Angel Time_The Songs of the Seraphim

Chapter THREE
Mortal Sin and Mortal Mystery

I KEPT A GARAGE IN LOS ANGELES, SIMILAR TO THE one I kept in New York: four panel trucks, one advertising a plumbing company, another a florist, one painted white with a red light on top of it so that it looked like a special ambulance, and one that was simply a beat-up handyman’s set of wheels, with rusted junk in the back. These vehicles were as transparent to the public as Wonder Woman’s famous invisible plane. A beat-up sedan attracted more attention. And I always drove just a little too fast, with my window rolled down and my bare arm showing, and nobody saw me at all. Sometimes I smoked, just enough to reek of it.
I used the florist truck this time. No doubt it was the very best thing, and especially with a hotel in which tourists and guests mingle freely, and wander freely, in and out and at random and nobody ever asks you where you’re headed, or whether or not you’ve got a room key.
What works in all hotels and hospitals is a resolute attitude, a steady momentum. It would certainly work at the Mission Inn.
No one sees a dark shaggy-headed man with a florist logo stitched to his green shirt pocket, with a soiled canvas bag over one shoulder, carrying only a modest bouquet of lilies in a foil-wrapped earthen pot, and no one cares that he goes in with a quick nod to the doormen, if they even bother to look up. Add to the wig a pair of thick-rimmed glasses that completely distorted the habitual expression on my face. The bite plate between my teeth would give me the perfect lisp.
The garden gloves I wore hid the plastic gloves that were more important. The canvas sack over my shoulder smelled like peat moss. I held the pot of lilies as if it might break. I walked with a weak left knee and a regular swing to my head, something somebody might remember when they didn’t remember anything else. I put out a cigarette in a flowerbed on the main path. Someone might make note of that.
I had two syringes for the job, but only one was needed. There was a small gun strapped to my ankle under my trouser, though I dreaded the thought of having to use it, and for what it was worth, I had, in the lapel of my starched company shirt, a long thin blade of plastic, stiff and sharp enough to cut a man’s throat, or both his eyes.
The plastic was the weapon I could use most easily when I encountered difficulty, but I never had. I dreaded the blood. I also dreaded the cruelty of it. I detested cruelty in any form whatsoever. I liked things to be perfect. In the files, they call me the Perfectionist, the Invisible Man, and the Thief in the Night.
I counted entirely on the syringe to do this job, obviously, because the heart attack was the desired effect.
It was an over-the-counter syringe of the kind used by diabetics, with a micro needle that some men couldn’t even feel. And the poison had a huge fast-acting chaser of another over-the-counter drug that would sink the man almost immediately so that he’d be in a coma when the poison reached his heart. All trace of both drugs would clear his bloodstream in less than an hour. No autopsy would reveal a thing.
Just about every chemical combination I used could be bought in any drugstore nationwide. It’s astonishing what you can learn about poison if you really want to hurt people and you do not care what becomes of you, or whether or not you have any heart or soul left. I had at least twenty poisons at my disposal. I bought drugs in suburban drugstores in small amounts. I used the leaf of the oleander now and then, and oleander grew everywhere in California. I knew how to use the poison of the castor bean.
It went as planned.
I was there by nine-thirty. Black hair, black-rimmed glasses. Smell of cigarettes on the soiled gloves.
I took the creaky little elevator up to the top floor along with two people who never glanced at me once, and followed the snaking corridors out into the air and past the herb garden till I came to the green railing over the courtyard. I leaned on the railing and observed the clock.
All this was mine. To the left was the long red-tiled veranda, the long rectangular fountain, with its bubbling urn-shaped jets, with the room at the end, and the iron table and chairs beneath the green umbrella right across from the double doors.
Damn. How I loved to sit in the sun, in the cool California breeze, at that very table. I felt an intense temptation to scrap this job, and sit at that table until my heart stopped racing, and to simply walk off, leaving the pot of flowers there for anyone who might care.
I moved sluggishly up and down the veranda, even making my way around the rotunda, with its plunging circular stairways, as if I were checking the numbers on the doors, or just gaping at things as people do who roam the whole place as I did, on a whim. Who says a delivery boy cannot look around?
Finally the lady came out of the Amistad Suite and slammed the door. Big red patent-leather purse and breakneck high heels full of sequins and gold, skintight skirt, pushed-up sleeves, yellow hair flying. Beautiful and costly no doubt.
She was walking fast as if she was angry and she probably was. I moved closer to the room.
