by Gil Reavill
“We were talking about making a fire,” Val said.
“Brockton is such an ass,” Caroline muttered. “Men and their stinking feelings. Why don’t we just shove Simon under a rug while we’re at it?”
“Have another drink, Car,” Ellis suggested.
Val Duran slipped out from under her. “You know, whenever I see twins I ask myself which one came out of Mommy’s tummy first. Do you know, Layla?”
“Of course I do.”
“Don’t tell me, let me guess,” Val said. He made a show of looking from Caroline to Ellis and back again. Then he bent over to tap a small hillock of cocaine onto the mirror beside Caroline. “It was you. So you win the prize.”
“And he’s right!” Ellis exclaimed. “She came first—by what, Caroline, eight minutes?”
Caroline laughed. “Well, he did have a fifty-fifty chance. And it was eight minutes and thirty-seven seconds.”
She put her face to the coke. Val crossed to the fire pit. Making himself at home, Remington thought.
—
No one spoke for a long while. Val and Caroline made out. On the beach, the rangers swept through in their red pickups. Two of them walked the sand, sidearms on their hips. Under their prodding, the last laggards moved off the sand toward the parking lots.
Time to go, folks. It’s time, everyone.
As if in response, the two lovebirds wordlessly got up. Still unable to keep their hands off each other, they headed into the house.
Ellis looked at Remington, unembarrassed.
She mouthed at him, “Oh. My. God.”
He grinned. They waited until Caroline and Val were inside and out of earshot to giggle.
“Whoa,” Remington said. “I’ve never seen her this way.”
“Remember Alan Salter?”
“Okay, well, then I haven’t seen her this way lately. Lately, I always hear that she’s been too cool to fool around.”
“They met just a few days ago, and already she’s in deep. He’s sort of interesting, isn’t he? Don’t you find him so? There’s something about him I like.”
“Well, she sure seems to find him interesting.”
“You haven’t been around. Incredible. Worse than her thing with Alan Salter, actually, which I didn’t think was possible. And you know Caroline. She doesn’t fall easily, but when she does—” He blew out his cheeks and imitated the sound of an explosion.
“The coke is new, though, right?”
Ellis shrugged. “It’s all from him.”
Caroline had done a stint in rehab a few years back, coming out of it squeaky clean, as far as Remington knew. It surprised her to see the girl slipping back into her old ways.
“Listen, I want to ask you, Ellis—did little brother ever have any run-ins with Chicano radicals?”
“What? Jesus, no. Simon wouldn’t know a political radical if one came up and bit him on the ass. He once told Dad that the word ‘politics’ made him want to vomit. I think that’s why he moved out here. To get away from all that. Dad’s Republican horseshit.”
“Where did he get his weed, do you know?”
“Jesus, you are a cop now, aren’t you?”
“It’s not that. It’s just…Val Duran, this guy here, do you think he could be a supplier?”
Ellis cocked his head at her. “Wait. You really don’t know about Val?”
“No. He’s a friend of Simon’s, right? They used to play ultimate together.”
“Wow. Caroline didn’t tell you? You haven’t talked?”
“I swear this is all a surprise to me.”
“You might be an early eyewitness to the real thing. She’s in love.”
“Then he’s in trouble,” Remington responded, laughing. “Caroline’ll eat him alive.”
“And him her,” Ellis shot back. “Like a couple of cannibals.” Valentin Duran, he told her, was a member of one of the wealthiest extended clans in Mexico. Mining and oil. Oligarchs, at any rate. “You know what it’s like down there—ten families own the whole country. You ever hear of the Baillères? We looked them up on the internet. Val’s people have three places in Malibu, one up by Matador, two more down on Billionaire’s Beach.”
“Okay, more money than Bill Gates, I get it.”
“Caroline told me, ‘They’re richer than we are,’ and I said, ‘No one is richer than we are,’ and she said, ‘He is.’ ”
“Then Duran’s probably not a dope peddler.”
“No.”
“No,” Remington repeated, getting to her feet. “I was just, I don’t know—I was just curious, I guess.”
