Angel Fire Read online

  “Answer your question?” She walked much more slowly toward the parlor.

  “I guess.”

  “It really doesn’t, you know.” She leaned against the door frame. “You wanted to know if I were happy, didn’t you?”

  “Illegitimate questions to a guardian angel?”

  “No.”

  “Well?”

  She winked at him. “I like my work. Now get dressed for the concert.”

  Damn clever answer.

  And, to whoever or Whoever might be lurking across the street in St. Paddy’s, I don’t like the deck you’ve dealt me this time, fella. Not one bit.

  Not that whether I like it makes any difference.

  He didn’t have his new suit yet or the made-to-order shirts, but he did don one of the color-coordinated ties and splash himself liberally with the scent she had chosen. Does too smell like a whorehouse, even if I have never been in one.

  He sat next to the massive TV set in the parlor, which he hadn’t dared turn on because he didn’t believe in his heart of hearts that it really existed. Any more than he believed that Gabriella light existed.

  The lights in the parlor dimmed; an aroma of incense—he could call it nothing but heavenly—wafted across the room. A bright beam, from no discernible source, illumined an ornately carved ivory stool that had materialized on the other side of the room.

  Solemn high, he thought.

  Then Gabriella appeared. Wow! he did not dare say the word aloud. It would be like talking at the consecration of the Mass. He applauded lightly.

  She bowed solemnly in response and seated herself on the stool. Then she began fiddling with the strings on her ancient Celtic harp, the way harpists always do.

  She was dressed in a glittering white gown, long sleeves, clenched at the waist and flowing to the floor, with a deep V neck that plunged almost to her navel. At least. An elaborate jeweled choker circled her neck, and in her silver gray hair, done in a new wave for the event, she wore a tiara that would have made the Queen of England envious.

  No paste either, he was willing to bet. Not that they were stolen from anyone permanently.

  Probably the harp had been borrowed for the moment from a safe in Trinity College in Dublin.

  This crowd had class when they engaged in larceny. “Irish harp,” he murmured, wondering if Sister Intemerata would slap his wrists for talking in church.

  “When in Rome,” she sniggered nervously. She’s worried about pleasing her audience! Well, I suppose all performers are, once their species reaches—what was her word?—reflectivity.

  All fellow pilgrims of the absolute do worry about how they are about to perform before an audience. Even angels. Desmond’s First Law.

  Then she began to play and sing, first in one voice, then in many voices, her notes running the full range from deep bass to high soprano and sometimes deeper and higher. She was often a pure and lonely voice gliding over the water, and then a mighty choir of eight parts dancing back and forth in intricate harmonies. Her first song was to Stacey’s tapes what a Handel oratorio is to a kindergarten ditty. And she got better.

  Her overture reminded him of water, trickling brooks, bubbling creeks, rushing streams, rolling rivers, surging oceans, pounding rain storms, crushing waterfalls, glistening dew, a drop of water on a thirsty tongue. Then silence. He forgot to applaud.

  “Too much, Seano?”

  “Oh no.”

  “Sure?”

  “Who’s clinging now?”

  Rich laughter. Then a song about laughter—no, a song of laughter—no again, a song like laughter. All the joy and merriment, all the comedy and delight, all the jollity and mirth in the world—no, in the universe—merged into one wild, hilarious ecstasy.

  “Not bad.” He sighed appreciatively when she had finished. “With a little practice you might be the Spike Jones of your generation.”

  “Humf,” she sniffed. “More?” “Oh yes.”

  There were no words in her songs, not as he knew words; rather, sounds which said more than words.

  The next piece was dirge, so sad, so melancholy, so bittersweet that tears poured down his cheeks. A funeral march for her spouse? Most likely but he would not ask. No way. Then so subtly, so imperceptibly that he hardly knew what was happening the dirge turned into a triumphal hymn of hope and glory.

