Angel Fire Read online

  With an open tomb.

  Open and empty.

  At last he was back in his chair in the Grand Hotel. Gaby, drenched in perspiration and breathing heavily, was sitting next to him, wrapped in a huge terry-cloth robe.

  “Pretty hard to do all that on the head of a pin,” he observed.

  She laughed between gasps. “Hard work,” she said, “even for an angel. Did you like it?”

  “Take it on the road.” He clapped enthusiastically. “Sure commercial success.”

  “I’m so glad.” She beamed happily. “It was the first time I tried it.”

  “What about your friends?”

  She dismissed them with a brief flip of her hand. “Angels tend to like anything other angels do.... Now, Jackie Jim, a shower and bed for you. Show’s over and tomorrow is an important day.”

  “Can we do that Lake Michigan fling again?”

  ‘Wo way.” She pointed at the bedroom door. “BED!”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  Later that night Sean woke from his sleep with total illumination.

  There’s no point, the illumination said, in not being who and what you are. She dances because she’s a dancer.

  Right?

  Right.

  So I should do tomorrow what I do best. Right?

  Right.

  He crept through the parlor to the other bedroom and peeked through the door. As he had expected, Gaby’s bed was empty. No sign of the gown she’d worn to the ball or her red leotard or any other clothes.

  Where did she go at night?

  Well, it didn’t matter. He would do what he intended. She said he was free, didn’t she?

  The awards ceremony, solemn, high, pontifical, Sean remembered the words from his altar boy days, had begun at three in the afternoon in the concert hall with the presentation of the diplomas and medals by Karl Gustav and the reading of the citations by representatives of the academy, followed by fanfares from the Royal Swedish Symphony Orchestra. The other laureates all seemed awkward and embarrassed, even the arrogant monetarist.

  Don Martino chewed on his Havana cigar. Poor man, Gaby had said, he overreached. Now everyone is avoiding him.

  Gaby was sitting next to Sean, looking even more like a queen in her white gown than the young queen did.

  Not that the queen was at all difficult to look at, sweet, wide-eyed, pretty little thing.

  “Is it me they’re talking about up there?” he whispered to Gaby when his citation was being read.

  “Shush, this is serious.”

  “No, it’s not,” he insisted, “and you of all people, uh, persons here ought to know that.”

  “You didn’t need me,” she said with a sigh, “to keep you cool.”

  He felt a touch of anxiety when the time came to rise from the plush chair in the front row and walk up to the dais. He remembered Paul Newman at the motion picture academy dinner and resolved he would bounce up, bright and smiling, the same way.

  No point in being solemn, this is a fun event. Let them see by the smile on your face and the glint in your eye that you love every second of it.

  That’ll show the bastards.

  What bastards?

  All of them, whoever and wherever they may be.

  Sean Seamus Desmond did indeed love every minute of it, as he strolled up to the throne and received his prize. He even said “Thank you, Your Reverence” to the handsome young King and winked at his pretty wife.

  She blushed and, delighted, winked back. The three of them laughed.

  The King held his hand a little longer. “You are a delight, Professor Desmond. It is so ‘wonderful to have someone who is not pompous.”

  “We Irish Americans react to fear differently than some other folks do,” he said honestly enough.

  “My wife and I,” the King whispered, “would like to have a private and off-the-record cup of tea with you before you leave, if that be possible. You and your beautiful companion, naturally.”

  “We’d be delighted.” And he pumped the King’s hand again.

  And the Queen’s. Which was not part of the ceremony but which earned him an extra round of applause. He thought about kissing her cheek and concluded that he wasn’t sure how Lutherans would react to that. Instead, he kissed her hand.

  Tumultuous cheers.

  It was the least a man with a long history of republicanism behind him could do.

  Gaby’s smile of amusement as he returned to his chair was as wide as the Baltic Sea.

