The Mona Lisa Sacrifice

by Peter Roman

  I was surprised at how much Tokyo reminded me of any other city in those days.

  The virus of modernity had spread even there. We wandered the busy streets until we found a small cemetery hidden away between some apartment buildings. We went through it, but I didn’t see any signs of seraphim. It wasn’t really their kind of place. It was all neat and tidy rows of stone markers and swept gravel paths. There wasn’t a statue or a tomb in sight, nothing that reeked of brooding loneliness or dramatic suffering.

  Penelope asked me what I was looking for, but all I could do was shrug.

  “I’ll know it when I see it,” I said. Like the time I’d found the angel Haniel in a graveyard in Berlin when he’d melted the name off a tombstone with his tears.

  We moved on, back into the streets outside and the land of the living. No one paid any attention to us now because I’d adjusted the sleight again to make us look like an average Japanese couple. We’d brought along Penelope’s camera gear and every now and then Penelope stopped us to take photos of things.

  A row of monks kneeling outside a bank on one of the main streets, eyes closed, praying.

  A man carving strips of meat off a pig carcass in the window of a butcher shop.

  A man hung and left as a warning to others, his offence of distributing copies of The Communist Manifesto scrawled across the wooden marker at his feet.

  It was just like any other place in the world.

  For two weeks we toured the cemeteries of Tokyo, but they were all the same: neat, orderly and empty. Every now and then we’d come across another person in them, paying their respects at some gravestone or another. Sometimes they’d bow to us, sometimes they’d turn to watch us move through the place but wouldn’t say anything. I wanted to ask them if they’d seen anything odd or unusual lately, but there was that whole language problem. Someday I would start taking my life more seriously and actually apply myself to learning things rather than simply drifting through history. Someday.

  When we were done with the cemeteries we moved on to the temples. I knew from the first one that they weren’t the sort of places angels would like. They were open-air affairs, at one with the trees and parks surrounding them. Quiet and harmonious, not dramatic and imposing, like the churches of Europe. No, they weren’t the angels’ style at all.

  We spent another few days visiting them all anyway. Penelope took photographs of the buildings and of the people praying inside or walking on the grounds. We ate at roadside stalls or in train stations, where people didn’t ask too many questions or try to engage us in conversation. I picked up a few words here and there, enough to ask about restrooms and tea. There was hope for me yet. We tried not to hold hands or otherwise show our affection for each other in public, as it wasn’t the Japanese way at the time. But it was difficult. It was very difficult.

  We found the odd Christian church in the city. They were smaller affairs than the ones back in Europe, as if they were still trying to maintain a low profile, even though Christianity was legal in Japan again. But we didn’t have any more luck with them. The priests in them were mostly Japanese men, but in one a European man in robes was sweeping the pews. I went over and asked him in English if he had seen anything unusual lately.

  “Paintings weeping blood,” I said. “Statues moving around. The dead rising from their graves and speaking in tongues. Men with wings fighting in the sky. Burning animals roaming the streets.” You know, the usual.

  He considered me for a moment before answering, perhaps because of what I’d asked him, perhaps because I appeared to be a Japanese man speaking English. “Only in my dreams,” he said, and went back to sweeping the dust from the pews.

  By the end of the week we’d visited all the sorts of places that were the angels’ usual haunts and found nothing. The city felt empty of grace to me, outside of Penelope. The seraphim were either hiding with more care than usual or they weren’t in Tokyo.

  I should have been desperate to find them. It had been too long since I’d had any grace. But I didn’t feel hungry or empty or any of the usual things I felt when I was out of grace. Instead, I just felt calm and content. I knew it was because of Penelope. Her grace was different from that of the angels. I didn’t need to take it from her. It fed me just from her presence. I didn’t even care about Judas anymore, or who I was. When I was with her, it was enough. For the first time, I felt accepted. For the first time, I felt whole.

  We travelled by train to Kyoto and I stayed up all night in our cabin thinking. I thought that maybe after we killed Penelope’s father I didn’t need to kill any more angels. I thought that maybe Penelope would be enough for me for the rest of our lives together. The only problem, of course, being that she would eventually die and I wouldn’t. Not permanently, anyway.

  So I came up with a plan for that

  The first night we were in Kyoto we went to the cherry blossom festival along the banks of the Kamo River. We sat on a blanket under a tree and toasted the people sitting around us with sake. The lights of the paper lanterns in the trees were better than any stars. The smell of the blossoms was as intoxicating as the sake.

  I was going to tell Penelope what I was thinking about, that she didn’t have to die when she was with me. That I could keep her alive. That we could spend forever together. But she had her own surprise announcement.

  “I wasn’t exactly planning this,” she said, “but I’m pregnant.” She smiled and shook her head at the wine, like it was responsible.

  I smiled back at her. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but it can’t be.” I knew I was incapable of fathering anyone. It had never happened over the centuries, and there had been plenty of opportunities. “You’re just late,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but it is.” And she took my hand and guided it to her stomach. And I felt it there. A stirring.

