The Angel's Cut

by Elizabeth Knox

  Flora lay, patting her cat and promising him food any minute now. She couldn’t get the picture out of her head. ‘Why?’ she thought. ‘Why did he do that?’

  Though there were no more notes, Flora was haunted by what she’d written herself—that, as far as she knew, Cole really was the last person to see Xas. She had a suspicion, not much more than an itch. It was as if something she hadn’t fully recognised had managed to find another way to present itself to her.

  Late at night, and upon waking, if her mind didn’t conjure Xas, out on the paper road in the rain, it mysteriously presented her with Cole, beside her hospital bed, all those years ago. Cole speaking to Avril, in a low, vehement voice, about John Weber, the man who’d set fire to her grass skirt. Flora would remember Cole and Avril standing together over her tented, iodine-stained body, arguing, Cole’s voice full of boyish indignation. He kept saying, over and over, that John should be made to pay. That anyone who injures another must be made to pay.

  Flora would wake in the small hours, disturbed by O’Brien’s usual comings and goings, and instead of dropping off again would come fully awake, her heart pounding, her mind fixed on that memory of Cole.

  Finally, unable to put it out of her head, Flora went to visit him at Château Marmont.

  Flora waited for a time in the hotel bar, before being led into the garden and pointed the way to Cole’s door. It was open. Cole was lying on the couch, which seemed afloat in a sea of paper. The room was dusty, and smelled rancid, but Cole was clean. He was in a robe, his hair wet from the shower. Flora saw he hadn’t rinsed all the suds from his ears.

  He asked her to close the door, then sat up and made a sweeping gesture over the piled papers. ‘Look at all this. All these people making bids for my attention—finally prepared to acknowledge what I can do.’

  Flora took a seat, though she’d not been invited to.

  Cole picked up a screenplay and began to tell her about it. She couldn’t make out whether he was feeling enthusiastic, or only demonstrating how well he understood the story. She listened and tried not to show too much interest for fear that her own vague intentions would have their legs knocked out from under them by his torrent of talk. Gradually, over a number of hours, and by flattering reminiscence, she managed to get him onto the subject of how he’d saved her life. Then onto the subject of John Weber. And in the course of his reminiscing Flora became inspired. She suddenly understood what she must ask him; where her own secretive mind had been leading her.

  ‘A while ago I was talking to Avril about Weber,’ she said. ‘About how, once I came back to town after my convalescence, I was always a little frightened that I might run into him. But I needn’t have worried, since he’d disappeared. Later I got to wondering whether you had anything to do with his going away. No matter what other people might have thought I always understood that you were capable of extraordinary decisiveness.’

  Cole blushed. He looked momentarily smug. Then he seemed to think of something else, and his eyes flickered and their focus moved beyond her.

  Flora went on, as if she hadn’t had any sign from him she could take as an answer. ‘It wasn’t just that I lost sight of John. He seemed to vanish. Did you pay him off, Con?’

  The room was silent for a moment, absolutely silent and exclusive, with not a sound from the other rooms, or the street beyond the garden wall. Flora watched as Cole’s smugness won out. He began to explain. ‘When you were in hospital we found that Weber had made himself scarce. Avril supposed that you wouldn’t notice, or wouldn’t want to be reminded of him. But I thought that if it was me, I’d mind very much one day. I do understand that it wasn’t as if Weber had you in his power when he did what he did. I understand that he was careless and you were merely combustible. But what he did to you was about as terrible as anything I ever saw. You were lying in that hospital covered in bandages, and the doctors were just waiting for an infection to set in. We could all tell they didn’t give much for your chances.’ He broke off, then blurted, ‘Did I tell you that my mama died of blood poisoning? That’s what your doctors thought would happen to you—blood poisoning, then kidney failure. When you were in hospital it was apparently enough for Avril to put on a mask and gown and pose herself at your bedside. But I wasn’t about to stand by and watch anything like that again.’

  ‘You paid for my room and my treatment, Con,’ Flora said. ‘You caught me in the curtain. No one would have expected you to stand watch at my sickbed.’