  “Analog sounds, I suppose,” he said at the end of the melody, for want of courage to make direct comment.

  “Certainly, the sound patterns we hear are translated into waves that your ear can perceive.”

  “What if you sang them in the original sound patterns and didn’t modify the waves, would they be too much for me?”

  “Oh no, Jackie Jim”—she chuckled—“you wouldn’t hear anything at all. I have to translate them. One more?”

  “As many as you want. It beats Johnny Carson.”

  “One more will be enough. This is hard work. Let me see ... I know!”

  The final song seemed to combine all the others and add something more—it was funny, sad, impertinent, angry, outraged and outrageous, saucy, implacable, crazy. It ended with a nutty little fillip that seemed to say, not without affection, “To hell with you.”

  “Bravo, bravo!” Sean stood up and applauded. “Not so loud!” She bowed complacently, her face and chest flushed with pleasure. “You’ll wake up our neighbors.”

  “Wake them up, why it’s only”—he glanced at his watch— “midnight? You’ve been singing for three hours?”

  “And nine minutes.”

  “The last was a self-portrait.”

  “Fresh!” She strummed a protest chord on the harp.

  “It was too.”

  “All right.”

  “You wrote them all, I bet?” The Eiswein bottle, replenished, was at his side with two goblets; he filled them both.

  “We wouldn’t put it that way.” She accepted a goblet from him. “We are a bit more communal than your species, but in your terms that statement contains the truth.”

  “I suppose that anyone of your gang can do the same.” He

  toasted her.

  She acknowledged the toast. “Certainly not. Some have some talents, others have others. My, this is good wine.”

  “You made it. You ought to know.”

  “I did not make it.” She sipped it again. Perspiration was running down her face and neck. Hard work indeed. “Not exactly anyway.”

  “I would assume that you are one of the better, uh, composers

  in your gang?”

  “A fair assumption,” she said, nodding politely.

  “So why don’t you spend all your time composing instead of flitting around the universe, meddling in the affairs of other species?”

  She disappeared from view for a moment. Where there had been a woman in white with an Irish harp in one hand and a glass of wine in the other, there was nothing at all. Indeed, the whole parlor vanished and Sean was back in his own bedroom.

  I think I am in real trouble.

  Then everything twinkled back into view. He expected to see an angel analog in a white dress with deep cleavage at the height of cherubic fury. Instead, she was sitting on the ivory stool laughing

  hilariously.

  “Wonderful, Seano, absolutely wonderful.” She chortled. “Put the nosy, pushy angel woman in her place. Touche and again I say touche.” She lifted the wineglass for more.

  “You won’t get drunk on me?”

  “On this stuff?” She gulped the Neirsteiner. “Don’t be absurd.”

  “You’re not angry anymore?”

  “How can I be angry at my sweet little wolfhound?” More laughter.

  And she evaded my point quite nicely.

  “I’m just practicing on how to deal with the next nosy, pushy, vulnerable earth woman, I meet.”

  “Of course. Hoisting me on my own petard, I believe is your saying. All right, Jackie Jim. It’s late and you have a long day before we catch our plane tomorrow night. To bed!”
/>   “Anything you say, lady. No, wait a minute.” He emptied the wine bottle. “One for the road ... I have one more question before this most interesting day is over.”

  “Ask.” She had found a towel somewhere and was wiping her face and neck and chest.

  “What was she really like, the kid I mean.”

  “What kid?”

  “Mary of Nazareth.”

  The movement of the towel stopped. Gaby’s big eyes grew even bigger.

  “She was wonderful, Jackie Jim, dazzling. My songs made you think of her?”

  “I guess. I don’t know why else the question came up.”

  She sighed. ‘Tour species says all the right words about her, but you don’t know what they really mean. I’ve never met anyone quite like her. In any species.... You know what she is really like? Monsignor Blackie’s ivory statue.”

  “Saucy?”

