Angel Fire Read online

  “Who needs a phone? You didn’t use one in there.”

  “Of course I did. Do you think I shouted?”

  “There was only one phone in the room—I’m walking as fast as I can—and you never left the room.”

  “Didn’t I now? Here we are.” She waved the tickets at a cabin attendant. “Does Doctor Desmond have a minute to make a phone call?”

  “Two.” The young woman beamed. “We’re honored to have him aboard.”

  “Don’t spoil him worse than he already is. Here, darling, let me make the call.”

  She shoved the phone into Sean’s hands, naturally without pressing any of the buttons. The witch was having the time of her life.

  No wonder she said she enjoyed her work.

  “Father Ryan.”

  “Blackie, Johnny Desmond, a minute to get on the plane, I’m calling to thank you for turning Senator Nora loose on the spooks.”

  “Indeed.”

  “It was just in the nick of time.”

  “The inestimable senator, to say nothing of my noble Lord Cronin, has a distinct distaste for spooks. As I told your admirable aide, the good Doctor Light, when she called an hour ago, the assignment would give pleasure all around.”

  “An hour ago?”

  “Indeed. Bon voyage, Johnny. The annulment document has been filed, by the way, and is making progress.”

  “Huh? Oh yes, sure.”

  “Mike the Cop continues to supervise your worthy daughters, the esteemed Dee and Fee.”

  “Thanks, they’re waving me on board. Gotta run.”

  “Indeed.”

  Dazed, no longer sure where he was or why he was there, Sean Seamus Desmond permitted himself to be led on board and to be seated with the attention appropriate for a reigning monarch.

  “Blackie said you talked to him an hour ago. Before we met those two spooks. Did you know they were laying for us.”

  “Not really.” She was totally satisfied with herself.

  “But how... ?”

  “Oh, I played a few little simple tricks with time.”

  “With TIME!”

  She nodded. “Nothing really very difficult when you know how to do it. Relativity, that sort of thing. You’re too frazzled to understand it now. Poor Jackie Jim has had such a hard day. He should have a nice sleep before the big old mean airplane thing takes off and scares him to death. He won’t even”—her finger touched his chin—“know it’s taking off, bad old airplane thing.”

  Jackie Jim did indeed fall into sound sleep, a sleep as usual populated by images of Gaby’s breasts and belly and thighs.

  But not before he wondered how anyone, even an angel, could mess with time.

  “That crowd isn’t waiting for me, is it?” Sean Desmond pointed at a knot of twenty men and women, some with cameras and others with microphones and recorders, beyond the passport checkpoint at Heathrow’s new Terminal Four. “After my pleasant and restful flight across the Atlantic, do I have to face them?”

  “Pleasant, restful, and safer she corrected him. “Unless there was a rock star on the plane, which I doubt, they are waiting for you. You’d better get used to it, Seano, you’re a celebrity.”

  She handed the two passports to the rather dour British immigration inspector and smiled. He stamped both of them without even glancing through and smiled back.

  “You love every second of this, don’t you?” he accused her.

  “I told you that I enjoyed my work.” She led him away from the passport control toward the waiting band of journalists.

  “And you’re an imp.”

  “So long”—she giggled—“for you to figure that out.”

  “I bet you embarrass your kids with your antics.”

  “Sometimes.” She poked him affectionately in the ribs. “They’re proud of me just the same___This is not Professor Sean

  Seamus Desmond, the Nobel Prize nominee, ladies and gentlemen, this is his twin brother Liam Brendan Desmond. He’ll answer all your questions, however.”

  He was asked about his wife’s comments in the Enquirer, about his daughters’ reaction to the prize, about the attempted assassination (with difficulty he resisted the temptation to ask in response: “Which one?”), about the conflict in Northern Ireland, about what he thought of the United Kingdom, and about AIDS.

  On the last three questions he opposed violence, praised the U.K. (with fingers crossed), and hoped for a cure and a vaccine against AIDS. He was pushed as to whether he thought AIDS was a divine judgment on homosexuals.