  Cole looked at her blankly.

  ‘So—what about Weber? Did he ever show his face at the hospital?’

  ‘No. He skipped town. I hired detectives who tracked him to San Francisco. I flew up there to find him and told him what Avril was doing and what he should do. How he should be with you. I offered to fly him back. I’d taken my two-seater Curtiss float plane. It was a favourite of mine back then, when I still thought of true flight as being out in the open air. Anyway, I took my Curtiss, so I guess I knew what I meant to do.’

  ‘Which was what?’

  ‘I flew him out over the sea.’ Cole took several deep breaths, his eyes went hazy. ‘When we were well out I grabbed the sides of the cockpit, pushed the stick over with my knees, and the plane rolled. The cockpit was open, and the seats had no belts. Weber fell out.’

  Flora sat very still. She had a terrible suspicion that this was what had happened to Xas. Cole supposed that Xas had given him clap so he dropped him out of a plane into the sea.

  In a moment she’d begin to cry. She could feel the tears coming. It wasn’t just her eyes, or the bones of her face that felt the imminence of the tears, it was her whole body, as if she might begin to blister as she had when burned, and, from every inch of her, shed tears.

  Cole was still talking. ‘I thought it through,’ he said, in a reasonable, explanatory way. ‘When Weber touched his cigarette to your skirt you can bet he hadn’t thought anything through. I had to do something decisive. I wasn’t going to sit around waiting for you to die—because of what had happened with Mama. When Mama became sick they sent for me at school. My school was in Boston; she was in Houston. I spent two days on a train. She tried to stay alive to see me, but wasn’t conscious when I got there. They had tucked her in up to her neck. They presented her to me like that, like a monument of herself. When they left us alone I fished her hand out from under the covers and saw that her fingers were black. She was black and mottled all the way up her arm. The first flying lesson I ever took was because of those two days on the train. So—of course I couldn’t wait to see whether you’d die.’

  Flora put her fingers to her temples and pressed. She shook her head.

  ‘I don’t expect you to thank me,’ Cole said, ‘but I am glad you know now.’

  They sat facing each other but with their heads turned like cats paused mid-scrap to measure their respective importances. Then Flora began to sob.

  ‘Flora?’ Cole was astonished.

  Flora opened her purse. She took out a handkerchief and then just held it. She glared at Cole through her streaming eyes. She said, ‘He wasn’t yours. He was mine.’

  ‘He was a waster,’ Cole said, frowning at her.

  ‘He was wonderful!’ she shouted.

  Cole went pale. ‘Oh,’ he said.

  Flora got up and ran out of his room. She moved as fast as she could, hampered by her scars. She had to get out. Out of that moment, that hour—but it had its hooks in her. Cole came after her, caught up as she was fumbling with the catch of the garden gate. ‘Flora,’ he said, ‘Flora.’ Just her name, pleading.

  Flora wrestled the bolt back. She jabbed her elbow into Cole’s sternum, pulled the gate open and fled out onto Sunset.

  Though Cole had confessed, if only sidelong, Flora had no proof. She was in a rage of grief, but powerless to act on what she knew. Who could she go to for help, or even sympathy? Who would care now, but her? Because, in the end, what was Xas? He was a thief, he was shiftless and unreliable and lived under alia
ses and had left nothing behind him.

  After several sleepless nights and drained days all Flora could think to do was to leave a note on the pad on her porch. She wrote to her mysterious correspondent. She wrote that Xas was dead. And that Conrad Cole had killed him. She wrote that she had no proof, and that her heart was broken.

  For over a week the note stayed where it was, slowly curling in the damp air. Then one morning it had gone, and in its place, Flora found this. This list:

  Four facts about angels.

  1. Angels are indestructible. An angel can only be injured by another angel.

  2. Angels are animals not spirits. (The separation of the spiritual and mundane, and the notion that angels are spirits, only dates back to the Lateran Council of 1215.) Angels are warm-blooded animals, but have no oesophagus, duodenum, stomach, small or large intestine, no anus, no need to eat, and no genitals. (Except for the one angel who is a copy of a particular human being—though since God added wings He might have considered subtracting other appendages as a matter of balance.)

