Of Love and Evil (17 page)

And then there was Ankanoc, the real dybbuk of this adventure, and his words still echoing in my mind. When and how would I have to deal with Ankanoc from now on? Of course it had been foolish for me to think that I might see angels and not demons, that the one would not presuppose the other, and that some sinister personage would not manage to be more than a negative voice in my head. Yet I hadn’t expected it. No, I hadn’t. And still didn’t know what to make of it. Fact was, I believed in God and always had, but I don’t know if I have ever really believed in the Devil.

I couldn’t get Ankanoc’s face out of my mind, that bittersweet, charming expression. Surely before his fall, he had been an angel as beautiful as Malchiah, or so it seemed. Shocking to think of it, the vast airy firmament with its angels and demons,
the world to which I belonged now more surely than any world I’d ever known.

I was growing tired. Why hadn’t Malchiah taken me away? Perhaps because I had my heart set upon one more small experience here, and that was to find a cheery tavern, filled with laughter and light, where there was no lutenist playing at the moment.

At last I came to just such a bright and cheerful place with its door wide open to the night. A fire blazed in a crude cavern of a fireplace, and the rude tables and benches were thronged with men young and old, rich and poor, many with shining oily faces, some with heads bowed, dozing in the shadows, and indeed there were children there asleep on the laps of their fathers, or on bundles of rags on the dusty floor.

When I appeared with my lute, a lusty cry rose from the crowd. Cups were raised in greeting. I bowed, and I made my way towards a corner table where at once two tankards of ale were set down before me.

“Play, play, play,” came the cries from all sides.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. How sweet the wine smelled, how delicious the malt. And how warm was the air, filled with the sounds of talk and laughter. I opened my eyes. Far on the other side of the tavern sat Ankanoc, looking exactly as he had at the Cardinal’s banquet, peering at me, his eyes filled with tears.

I shook my head as if to say no to all he meant to offer, and now to answer him the best way I knew how—with song.

I began to strum and then to play, and within a moment had the place singing with me, though what the song was and how they knew it I could not guess. All the melodies I’d ever heard from this time I could easily now run through and it seemed to me I was happier here in these moments, surrounded by these crude and bold singers, than ever I’d been in
all my strange life in this time, and maybe in any other. Ah, what broken creatures we are, and how we endure.

Indeed, deep dark memories came back to me, not of this world, but of the world I’d long ago left as a boy, when I’d stood on the street corner and strummed these old Renaissance songs for the bills people threw at my feet. I felt so sad for that boy, sad for his bitterness, sad for the mistakes he was going to make. I felt sad that he had lived so long with a locked heart and a ruptured conscience, sharpening the bitterness of his life on every cherished memory of pain that he carried in him day in and day out. And then I felt wonder that the seeds of goodness had lain dormant so long in him, waiting for the breath from an angel’s lips.

Ankanoc was gone, though where or how I didn’t know. All around me were convivial faces. People brought down their cups and tankards in time with my playing. I sang some of the old phrases I remembered, but mostly I played to their singing as melodies I’d never heard before came from the lute in my hands.

On and on I played until my soul was full of the warmth and the love around me, full of the light of the fire, and the light of so many faces, full with the sound of the strings of the lute, and the words becoming music, and then it seemed—right in the very middle of my boldest song, my sweetest, boldest most thumping and melodic song, I felt the air change, and the light brighten and I knew, I knew all these greasy shining faces that surrounded me were being transformed into something that was not corporeal at all, but rather notes of music, and it was a music of which I was only the barest part, and the music was rising higher and higher.

“Malchiah, I’m weeping,” I whispered. “I don’t want to leave them.”

A long ribbon of laughter softly broke the darkness that surrounded
me, and every syllable of it was picked up as if it were the kernel of a melody, full and entire, and destined now to mingle with another.

“Malchiah,” I whispered.

And I felt his arms around me. I felt him cradling me as he lifted me. The music was made up of space as well as time and it seemed each note was a mouth from which another mouth sprang and then another and another.

He was cradling me as he carried me upward.

“Will I always love them so much? Will I always hate to leave them? Is that part of it, part of what I have to suffer?”

