From Cape Town with Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

the accelerator while the electric guitar whined and raged.
    Free!
I sang along at the top of my lungs, vowing never to change.
    The Twelve Apostles Hotel was sandwiched between the mountains and the endless rocky shoreline, almost an island unto itself. The only vehicle parked outside was the well-shined white van Rachel Wentz had mentioned. I expected to find paparazzi, but I didn’t see anyone lurking.
Good for her.
There are worse problems in life, but I feel bad for actors with swarms of paparazzi. Why would Sofia Maitlin want a circus in the middle of an adoption?
    I hate tabloid culture. I haven’t bought a tabloid since the nineties, and here’s why: I once had a costar who was one of my mentors, an older man I’ll call Raul Garcia. He played the assistant principal on my old series,
Malibu High
—a stern Edward James Olmos type. He was far froma household name, just a working character actor who’d been in the business for years, delivered his lines, showed up on time, and loved his work. He often brought his nephews to the set, and I used to shoot hoops with them. (I played a basketball coach.)
    Our series came and went, so we didn’t see each other for about a year. I called to have lunch with Raul and found out he was dying. Too far gone for visitors, his family said, but we spoke for ten minutes on the phone. His voice sounded awful, but he cracked me up with jokes, and the single most blasphemously filthy limerick I’ve ever heard. Buy me a drink sometime and ask me. I refuse to write it down.
    Raul was an immigrant, and his family was proud and protective. In his home country, his success in American television gave him a stature beyond the size of his roles. His family might have suspected he was gay, but he never told them—only a few select friends. It was nobody’s business. At his funeral, where his parents wept over his casket, no one acknowledged the lonely white-haired man I guessed to be his lover, and no one said the word
AIDS
aloud.
    A week after the funeral, I was walking down Wilshire when a tabloid on display at the newsstand stopped me: RAUL GARCIA AIDS SECRET, a giant headline read. The photo was worse: an emaciated Raul celebrating his sixty-third birthday only two weeks before he died. A private photo someone had stolen or sold. Apparently, grave robbing is alive and well.
    I refused to read the story inside, but a grainy image of the sad, white-haired man I’d seen at the funeral bore the caption RAUL’S SECRET GAY LOVER . And a large, boxed quote from an anonymous morgue employee confirmed that Raul died of AIDS from his
toe tag.
The toe tag was pictured beneath the quote—exhibit A.
    It was an assault, as if someone had dug Raul up out of the ground and violated him. Maybe his family shouldn’t have cared—and it’s too bad Raul felt he had to hide—but grief is hard enough. If that tabloid story had been about my father, I would have wanted to skin the reporter and roll him in salt.
    Thank God no reporters will be calling to ask me about April,
I thought, the bright side of anonymity.
Yeah, Ten—lucky you! You’re not an Oscar winner worth fifty million dollars.
    The parked white van was empty except for the wiry driver, who looked about fifty. He was so preoccupied with his cell phone, speaking Xhosa with clicks and dizzying speed, that he didn’t notice me standing by the passenger-side door. I scanned the license pinned to the visor—his face matched the photo. The van was owned by an agency called Children First Mission. The insignia, children’s hands clasped around a traditional shield, was on the door.
    Rachel Wentz had asked me to wait by the van, but I wanted to meet my client before we faced the public. I used to know the hotel security managers in Cape Town, but I had to wait at the desk while the skeptical concierge called up to the room. She was a matronly woman with blond hair in a severe