  3. Fallen angels are not demons.

  4. God made angels. Angels are, broadly speaking, copies of humans, whom God did not make.

  Two days after she’d received this insane and taunting message, Flora had a call from the jeweller. Green told her that he’d had a response to the queries he’d made through Lloyds of London. The present Comte du Vully had written to him requesting a full description of the pearls, their number, size, and colour. Green complied, and three weeks later he received a wire saying that one Henri de Valday was coming to America to claim the pearls. De Valday would arrive in New York on the fifteenth of March, and would be in Los Angeles eight days later. Green said, ‘Would you like to be present when I speak to him, Miss McLeod?’

  Flora said yes, she would.

  ‘And have you heard from your friend?’

  ‘No,’ Flora said, and that she knew now that she wouldn’t be hearing from him. ‘He got into trouble. People bore him ill will. I guess there was something provoking about him.’

  ‘I hope you’re not in danger!’ Green was concerned.

  ‘No. All I suffered was spite. Harmless, pointless spite.’

  ‘I’m very sorry to hear it. Are you all right now?’

  Flora reassured the jeweller that, if she wasn’t yet, she soon would be. She hoped she was telling him the truth. She felt so low. Whoever it was who’d coaxed the truth out of her—the truth about what Cole had done—had only mocked her trust and her grief.

  ‘I’ll let you know when M. de Valday arrives.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Cahuenga Building, Hollywood Boulevard

  March, 1931

  Flora had been sitting for some time by herself among the gleaming display cases when Green and M. de Valday arrived. They’d been out to lunch. Green had grease on his chin, and a look of happy triumph in his eyes. He introduced Flora, then told her that he’d been very daring and had taken de Valday to a little delicatessen nearby, whose specialty was avocado sliced on rye and dressed with olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper.

  Henri de Valday was in his early thirties, a slight, energetic man with a pockmarked face and warm hazel eyes. When Green finished describing their lunch de Valday kissed his fingertips—a gesture Flora had always thought a property of film, not life. He added, in perfect English, ‘And at last I forgot to shake my head over the absence of wine at the table.’ He took Flora’s hand. ‘So, you are the friend of this Jodeau?’

  Green led them to his office, a room even more hushed and exclusive than the showroom. De Valday and Flora sat side by side on a sofa. Green went to a wall safe, and came back with a blue velvet box, which he set on the coffee table before the Frenchman. The jeweller then perched on the edge of his desk.

  De Valday opened the box. His face went soft and sombre. He lifted the pearls from the box and wrapped them around one hand. As they moved they made their distinctive heavy kissing noises.

  ‘You see,’ said Green. ‘Priceless is not a word I use lightly or lazily.’

  De Valday looked up at Flora through his eyelashes. ‘Jodeau is not a common name. Before I left home I spoke to our neighbours, the family Jodeau. They couldn’t think who this person might be, although, of course, they are a large family, and spread far and wide. M. Green tells me you have no idea how your friend came by the pearls.’

  ‘None,’ said Flora.

  ‘The Jodeaus of Aluze are still in partnership with my family. Vully’s only Grande Cru is made of Jodeau grapes—and hence its name, Château Vully l’Ange du Cru Jodeau—‘the angel of the soil of Jodeau’.’

  Green leaned forward, eager. ‘Would you please tell Miss McLeod about that? Tell her what you told me.’

  De Valday smiled. He coiled the pearls in his lap and made a steeple of his fingers. ‘In the cellars of the Château are the two barrels in which our only Grande Cru matures. Two barrels, because the wine is pressed from grapes from one slope only, a stony south-facing slope above the villa of the family Jodeau. There are vines growing right to the walls of the house—the soil is that good, that blessed. The barrels in which the wine matures are very old. I have seen myself the bill of lading for their delivery, which is pasted into the Château’s account book for the year of 1838.

  ‘There is, in my family, a story told about these barrels. A legend. Though it is a legend with an addendum I regard as truth, since I myself heard my grandfather swear to it.’