“Don’t go yet,” Ellis said. He fetched one of his flannel shirts for Remington to wear. As she snuggled into it, she realized that it smelled of him. He put some Chet Baker on the stereo. The two of them sat next to each other and gazed into the fire.
“Nice like this,” Remington said.
The mesquite coals burned black and red. “I see dark realms revealed,” Ellis said.
“People have been staring into embers for forever,” she said. “Cavemen and cave-women, you know?”
“Jesus of Nazareth.”
“Buddha of…wherever Buddha was of.”
“Right, we’re like them,” Ellis said, laughing. He turned serious. “You know, Layla, I think I’m becoming more and more, like, Zen.”
“Your greatest desire is to be a Buddhist.”
“Ha-ha, you’re very funny. But, really, I think I’d like to become a monk. Leave all this business behind.” He waved his hand at the beach house, Zuma, Malibu, the world.
“Genevieve would be terribly disappointed.”
Val Duran emerged from the house as the song “Almost Blue” came on. He sang along with Chet Baker, low-voiced, trying out some soft-shoe dance moves. It was corny, but somehow it worked. He knew the words.
Caroline, love-mellowed, her hair a tangled mess, lingered at the sliding glass door to the house, watching Val, an amused expression on her face. She applauded ironically as the song finished. He bowed ironically. He broke open more cocaine and chopped it into rails on the mirror. Ellis and Remington declined to partake. Afterward, Caroline’s new crush went around and refilled everyone’s drinks.
When he came to Remington, she shook her head. “I should go.”
“She wants to talk to you.” Val indicated Caroline.
Remington looked up at him. In the rising dark his face seemed familiar and foreign at the same time. Or maybe the alcohol had warmed her heart.
“You don’t have to drive,” he murmured. “Stay here with us.”
Remington realized how easy it would be to fall under his sway. She accepted another couple of fingers of vodka.
“Besides,” Val said, raising his voice. “We have to talk, all of us.”
“Besides? Besides what?” Caroline asked.
“We’re the only ones who know what Simon was up to, isn’t that right?” Val’s voice had a natural authority. “Layla? You haven’t told anyone else what you found when you were packing up the beach house, have you? The invoice?”
Remington shook her head.
“Señor César Montenegro of Investigaciones Especiales, Ltd.” Caroline bit off the letters of the abbreviation, “Ell-Tee-Dee.”
“It’s probably nothing,” Remington offered.
“Right, it’s nothing.” Ellis fumbled for words. “Our dear departed brother was…into a whole lot of things. Not one of them was ever serious, as far as I could tell.”
“This is serious,” Val said quietly. “Simon was my friend.”
“Let’s face it,” Ellis said. “Simon wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed.”
“He had a sort of intelligence,” Val said. “Only it was a meandering kind.”
“Very nicely put, sweetie,” Caroline said. “Yes, Simon was smart in his own way.”
After a beat, they all laughed as one.
Caroline mused. “Simon could have consulted this person—this César person…”
“…Consulted him out of any stray whim that crossed his mind. Yes, it could be meaningless. But I don’t think so.” Caroline got up, paced, topped off her glass, paced some more.
“What I can’t believe is the five thousand,” Ellis said. “How did Simon get his hands on five thousand dollars to pay the guy? Was the weed business so good? I haven’t had that kind of money since First Communion.”
The faint scent of the bougainvillea reached Remington’s nostrils. Her eyes on Caroline, she counted to ten on the crash of the waves. Waiting for her to come to it.
“It’s probably nothing,” Caroline repeated, echoing Remington.
Val Duran turned to Ellis and Remington. “She knows what she has to do, but she doesn’t want to do it.”
Caroline brooded. “I suppose we could go down and see exactly where the dumb cluck broke his neck.”
Val let a long moment of silence run out. “We have to go to Tijuana, don’t we?”
“The four of us,” Ellis said. “Like, we need to make an alliance. Layla? Can you come?”
“We could be like a gang of four,” Caroline said. The old English punk band Gang of Four had always been one of Simon’s favorites.