Through the dining area window of the suite, I saw the dim outline of the banker, beyond the white curtains, hunched over his computer on the desk, not even noticing that I was looking in at him, probably oblivious because tourists had been looking in all morning.
He was talking on a tiny phone, with an earpiece, and hammering the keys at the same time.
I made my way to the double doors and knocked.
At first he didn’t answer. Then gruffly he came to the door, opened it very wide, stared at me, and said: “What!”
“From the management, sir, with compliments,” I said, in the usual hoarse whisper, the bite plate making it hard for me to pronounce the words. I held up the lilies. They were beautiful lilies.
Then I moved right past him towards the bathroom murmuring something about water, they needed water, and with a shrug, the man went back to the desk.
The open bathroom was empty.
There might be someone in the tiny toilet compartment, but I doubted that and heard not a single telltale sound.
Just to be sure, I went in there for the water, and drew it from the spout in the tub.
No, he was the only one here.
The door to the veranda was hanging wide open.
He was talking into the phone and hammering on the computer keyboard. I could see a cascade of numbers flashing by.
Sounded like German, and I could understand only that he was irritated with somebody and mad in general at the whole world.
Sometimes bankers make the easiest targets, I reflected. They think their vast wealth protects them. They rarely use the bodyguards that they need.
I moved towards him, and set the flowers in the center of the dining room table, ignoring the mess of breakfast dishes. He didn’t care that I was at his back.
For a moment I turned away from him and looked up at the familiar dome. I looked at the soft beige pine trees painted along the base of it. I looked at the doves ascending through the mist of clouds to the blue sky. I fussed with the flowers. I loved the fragrance of them. I breathed it in and some faint memory came back to me, of some quiet and lovely place where the scent of flowers had been the very air. Where was that? Does it matter?
And all the while the door to the veranda stood gaping and there came the fresh breeze. Anybody walking by could see the bed and the dome, but not him, and not me.
I moved swiftly behind his chair, and I pumped thirty units of the deadly stuff into his neck.
Without looking up, he reached for the spot, as if batting away an insect, which is almost always what they all do, and then I said, slipping the syringe in my pocket:
“Sir, you wouldn’t have a tip for a poor delivery boy, would you?”
He turned. I was looming over him, smelling of peat moss and cigarettes.
His ice-cold eyes fixed me with fury. And then suddenly his face began to change. His left hand fell away from the computer keyboard, and with the right he groped for the earpiece. It fell out. He let that hand drop too. The phone slipped off the desk, as his left hand slipped to his leg.
His face was slack and soft and all the belligerence went out of him. He sucked in his breath and tried to steady himself with his right hand but couldn’t find the edge of the desk. Then he managed to raise his hand towards me.
Quickly I took off the garden gloves. He didn’t notice. He couldn’t be noticing much of anything.
He tried to stand but couldn’t.
“Help me,” he whispered.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “You just sit right here till it passes.”
Then with my plastic-gloved hands, I shut his computer, and I turned him back in the chair so that he fell silently forward on the desk.
“Yes,” he said in English. “Yes.”
“You aren’t well, sir,” I said. “You want me to call for a doctor?”
I looked up and out at the empty veranda. We were right opposite the black iron table, and I noticed for the first time that the Tuscan pots overflowing with lavender geraniums had tall hibiscus trees in them as well. The sun was beautiful there.
He was trying to catch his breath.
As I said, I detest cruelty. I picked up the landline phone beside him, and without punching for a dial tone I spoke to the empty receiver. We needed a doctor right away.
His head was to the side. I saw his eyes close. I think he tried to speak again but he couldn’t manage a word.
“They’re coming, sir,” I told him.
I might have left then, but as I said, I detest cruelty in any form.
By this time, he wasn’t seeing anything too clearly. Perhaps he was seeing nothing at all. But I remembered that bit of information they always give you in the hospital that “the hearing is the last thing to go.”
They’d told me that when my grandmother was dying, and I’d wanted to watch the television in the room, and my mother had been sobbing.
Finally he closed his eyes. I was surprised he was able to do it. First they were half shut, then shut altogether. His neck was a mass of wrinkles. I couldn’t see any breath coming from him, or see the slightest rise or fall to his frame.
I looked beyond him, through the white curtains, at the veranda again. At the black table, among the Tuscan potted flowers, a man had taken his place and appeared to be staring at us.
I knew that he couldn’t penetrate the curtains from that distance. All he could see was the whiteness, and perhaps a veiled shape. I didn’t care.
I needed only a few more moments, and then I could safely leave with the knowledge that the job was complete.
