by Michele Lang
“Of course, I came to Earth filled with a mighty and righteous wrath. But not against you, Magda.”
I blinked hard, the sudden rush of tears surprising me as much as his revelations. “I always thought anger was a grave sin, too.”
“So many sins! From what you say, everything you do is a grave sin. Your very existence is a sin.”
I blinked my traitorous tears back with difficulty. I had thought the price of returning from the dead included a blast of heavenly wrath as well as a good percentage of my eternal soul. For the first time since I had returned to life and earth, the night air caressed my living skin, my senses opened to the world again. “Life is so good, it’s worth sinning to live.”
“But you have committed no cosmic crime, my girl. You have the right to live, to fight to live. And the Almighty Himself granted you this gift of return.”
Why had I returned? I thought of Capa’s face when he spoke of Gerda, my mother’s when she spoke of my father—love can be cruel.
Carefully, I kept Raziel at a distance so that I could calm my racing, galloping pulse. “Honestly, Raziel. I broke all my frightful oaths simply to bring you here to thank you, with all of my heart, before I go to Amsterdam and start sinning for certain. And I also wanted to invite you for a cognac. No more.”
He hesitated. “Cognac?”
“Yes. Or if you are not allowed to drink spirits, at least a white wine with seltzer or a strong cup of coffee. I want to toast the fact that you exist, Raziel.”
He looked away, quickly, as if my words stung him, across the river to the black, shadowy face of Notre Dame by night. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a couple, little more than shadows in the night, stroll along the path and down the stairway to the river’s edge.
“Love can make people do funny things,” I said, half in a reverie. “But love is all that matters in the end, isn’t it?”
He smiled then, though his smile was melancholy. “But you were speaking of cognac, not love. Why not? Let’s have a drink in Paris—I’ll toast you, and you toast me.”
16
Heaven is a crowded café, decorated with smoke and light and condensation caught against plate-glass windows filled with darkness. With white linen tablecloths, and smiling waiters who don’t sneer at you because you are a woman, a Jew, or both. With coffee flowing in an endless, sweet river. And filled with languorous, beautiful, benevolent souls.
In the midst of my Heaven sits an angel, Raziel. Refusing a cigarette but more than content with a crock of French onion soup and a small espresso in a gilded cup; an angel with a diabolical smile, diabolical because of the emotions this Raziel summons forth from me.
We had wandered into the Café Alibi, and French hauteur, applied democratically to all patrons not known to the establishment, cloaked us in an anonymity that worked better than any spell. Raziel kept his wings tightly furled and out of sight, his godlight at a low wattage. Still, every female in the place hardly failed to notice him.
“Where do they go?” I asked him, after the waiter had settled us in an obscure corner.
“Go? They?”
I leaned forward, and whispered conspiratorially, “Your wings.”
His smile broadened, and his whiskey brown eyes dazzled me with his warm, barely suppressible radiance. “Ah, those. They are made of light, you know. Everything is made of light, but my wings—they are at a higher frequency than this place, than the rest of me. The everlasting love of the Almighty, clouds of unknowing . . . Anyway, I turn them down like a wick in a gas lamp.”
His analogy made me smile too. “And they fold away just like ladybug wings. Charming, and practical too.”
He laughed aloud, and so did I. Some ladybug he was, Raziel. I leaned over the tiny round table and studied his features, memorized them for a talisman against despair. “Ladybugs are good luck, you know.” I dared to touched his forearm with the tips of my fingers, and a warm glow ran through me like an incandescent light.
His smile faded away. “You sound like you are saying good-bye.”
I took a long, camouflaging sip of my café au lait. “Aren’t I?”
“Magda. Always call upon me—I hear you best from the midst of the fire.”
“Is that so.” I replaced my coffee cup in its matching saucer, admired the steadiness in my hands. “But what about those poor devils trapped in that hell. That . . . Mauthausen. Are their guardian angels listening to them? Or are they too far away to hear their cries for mercy, their prayers?”