“It would be good to have a cop along,” Val added.
“Hardly,” Remington responded.
“Do you have a gun?” Caroline asked.
“What I have is classes at the police academy. I’m sorry, but I can’t possibly go.”
“The gang of three,” Val said.
On the sound system, Chet Baker had moved on to “I Remember You.” Ellis took Remington in his arms and moved her around the terrace in a jazzy two-step.
“If you don’t come along,” he whispered, “I’ll be alone with them.” He crossed his eyes and stuck out his tongue. Remington laughed.
“She’ll come,” Ellis announced, spinning her around and working smoothly back toward Val and his sister.
By that point, everyone was fairly well marinated. They all met around the glowing coals of the bonfire and crashed their glasses together.
“Tijuana,” they toasted.
Chapter 6
Portraying himself as an undocumented migrant with tenancy issues, a twenty-seven-year-old Chihuahuan who said his name was Juan Sanches showed up at the Atzlándia offices on Whittier Boulevard. Fausto had told him to give a fake name and he did, but he didn’t overwork any brain cells coming up with one.
A weekend afternoon. The place was busy. Atzlándia did a lot of community outreach as well as its political advocacy work. By a stroke of luck, the head of the organization, Subcomandante G, was leaving just as Juan Sanches approached down the long second-floor hallway. The big man went around accompanied by a trio of armed bodyguards.
“Disculpe,” Sanches called to him. “¿Un autógrafo, por favor?”
He expected Subcomandante G to be too lofty to sign an autograph for a peón such as himself, but the man stopped and gave a wide smile. He asked where Juan was from, how he was making his way in L.A. and readily took the pen and file folder he was offered. With an extravagant flourish, Subcomandante G signed his name, adding the slogan “¡Reconquista!”
Sanches gushed like a starstruck fan, assuring everyone around that he was dedicated to the cause. He pretended to be so flustered that he dropped the folder, and Subcomandante G actually stooped to help him pick up the contents.
Once inside the office proper, Sanches had to wait in line. The place was crowded. They eventually assigned him a pretty young counselor named Gloria. Her cubicle was one of many in a large, incredibly cluttered partitioned office. He was embarrassed even to be in the same space with her, she seemed so competent and educated and self-assured. Sanches went through his song and dance. His landlady was evicting him. He didn’t have no place to go. Could Atzlándia help?
“Do you have reason to believe your landlady is taking advantage of your undocumented status?” Gloria’s Spanish sounded almost Castilian, or of the Mexican professional class, at least. Her soft c’s were hard and she had a lilt to her ll’s. The man calling himself Juan Sanches had been intimidated by people like Gloria his entire life.
“Do you see?” she asked, pointing to a peeling bumper sticker lost among the muddle of posters, petitions and flyers that papered the walls of the office. “Landlords are not lords of the land—they are the scum of the earth.” The words were in English, so they meant nothing to Sanches. Gloria tried to explain it to him.
Sanches was winging it. He didn’t know how to answer her, so he just nodded and said, “Sí.” He bowed his head and tried his best to appear hangdog. All he really wanted was for Gloria to leave him alone for a single second so that he could do what he came here to do.
The file folder that Fausto had directed him to leave behind in the Atzlándia offices had been prepared in advance. Sanches had taken a peek. Photos of a collection of wooden buildings arranged beside a lake. Maps. A diagram scrawled with words and arrows. Many printed-out papers in English.
He couldn’t make sense of it and didn’t much want to. Shut up and do the boss’s bidding—that was his philosophy. He kept the bogus file hidden among the other documents that were supposedly related to his fight with the landlady. He handled the file carefully, since it now had the Subcomandante’s fingerprints all over it.
“I am going to give you the address of the Coalition for Economic Survival,” Gloria said. “They’re up in Koreatown, and they have a very effective tenant outreach program. Just one second, will you? I’ll be right back.”
As soon as she left, Sanches slipped Fausto’s file folder under a cabinet in her cubicle, where no one would stumble upon it but where someone could find it if he was told where to look. His counselor returned with a sheaf of papers, many pages detailing his rights, possibilities for support, invitations to days of action.