I didn’t touch the phones or the computers, but I made a mental inventory of what was there. Two cell phones on the desk just as The Boss had indicated. One dead phone on the floor. There had been phones in the bathroom. And there was another computer, the lady’s perhaps, unopened on the table before the fireplace, between the wing chairs.
I was merely giving the man time to die as I noted this, but the longer I remained in the room, the worse I began to feel. I wasn’t shaky, merely miserable.
The stranger on the veranda didn’t bother me. Let him stare. Let him stare right into the room.
I made sure the lilies were turned the best way, wiped up a bit of water that had spilled on the table.
By now the man was surely almost dead. I felt a full-fledged despair creeping over me, an utter sense of emptiness, and why not?
I went to feel his pulse. I couldn’t find it. But he was still alive. That I knew when I touched his wrist.
I listened to hear his breathing, and to my uncomfortable surprise, I heard the faint sigh of someone else.
Someone else.
Couldn’t have been that guy on the veranda, even though he was still staring into the room. A couple passed by. Then a lone man came, gazing up and around himself, and moved on to the rotunda stairs.
I wrote it off to nerves, that sigh. It had sounded close to my ear as if someone were whispering to me. Just this room, I figured, unnerving me because I loved it so much, and the sheer ugliness of the murder was tearing at my soul.
Maybe the room was sighing at the pity of it. I certainly wanted to. I wanted to go.
And then the misery in me darkened as it so often did at these times. Only on this occasion it was stronger, much stronger, and it had language to it in my head which I didn’t expect.
Why don’t you join him? You know you ought to go where he’s going. You ought to take that small gun off your ankle right now and hold the barrel right under your chin. Shoot straight up. Your brains will fly to the ceiling maybe, but you’ll be dead finally, and everything will be dark, darker even than it is now, and you’ll be separated from all of them forever, all of them, Mama, Emily, Jacob, your father, your unnamable father, and all of these, like him, whom you’ve personally and mercilessly killed. Do it. Don’t wait any longer. Do it.
There was nothing unusual about this crushing depression, I reminded myself, this crushing desire to end it, this crushing and paralyzing obsession with lifting the gun and doing just what the voice said. What was unusual was the clarity of the voice. It felt as if the voice was beside me, instead of inside me, Lucky talking to Lucky, as he so often did.
Outside, the stranger got up from the table, and I found myself watching in cool amazement as he came into the open door. He stood in the room, under the dome, staring at me as I stood behind the dying man.
He was a tall, rather impressive figure, slender, with a mop of soft black wavy hair and blue eyes with an unusually engaging expression.
“This man’s ill, sir,” I said immediately, pushing my tongue hard against the bite plate. “I think he needs a doctor.”
“He’s dead, Lucky,” said the stranger. “And don’t listen to the voice in your head.”
This was so utterly unexpected that I didn’t know what to do or to say. Yet no sooner had he spoken these words, than the voice in my head kicked in again.
End it. Forget the gun and its inevitable sloppiness. You have another syringe in your pocket. Are you going to let yourself be caught? Your life’s Hell now. Think what it will be like in prison. The syringe. Do it now.
“Ignore him, Lucky,” said the stranger. An immense generosity seemed to emanate from him. He looked at me with such focus that it was almost devotion, and I had, unaccountably, an instinct that he was feeling love.
The light shifted. A cloud must have unveiled the sun, because the light in the room had brightened, and I saw him with uncommon clarity, even though I was very used to noticing and memorizing people. He was my height, and he was looking at me with obvious tenderness and even concern.
Impossible.
When you know something is clearly impossible, what do you do? What was I to do now?
I put my hand into my pocket and felt for the syringe.
That’s right. Don’t waste the last precious minutes of your loathsome existence trying to figure this one. Don’t you see, The Right Man has worked a double-cross?
“Not so,” said the stranger. He stared at the dead man and his face melted in an expression of perfect sorrow, and then he appealed to me again.
“Time to leave here with me, Lucky. Time to listen to what I have to say.”
I couldn’t form a coherent thought. My heart was thudding in my ears, and with my finger I pushed ever so slightly at the plastic cap on the syringe.
Yes, bow out of their contradictions and their traps and their lies, and their endless capacity to use you. Defeat them. Come now.
“Come now?” I whispered. The words separated themselves from the theme of rage that was common to my mind. Why had I thought that, Come now?
“You didn’t think it,” said the stranger. “Don’t you see he’s doing his damnedest to defeat both of us? Leave the syringe alone.”
