taxis and delivery vans, hitting his horn, cursing out the window. A bicycle messenger spat on his windshield and flipped him off. An executive screamed “Asshole” from the sudden refuge of a car hood. We have changed, Abatangelo thought. We used to be smarter.
The Grant Street Gate outside Chinatown, fouled by birds, reminded him of the temple dragon in Cohn’s office. Assumption of Risk. Distinction without a Difference. Cohn had laughed at him—no baring of teeth, no little heh-hehs, but laughing just the same.
He wondered how Shel was doing. He felt an impulse to call off the hunt and go back, see how she was holding up, but the countering impulse held sway: Press on. The remaining drive dissolved in a frenzy of taillights, the braying rhythm of his horn, a fluid maze of other cars and the brief, urgent spaces between them. He parked in the garage at Fifth and Mission, removed the negatives from the photo packet and locked them in the trunk, tucking the prints into his pocket.
He was looking for a reporter named Bert Waxman, and found him in a bar named Benny’s. The place catered to the newspaper crews, and as Abatangelo broke through the doorway he confronted a bristling wall of noise. It was five o’clock, change of shift. The crowd stood two deep at the bar, the tables were full. Sawdust and peanut shells littered the floor. The men’s room door stood open, revealing mounds of ice melting in the urinals.
Abatangelo wandered the bar’s various rooms, searching the faces. He found Waxman at a corner table all the way in the back, sitting alone, face flushed with drink. His wavy red hair receded in front; he wore tortoiseshell glasses and a bow tie. Across the tabletop before him ravaged envelopes and crumpled mail lay scattered like debris.
Abatangelo had met Waxman during the Oregon trial, which the reporter came north to cover for the local alternative press—the “rad rags.” Alone among the reporters in the courtroom, Waxman refused to feed at the government trough, befriending the defense team instead. Tipped to Tony Cohn’s plan of attack on the informant, he detailed every squirm, every backstep, every lie as it came out on the stand. He followed up with the agents, gave them a chance to hang themselves in private interviews, then pronounced them corrupt bunglers in print. When his stories got picked up by the newswires, he got blackballed from the U.S. Attorney’s office. Local narcs, tipped by the feds, searched his hotel room for drugs.
He returned to the Bay Area after the trial equipped with a sterling new vision of himself. He began talking book projects, courting publishers, naming the editors he’d met or intended to meet. The books never quite materialized. His articles grew repetitious and sparse, he gained a reputation for slant. He started to drink a bit too hard. In the past few years he’d managed to beg his way back from limbo, taking stringer work, puff pieces, anything.
Since his release from prison, Abatangelo had come across Waxman’s by-line a half dozen times or so. There were indications Waxman was hitting his stride again. Though something less than pulsating, his most recent pieces did reveal a little of the old spine. By and large they focused on the radical right, the militia movement, the so-called tax revolt. Waxman brought a feverish devotion to his subjects, his prose teemed with drum-poundings and evocations of doom. All things considered—particularly the botched attempt to bring Cohn on board—Abatangelo found Waxman ripe with potential.
He pulled up a chair and sat down without a word. Waxman stopped reading and looked up, blinking in mild astonishment. Abatangelo extended his hand. “Maybe you remember me,” he said. “Dan Abatangelo. Ten years ago, you covered my trial, a federal CCE bit, up in Oregon.”
Waxman frowned, blinked, then it registered. His eyes flared and he offered an expansive smile. “A decorated veteran of our fabled War on Drugs,” he intoned, reaching out to take Abatangelo’s hand, shaking it avidly. “Ten years, it’s been that long?”
“Got raised a few weeks ago.”
Waxman blew out a gusty sigh and shook his head. “Fucking atrocity what they did to men like you. Marijuana. Christ. And for what? To let the real gangsters take over.”
Abatangelo nodded toward the ransacked envelopes and letters spread out across the tabletop. “Catching up with your admirers?”
Waxman laughed acidly, picked up one letter and tossed it onto a pile of others, as though into a fire. “I wrote a piece last week, about this Christian telethon that took place down around San Diego. They were raising money for their school board candidates, the usual Creationist mob, with some militia kooks thrown in for good measure. There were protestors outside, and this being the north end of the county, this drew out the neo-Nazis, skinheads, and just floor-model rednecks. Armed and ready for the Great Uprising. Fucking melee. I titled the piece ‘A Catfight for Christ’ and said it was a pretty good preview of the next Republican Convention.” He gestured toward his mail. “This stuff’s been sailing in by the truckload ever since.”
Abatangelo turned one letter around, read a little. “Any death threats?”
Waxman looked off with a sort of dreamy smugness. “Nothing so glamorous.” He rolled his glass across his chest and, feigning a grand manner, intoned, “‘You spent hack. Take it to the tabs, Jew.’”
Abatangelo pushed the letter away. “Tabloids take this kind of thing?”
Waxman waved the question off. “The best of the bunch, or the worst, take your pick, accused me of”—Waxman snapped his fingers—“how did he put it—‘hand-feeding the paranoid delusions of a disturbed and gullible minority.’”
It seemed strangely apropos that Waxman would have memorized the invective. “They mean liberals,” Abatangelo guessed.
Waxman gestured for the waitress and when she arrived he handed her a ten, telling her, “Given the crowd, why not bring
me two, dear, save you a second trip.” The waitress turned to Abatangelo then and he noticed the weary eyes, the cheerless smile, the heavy rouge. The kind of woman Shel feared becoming, he thought. He ordered Myers neat with a water back, and once she was gone, Waxman said, “So what brings you to this particular watering hole? Lost?”
Abatangelo withdrew his photographs of Shel and set them on the table. Waxman eyed the packet of photographs warily.
“Take a look, Wax. Let me tell you a story.”
Waxman reluctantly reached out, collected the plasticine envelope and bent back the fold. He fished the pictures out and sighed, turning them right side up. He made it seem a monstrous chore.
“This is your sort of story, Wax. I’ve been following your work since I got out, and when this thing came my way, your name was the first that came to mind.” He checked Waxman’s eyes for suspicion. “Christians scare me too, Wax. And yet, when all’s said and done, they aren’t half as scary as some of their friends.”
Waxman punctuated his review of the photographs with a laborious sigh. Abatangelo leaned closer.
“I was in the tank ten years. When I first got in, the Aryans were cartoons. A sideshow in the yard. But over time, you know? They held their little conclaves. They went to school, they studied the IRA and the Whitecaps, they read The Turner Diaries and Mein Kampf. They sent their converts out into the world. There’s your shock troops, Wax. How many militia contingents are there in this state, couple dozen? In every goddamn one, I promise, there’s at least one guy who got indoctrinated doing hard time. And he’ll be the one everybody listens to when it comes time to talk methods.”
The waitress returned with their drinks. Abatangelo waited till she was gone before resuming. “People in this country think drugs, Wax, they think bangers. Spades, pachucos. It’s bullshit. The white underground, the militias, without crank they’re nothing but a rumor. Crystal’s how they bankroll their ordnance. Which brings us to the pictures you’ve been looking at. You remember the face, right?”
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