But the word “suffer” was the wrong word because it had all been too grand, too splendid, too golden. And I could hear his lips against my ear reminding me of that, and saying in the softest tones,

“You’ve done well, and now you know there are others waiting for you.”

“This is the school of love,” I said, “and every lesson is deeper, richer, finer.”

I
saw
a vision of love; I
saw
that it was no one thing, but a great commingling of things both light and dark and fierce and tender, and my heart broke as the questions broke from my lips.

But no answer came except the anthems of Heaven.

S
OMEONE WAS SHAKING ME
. I
WOKE UP, OUT OF A
nightmare. Shmarya stood there in the darkness, his back to the pale light from the window. Nighttime streets below.

“You’ve been asleep for twenty-four hours,” he said. We were in my room in the Mission Inn, and I lay on top of the rumpled comforter, my clothes twisted and moist, my body full of aching muscles. The room was cold.

The nightmare clung to me—full of all the telltale signs of dreams, the incoherent shifts, the distorted faces, the absurd and incomplete backdrops. It was utterly unlike the clarity of Angel Time.

I tried to hear again the angels singing, but there were only faint echoes, and a fragment of the nightmare rose, to blot them out.

Ankanoc had been arguing with me about the suicide of Lodovico. “According to your system,” he had said over and over, “this poor soul goes into a blazing Hell. But there is no such place. His soul will reincarnate and he will have to learn what he failed to learn the first time.” I’d seen the blazing Hell. I’d heard the screams of the damned. Ankanoc kept laughing. “You think I’m a devil? Why would I want to live in such a place?” Such a mocking smile, and then a wooden expression.
“You think you’ve been visited by angels of the Lord? Why would you be in such torment over so many things? If your personal God had forgiven you, if you had in fact turned to Him, wouldn’t the Holy Spirit have flooded you with consolation and light? No, you know nothing of Heavenly Spirits. But don’t let that frighten you. Welcome to the Human Race.”

I sat up, bowed my head and prayed. “Lord, deliver me from this.” I was dizzy and terribly thirsty. The sense of having failed, of having let Lodovico slip away into death, was as strong with me as it had been in Rome. And I was angry, angry that Ankanoc had come into my world, into my dreams, into my thoughts.

If your personal God had forgiven you, if you had in fact turned to Him, wouldn’t the Holy Spirit have flooded you with consolation and light?

“It’s finished now,” said Shmarya. He had a quiet easy voice, resonant, but youthful, and he was dressed as I was dressed, in a blue cotton shirt and khaki pants.

He helped me off the bed. I went to the window and looked at my watch. It was 2:00 a.m. The streetlamps below gave the only illumination.

Memories of my time in Rome were crowding in, pervading the fragments of nightmare. “Let this dream go away, please!” I whispered.

To my surprise I felt Shmarya’s hand on my shoulder. We were eye to eye.
I failed Lodovico. That one got away.

“Stop struggling,” he said. His expression was innocent, probing, his eyebrows knitting for an instant as he made his point. “This man’s soul is not in your hands.”

“The Maker
has
to know all things,” I said. My voice broke. I could hear Ankanoc laughing, but this was memory. Shmarya was here. “And the Maker is the only one who can judge.”

He nodded.

“Where’s The Boss?” I asked. I meant Malchiah.

“He’ll come soon enough,” said Shmarya. “You need to take care of yourself now.”

“Why do I have the feeling that you don’t like him?”

“I love him,” he said simply. “You know this. But he and I don’t always agree. After all, I’m your guardian angel. My assignment is simple. You are my charge.”

“And Malchiah?”

“Again, you know the answer to your own question. He’s a Seraph. He’s sent to answer the prayers of many. He knows things I can’t know. He does things I’m not sent to do.”

“But I thought you all know everything,” I said. It sounded immediately stupid.

He shook his head.

“Then you can’t tell me, can you, whether or not Lodovico went to Hell?” I insisted.

He shook his head.

I nodded. I pulled the blinds over the window. And I turned on the lamp by the bed.

It was powerfully comforting to see him so fully realized in the light. He looked as solid as anything else in the room. I wanted to touch him but I didn’t, and then I remembered that he had just touched me.