He looked young and eager, and almost irresistibly affectionate as he stared at me, but there was nothing young about him, and the sunlight was spilling in on him beautifully, and everything about him was effortlessly attractive. Only now did I notice, a little frantically, that he wore a simple gray suit, and a very beautiful blue silk tie.
Nothing about this was remarkable, but his face and hands were remarkable. And the expression was inviting and forgiving.
Forgiving.
Why would someone, anyone, look that way at me? Yet I had the feeling that he knew me, knew me better than I knew myself. It was as if he knew all about me, and only now did it penetrate that he had three times called me by my name.
Surely that was because The Right Man had sent him. Surely that was because I had been double-crossed. This was the last job for me with The Right Man, and here was the superior assassin who could put an end to an old assassin who was now more of a mystery than he was worth.
Then cheat them, and do it now.
“I do know you,” said the stranger. “I’ve known you all your life. And I’m not from The Right Man.” At this he softly laughed. “Well, not The Right Man you hold in such regard, Lucky, but from another who is The Right Man, I should say.”
“What do you want?”
“For you to come with me out of here. For you to turn a deaf ear to the voice that’s plaguing you. You’ve listened to that voice long enough.”
I calculated. What could explain all this? Not merely the stress of being in my room at the Mission Inn, no, that wasn’t sufficient. It must have been the poison, that I’d absorbed some of it when preparing it, that in spite of the double gloves, I hadn’t done things exactly right.
“You’re too clever for that,” said the stranger.
And so you devolve into madness? When you have the power to turn your back on them all?
I looked about me. I looked at the tester bed; I looked at the familiar dark brown draperies. I looked at the huge fireplace, now directly behind the stranger. I looked at all the common furnishings and objects of the room that I so well knew. How could madness project itself so sharply? How could it create such a specific illusion? But surely this figure wasn’t there, and I wasn’t talking to him, and the warm, inviting look on his face was some device of my own wretched mind.
He laughed again very softly. But the other voice was working.
Don’t give him a chance to get that syringe away from you. If you won’t die in this room, damn you, then step outside. Find some corner of this hotel, and you know all of them, and there put an end to yourself once and for all.
For one precious second, I was certain this figure would vanish if I moved towards him. I did it. He was as solid and palpable as before. He stepped back for me, and gestured that I might go out before him.
And suddenly I found myself standing on the veranda, in the sunlight, and the colors around me were wondrously vivid and lulling and I felt no urgency whatsoever, no ticking of any clock.
I heard him close the door of the suite and then I looked at him as he stood beside me.
“Don’t talk to me,” I said crossly. “I don’t know who you are or what you want or where you came from.”
“You called me,” he said in his even and agreeable voice. “You’ve called me in the past, but never so desperately as you called me now.”
Again I had that sensation of love flowing from him, of an infinite knowledge and an unaccountable acceptance of who and what I was.
“Called you?”
“You prayed, Lucky. You prayed to your guardian angel, and your guardian angel relayed the prayer to me.”
There was simply no way in the world that I could accept this. But what struck me with full force was that The Right Man couldn’t possibly know about my praying, couldn’t possibly know what went on in my mind.
“I know what goes on in your mind,” said the stranger. His face was as appealing and trusting as before. That was it, trusting, as if he had nothing whatsoever to fear from me, or any weapon I carried, or any desperate thing I might do.
“Wrong,” he said gently, drawing closer to me. “There are desperate things that I don’t want you to do.”
Don’t you know the Devil when you see him? Don’t you know he’s the Father of Lies? Maybe there are special devils for people like you, Lucky, did you ever think of that?
My hand went into my pocket for the syringe again, but instantly I pulled it back.
“Special devils, that’s likely,” said the stranger, “and special angels as well. You know that from your old studies. Special men have special angels, and I’m your angel, Lucky. I’ve come to offer you a way out of this, and you must not, you absolutely must not, reach for that syringe.”
I was about to speak, when that despair came over me as surely as if someone had wrapped me in a shroud, though I’ve never seen a shroud. It was simply the image that came to me.
This is how you want to die? Crazy in some little cell with people torturing you to get information out of you? Get out of here. Go. Go where you can put the gun to your chin and pull the trigger. You knew when you came here to this place and this room that you would do that. This was always meant to be your last killing. That’s why you brought the extra syringe.
The stranger laughed as if he couldn’t help himself. “He’s pulling all the stops out,” he said quietly. “Don’t listen. He wouldn’t have raised his voice so stridently if I weren’t here.”
“I don’t want you to talk to me!” I stammered.