  Then the festivities adjourned to the new Town Hall, which rose over Lake Malar like the Doge’s palace did over the Grand Canal in Venice (at least like it seemed to do in the pictures Sean had seen).

  There were more trumpets, more ceremonies, more royalty, and then the traditional, candlelight dinner featuring potage aux champignons, filet de boeuf Bearnaise (washed down with monopole rouge), and a spectacular ice cream dessert.

  Gaby, absolutely stunning in a strapless white evening dress, was in close attendance, despite his weak protests.

  “Brilliant, Seano, I knew you’d be perfect and you were.”

  “Sister Mary Intemerata said that only God and the angels are

  perfect.”

  “Now you know she was wrong on one count.” Her keen eyes, alert like vast brown searchlights, swept the crowds. How big was she really? he wondered. The column of lights in the Helmsley had reached to the ceiling of his room. Was the real Gaby somewhere at the top of the giant hall, looking at every face to see if it revealed a potential killer?

  He found it hard to believe that there had been four attempts on his life. They had happened so quickly and the traces swept away so briskly that they seemed like brief nightmares. And maybe that’s all they were.

  He was the last of the speakers. The others were incredibly dull; even King Carl seemed a bit bored by the bitter denunciation of American capitalism by the Jesuit poet.

  Indeed, the poor man had overreached. It was no longer the nineteen sixties.

  Sean decided that he preferred Father Higgins, the priest of his childhood, denouncing birth control every Sunday morning as he sunk deeper into the pleasant swamp of senility.

  I’ll twit the Jebs at Ignatius when I get back about this guy. He was suddenly lonesome for his daughters, all that he really had left in his life, he thought sentimentally. The sooner I get home to them and Chicago the better.

  Single-parent Christmas was no fun. Still, he’d be with them.

  Right home from here. No, damnit, I have to go to Leipzig

  with that pest What’s-his-name. Well, straight home from there.

  Will Gaby come with me? Or does her assignment end when I

  leave Europe?

  I will miss her. She’s special. Probably has changed my whole life, even if I haven’t quite figured out all the implications.

  The Jesuit finally ended with a “Viva la Liberacidn!” that woke up some of the sleeping audience.

  Well, I won’t put them to sleep, he thought rather smugly.

  “The Irish are accustomed to being last,” he began with more than a trace of the brogue. Gaby winced.

  At first his remarks were standard: chain of biological knowledge like the chain of life itself. Gratitude and praise for other scholars and colleagues. The expected hypocrisy.

  Then astonishment that some religionists thought evolution took the mystery out of life. Actually science brought more mystery into life. The more we know the more we know that we don’t know. Many dynamisms that we have yet to discover. And others of whose existence we can only guess but which we know that we will never discover. Modern science reveals not a closed, explicable universe, but an open and mysterious one, which even hints at transcendence.

  Some restless stirring in the audience, like they thought they were listening to someone hallway through a dirty joke.

  From the very first minute fraction of a second when the “singularity” exploded in its “big bang,” the cosmos was biotic, oriented toward
the production of life. The biopolymers were fated before the first second of the explosion was over and with them a universe teeming with life. It was inevitable that memory, intellect, organic structure, sexual reproduction (a wink at Gaby), and eventually consciousness, at first rudimentary, then advanced, would emerge.

  And with consciousness, eventually Mind, which, despite all the attempts to reduce it to biology and chemistry, seemed not so much to emerge from evolution as to merge with it.

  The deaf-mute chemist whose wife was scribbling a translation as he talked, look at Sean as though he had lost his mind.

  Much stirring from the antidualist forces.

  No one would dare to say he was wrong, however.

  Gaby tense and white. What’s she worrying about?

  Has not von Weizsacker said that matter is mind submitting to objectification? As evolution progresses, will not that objectifica-tion become more and more elaborate, subtle, and Mind serving?

