He was standing at the highest window of Coney Eye, looking down upon the driveway. It was a little before noon, and the limos gliding up the driveway announced the first of the party guests. He would have liked to have Tommy-Ray at his side at this juncture, but the boy had not yet returned from his trip to the Mission. No matter. Lamar had proved a more than able substitute. There had been one uncomfortable moment, when the Jaff had finally put off the mask of being Buddy Vance and presented his true face to the comedian, but it hadn't taken long to bring the man around. In some regard he was more preferable company to Tommy-Ray; more sensual, more cynical. What was more he had a thorough knowledge of the guests who would soon be gathering in Buddy Vance's memory; a more thorough knowledge, indeed, than the widow Rochelle. She had sunk deeper and deeper into a drug-induced stupor since the previous evening; a condition which Lamar had taken sexual advantage of, much to the Jaff's amusement. Once upon a time (so long ago) he might have done the same, of course. No, not might, would. Rochelle Vance was undoubtedly beautiful, and her addiction, informed as it was by a constant undercurrent of rage, made her even more attractive. But these were affairs of the flesh, and for another life. There were more urgent pursuits: namely, the power to be garnered from the guests who were even now gathering below. Lamar had run down the list with him, offering some savage observation or other on practically every one. Corrupt lawyers, addicted actors, reformed whores, pimps, priapists, hitmen, white men with black souls, hot men with cold, ass-kissers, coke-sniffers, the wretched high, the more wretched low, egotists, onanists and hedonists to a man. Where better to find the kind of forces he needed to keep him from harm when the Art opened? He would find fears in these addicted, bewildered, inflated souls of a kind he'd never have found in the mere bourgeois. From them he'd raise terata the like of which the world had never seen. Then he'd be ready. Fletcher was dead, and his army, if it had indeed manifested itself, was keeping its head low.
There was nothing left between the Jaff and Quiddity.
As he stood at the window and watched the victims disembark, greeting one another with rhinestone smiles and pinched kisses, his thoughts went—of all places—to that dead-letter room in Omaha, Nebraska, where, so many lives ago, he'd first had a hint of America's secret self. He remembered Homer, who'd opened the door to that treasure house, and later died against it, his life stabbed out by the blunt-bladed knife the Jaff still carried in his jacket pocket. Death had meant something then. Been an experience to go in dread of. It wasn't until he'd stepped into the Loop that he'd realized how irrelevant such fears were, when time could be suspended, even by a minor charlatan like Kissoon. Presumably the shaman was still secure in his refuge, as far from his spiritual creditors, or the lynch-mob, as it was possible to get. Lingering in the Loop, planning the getting of power. Or holding it at bay.
That last notion occurred to him now for the first time, like a long-postponed solution to a puzzle he hadn't even known he'd been gnawing at. Kissoon had been holding the moment because if he once let it slip he'd unleash his own death...
"Well..." he murmured.
Lamar was behind him. "Well, what?"
"Just musing," the Jaff said. He turned from the window. "Is the widow already downstairs?"
"I'm trying to rouse her."
"Who's greeting the guests?"
"Nobody."
"Go to it."
"I thought you wanted me here."
"Later. Once they've all arrived you can bring them up one by one."
"As you wish."
"One question."
"Only one?"
"Why aren't you afraid of me?"
Lamar narrowed his already narrow eyes. Then said:
"I've still got my sense of the ridiculous."
Without waiting for any riposte from the Jaff he opened the door and headed about his duties as host. The Jaff turned back to the window. Another limo was at the gates, this one white, its driver showing his passengers' invitations to the guards.
"One by one," the Jaff murmured to himself. "One by wretched one."
Grillo's invitation to the party at Coney Eye had been delivered by hand mid-morning, its courier Ellen Nguyen. Her manner was friendly but brisk; there was no trace of the intimacy that had flowered between them the previous afternoon. He invited her into his hotel room but she insisted that there was no time:
"I'm needed up at the house," she said. "Rochelle seems to be completely out of it. I don't think you need give a second thought to being recognized. But you will need the invitation. Fill in whatever name you want to invent. There'll be a lot of security so don't lose it. This is one party you won't be able to talk your way into."
"Where will you be?"
"I don't even think I'll be there."
"I thought you said you were going up there now."
"Just for the preparations. As soon as the party starts, I'm out. I don't want to mix with those people. Parasites, all of them. None of them really loved Buddy. It's just a show."
"Well I'll tell it like I see it."
"Do that," she said, turning to go.
"Could we just talk a moment?" Grillo said.
"About what? I haven't got much time."
"About you and me," Grillo said. "About what happened yesterday."
She looked at him without focusing her gaze. "What happened, happened," she said. "We were both there. What's to say?"
"Well for one: how about trying it again?"
Again, the unfixed look.
"I don't think so," she said.
"You didn't give me a chance—" he said.
"Oh no," she replied, eager to correct any error he was about to make. "You were fine...but things have changed."
"Since yesterday?"
"Yes," she said. "I can't quite tell you how..." She let the sentence hang, then took another thought up. "We're both adults. We know how these things work."
He was about to say that no, he didn't know how this or any other thing worked any longer, but that after this conversation his self-esteem was enfeebled enough without beating it to its knees with further confessions.
"Be careful at the party," she said as she once more turned to go.
He couldn't keep himself from saying, "Thanks for that at least."
She returned him a small, enigmatic smile, and left.
The trip back to the Grove had been lengthy for Tommy-Ray, but it was lengthier still for Tesla and Raul, though for less metaphysical reasons. For one, Tesla's car was not so hot, and it had taken quite a beating on the way down; it was now much the worse for wear. For another, though she had been raised from near death by the touch of the Nuncio, it had left her with side-effects the full extent of which she didn't really grasp until they were over the border. Though she was driving a solid car along a solid highway her grasp of that solidity was not as good as it had been. She felt a pull on her from other places and other states of mind. She'd driven high on drugs and drink in the past but what she was experiencing now was a wilder ride altogether, as though her brain had summoned up from memory fragments of every trip she'd ever taken, every hallucinogen, every tranquilizer, and was running her through the lot, giving her mind a shot of each. One moment she knew she was whooping like a wild thing (she could hear herself, like another voice), the next she was floating in ether with the highway dissolving in front of her, the next her thoughts were filthier than the New York subway, and it was all she could do to stop herself putting an end to the whole damn farce of living with one turn of the wheel. Through it all, two facts. One, that of Raul sitting beside her, gripping the dashboard with white-knuckled hands, his fear pungent. The other, the place that she'd visited in her Nunciate dream, Kissoon's Loop. Though it was not as real as the car she was travelling in, and the smell of Raul, it was no less insistent. She carried its memory with her every mile they covered. Trinity, he'd called it, and it, or Kissoon himself, wanted her back. She felt its pull, almost like a physical claim upon her. She resisted it, though not entirely willingly. Though she'd been glad to be delivered back into life, what she'd seen and heard in her time in Trinity made her curious to return; even anxious. The more she resisted the more exhausted she became, until by the time they reached the outskirts of L.A. she was like someone deprived of sleep: with waking dreams threatening to erupt at any moment into the texture of reality.