A young couple was drifting towards us down the veranda. I wondered what they saw. They avoided us, their eyes scanning the brickwork and the heavy doors. I think they marveled at the flowers.
“It’s the lavender geraniums,” said the stranger as he looked at them in the pots that surrounded us. “And they want to sit down at this table, so why don’t you and I move on?”
“I’m moving on,” I said angrily, “but not because you say so. I don’t know who you are. But I’ll tell you this. If The Right Man sent you, you better be prepared for a little battle, because I’m going to take you down before I go.”
I walked off to the right and started down the winding staircase of the huge rotunda. I moved fast, silencing the voice in my head deliberately and certainly, as I crossed one landing after another and came at last to the bottom floor. I found him standing there.
“Angel of God, my guardian dear,” he whispered. He had been leaning against the wall, with his arms folded, a collected figure, but now he stood up straight and fell in beside me as I continued to walk on just about as briskly as I could.
“Be straight with me,” I said under my breath. “Who are you?”
“I don’t think you’re ready to believe me,” he said, his manner as gentle and solicitous as ever. “I’d rather that we were on the road back to Los Angeles, but if you insist …”
I felt the sweat breaking out all over me. I ripped the bite plate out of my mouth, and tore off the plastic gloves too. I shoved them in my pockets.
“Be careful. Uncap that syringe, and I’ve lost you,” he said, drawing close to me. He was moving just as quickly as I was and we were now nearing the front walk of the hotel.
You know madness. You’ve seen it. Ignore him. You fall for him and you’re finished. Get in the truck and drive out of here. Find someplace by the side of the road. And you know what to do.
The feeling of despair was almost blinding. I stopped in my tracks. We were under the campanario. It couldn’t have been a more lovely spot. The ivy was trailing over the bells, and people were streaming by us on the pathway, to the left and to the right. I could hear the laughter and chatter from the nearby Mexican restaurant. I could hear the birds in the trees.
He stood close to me, looking at me intently, looking at me the way I’d want a brother to look at me, but I had no brother, because my little brother had died a long, long time ago. My fault. The original murders.
The breath went out of me. The breath just left me. I looked directly into his eyes and I saw the love again, the pure unadulterated love, and acceptance, and then very gently, cautiously, he laid his hand on my left arm.
“All right,” I whispered. I was shaking. “You’ve come to kill me because he sent you. He thinks I’m a half-cocked gun out here, and he’s dropped the dime on me.”
“No, and no, and no.”
“Am I the one who’s dead? I somehow got that poison into my veins and I don’t know it? Is that what’s happened?”
“No, and no, and no. You’re very much alive and that’s why I want you. Now the truck isn’t fifty feet away. You told them to keep it at the entrance. Get the ticket out of your pocket. Complete the few gestures required here.”
“You’re helping me to complete the murder,” I said angrily. “You’re implying you’re an angel, but you’re helping a killer.”
“The man upstairs is gone, Lucky. He had his angels with him. And I can do no more for him now. I have come for you.” There was an indescribable beauty to him when he spoke these words, and again that loving invitation, as if he could somehow make everything in this broken world right.
Rage.
I wasn’t going out of my head. And I didn’t think The Right Man could come up with this brand of assassin if he searched for a hundred years.
I moved forward with my legs shaking and I handed the ticket to the boy who was waiting, putting a twenty-dollar bill on top of it, and I climbed into my waiting truck.
Of course he climbed in beside me. He appeared to ignore the dust and dirt everywhere, the peat moss and the crumpled newspaper and whatever else I’d added to make it look like a working vehicle rather than a prop.
I pulled out, made a sharp turn, and headed for the freeway.
“I know what’s happened,” I said over the roar of the warm air in the open windows.
“And what precisely is that?”
“I’ve made you up. I’ve concocted you. And this is a form of madness. And all I have to do to end it is ram this truck into the wall. Nobody else will be hurt but me and you, this illusion, this thing I’ve created because I’ve come to some sort of end of the line. It was the room, wasn’t it, doing it there. I know it was.”
He just laughed softly to himself and kept his eyes on the road. After a moment, he said, “You’re going a hundred and ten miles an hour. You’re going to be stopped.”
“Do you or do you not claim to be an angel?” I demanded.
“I am indeed an angel,” he responded, still staring forward. “Slow down.”
“You know, I read a book about angels recently,” I told him. “You know, I like those kind of books.”
“Yes, you have quite a library about what you don’t believe in and no longer hold sacred. And you were a good Jesuit boy when you were in school.”
Again the breath went out of me. “Oh, you are some assassin, throwing all that in my face,” I said, “if that’s what you are.”