“You’ll go see them at CES, Juan?” Gloria asked.
He promised her that he would. The person calling himself Juan Sanches fled the Atzlándia offices relieved that he was not really being evicted, that he did not have to avail himself of the services Atzlándia offered and that he had escaped without being talked into going to a demonstration.
—
Hermana hustled out of the lobby to greet them on the street in front of the hotel. She hugged herself and shivered in the Chicago cold.
“You made it,” she said in English. “Ya no te muriste este año.” A gently satiric slang greeting, congratulating him for not having died since she saw him last.
Chupé leaned forward in the passenger seat to let Marco and David get out. The two men busied themselves unloading the baggage from the bed of the pickup. Fausto stayed perched in the driver’s seat, the window rolled down beside him.
“Pásale,” Hermana said, motioning him in toward the lobby. “I’m freezing.”
“You know what they say around here when the wind blows off the lake?” Fausto asked. “El halcón está fuera. The hawk is out.”
Hermana peered into the back of the crew cab. “Jesucristo,” she whispered, seeing the dark figure in the far corner.
Raúl stared back at her, his eyes glittering.
“We didn’t need to run the heater in the truck,” Chupé said. “His body heat was enough.”
Fausto told her that he had wrongly concluded that the zombi had died, not once but a couple of times on the trip north.
“Pásale,” Hermana said, inviting him into the hotel again. The two peóns had already humped the bags inside.
“Raúl stays in the truck,” the dwarf decreed. “He smells like the grave.”
“We’ll send some food out to him,” Hermana suggested.
“He don’t eat.” Fausto pulled the door handle and swung his foreshortened legs out onto the pavement.
Chupé waved off the hotel valet and parked the truck himself. Raúl stayed where he was in the backseat. Except for Marco and David, who shared, they all had rooms to t
hemselves. Fausto slept like the dead for five hours straight. He woke to find Hermana in the room, rustling around in the dark with a tray of room-service food.
His little sister. Not so little anymore. Beautiful, in her own way. Even after all these years, Fausto was still self-conscious in front of Hermana. His poor ruined body.
“It’s okay,” he told her. “I’m awake.”
“Son las cinco.” It’s five o’clock. She had ordered him up a hamburger.
“¿Y la chava?” And the girl?
An hour and a half’s drive away, Hermana told him.
“I want to get there, say, a la medianoche.”
Midnight. “Bueno,” Hermana agreed. “Eat your food.”
For Fausto, the hour of 4 A.M. was prime for crime. It had been that way even before he became a warlock. At 1 A.M., 2 A.M., even 3 A.M., you could always count on a few stubborn drunks or idiot stragglers still being awake. Four A.M. was the hour when the greatest percentage of Fausto’s fellow citizens were bound to be sleeping. The world was left to just him and the vampires.
Lake Geneva, the place where the girl was, sounded white to Fausto’s ears, just like Wisconsin, the American province it was in. An hour and a half’s drive north from the hotel. So arrive early, give himself a little time to check the place out. He was eager to get to it, eager most of all to try out his new toy, his sicario, Raúl of the Undead.
Leave Marco and David in the hotel watching porn. Launch off into the windblown Midwest dark.
“Órale,” he said to Hermana. Fausto hefted himself off the bed.
“Anticipo.” We’ll be early.
“I don’t care,” Fausto replied in English.
Hermana sat up front beside him in the truck. Chupé was in back with Raúl. They took the back roads northwest out of the city. Arlington Heights, Route 12, Wauconda, Volo. A succession of lakes went past, empty dark mirrors on both sides of the road, one after another. The stars were too weak to reflect light.
Passing over the Wisconsin state line and coming up on their destination, they smoked, all of them except Raúl, firing up some legal commercial hash oil that Hermana had copped in Colorado just for a goof. Under the drug’s influence the road seemed to narrow, closing in on the truck’s headlights. It appeared that they were hurtling down some kind of weird underworld gutter, spangled with autumn leaves that showered down like gold coins. Fausto felt the whine of the road in his teeth.