  “I’m not sure there is a God.” He gave his standard answer, although he was less and less sure since one of those who stand before the face of God had intruded herself into his life. “But I presume that, should She be, Her aim is more accurate. He would not have hit innocent children with hemophilia, for example.”

  “Is that all, ladies and gentlemen?” Gaby asked authoritatively. She had smiled and nodded her head in approval at his answers, proud of her handiwork in having remade him into an artful celebrity.

  “One more question, if you don’t mind, sir,” begged a large man who looked just like G. K. Chesterton. “In your remarks at the American mission to the United Nations, which we saw here, you were discussing a possible evolution toward mind. Some have said that the psychic and occult phenomena that are of so much concern to many today are a harbinger of such evolution. Would you care to comment?”

  “It may take several more leaps—over millions of years, I would suppose—before we are able to clearly distinguish between what are fashionable epiphenomena and what are central to the underlying directionality.”

  Figure that out, friend.

  “Do you believe there are channeling spirits among us, or even aliens?”

  “I never met one.” Which was, he realized after he had said it, an outright lie.

  “Would you approve, sir, of the attempts of some govern-

  ments to enlist such aliens in their military effort?”

  Beside him Gaby stiffened.

  “I was unaware that such efforts were being made.”

  “They are, sir, even here in the U.K. Private initiative in Mrs. Thatcher’s era. A scheme [he pronounced it “sheem”] to establish contact with aliens for purposes of military and political intelligence, and for information about how to accelerate our own evolutionary progress. It’s called Project Archangel, I’m told.”

  “Such matters,” he said, groping for the right words, “are far beyond my competency as a scholar. As a citizen, I find them offensive and would oppose them. I also suspect that the aliens, should there be any, might well resist a draft. Finally, Superman exists only in a comic strip that is older than I am and in one of your Mr. Bernard Shaw’s plays.”

  “Thank you, Doctor Desmond.”

  Gaby guided him through the crowd to the taxi stand in front of Terminal Four.

  “Was that an accident? That last set of questions?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I’m beginning to believe that nothing is accidental. British intelligence?”

  “More likely someone with sources inside.”

  “I’m not sure I believe in angels”—they climbed into a taxi— “saving Your Reverence, of course. I know most of my colleagues will think I’ve lost my own mind if I hint about such beings in my talk. Yet all the intelligence services in the world are trying to recruit you folk.”

  “It would seem so.” Gaby was withdrawn in deep thought.

  “Are you somehow dependent on us, like that guy suggested?”

  “Hardly.” She patted his arm, a now familiar gesture. “That doesn’t mean wishful thinking would not make it so.”

  “Do you think they might have caught on to you?”

  “Could anyone seem more earthy?”

  “I guess not.”

  The rest of the trip into central London was conducted in silence as Gaby continued her deep thinking and Sean gawked at the city, drab and unfriendly in the dim light of a br
ief December day.

  Their suite in the Grosvenor House on Park Lane seemed an authentic suite, not one put together on the spur of the moment by angelic powers.

  Their bags were deposited by a grinning black bellman in the middle of the parlor. “These two sure are light,” he said.

  They ought to be, Sean noted to himself, the woman carries hardly anything at all with her.

  Still lost in thought, Gaby produced a ten-pound note for the young man—her wad had been transmuted from crisp new American bills to crisp new British bills. Sean was not even surprised anymore about this sort of trick. Strictly minor league.

  “Off to the Reform Club for a luncheon address.” He looked at the typed schedule she had produced for him—without any obvious access to a typewriter.

  “You go by yourself this time, I think.” She doffed her costly yellow jacket and pulled her T-shirt over her head, a wife casually undressing after a long trip. “I think I better fade into the background for a while to see what happens.”

  “I’m not sure I like that idea.”

  “Becoming attached to me, Seano?” She grinned crookedly as she kicked off her jeans.

