The Devil's Redhead (41 page)

She removed her stare from Frank's body long enough to meet Abatangelo's eye. She did not smile or offer any greeting, and Abatangelo decided against saying anything himself. Her spirit seemed inured to courtesies. Waxman broke the spell finally, guiding her by the arm out the door and thanking her.

The woman gone, Waxman joined Abatangelo in the dining room. Without waiting for a question, he started in quietly with, “Her name is Aleris. Missionaries christened her that. She's Kekchí, an Indian from northern Guatemala. Two years ago she came to San Francisco to work with the refugees here. I met her while I was working on an article. She's quite a story in and of herself.”

His eyes betrayed a gravity Abatangelo had not seen before. “Tell me later,” he said.

“Of course,” Waxman replied. “In any event, Aleris brought something. I think you should see it.”

“Bring it to me here. I want to keep an eye on our boy.”

Waxman went to his room, returning with the accordion folder Aleris had left behind. He set it down on the table, then closed the sliding doors connecting the dining area to the living room, leaving just enough space so Frank could be seen. The folder contained news clippings, press releases, human rights reports, written in various languages and worn smooth by repeated handling. Typewritten translations had been stapled to each of the foreign pieces, some in Spanish, some in English.

“This,” Waxman said, withdrawing an article and pointing to the accompanying photograph, “is Rolando Moreira. The man who owns the hotel Frank told us about.”

Abatangelo leaned closer. The man wore white and addressed a crowd of schoolchildren in a tropical courtyard.

“Moreira,” Waxman continued, “is a
hacendado
who runs a glass factory in Tapachula, near the Guatemalan border. He also owns a great deal of ranch land in that area, all along the Rio Suchiate, which is to Chiapas what the Rio Grande is to Texas. Immigrants cross it by the thousands daily.”

Abatangelo said, “The point, Wax. We've got a drive to make.”

“I understand. Indulge me just this moment. Basically, Moreira positions touts in the border village of Hidalgo, across the river from Tecún Umán. He offers work on his ranches or transport north to America. The touts charge outrageous fees and kick back to Moreira. Sometimes they just drop the pretense, take their pigeons out into the forest and rob them. Rape them.”

“Let me guess,” Abatangelo said. “You just snuck in Aleris's story.”

Frank groaned on the sofa and pulled the blankets tighter over his head. Waxman regarded him a bit differently now, as though he were a rare and poisonous flower.

“Here,” he said, finding a second clipping and photograph, “is the person Frank referred to as El Zopilote.”

The grainy picture, a decade older than Moreira's, presented a man with lean features and thick black hair, descending the steps of a small white courthouse.

“His real name is Victor Facio,” Waxman explained. “He's the overlord of Rolando Moreira's security apparatus. I don't know how much you know about recent Mexican history.”

“No history lessons,” Abatangelo said.

“The short version, then.”

“Tell me in the car.”

“I don't think it would be wise,” Waxman said, “to share some of this information with him present.” He nodded toward the sofa.

Abatangelo sighed. “Go on, wrap it up.”

“After 1972 or so, rumors put Facio everywhere and anywhere there's money and guns and a smack of anticommunism in the air. There's only one file in the public record here in the States, though. It's in U.S. District Court in Brownsville, Texas.” Waxman pointed again to the article Abatangelo was holding, the one with the picture of Facio standing before a courthouse. “It was for trafficking—weapons, primarily, the drug charges were quashed. Facio served twenty-three months in Huntsville, was released, and then vanished underground again.”

Waxman's tone was almost reverential. There was a newfound purpose about him. Abatangelo found this troubling.

“Wax,” he said. “It's gonna be dark soon.”

“I'm almost finished,” Waxman insisted. “Come the 1990's, Facio apparently saw the wisdom of plying his trade in the private sector. The Iron Curtain fell; Castro was isolated. During a return visit to Mexico City he paid calls on several
patrones
he'd hit up for funds over the years. There were a lot of executive kidnappings then, it was a very tense time. Facio interviewed with Rolando Moreira in the Colonia Roma. Curiously, at the same time as his interview, a prominent financier who'd been abducted a month before was found alive, wandering along the Paseo de la Reforma. There's always been talk that Facio was somehow involved in the man's release, and he used it as a calling card. Regardless, he became Moreira's director of security.”

