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 c
an 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 suppos
ed 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.”