  She was wearing black underwear, of course, probably no more than a hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of lace tap pants and bra. The latter was solid and businesslike as was appropriate for her large breasts.

  “I feel safer when you’re around.” Sean tried not to stare.

  “I didn’t say I wouldn’t be around.” She was oblivious to his fascination. “If you need me, merely say, ‘Please, Gaby,’ and I’ll swing into action.”

  She scooped up her shirt and jeans and strolled toward her bedroom.

  “Would pretty please be better?”

  “With sugar on it.” The door to her room closed, leaving Sean Desmond alone in the parlor with four flight bags, two of them empty.

  If I opened that door, he thought to himself, the bedroom would be empty. I bet she’s gone into consultation with her buddies. Something odd is happening. She is not the bashful, retiring type.

  He glanced at his watch, which someone, not he surely, had

  updated to London time. He should get his suit, his only suit, pressed before leaving for the Reform Club.

  Then he looked at the trousers of the suit. Already pressed. She was not so preoccupied as to forget the little niceties of angelic behavior. Life without Gaby would be difficult.

  In the taxi on the way to the Reform Club, he pondered two undeniable and contradictory truths:

  1. He still did not believe any of it. She didn’t really exist. She wasn’t an angel sent to protect him from an odd assortment of characters who wanted to kill him.

  2. Their relationship had become so casual as to be taken for granted. They were of different species, millions of years separated on the evolutionary process, but still, male and female; they had settled down to an intimacy which was not quite easy but certainly matter-of-fact.

  There might be a hint of some law of evolutionary directionality in that latter truth, some clue to a basic truth that would apply to all species in which reflectivity and sexual differentiation had developed.

  He had better not mention that theory in his talk to the Royal Swedes. He would surely be locked up.

  How could it be phrased?

  Once reflectivity has been achieved, males and females, of whatever species, tend to like one another and fear one another.

  Desmond’s Fourth Law.

  Well, he pondered on his mighty insight, you won’t win a Nobel for that one.

  Something at the impromptu press conference must have bugged her. She was giddy and cheerful when we got off the plane and abstracted and worried since the conference. It must have been the question about aliens depending on humans. She dismissed the possibility and she doesn’t lie. But still, something is worrying her.

  Outside, the rain was pouring down. He was glad he was wearing the London Fog trench coat which had materialized in his closet. A London Fog in a London fog. Maybe I can write a haiku about that.

  Lunch at the Reform Club—where Daniel O’Connell himself

  presided at the door in a full-length portrait—was for the upper brass of the British scientific establishment. It was something like a round table back at the university, as self-important and narcissistic, but less pompous and more witty. His cleverness, a liability at the university, was an asset with these men.

  So he had a good time and, in the camaraderie of a group of men who liked and admired him, forgot about his lovely and absent assistant.

  Maybe she was only a figment of his imagination.

  Hastings, who was to be his host the next day at Cambridge, had come down for the lunch. He was an elderly, tweedy man with long hair, a discouraged mustache, and sparkling eyes, a Nobel laureate of fifteen years before.

  “Rather miss your charming assistant, old chap.”

  “Doctor light? Oh, she thought she might be out of place at an all-male lunch.”

  “Quite discreet, eh? I saw her on the telly, you know. I do hope she will join you tomorrow.”

  “I presume she will___You saw her on TV at the airport this

  morning?”

  “Yes, indeed, on the midday news upstairs before you arrived. Quite striking in that yellow jacket, don’t you know?”

  “I suppose___Did they show that odd question about recruiting aliens, I mean from other worlds, for military purposes?”

  “I believe they did,” he whispered back, glancing around the table.

  “What was that all about?” Sean had lowered his voice to a whisper too.

  “This is not quite the place to talk about it, old chap.” He continued to glance about nervously. “Perhaps tomorrow.”

  “Classified stuff?”

  “And, it would seem”—Hastings stabbed anxiously at a slab of roast beef—“dangerous. Very dangerous.”