  Others have suggested this, von Ditfurth, Vollmer, for example (always useful to quote Krauts, no one thinks they’re comedians). It is necessary to say it explicitly even though there is great resistance in the scientific community to what our research seems to be suggesting: Such elaborate, sophisticated, and efficient brain/

  mind composites might very well consist of matter and energy patterns that would be quite beyond our powers to record, rational corporeal creatures whom we could not possibly see unless they chose to reveal themselves to us.

  Increasing restlessness and dismay in the crowd.

  You haven’t seen anything yet, little brothers.

  “If such unperceivable creatures should exist—and I do not, to repeat myself, say anything more than that they are a distinct evolutionary possibility—they might well someday come among us. There is no reason to think their modes of transport would impact on our senses any more than they themselves would.

  “And if they could come among us, perhaps they already have, perhaps they are even present at this august occasion, perhaps amused by our dim probings, much as we would be amused by the doings of chimpanzees or Irish wolfhounds.”

  Gaby’s eyes closed in dismayed amusement. She wasn’t ready for that ad lib.

  “Is it not possible that the stories of spiritual beings which are to be found in every cultural tradition in the world are hints of the presence of such corporeal intelligences whom our sense mechanisms do not record? May not such beings, for example, have appeared to the maid of Nazareth, sung on the hillside at Bethlehem, waited at the empty tomb very early in the morning on the first day of the week?—“

  Cries of protest from the audience. Call for the Inquisition, guys, the crazy mick dared to hint at God.

  Gaby was still there, but she looked like she wished she wasn’t. What’s the matter, woman? I put that ad lib in especially for you?

  “I do not insist that any of these hypotheses are true, or that there is sufficient evidence to make them any more than interesting questions. But I do insist that we now know enough about the mysteries of life and the mysteries of evolution to make them not merely interesting questions, but questions that must be asked not in the name of religion, which I do not take seriously—at least for the purposes of my biology—but in the name of pure science. To say that they should not be asked or cannot be asked is to abandon science to dogmatism, to replace inquiry with obscurantism, to ignore the demands of our data, and to side with those who locked Galileo in a cell and burned Giordano Bruno at the stake!

  “Finally, I have been labeled in my own country, mostly through my own fault, as the discoverer of superfly. I do not propose to suggest here that Superman is an angel, though clearly he has angelic powers. I do wish to insist, however, that long before we reach such a phase of our evolutionary process, we must first develop a higher degree of skills at peaceful cooperation. We cannot accelerate that process. The ‘intelligence’ that governs our evolution cannot be short-circuited. But, unlike all other species, we in the species Homo sapiens sapiens—a redundant if not inaccurate label—have the capacity of blocking the directionality of our organisms. We can stand in the way of our pilgrimage in the direction of what someone once called the Point Omega. Unless our culture and social structure acquire more skills at cooperation, the organisms that bear our endlessly transpositioning genetic codes will not survive to make the big leap in the angelic direction.

  “Or even a small leap toward peace.”

  Wild applause as the leprechaun departed the podium.

  Nothing succeeds nearly so well as failure.

  With the exception of martyrdom.

  The pretty Queen, it turned out, was a devout Lutheran and had read Luther’s work on angels, a body of literature about which Sean Desmond knew nothing at all.

  With the help, however, of an occasional word or sentence from Gabriella Light and memories of Sister Intemerata, Fee and Dee, and Blackie Ryan, he managed to hold his own in the conversation.

  The King listened politely, proud of his wife and fascinated by the mad Irishman who came to tea.

  “Well,” he said finally, “I am perhaps not as devout as my wife, though she says I am more religious.” He beamed at her and she smiled back. “I am a bit of a scientist, though only as an amateur.”

  “Your work on forestry”—Gaby jumped in smoothly—“suggests far more than that.”

  “Why, thank you very much.” The young monarch was pleased as punch at the compliment. One more for Gaby. “But to speak about angels, I am not sure we have to believe in them anymore, but it would be a shame, it seems to me, if there were not, somewhere in creation, creatures like them. It would, how shall I say, be less complete a universe.”