Abatangelo thought about this for a moment. “What you're saying is, he plays both sides.”

“The rumor,” Waxman said, “is that Facio is responsible for putting Rolando Moreira together with a major trafficker from Sinaloa. A man named Marco Carasco.”

“A rumor,” Abatangelo said. “This article, the one about the kidnapping, it appeared …?”

“In one of the opposition newspapers from Guerrero.”

“Aha,” Abatangelo said. “What's that, a Mexican rad rag?”

Waxman bristled. “You put Facio in the picture with Moreira and Marco Carasco, you have the prospects for everything we heard from our friend there on the couch. Stolen goods? Trafficking, kidnapping, murder? I don't find it a stretch. Not now. I'll be honest, at first I hadn't the least faith he would say anything worthwhile, or even coherent. But these people are real. If he knows half what he claims to know, he is a very valuable man.”

Abatangelo eyed Waxman with mild dismay. In a cautioning tone, he said, “You were at the table with me, Wax. You got to watch him work. It was like he was tooling through his mind on roller skates. And it's not much of a mind.”

“I believe he's telling the truth.”

“There's no future in the truth, Wax, not on that plane. Let's not save the world today, all right? Think small, walk tall.”

Waxman reddened. “We have to get corroboration. Of course. I don't mean to imply otherwise.”

Abatangelo shook his head. “No time.”

“I intend to make time,” Waxman responded. “I also intend to treat our friend with a little more respect. It's time we stopped assuming the only way to get him to cooperate is to scare him. You'll probably laugh if I say we might appeal to his conscience.”

Abatangelo laughed.

“He could use a friend.”

“I'm friendly,” Abatangelo said.

“Aleris is willing to track down other witnesses—”

“To what—something that happened years ago at the ass end of Mexico? That's not my fight, Wax. Her kind can't blame me or my politics. I don't vote, remember? I'm a felon.” He returned his glance to Frank. “It's not that I'm unsympathetic. It's just my focus here is a little narrower.”

Waxman removed his glasses and wiped the lenses with his shirttail. “Excuse my saying so, but given the circumstances of your friend's abduction—the methods, to use your term—I find this little fit of cynicism less than compelling.”

Abatangelo turned and in one short movement grabbed Waxman's shoulders, lifted him onto the balls of his feet and pinned him to the wall. He pushed his face close, hissing through his teeth. “Don't lecture me about her. What happened to her. What to do about her or how to feel about it.”

Waxman stared back blinking. He licked his lips. Abatangelo released his hold and turned away. Waxman gathered his breath, fumbled with his glasses and put them back on. “Forgive me,” he said. “I shouldn't sermonize. What I said about your friend was improper. I know she means a great deal to you.”

Abatangelo winced at the change of tone. Turning around again, he found himself regarded with immense, pitying eyes. He felt indulged. He felt as though an appeal were being made to his conscience.

CHAPTER

20

Saturday traffic offered little resistance as they headed up the East-shore Freeway. Waxman sat alone in front, driving the Dart. Abatangelo sat in back with Frank. It seemed best not to make him sit back there alone, like a prize, or a prisoner. Abatangelo urged him to talk, thinking that training Frank's mind on actual events might keep his more extreme imaginings at bay. Frank obliged, telling again the story of the past few weeks, confirming details. The effort came off like a sort of dreary chant. Abatangelo couldn't resist the impression that this was the last time Frank expected to say these things.

In time they turned onto the Delta Highway, heading toward the flood plain beyond Martinez. They reached the Pacheco turnoff and Frank told Waxman to leave the highway and head north through the low hills toward the river.

“There's a turn up here,” Waxman shortly announced from the front. “Which way do I go?”

Frank told him to bear right. They rounded a corner above which a refinery complex crowned a grassless bluff and then the marina came into view. Nearly three dozen boats buffeted a hatchwork of low sagging docks: weathered houseboats fouled with rubbish, listing barks, fishing smacks. Mainsails rattled in the late-day wind. The stench of brackish water mingled with that of rotting food and turpentine.