“I have never been an assassin and never will be,” he said calmly.
“You’re an accessory after the fact!”
Again he laughed lightly. “If I had been meant to prevent the murder, I would have done it,” he said. “You do remember reading that angels are essentially messengers, the embodiment of their function, so to speak. Those words don’t come as any surprise but the surprise is obviously that I’ve been sent as a messenger to you.”
A traffic jam brought us to a slower pace and then to a crawl and a stop. I looked at him intently.
A calm came over me, that made me conscious that I’d sweated through the ugly green shirt I was wearing, and my legs were still unsteady, with a throb in the foot that pressed the brake.
“I’ll tell you what I do know from that book on angels,” I said. “Three-fourths of the time, they intervene in traffic incidents. Just what exactly did your kind do before there were automobiles? I really left the book wondering about that fact.”
He laughed.
Behind me, there came the blast of a horn. The traffic was moving and so were we.
“That’s a perfectly legitimate question,” he said, “especially after one has read that particular book. It doesn’t matter what we’ve done in the past. What matters now is what you and I can do together.”
“And you don’t have any name.”
We were speeding again, but I was going no faster than the other cars in the far-left lane.
“You can call me Malchiah,” he said kindly, “but I assure you, no Seraph under Heaven is ever going to tell you his real name.”
“A Seraph? You’re telling me you’re a Seraph?”
“I want you for a special assignment, and I’m offering you a chance to use every skill you possess to help me, and to help the people who are praying for our intervention right now.”
I was stunned. I felt the shock. It was like the coolness of the breeze as we drew closer to Los Angeles and closer to the coast.
You’ve made him up. Hit the embankment. Don’t play the fool for something out of your own diseased mind.
“You did not make me up,” he said. “Don’t you see what’s happening?”
The despair threatened to drown out my own words. It’s a sham. You’ve killed a man. You deserve death and the oblivion that’s waiting for you.
“Oblivion?” murmured the stranger. He raised his voice over the wind. “You think oblivion is waiting? You think you’ll never see Emily and Jacob again?”
Emily and Jacob!
“Don’t speak to me about them!” I said. “How dare you mention them to me. I don’t know who you are, or what you are, but you don’t mention them to me. If you’re thriving on my imagination, then shape up!”
This time his laughter had an innocence and a ring to it.
“Why didn’t I know it would be this way with you?” he said. He reached out and laid one of his soft hands gently on my shoulder. He looked wistful, sad, and then as if he were lost in thought.
I looked at the road. “I’m losing it,” I said. We were driving into the heart of Los Angeles, and within minutes we’d taken the exit that would lead me to the garage where I could leave the truck.
“Losing it,” he said, as if he were musing. He seemed to be watching our surroundings, the dipping ivy-covered embankments and the rising glass towers. “That’s just the point, my dear Lucky. In believing in me, what do you have to lose?”
“How did you find out about my brother and sister?” I asked him. “How did you learn their names? You made some connections and I want to know how you did it.”
“Anything but the obvious explanation? That I am what I say I am.” He sighed. It was exactly that sigh I’d heard in the Amistad Suite, right by my ear. When he spoke again, his voice was caressing. “I know your life from the time you were in your mother’s womb.”
This was beyond anything I could have ever anticipated and suddenly it came clear to me, wondrously clear, that it was beyond anything I could have imagined.
“You are really here, aren’t you?”
“I’m here to tell you that everything can change for you. I’m here to tell you that you can stop being Lucky the Fox. I’m here to take you to a place where you can begin to be the person you might have been … if certain things had not happened. I’m here to tell you …” He broke off.
We had reached the garage, and after hitting the remote for the door, I brought the truck safely and quietly inside.
“What, tell me what?” I said. We were eye to eye and he seemed wrapped in a calm that my fear couldn’t penetrate.
The garage was dark, lit only by one grimed skylight, and the single open door through which we’d passed. It was vast and shadowy and filled with coolers and lockers and piles of clothing that I would or could use on future jobs.
It seemed a meaningless place to me suddenly, a place that I could surely and gloriously leave behind.
I knew this sense of elation. It was like the way you feel after you’ve been sick for a long time and suddenly a clearheaded good feeling comes over you, and life seems worth living again.
He sat perfectly still beside me and I could see the light in two small glints in his eyes.
“The Maker loves you,” he said softly, almost dreamily. “I’m here to offer you another way, a way to that love if you’ll take it.”