  They were swimming in the pool of the Grosvenor House Hotel, Park Lane, London SW1.

  Gaby was sumptuous in a skintight white maillot, high-cut thigh, naturally. One of the models in the Sports Illustrated swim-suit issue had worn it, he was sure. Angelic white, he presumed. Every head in the pool area turned when she walked in. Which is what they were supposed to do.

  The high-thigh suits left little of the model’s ass to your imagination. So you risked wearing one only if your flesh was both ample and solid. Naturally, Gaby could run the risk. Her firm figure and silver hair were a devastating combination.

  Which, again, is what they were supposed to be.

  Her hair was always perfectly groomed without any effort. And she never did seem to need a shower. She did, however, keep the rules of the pool and head for the shower room before they swam.

  “Gorgeous ass,” he observed when she reappeared.

  “Vulgar man,” she replied, both displeased and flattered. Considerably more flattered than displeased.

  “Sumptuous, I might add.”

  “Classical.” She was the old contentious, cheerful Gaby again. Whatever her problems had been, she must have straightened them out with her buddies.

  “Only a half inch too broad. Maybe three-quarters.” “It is not!” She turned on him furiously, then grinned, knowing she was being baited.

  “I won’t ask what it’s an analog of.”

  “Of what it’s an analog,” she corrected his grammar. “And you’d better not.”

  “You get high on wearing the most expensive human fashions, don’t you?”

  “Putting them on my analog,” she corrected him. “Why shouldn’t I? It’s fun. We’re not prudes.”

  “I noticed___The analog is not you, but then it’s not not you

  either. Right?”

  “That’s one way of putting it.” “Then I repeat my comment: it’s a great ass.” He playfully swatted that delicious part of her analog’s anatomy.

  “Sean Seamus Desmond,” she pretended to be furious. “How dare you do that to”—she lowered her voice—“an an
gel.”

  She then picked him up and, like he was a bathtub toy, heaved him into the pool. Before the attendant at the other end could turn to see what had caused the noise, she dove in after him.

  “If we play that game,” she whispered in his ear, “I’ll win.” “I don’t doubt it for a moment.” He swam rapidly away from her. Dangerous woman. Person. Whatever.

  The perfect assistant to a Nobel laureate. Does she sleep with him? he imagined one reporter asking another.

  I’m sure she does, the other (female) would reply, though I can’t imagine what she sees in him.

  If you punks only knew what she really was, Sean said defensively to the imaginary journalists.

  Sexually she continued to affect him as much as “Venus” dug up from a Stone Age cave, though she was much better put together. How do you get horny over an angel?

  But he had become dependent on her and, in a weird sort of way, fond of her. It was more pleasant to have her around than not.

  And she certainly precluded the possibility of his chasing after women.

  An angelic function with which Sister Intemerata would have been quite happy.

  So, despite the disapproving stare of the cockney lifeguard, she shoved his head under the water at the deep end of the long, narrow, low-ceilinged pool, an English hotel architect’s idea of masculine luxury. Women had been admitted by cultural norms which the artist who painted the half-naked Chinese women on the side wall could not have imagined.

  Sean, an old hand at dunking women, fought back. He pushed her head into the water and held it there, wondering if you could drown an angel.

  You couldn’t, it turned out. Mostly because they were as strong as a Patton tank. She broke his grip with a quick, deft movement and came up sputtering and laughing.

  “Angels can breathe underwater,” she chortled.

  The lifeguard walked in their direction, like an English bobby approaching two undisciplined kids on his beat.

  “ Tis the woman that’s to blame, Officer,” Sean said in his Irish brogue.

  “I can see that, sir.” He was admiring the woman and wondering how to reprimand her effectively.

  Gaby produced one of her “Gaby” stares. The lifeguard seemed content that somehow—he didn’t quite know how—his problem had been solved. He paused and then walked back to his chair at the other end of the pool. He continued to admire her.