I watched the sea of living mortals churn: smoking, kissing, fighting, drinking, drowsing, hating, despairing. Life surged all around us, and Raziel was my island in the midst of it. “Why do you come to me? What about the children slaughtered last year during the Kristallnacht? Didn’t those sweet babies deserve to be saved?”
Raziel squeezed my fingers, and unwillingly I shifted my gaze to look at him.
His eyes, huge and dark, looked deeply into mine. His voice was so hoarse I could scarcely understand his words. “Don’t you think I ask the same questions? Do you think that the Almighty Himself deigns to whisper all the answers into my ear?”
I had never heard Raziel even whisper a word of doubt before now. My heart began to pound, and the noise of the café retreated to a low hum as we leaned closer together. “Oh, Raziel. I had hoped you would have a more enlightened view on our wretched human affairs. Some crutch for me to lean on.”
When Raziel spoke, his smooth baritone voice was still husky. “No. Unless that crutch is me.”
“But, Raziel . . .” I bit my lip, tried again. “I can’t lean on you, not that way. That couldn’t be what God had in mind—could it? I thought compelling an angel violated the witches’ creed, and Divine law, too.”
His eyes flashed with a danger I could not identify, and I braced myself for a divine stroke of lightning, for a smiting.
No divine retribution struck me where I sat, but Raziel frightened me enough. His fingers inched out and re-captured mine. “I cannot tell you God’s plan. But I come to you because you call to me, have the power to compel me.”
“But why do you not rebuke me for summoning you?”
“Because. I want you to summon me. Even compel me to stay.”
My cheeks burned with the shock and I spilled my coffee. As I mopped up the mess and ruined a lovely linen napkin, I considered the implications of what he’d just said. Raziel was tempted to fall, to walk alongside me on Earth. That truth put our earlier adventures into another light entirely.
His fingers slid up the length of my arms to the tops of my shoulders, and he pulled me away from the damp disaster of our table. I could feel his breath, hot and sweet, on my face. “No one, Magda, has ever called me by name to Earth. Not the Witch of Ein Dor, not another angel, not the wizard Rabdos Staff. I have come to deliver specific messages, and left thereafter. I came long ago to give a gift once, a balm to a suffering soul.
“But I never drank coffee and debated philosophy with mortals in a Parisian café before. Never joked about my wings before.”
I thought he was going to lean in and kiss me, and Heaven help me, I was going to let him. But he closed his eyes against me, released my shoulders, and pushed his chair away. Little drips of coffee ran in rivulets off the far end of the table.
That cinnamon-scented kiss, withheld, burned my lips as much as if it had happened. Capa was right, but I didn’t care: Goodness would have to trump passion, at least for now. I couldn’t let him do it. “I’ve put you in danger, angel mine. Gisele is charge enough.”
“Do not presume,” Raziel interrupted me, in a low, choking growl. “I am angel born, but I am a primal spirit of the air. Protected. But—”
“Exactly. You have to stay protected.”
“Let Raziel take care of Raziel. And you as well.”
“But,” I protested, “you have taken care of me from the second Heaven. That is where you properly belong.”
Raziel’s gaze pinned me like a butterfly to m
y chair. “No. No more second Heaven for me, no longer. You and your clan are my destiny and my charge. And unlike those slaughtered innocents who ascended straight to the throne of the Most High, you, little star, will not ascend so easily should the wizard have his way.”
My program of flouting convention had gotten me nowhere but on the verge of the kind of trouble proper mamas warn their girls about. I covered my confusion by withdrawing a compact and lipstick from my new beaded bag, and even though it was rude I painted my lips right at the table, in the full view of my bewitching guardian.
I pressed my lips together to smooth the coral lipstick to the lip line, checked the rest of my makeup in the mirror—
And read the wind.
“We have to leave,” I muttered, my fingers suddenly as cold as death.
“You cannot run from me,” Raziel began to say, but I lunged for him and we toppled to the ground just as the gunfire erupted from the front door. I did not know if angels’ bodies were immune to gunshot, but I did not want to find out.
The concussive sound of breaking glass and the rising shriek of ladies’ screams drowned out anything I could have said, any rational chain of thought. I draped my body over his, chest to chest, and I buried my face in the wide expanse of his arms, closed my eyes against the screaming pandemonium.