I went quiet. I had to go quiet. I wasn’t exhausted from the pitch of alarm that had gripped me. Rather I was emptied of that alarm. And the sheer beauty of this possibility arrested me, the way the look of the lavender geraniums could have arrested me, or the ivy trailing from the campanario, or the sway of trees moving in the breeze.
I saw all of these things suddenly, tumbling through my mind from the frantic rush to this dark and shadowy place, reeking of gasoline, and I didn’t see the dimness surrounding us. In fact I realized that the garage was now filled with a pale light.
Slowly, I got out of the truck. I moved away from it to the far end of the garage. Out of my pocket, I took the second syringe and laid it there on the workbench nearby.
I slipped off the ugly green shirt and pants, threw them in the deep waste can that was filled with kerosene. I emptied the contents of the syringe into the mess of clothes even as the kerosene was darkening them. I threw in the gloves. And I struck a match and threw it into the can.
The fire exploded dangerously. I threw the work shoes into it and watched the synthetic material melt. I threw the wig into the blaze too, and ran my hands gratefully over my own short hair. The glasses. I was still staring through the glasses. I took them off, broke them up, and put them into the fire as well. It was burning hot. Every single item was synthetic and it was all melting down to nothing in the blaze. I could smell it. Pretty soon everything was pretty much gone. The poison was most certainly gone.
The stench did not last for long. When there was no fire anymore, I gave the remains another douse of kerosene, and lighted the fire again.
In the uneven flicker of the blaze, I looked at my regular clothes neatly arranged on a hanger on the wall.
Slowly I put them on, the dress shirt, the gray trousers, the black socks and plain brown shoes, and finally the red tie.
The fire died out again.
I put on my jacket, and I turned around and saw him standing there, leaning against the truck. His ankles were crossed and his arms were folded, and the even light showed him to be as appealing as I’d found him earlier, and there was the same affectionate and loving expression on his face.
That deep, appalling despair gripped me again, voiceless, and fathomless, and I almost turned away from him, vowing never to look at him again, no matter where or how he appeared.
“He’s fighting hard for you,” he said. “He’s whispered to you all these years, and now he’s raised his voice. He thinks he can take you right out of my hands. He thinks you’ll believe his lies, even with me here.”
“Who is he?” I demanded.
“You know who he is. He’s been talking to you for a long, long time. And you’ve been listening to him ever more intently. Don’t listen anymore. Come with me.”
“You’re saying there’s a battle for my soul?”
“Yes, that’s what I’m saying.”
I could feel myself shaking again. I wasn’t afraid, so my body was getting afraid. I was calm but my legs were wobbly. My mind wouldn’t give in to the fear anymore, but my body was weathering the impact and couldn’t quite withstand it.
My car was there, a small open Bentley convertible I hadn’t bothered to replace for years.
I opened the door and got inside. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, he was beside me, just as I expected. I put the car in reverse, and left the garage behind.
I’d never driven through downtown so quickly before. It was as if the traffic were carrying me swiftly along a river.
Within minutes we were turning off into the streets of Beverly Hills, and then we were on my street lined on both sides by magnificent jacaranda trees in their full bloom. Almost all the green leaves were gone from them now, and their branches were laden with blue blossoms, and the petals carpeted the sidewalks and the tarmac below.
I didn’t look at him. I didn’t think about him. I was thinking about my life, and fighting that rising despair the way a person fights nausea, and I was wondering, What if this is true, what if he is just what he says he is? What if somehow I, the man who’s done all these things, can truly be redeemed?
We had pulled into the garage of my building before I said anything, and as I expected, he climbed out of the car as I did and went with me into the elevator and up to the fifth floor.
I never close the balcony doors to my apartment and I walked out now onto the concrete terrace and looked down at the blue jacarandas.
I was breathing rapidly, my body carrying the weight of all this, but my mind felt wondrously clear.
When I turned around and looked at him, he was as vivid and solid as the jacarandas and their tumbling blue blossoms. He was standing in the doorway merely regarding me, and again there was that promise in his face, that promise of comprehending, and of love.
I felt the urge to cry, to dissolve into a state of weakness, a state of being charmed.
“Why? Why have you come here for me?” I asked. “I know I asked you before, but you have to tell me, tell me completely, why me and not someone else? I don’t know if you’re real. I’m banking on it that you are now. But how can someone like me be redeemed?”
He came up to the concrete railing beside me. He looked down on the blue-blossomed trees. He whispered, “So perfect, so lovely.”