“This must be where the iconoclasts dock,” Abatangelo offered. A stenciled sign nailed to a fence post read,
WELCOME TO THE IRISH PENNANT—THOSE FOUND IN SKIFFS NEAR THE DOCKS AT NIGHT ARE LIKELY TO BE FOUND IN THEM COME MORNING
.

Garbage seethed out of brimming Dumpsters. A dog wearing a bandana collar barked from a paintless foredeck as the car eased past, joined by other dogs as yet unseen. A toddler in knee-soiled pajamas, holding a metal cup, stared, reaching behind one-handed to scratch. An inverted kayak rested on sawhorses amid a clutter of paint cans and tangled sail; two shirtless longhairs were stripping the hull with putty knives, sharing a bottle of peach schnapps as they worked. One of them spat into his paint shavings as the car went by.

When the marina lane came back around, a long brick wall standing chest-high ran parallel to the gravel for a hundred yards or more. Only the water stood opposite. A lone oak tree rose from the grass to the west. Abatangelo told Waxman to pull to the side.

“You can walk?” Waxman queried, turning back to Frank.

Frank didn't respond. He was staring out at the low wall which bore two fresh scrawlings in white paint.

The Son of Man is following out His appointed course.

Woe to that man by whom He is betrayed.

—Luke 22:22

Bring your pants

If you wanna dance.

—Felix the Cat

Waxman followed Frank's glance, adjusted his glasses, and read along. With forced humor, he quipped, “Proof at last. The Devil does quote scripture. And pop culture.”

“It wasn't here before,” Frank said. He scoured the distance in every direction, the marina, the waving tall grass, the gravel road arcing back toward the refinery.

Abatangelo said, “Looks like your friends intend to proceed.”

“That's not all they intend,” Frank answered, flinching as he read the white words over and over. Woe to the betrayer.

“Let's leave,” Frank said. “Please.”

“Not yet,” Abatangelo told him. “I want a closer look.”

He gripped Frank's sleeve and pulled him across the seat. Frank stepped out of the car, looking everywhere at once. Sniffing the air, he labored across the weed-choked gravel, Waxman doting alongside.

“Show me what you were talking about.” Abatangelo said.

Frank swallowed, scanning again the various distances. No idling cars. No waiting men. He flexed his hands, wiped them on his sleeves, then pointed. “One group lines up along the wall,” he said, “the other along the water. The drivers trade places, simple and quick. Headlights signal when things are okay. That's that.” He looked at Abatangelo, who was frowning. “I'm not making this up.”

“I didn't say you were.” Abatangelo checked the roads in and out, mentally trying to gauge the time it would take to arrive and leave. “Not yet, anyway.”

He stared out at the dull water, the abandoned derricks in the distance, the refinery behind. Winter twilight mottled the sky, a low red sun descending into scattered clouds.

He tried to picture what would happen. It would take a matter of seconds for Shel to be passed from one set of cars to the other. No one would dally. They loathed each other too much for that. He checked back toward the marina, the nearest boat rested 150 yards away at least. He could set up a tripod in the water, shield himself with the hull in the darkness, use the infrared with a telephoto. But the resolution would be poor, he wouldn't get faces.

He moved closer to the wall, pulling Frank along by the sleeve. A dirt mound abutted the bricks on the leeward side, leaving a trench that a smaller man might fit into, and yet it seemed too obvious. He looked beyond the wall then, across the mound, and spotted an incinerator shelter further into the grass, thirty yards back from the gravel road. The fact he hadn't seen it at first encouraged him.

“Wax,” he said over his shoulder, “keep Frank company here.”

Waxman sidled forward to Frank's side as Abatangelo jumped the wall. The ground was marshy underfoot. Mice fled through the tall grass, retreating from each step. The shelter was a cinder-block windbreak, three-sided, waist-high. A wire incinerator black from old fires stood amid a debris of charred paper, blackened soup cans, moldy singed cardboard. Abatangelo kicked the larger cinders into the grass. The interior walls wore a film of soot. Abatangelo crouched down and decided that, kneeling, he could hide here.