Almost immediately, the gunfire ceased, and we were in more danger from broken glass and the stampede of panicked Parisians fleeing from the café. After a moment, the smell of gunpowder faded and the smoke began to clear.
I wanted to stay wrapped in Raziel’s arms. But I snuffed that tender impulse like a cigarette, and dared to take a quick look around the café.
A man’s body sprawled facedown in the broken glass, blood pooling out in a circle like a spell of death all around him. The headwaiter’s face popped up over the surface of the bar like a ragged Punch-and-Judy puppet, his chubby cheeks streaked with sweat and dirt. He shrieked in broken French, “The Fascist dogs have got Hilare.” And then he dove under the bar again.
A flash blinded me, and I flinched until I realized it was a photographer’s bulb and not another round of bullets. A silhouette of a lithe, athletic male figure crossed into the room, and again he shot his camera like a gun.
I blinked hard against the flashes of negative light filling my eyes, strained to make out the man’s shadowed features. And then I laughed, a maniacal giggle dancing at the edge of madness. Of course.
The man taking photos was Capa.
“This is why I can’t stand Paris right now,” Capa said later, another unlit cigarette dangling from his lower lip. “The Third Republic still stands, yes. But these fascist thugs run around the city, shooting it out with the Communists. It’s not as bad as Budapest, not yet. But it doesn’t take a mystic—sorry, Magda—to see which way the winds are blowing.”
Capa, bless him, had rescued us from the floor of the Alibi and installed us at his customary table at the Dôme. He bought us both something alcoholic and fortifying, some kind of brandy or port or something. Raziel, who had refused a cigarette earlier, now puffed away at a thin Cuban cigar.
I watched Capa study Raziel with his photographer’s eyes, but if he perceived Raziel’s celestial origins, he did not remark upon them. He twirled the black enameled ashtray in a little circle, around and around like a children’s carousel.
He kept looking up at Raziel, but Capa spoke to me. “The city’s balanced on a razor’s edge. It’s time I went to the far shore, to America. I’m on all the wrong lists, my girl.”
I took a long, shaky sip of my brandy drink. “It’s a roll of honor, Capa, and you’re at the top of it.”
He acknowledged my shameless flattery with a little half smile, indicated Raziel with a nod and a waggling eyebrow. “Is this who you were really worrying about, before?”
It was my turn to smile, though secretly I still felt like throwing up after the scene in the café. “Even a wicked girl hides her secrets.”
Capa threw back his head and roared, tapped Raziel, backhanded, on the shoulder. “Watch yourself, mister. She’s worrying over you for good reason. This is a free spirit, this Magdalena Lazarus. Easy to sell your soul to be with one like her. Believe me, I know.”
Raziel stubbed out the still-smoldering end of his cigar in the ashtray, narrowly missing the back of Capa’s hand. The sweet smoke rose up like a king cobra.
Capa leaned in, and he whispered, “Sir, you are in dangerous territory now, the land of the fugitive. A land of mortals, souls that can die.”
Raziel only stared, a whisper of a smile playing along the sensual curve of his lips. And in the silence, something dangerous passed between Capa and the angel—some strange mixture of jealousy and brotherhood.
“We live in the shadow of death these days,” I said finally, to break their silent interplay. “That gives us all a certain kind of freedom.”
“You learn fast, girl,” Capa said under his breath. “I’m afraid for your friend, though.”
Raziel looked at me and back at Capa again. “I am no innocent on holiday, Mr. Capa.”
Capa raised his hands, as though Raziel were aiming a gun at his heart. “I have no claim on Magdalena. I wouldn’t dare. Catch her if you can. All I am saying is, innocent or not, be careful what you wish for.”
Raziel’s laughter rang like church bells in the rain. “I have no claim on her, it is she who has a claim on me.”
I couldn’t help grinning at both of them. Here we sat at the edge of disaster, and these elegant creatures still resorted to wit and repartee. There was a certain desperate gallantry to both of them that I deeply appreciated. “Now you both speak of me as if I weren’t sitting here. I can’t stand it.”