  “And less beautiful,” Sean added.

  Gaby bit her lip to hold back laughter. She was charming, reserved (a devout Lutheran queen might be uneasy about a mistress, a putative mistress, that is), and weary. So angels show the effects of stress too.

  The night before, she had hugged him briefly after his talk, an encounter that made him feel like he had been launched for a quick trip to the new supernova.

  “You were wonderful,” she whispered. “I’m so proud of you.”

  “A guy doesn’t hear that often from his guardian angel.”

  “Shush.”

  Then the reporters and scholars were all over him.

  “You looked worried at the end of the talk,” he said to her later during a brief interlude of peace.

  “Sometimes even angels have self-doubts. Tiny, tiny ones. You were yourself, which is what you should have been and what I always knew you would be.”

  A fair number of those who swarmed around him were hostile. Two greatly different men were favorable.

  The first was Bishop Stendahl of Stockholm, who had been the dean of the Harvard Divinity School, a tall handsome man with a rich voice and a happy smile, and with a purple vest and a pectoral that, added to his roman collar, made him look more like a cardinal than Chicago’s raffish Sean Cronin.

  “You would make a very good theologian, Professor Desmond. I’m sure the divinity school would give you a chair after today’s talk.”

  “You mean the Harvard Divinity School.”

  The bishop laughed heartily. “Yes, I forget that at the University of Cook County, no modifier is needed. Strange, is it not, theologians are preoccupied with politics, ethicians can talk only about sex, we bishops worry unduly about money, and physicists and biologists think about creation and purpose.”

  “And filmmakers like Spielberg portray creatures of light?”

  He winked at Gaby, who had the good grace to appear mildly embarrassed.

  The next man was Herr Doktor Professor Heinz-Johann Helm-stadt. “Ya, Desmond,” the ugly little man crowed, “you make good Marxist. Contradictions, nein? Thesis, antithesis, bang! synthesis, is so?”

  “I guess.”

  “Damn good Marxist. Socialism admires creative thinkers. Does not allow press idiots to bother them, nein?”
/>   “If you say so.”

  “Creep,” Sean said to Gaby.

  She nodded grimly.

  Before they went to bed there were two phone calls, one from Fee and Dee.

  “Daddy—“

  “—You were wonderful.”

  “All our friends—we had a Nobel Prize party—thought you were really excellent.”

  “Truly outstanding.”

  “Totally bitchin?” he asked.

  “Daddy!”

  “Really!”

  “Gaby looked really super!”

  “Outstanding!”

  “Where does she buy her clothes?”

  “Out of Vogue and Town and Country.”

  “Daddy!”

  “Say hello to her for us.”

  “ Bye, Daddy.”

  “Love you, Daddy.”

  “What man can need any more than to know that he’s like totally super?”

  By now he took it for granted that Gaby did not have to pick up the phone to hear a conversation.

  “No sermons, angel lass___Do they think I’m sleeping with

  you?”

  “No.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know.”

  “They don’t think I’m capable of it?” His feelings were hurt.

  “Not at all. They had a long discussion and came to a correct if incomplete conclusion. And I won’t violate their privacy by reporting it.”

  “Would they have minded if they thought I were?”

  “I will like totally not answer that question.”

  Before they could settle that one the phone rang again.

  “Johnny? Johnny.”

  “Blackie!”

  Gaby started to guffaw.

  “Well yes, what was it you wanted?”

  “You called me.”

  “So I did. Where are you?”

  “Sweden.”

  “Indeed, remarkable.... Ah, yes, for the prize. Indeed. You were quite typical, if I may be so bold, on TV. My Lord Cronin was pleased to comment that you were a real shit-kicker.”

  “Takes one to know one.”

  “Arguably. The local media are very positive about it all. You have become an enormous folk hero. Actually, I’m not surprised to hear it at all. As a matter of fact, the worthy Leader is in full retreat.”