  “And cute and funny and adorable and smart and respectful and tough as they come. God knows she had to be. And I’ve already said too much.”

  “Fair enough....”

  “The pictures,” she said, as she removed the tiara from her hair, “are terrible, mostly anyway. They’re almost as bad—“

  “As the pictures of you?” He finished for her.

  “I didn’t say that.” She unfastened the choker. “And I won’t be tricked into saying anything more. Now go to bed, I have work to do.”

  “I just want to go on record as saying that the pictures don’t do you justice.”

  “To bed!”

  “Yes ma’am!”

  Work, he thought as he fell to sleep. She can conjure up a tiara that would sink an aircraft carrier and an Irish harp that’s at least fifteen hundred years old and a gown that’s worth five big ones at least, and she still has to work.

  His last sensations were of an argument being conducted in melodic angel voices. He could pick Gaby out. She was, he was certain, trying to resign from her responsibility for him. He was, she seemed to be saying, too much of a handful altogether.

  Well, I’ll drink to that.

  The others, gentle, soothing, reassuring, were telling her that she was doing just fine. No problem.

  Gradually the Gaby voice calmed down. All right, I’ll keep on trying.

  He didn’t know whether to be glad or sad.

  On the whole, he whispered to no one in particular, I think she’s right. Send someone else. I don’t deserve the first team.

  Maybe I need it.

  Sean Desmond could not sleep. No sweetly sexy dreams about surrogate Gabys tranquilized his nervous system.

  He turned over in the bed, wished he had not given up smoking and tried to review the data like a good scientist should.

  There was someone in the room beyond the parlor—which didn’t really exist—who claimed to be an angel, indeed hinted that she was the angel Gabriel and that she had sung at Bethlehem on Christmas night. She had also announced to Mary the coming of her child. She had been present at Masurian Lakes and during the Cuban missile crisis. She was Lucifer’s mate before that good spirit had died. She was, if her story was to be believed, still mourning him. She had, apparently, saved Sean’s life, by disposing of two would-be assassins, quite abruptly and with chilling efficiency. She had also captured a fundamentalist loony, after intercepting his bullets by the rather simple (“easy when you know how to do it”) trick of catching up with them. At a speed marginally shorter than the speed of light. She had frozen two hit men into a position in which they would kill each other, with single shots mind you, the moment she unfroze them.

  Without so much as a “by your leave” she had instructed the “adorable” Blackie Ryan to process his application for a marriage annulment.

  She was engaged in remaking him, body and soul—fixing his posture, outfitting him with new clothes, advising him about attracting women.

  She argued that she was not taking away his freedom, but her demands, instructions, suggestions, requests, opinions, and recommendations were almost irresistible.

  No, totally irresistible.

  She said she was protecting him from mysterious enemies and that he was part of some important and apparently gracious pattern at work in the world. But she wouldn’t tell him who the enemies were or why he, of all people, was so important.

  She was also a strangely vulnerable sort of angel who seemed almost to need his help and who responded positively—sometimes—to his attempts to reassure her.

  Even docilely.

  And sometimes with robust laugher.

  She was gorgeous. And she seemed to think that he was “more than presentable” and, for a member of an inferior species, perhaps even deserving of love.

  By a woman seraph? Because that’s what I think she is, one who stands before the face of the Most High (her title for God, not mine, because I’m not sure you’re even there) in the sense that she sees the patterns with special clarity.

  She claimed not to be the pure spirit of Sister Intemerata’s religion class but a corporeal being whose energy patterns were not perceptible by human senses, though she seemed to admit that most of the phenomena which had been attributed to angels were the work of herself and her friends.

  They are interested in the world and in some ways protective of it because it aids them in a comparative study of their own evolutionary process, one which is more mature than ours but not totally dissimilar from it. And even more because they seemed to have been programmed by their evolution to seek out and protect emerging patterns of beauty and goodness, even when the task of protecting them seems well-nigh impossible.