“They’re why I live here,” I answered, “because every year when they come into bloom—.” My voice broke. I turned my back on the trees because I would start crying if I kept looking at them. I looked into my living room and saw its three walls covered with books from floor to ceiling. I saw the bit of hallway visible to me with its bookcases stacked just as high.
“Redemption is something one has to ask for,” he said in my ear. “You know that.”
“I can’t ask!” I said. “I can’t.”
“Why? Simply because you don’t believe?”
“That’s an excellent reason,” I said.
“Give me a chance to make you believe.”
“Then you have to begin by explaining, why me?”
“I’ve come for you because I’ve been sent,” he said in an even voice, “and because of who you are and what you’ve done and what you can do. It’s no random choice, coming for you. It’s for you, and you alone, that I’ve come. Every decision made by Heaven is like that. It’s particular. That’s how vast Heaven is, and you know how vast is the earth, and you must think of it, for just a moment, as a place existing with all of its centuries, all of its epochs, all of its many times.
“There isn’t a soul in the world whom Heaven doesn’t regard in particular fashion. There isn’t a sigh or a word that Heaven fails to hear.”
I heard him. I knew what he meant. I looked down at the spectacle of the trees. I wondered what it was like for a tree to lose its blossoms to the wind, when its blossoms were all that it had. The peculiarity of the thought startled me. I shuddered. The urge to weep was almost overwhelming me. But I fought it. I made myself look at him again.
“I know your whole life,” he said. “If you like I’ll show it to you. In fact, it seems that’s exactly what I’ll have to do before you really trust in me. I don’t mind. You have to understand. You can’t decide if you don’t.”
“Decide what? What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about an assignment, I told you.” He paused, then continued very kindly. “It’s a way to use you and who you are. It’s a way to use every detail of who you are. It’s an assignment to save life instead of taking it, to answer prayers instead of cutting them off. It’s a chance to do something that matters terribly to others while doing only good for yourself. That’s what it’s like to do good, you know. It’s like working for The Right Man except that you believe in it with your whole heart and your whole soul, so much so that it becomes your will and your purpose with love.”
“I have a soul, that’s what you want me to believe?” I asked.
“Of course you do. You have an immortal soul. You know that. You’re twenty-eight years old and that is very young by anyone’s count, and you feel immortal, for all your dark thoughts and desires to end your life, but you don’t grasp that the immortal part of you is the true part of you, and that all the rest in time will fall away.”
“I know these things,” I whispered. “I know them.” I didn’t mean to sound impatient. I was telling the truth and I was dazed.
I turned, only half realizing what I was about, and went into the living room of my small home. I looked again at the walls lined in books. I looked at the desk where I often read. I looked at the book open on the green blotter. Something obscure, something theological, and the irony of this struck me with full force.
“Oh, yes, you’re well prepared,” he said beside me. It was as if we’d never moved apart from each other at all.
“And I’m supposed to believe you’re The Right Man now?” I asked.
He smiled at that. I saw that much out of the corner of my eye. “The Right Man,” he repeated softly. “No. I’m not The Right Man. I’m Malchiah and I’m a Seraph, I told you, and I’m here to give you your choice. It’s the answer to your prayer, Lucky, but if you can’t accept that, let’s say it is the answer to your wildest dreams.”
“What dreams?”
“All these years you’ve always prayed The Right Man was Interpol. He was with the FBI. He was with the good men and everything he told you to do was for the good. That’s what you’ve always dreamed.”
“Doesn’t matter, and you know it. I killed them. I made the whole thing into a game.”
“I know you did, but that was still your dream. You come with me and there will be no doubts, Lucky. You will be on the side of the angels, with me.”
We looked at each other. I was trembling. My voice wasn’t steady:
“If that were only true,” I said, “I would do anything, anything you ask of me, for you, and for God in Heaven. I would suffer anything you demand.”
He smiled, but very slowly as if he was looking deep inside me to find the reservation, and then perhaps he found that there was none. Perhaps I realized there was none.
I sank down into the leather chair beside the couch. He sat opposite me.
“I’m going to show you your life now,” he said, “not because I need to do it, but because you need to see it. And only after you see it, will you believe in me.”
I nodded. “If you can do that,” I said miserably, “well, I’ll believe in anything that you say.”
“Prepare yourself,” he said. “You’ll hear my voice and see what I mean to describe, more vividly perhaps than you’ve ever seen anything, but the order and organization will be mine, and often more difficult for you to bear than a simple chronology. It’s the soul of Toby O’Dare we’re examining here, not merely a young man’s history. And remember, no matter what you see and what you feel, I’m truly here with you. I’ll never abandon you.”