  I couldn’t say anything else. I couldn’t do anything else but stare at her. I didn’t know what was happening.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, laughing. “It’s yours. There hasn’t been anyone else for a long time.”

  “How . . . ?” I said, but I didn’t even know what to ask.

  “If I have to explain that, I’ve really misjudged you,” she said.

  “That’s not what I mean,” I said. “The thing is, I can’t . . .” Again, I didn’t know what to say.

  She shrugged. “Let’s call it a miracle then,” she said.

  And I realized it was. Somehow, Penelope was changing me.

  “Amelia,” Penelope said. “We’re going to call her Amelia.”

  “What if it’s not a girl?” I asked.

  “It’s a girl,” she said. “I can feel her.”

  “You are my grace,” I told her, and we kissed there, in a sudden shower of cherry blossom petals, as the people around us cheered and lifted their drinks to the heavens.

  LOST IN THE GREAT LIBRARY

  When I went out into the parking lot in Detroit, the only car left was mine. None of the others had stuck around to see which one of us walked out of the factory. No honour among thieves and collectors, I guess.

  I got in the car and just sat there for a moment. I felt drained after the battle with Sut. I’d already burned up much of the grace I’d taken from Remiel, and I had little to show for it so far. If this kept up, I was going to have to find another angel soon.

  I sighed and started up the car. I drove it back to the airport. The same woman was working at the rental counter. She gave me the once-over, and I realized my clothes were still dirty and torn from the fight in the factory. There was probably blood on my face too, both mine and Sut’s.

  “So, it was a pleasure trip rather than business, was it?” she said.

  “A little of both,” I said and took the paperwork she gave me to fill out.

  Back in the airport, I booked a flight to Seattle. Sut hadn’t given me much in the way of useful information because he
wasn’t able to. But there weren’t any spells cast on his wallet. He had a driver’s licence with an address on it. Two Genesis Way. Cute. Another clue to what I was facing, no doubt, but not enough of one to actually figure out anything useful. I doubted the djinn would have its own place separate from its master, so that meant Sut’s address was probably Edwards’s address as well. And if not, well, I was getting good at figuring out things as I went.

  I boarded the plane along with all the people who probably hadn’t fought a djinn tonight and took my seat near the back. Someday I was going to fly first class. Someday. But for now I slipped back into veteran soldier mode and curled up in my seat as best I could to get some sleep.

  I didn’t wake again until the plane’s tires touched the ground in Seattle. I shuffled off the plane along with everybody who probably still hadn’t fought a djinn. I rented a car from another woman at another rental agency. This time, just for fun, I used Sut’s credit card. I hoped he could feel that in his oil can.

  I didn’t bother asking this rental agent for a map. Instead, I got a car with a GPS. I sat in the car in the parking lot and entered Two Genesis Way in the GPS, and the GPS told me there was no such address. So much for that.

  I wasn’t surprised. If it were easy, Cassiel wouldn’t need me to do his dirty work for him.

  I started the car and headed out of the parking lot. It was time to hit the library.

  I drove to the central branch and parked on the street. I didn’t bother putting money in the meter. Let them ticket me. Or rather, let them ticket Sut.

  The central branch of the Seattle Public Library system—what to say about the central branch? A gleaming edifice of glass and steel angles, it loomed above the street and the people walking past. Like a collapsing office building. It was everything a library shouldn’t be. I’ll take the New York Public Library over it any day. Or better yet, the Alexandria Library, although these days you could only find it in this world once every hundred years.

  But I wasn’t here to relax with a book in the stacks. I needed help.

  I went inside and browsed the fiction section. I looked for misshelved books. I opened one, read the first paragraph, then put it back and repeated the process with the next one. I got the usual looks from passing library staff, but no more than your average homeless man.

  Luckily, whoever was in charge of the universe now was kind to me that day. I’d only been at it for a few hours when I found a copy of Calvino’s Invisible Cities shelved out of place in the A section. I flipped it open and read a random passage.

  I entered the great library, I became lost among shelves collapsing under the vellum bindings, I followed the alphabetical order of vanished alphabets, up and down halls, stairs, bridges.

  As soon as I put the book back on the shelf I heard Alice singing “Ring around the Rosy” in the next aisle.

  “Ashes, ashes,” she sang, as I came around to her side. “We all fall down.”

  She was wearing a bloody hospital gown and sitting on the floor, building a house of cards, only it was made of books she pulled from the shelves. She’d reached waist height with it. I was particularly impressed by the balconies.

  “Crossy,” she sang when she saw me. “I dreamed about yousy.”

  I sat down across from her and studied the house. It wasn’t quite a mansion, but it would be close enough for most people.

  “Did you?” I said. “What did you dream?”

  “Apocalypse, apocalypse,” she sang. “We all fell down.”

  “Sounds more like a nightmare,” I said.

  “Nightmares are fun,” she giggled. “But this was . . .” She chewed on the end of a strand of hair and frowned at the house. “What’s the opposite of fun?” she asked.

  “Apocalypse?” I suggested.

  She laughed. “That’s exactly what it was. All the things that end the world decided to end the world together.”