  She is one of their better composers; no, bet she’s among the best. But she flits about the cosmos when she should be home

  writing more music. Claims that she likes her work, but I don’t think she does, not anymore.

  She even wants to get out of the Desmond Project.

  Desmond Sanction?

  Desmond Caper?

  Desmond Conspiracy?

  Desmond Diversion?

  That’s probably the best. Alliterative.

  She asserts that she is in fact the precise kind of creature about whose existence I speculate, mostly as a put-on, in my acceptance speech. And has more in common with such creatures than she does with Sister Intemerata’s angelic spirits.

  She sings the most wonderfully appealing and seductive melodies.

  Obviously, patently, clearly—choose your own academic buzzword—she doesn’t exist. Can’t exist.

  Let us consider the possibilities. Rationally and scientifically like the good scholar that I am:

  1. I am in a deep coma in some New York hospital after a terrible auto accident.

  2. I am drunk and have been drunk for weeks. A long celebration of my Nobel Prize.

  3. I have lost my mind, arguably the loss is permanent.

  4. This is a brief dream that seems like several days because I’m still in it.

  Check one.

  Or as many as apply.

  Why not?

  On the other hand, why?

  Why should anyone want to kill me? I’m a harmless academic, a phony Irishman who has failed at everything in life except biology

  And the science of biology at that.

  I don’t believe any of this.

  And yet I sit at a dinner table, eating roast beef with her and drinking Cote de Rhone for which she pays as though it were perfectly natural to have an ice goddess guardian angel protecting me.

  I listen, quite calmly, while she discusses her responsibility for the end of the modern world in August of 1914.1 am enthralled by her singing. Despite myself, I take careful note of her wisdom on how to improve my love life. I drink a toast to her in white wine that is almost as good as sex.

  Better than a lot of the sex I’ve had.

  Someone is playing a trick. It’s all illusion, a very clever game.

  Lucifer’s woman, indeed.

  He threw aside his blanket; despite the fact that he was wearing shorts�
��in itself a disturbing datum—he put on his battered robe, and strode to the connecting door.

  It had not been there when he checked in. Yet it must have been there. Doors do not appear suddenly in the walls of modern luxury hotels.

  Hypnotism, that’s what it was.

  Nonetheless, he pushed the door open very gently.

  Sure enough a large and comfortable parlor—on a floor on which, his directory of the hotel assured him—there were no suites. Nor should there be an ivory stool, lifted probably from the Greek rooms of the British Museum.

  He tiptoed across the manifestly nonexistent parlor, its soft carpet caressing his feet, and carefully pushed farther open the door to what must be an adjoining bedroom—left invitingly ajar.

  There was enough glow from Manhattan to see that she was not in the room. The bedclothes had been arranged to make it look like someone had slept there, but there was no one in it.

  And no sign of either the white gown or the beige robe she sometimes wore. No harp.

  No pantyhose or lingerie, not that there was much under that gown.

  No jeweled choker or tiara.

  No Giorgio scent.

  Indeed, no sign in the room or the closets or the bathroom that anyone had been there.

  Well, he said decisively to himself, that settles it.

  He was not quite sure, however, what it settled.

  He touched the mattress of the bed. No trace of warmth.

  Illusion. Clever illusion. Now I must figure out who is behind it.

  He turned and walked back to the door of the parlor.

  “You really ought to get some rest, Professor Desmond,” she said sleepily, as he was slipping through the door back to his own room. “Since you won’t fly on the Concorde, it will be an overnight flight tomorrow. You know how you act on airplanes.”

  He knew what he would see even before he turned around.

  Gaby in her bed, the covers pulled up to her waist, silver hair shining in the Manhattan glow. She was wearing a dark blue sleep T-shirt with red trim and white letters—rather inelegant covering for such a splendid torso.

  “Yes ma’am,” he said, like the dutiful chimp he was. “Flight’s today, though.”