  Flora liked the man’s ‘I myself’, and the caressing gesture that went with the words—he’d stroked his own sternum with the tips of his fingers.

  ‘The legend is this: that the Château’s vintner, Sobran Jodeau, my great-great-grandfather, ordered the barrels, which were very large, and were built by a cooper on site in Vully’s old cellar. Before they were finally sealed, a bundle was deposited in each barrel. Large silk-wrapped bundles. There was a rumour in the district that the winemaker had used the barrels to conceal the evidence of some crime. And there was other talk—for these country people were at that time not Christian in any civil sense—that the bundles were some kind of talisman, an offering to St Lawrence, the patron of winemakers.’ De Valday gave a simultaneous shrug of eyebrows and shoulders to show Flora what he thought of these theories. She didn’t respond. She didn’t like to intervene with questions. She didn’t know what to ask. What to ask about ‘Sobran’—the name of Xas’s dead lover and, apparently, this man’s distant ancestor.

  ‘There is another story. The family story. And that is this: that what Sobran Jodeau concealed in the barrels were what gave the wine its name. What lay beneath the silk wrappings of each bundle was the severed wing of an angel. M. Jodeau himself apparently never had anything to say on the subject, though his wife, my great-great-grandmother, would say quite readily that it was true, that the bundles were wings and that she’d had some part in cutting them off. However, another of my great-great-grandmothers, on the de Valday side, Aurora, the Baroness Lettelier, used to spit with fury whenever anyone repeated Madame Jodeau’s remarks. Of course I should say that there was no love lost between the Baroness and Madame Jodeau, the Baroness having been for many years Sobran Jodeau’s lover.’

  De Valday made a graceful, dismissive gesture. ‘So much for that. It’s a good story—a colourful story—a pretty legend my brother the Comte would like to print on our wine labels. But what I will tell you next is what I must regard as true.

  ‘The Angel of the Soil of Jodeau is a great wine, and one that has always had a heavenly consistency. There are variations, naturally. There are vintages. But for all its faintly altering points of interest, for all that comes to the wine from different seasons and changes in the soil, there is a spirit in the wine, a divine quality, and the family opens a bottle whenever anyone is ill.

  ‘Because the wine is so consistent, the methods of its making have never altered, and the barrels are never opened. They are filled and emptied. The Château’s practice of reverence
toward “The Angels”—as the barrels are called—is regarded by the neighbourhood as simply a sensible superstition.

  ‘However, when my grandfather was a boy the Château employed a winemaker from outside the district and, during his tenure, it happened that there appeared a discernible clouding in the wine drawn from Angel One.

  ‘On the winemaker’s prompting the family decided to take a look in that barrel.

  ‘The job of scrubbing plaques of tannin from the timbers of a barrel usually falls to a boy—someone old enough to follow simple instructions, but small enough to fit through the aperture in the top of the barrel. It is a dark job, though someone will be posed at the opening with a lamp. It is a suffocating job, because the wood of an empty barrel is impregnated with wine and the barrel full of fumes.

  ‘My grandfather was eight years of age when he was lowered into Angel One. He had scrubbed other barrels, so was prepared for the darkness and the smothering perfume of the wood. The perfume was as strong as ever, he said, but different. The barrel was warm, he said, but there was something cold to the smell in there. My grandfather said that the family didn’t tell him to get on with the usual job—chipping at the staves—instead they wanted to know what was in there. My grandfather said he could hear the winemaker too, but the way in which the winemaker asked what was in the barrel was quite different from the way his father and uncles and cousins were asking, for, after all, the winemaker was only looking for the cause of a pollution.

  ‘Grandfather shuffled about in the silt at the bottom of the barrel. He explored its damp curving walls with his fingers. He moved out of the light. Then he touched something—wet, slimy fabric. He called out to tell his father and uncles. He said what he’d found. Then he heard the winemaker ordering him to “Get that mess out of there!” Then, at once, there was a chorus of other voices countermanding the winemaker, asking my grandfather to just “pull at the cloth”.