  “There’s a lot of things that can end the world,” I pointed out.

  “The Midgard serpent,” she said. “The fifth horseman of the apocalypse. The drowned god under the sea. You tried to save everyone from them.”

  “I don’t do that sort of thing anymore,” I said.

  “Yes you do,” she said, smiling at me. “I saw you.”

  “It was just a dream,” I said.

  “No it wasn’t,” she said. “It actually happened. It just hasn’t happened yet.”

  I shook my head. Having a conversation with Alice was like falling down the rabbit hole.

  “I need your help,” I told her.

  “That’s why I dressed up,” she said, pointing at her hospital gown.

  “I don’t suppose you know where Judas is,” I said.

  “Of course I do,” she said. “He’s in the apocalypse.”

  Yeah. Well. That didn’t surprise me at all.

  Time to get on with things.

  “What do you know about Jonathan Edwards?” I asked.

  She chewed on her hair some more. “Is this, like, a test?” she asked. “Because they have those metal boxes that answer these questions now.”

  “You mean computers?” I said. “I don’t think they’re going to have the Edwards I’m looking for. He’s at least 400 years old and has a fondness for quoting the bible.”

  She clapped her hands together. “I know who you mean!” she said. She pulled one of the books from her stack and handed it to me, and the house wobbled a bit. I looked at the title. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. By Jonathan Edwards. I opened the book and flipped through it. It was a sermon. The title pretty much summed up the subject.

  “Edwards was a preacher?” I said.

  “Uh, don’t you know all the preachers?” Alice asked. “I mean, aren’t they all talking to you?”

  “Maybe, but I haven’t been listening,” I said. On principle, I tried to avoid priests and churches and that sort of thing unless I was hunting angels. One too many misunderstandings.

  “Well, you’ll like him then,” Alice said. “He’s dead. It says so right there in the book.”

  I flipped to the biographical information. An illustration of a stern-looking man gazed out at me. It was true—according to what I read, he died in 1758.

  “I don’t think this is my man,” I said.

  “It’s him,” Alice said. “Books never lie. Except for when they do.”

  “Do you have any other books about him?” I asked. “Maybe some secret histories that haven’t been published?”

  But she just coughed up a hairball and then went back to building her house of books without saying anything. So much for Alice providing all the answers to my mystery.

  I looked around and saw a library clerk standing at the end of the aisle. She shook her head at us and walked away, no doubt going off in search of a security guard. We didn’t have much time left.

  “All right, forget that,” I said. “I need help finding an address instead.”

  Alice clapped her hands together. “Oh, I like hide and seek,” she said.

  “I don’t need that kind of help,” I said. “I need a map.”

  She pouted at me. “But you can get a map anywhere,” she said. “You don’t need my help for that.”

  “Yes, I do,” I said. “This address doesn’t show up on any map. Two Genesis Way. Here in the city.” Then, for her benefit, I added, “Seattle.”

  “It does so show up on a map,” she said. She shoved the house of books and it fell apart in a jumbled mess. In the centre of the ruins was a vellum scroll. I picked it up and unrolled it. It was a road map of Seattle, but it was hand drawn, and the ink looked like blood. The scroll appeared to be a few hundred years old, but the map was up to date. Well, Alice had shown me stranger things before.

  There was no index, so I scanned the map until I found what I was looking for. A rendering of a nail, the end pointing at a blank patch of land by th
e water. It was also drawn in blood. There were no other distinguishing marks anywhere on the map, so I took this to be a sign. But maybe that’s just because I hate nails. I never have been any good at carpentry.

  I rolled the scroll up and tucked it into my shirt.

  “All right, take your payment,” I told Alice.

  “I already have,” she said. “Weren’t you listening?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, then thought about it. “You mean that end of the world thing?”

  She got to her feet and curtsied in her bloody hospital gown.

  “But that’s not a memory,” I said.

  “Yes, it is,” she said. “You just haven’t had it yet. But there’s no rule saying I can’t take a memory before you have it.”

  And then she went skipping off down the aisle, singing over and over, “We all fall down.”

  And that was Alice again.

  I got to my feet and went down the aisle in the opposite direction before the security guards showed up. When I went out the exit, I half expected the alarm to ring because of the scroll tucked into my shirt. But nothing happened. Just another ordinary trip to the library.

  It was raining outside, but my mood was improved somewhat by seeing a parking ticket under my windshield wiper. This day just kept getting better.

  Back in the car, I took out the map and looked at it again. Then I put it in the glove compartment for later. I wasn’t going to Edwards’s place right away. I had someplace else I wanted to visit first.

  THE END OF THE WORLD

  All right.

  This is how Penelope died.

  This is how I couldn’t save her.

  Penelope and I toured the cities of Japan looking for the angels but we were unable to find a sign of even one of them. We didn’t carry the camera gear in public anymore. We didn’t want to attract any attention. Now that the Americans had started firebombing cities, people were growing suspicious of each other. That was always the way once your side started to lose. No one wanted to believe the enemy was simply better or more technologically advanced. Or worse, had God on their side. Like he’d ever taken sides.