My pleasure faded when I saw the expression on Raziel’s face and I considered the truth: to Raziel, my café Heaven was in fact a descent into an unprecedented level of Hell. And he had fallen this far on my account.
“How can we sit here joking in the midst of disaster. That poor devil, Hilare,” I said, to change the subject.
“Hilare was the lucky one,” Capa muttered around the unlit cigarette clamped in his teeth. He flicked open his battered Zippo lighter and the end of his unfiltered Gauloise bloomed with a tiny flame.
As I watched the smoke rise from Capa’s nostrils, it became ever clearer to me that Raziel had to return to his proper sphere, turn away from the dark road I now had to travel. The realization was sudden, perfect, complete in itself, sharp as a shard of broken glass lying on the floor at the Café Alibi.
“You saved us, Capa,” I said.
“No one can save anybody, Magda. I thought I made that clear, earlier.” He squinted down at his Breitling watch. “Or should I say yesterday. The sun is up, by now.”
I flashed a smile at Raziel. “Ah, yet another sleepless night. Someday, I’ll sink into a big, fluffy, down-filled featherbed and sleep the divine sleep of the gods. That’s all the Heaven I’ll ever need.”
Raziel winked at me, slowly. “Perhaps Heaven is overrated.” His face stilled, and the noise of the café suddenly seemed an eternity away.
I couldn’t tear my gaze away from Raziel’s face, even though Capa watched us with his knowing eyes. My words were for my countryman, but my sentiment was for Raziel. “Thanks for all your many kindnesses, Endre. I mean, Capa—the world’s most famous photographer. I kiss your hands.”
“Sounds like you’re saying good-bye.”
I swallowed hard and looked from mortal to angel and back again, and I made up my mind. “In fact, I am. In Amsterdam awaits my doom. It’s only fair I go down to it alone. Better not to take anybody else with me. Not even you, dear Raziel. Farewell.”
I turned to Capa, held out my hand, and bemused, he shook it. “I’m no seer, Endre—my baby sister’s the one for that—but you’re right about one thing. You should get out of Europe as fast as you can. Or you’ll end up as dead as Hilare.”
He paled, and I reveled darkly in the pleasure of shocking the unshockable
Robert Capa. I rose slowly, and left him and the angel sitting together at the table.
17
It was such a grand farewell. Eva would have been so proud. Except Raziel wouldn’t stay put, in his assigned place in the tableau. I had walked no more than twenty feet from the Café du Dôme, when he somehow stood in front of me, blocking my way as sleepy-headed working people stumbled over the cobblestones, rubbing the dreams out of their eyes as they scuttled off to work.
“Magda.”
I drew myself up, with as much authority as I could muster. I am tall; as a young woman I spent most of my days hunched down, trying to make myself smaller to match the men in my life. But Raziel physically loomed over me.
“You cannot run away.”
“Can’t I? The night is done, Raziel. Thank you for saving me, though honestly only the Almighty knows why. I’m off to Amsterdam now. I don’t need your help anymore. Good-bye.”
“I’m coming with you.”
I blinked once, twice, trying to clear my head of the night’s magic, regain the clarity of daylight, and make sense of Raziel’s words. “Why? I mean, what can you do, really? You deliver messages, as you say, sweet, wonderful Raziel—a celestial postman from the Almighty. But you are forbidden to open the letters yourself, to read them in advance of delivery. And you are not allowed to write a reply.”
He stood, immobile, taking my words like blows.
I swallowed hard, wished with all my heart he wouldn’t listen to me. “I have already released you, angel of mine. You belong in Heaven, creature of light. Go, ascend, trouble me no more.”
Raziel crossed his arms over his chest. His expression clouded over. “How do I trouble you?”
I didn’t want to answer him. A pigeon fluttered between us with a great clatter of dirty wings. “Because. For one thing, you can’t help me with my job. All you can do is remind me, so kindly, that I’m going straight to Hell when I’m done. And for another . . .”
I hesitated, then decided on the truth. “I—well. My feelings for you are not exactly, shall we say, angelic. I seem to remember my ancestors, and your brothers, got into a lot of trouble over that sort of thing.”