I couldn’t read anything into his blue eyes, or the relaxed way in which he studied me. He gave a little lift to his eyebrows, and then he said in a whisper, “Trust the Maker. What you think or what I think does not put a man in Hell.”

“You know why I’m angry?”

He nodded.

I went on, “Because before I saw that man take his own life, I didn’t believe in Hell. I didn’t believe in the Devil or demons, and when I came to God, it was not out of fear of Hell.”

He nodded.

“And now there is Ankanoc, and there is Hell.”

He pondered this and then he shrugged.

“You’ve heard the voices of evil in the past,” he said. “You’ve always known what evil is. You never lied to yourself.”

“I have but I thought the voices came from within me. I thought all the evil I’d ever witnessed came from within individuals, that devils and Hell were old constructs. I felt myself become evil when I first took a human life. I felt myself grow ever more evil as I killed others. I can live with an evil that was inside myself, perhaps because I was able to repent. But now there’s Ankanoc, a dybbuk, and I don’t want to believe in such things.”

“Does it really change things so much?”

“Shouldn’t it?”

“How do we measure evil? By what evil does, isn’t that so?” he waited. Then: “Nothing’s changed. You’ve cast off the ways of Lucky the Fox, that’s what matters. You’re a Child of the Angels. A philosophy of evil does not alter those things.”

I nodded. But I didn’t find this perfectly comforting, true as it was. A wave of dizziness came over me. And the thirst was burning.

I went to the refrigerator in the little dining area, found a bottle of icy cold soda and drank it down in several gulps. The sheer sensuous pleasure of this quieted me and made me feel a little ashamed. Abstract thoughts yield so easily to bodily comfort, I thought.

“Don’t you sometimes hate us?” I asked him.

“Never, and again you know that I don’t.”

“Are you trying to persuade me to ask genuine questions, instead of rhetorical questions?”

He laughed. It was a small agreeable laugh.

The caffeine in the soda was going to my head.

I went to the other windows one by one and drew the drapes, turning on the lamps that I passed—on the desk, and by the bed. The room felt a little safer now, for no good reason. Then I turned on the heat.

“You won’t leave me, will you?” I asked.

“I never leave you,” he said. His arms were folded. He was leaning against the wall by the window, looking at me across the room. Though his hair was red, his eyebrows were more golden, yet dark enough to give his expression a definite character. He was wearing shoes like mine, but not a wristwatch.

“I mean you won’t go invisible!” I said with a little gesture of both hands. “You’ll stay here till I’ve had a shower and changed clothes.”

“You have things to do,” he said. “If I’m distracting you, I should go.”

“I can’t call Liona at this hour,” I said. “She’s asleep.”

“But what did you do last time when you came back?”

“Research, writing,” I said. “I wrote down everything that had happened. I looked up more of the history of what I’d glimpsed. But you know The Boss is never going to let me show my writing about all this to anyone. That little dream of writing it down, being an author, putting it in books, it’s gone.”

I thought again of how I’d boasted to my former boss, The Right Man, that I would write about this great “something” that had happened to me, and about how I’d turned my life around. I’d told him to keep his eye on the bookstores, that someday he might find my name on the cover of a book. How foolish and impetuous that now seemed. I also recalled that I’d told him my real name, and I wished I had not done that. Why did I have to tell him that his trusted assassin, Lucky the Fox, was really Toby O’Dare?

Images of Liona and Toby flashed through my mind.

Those awful words of Ankanoc came back to me.
Wouldn’t the Holy Spirit have flooded you with consolation and light?

Well, I’d been filled with consolation and light when I’d spoken those words to The Right Man, and now I was confused. I didn’t mind so much never telling anyone what I did for Malchiah. A Child of the Angels should keep confidential what he does if that is what is expected of him, just as secrecy had always been expected when I was assassin for The Right Man. How could I give the angels less than I’d given The Right Man? But there was more to it, this restlessness and confusion I felt. I felt fear. I was in the presence of a visible angel and I felt fear. It wasn’t overwhelming, but it hurt, as if someone were subjecting me to an electrical current just strong enough to burn.