Angel of Death

by J. Robert King

  “But it isn’t envy. I couldn’t envy you: fragile flesh. Pain. Wounds. Weariness. Do you see this hand? Of course you don’t. My flesh was cut away. You see this other hand? Yes, it is still flesh and bone. And what does it hold? A faint, flickering light, because these human eyes of mine cannot see without it. What was it St Paul said, that we see through a mirror dimly? But when my spirit eyes are returned to me, ah, then I shall see face to face. How could I possibly envy you?”

  “‘Nothing that is human disgusts me.’” She chanted the line as though it were an article of faith.

  “What?”

  “He wrote that, too, not St Paul, but Tennessee Williams. In one of his other plays, he said, ‘Nothing that is human disgusts me, unless it is unkind, violent.’

  And that’s what you have become, Azra. That’s all you are. Cruel.”

  “Cruel? No. I take pleasure in my work, but that isn’t cruelty. It’s artistry,” Samael replied. His tones were fervid in the chill air as he approached her. “Don’t you see? Humans are alone in all of creation. God is not on your side. Satan is not, either. No angel, no devil allies with you. No plant, no animal loves you. You are at war with all the universe, and at war with your very selves. You are different from the rest, and different from each other. You are a hundred feet below the sunshine, cold and wounded and trapped, clutching a tiny light that is destined to go out. No, I could not envy you, but I do love you.”

  “If you love me, let me go.”

  “The hunter loves the doe and kills her all the same. He admires her animal grace, her tenacity, her innocence – and he wants to possess it. Loving you only makes me better at killing you.”

  “You’re insane.”

  He continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “I used to slay without compassion, with only an eye for justice and poetry. But then you taught me to love my prey. You, Donna. And I fell. Angels, it seems, are forbidden to love your kind. But demons are forbidden nothing. Which is better, the angel that disdains you, or the demon that loves you?”

  Donna’s lungs strained against the tight bands. “So, what is it, then? Once I’m healed, you’re just going to hunt me down and kill me?”

  “No.” His voice was gentle, and he leaned toward her.

  “No, Donna. I’m making you well so that you can live. Trying to kill the baby inside you was a mistake. It’s part of you. I couldn’t kill it without killing you. No, Donna, I’m making you well so that you can deliver the child. I’ve already selected the doctor who will help you. She’s the best obstetrician in the Midwest.”

  “You’re going to let me give birth?”

  His hand reached up to the flow regulator of the morphine-blood mixture. The droplets quickened in the tube. “We’ll all be delivered on that day. The baby will be delivered from your womb, and I from this flesh, and you – you, my darling Donna – will be delivered alive from this dark, cold hole.”

  Already she was getting sleepy, and her sight had darkened even before he switched off the penlight.

  “You’d never let my child live.”

  “Oh,” he replied, his voice floating in the darkness,

  “I said it would be delivered. I didn’t say it would live.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  The killing tonight is as it was before. Simple. Powerful. Clean. It’s the old angel days. I’d almost forgotten how diverting it can be.

  For the man waiting for the L, it’s as simple as a push. But not that simple. I discover that he is a Caterpillar salesman, known for his aggressive tactics. He’s even now telling me of the killing he thinks he’ll make in Bloomington.

  Death by southbound train would be perfectly fitting. The story of it will follow his generations. They will think of him forever, though he thinks of them not at all in this, his final moment.

  A train is presently pulling up.

  In one hand, the man lifts his briefcase full of pamphlets. In the other, he lifts his suitcase, filled with the clean folds of his wardrobe, his life. I push him in front of the train.

  The really interesting thing is not that the suitcase and briefcase explode simultaneously beneath the untroubled shriek and rumble of steel wheels. The really interesting thing is that I use both hands to push him. I’m not even thinking about my stump, but I use both hands. I can feel my missing hand. Ever since chopping my hand off, I’ve felt phantom pain, but now I can feel pressure, too. His back was warm, his tweed jacket had a gentle prickle to it. It is as though, in killing, I regained my hand. This intrigues me. There must be someone else hereabouts who needs to die, someone I can similarly touch. The streets are loud with police cars. They send an eerie and faraway wail among the canyons of steel and glass. They neither approach nor recede but only suddenly arrive in a toothy rush and skid to a stop beneath the train station pillars. The police are bolting up iron stairs and along catwalks. The ticket woman is shrieking something I can’t make out.

  I walk away.

  The flashing lights send my shadow huge and intermittent across the huddled shops and immemorial foundations of the skyscrapers. Passersby pause and face the murder scene. Their eyes and faces shine like small moons. I walk toward them, in and among them, black bodied and eclipsing. I’m outlined in a corona of warning glow, like old times. We’re ghosts to each other, the people and I – they gray and watchful ghosts, and I a black and ceaseless one.

  The old woman is at her window, just a tiny face above the sill. Her body is invisible behind steel and brick, but I know she is frail and wheelchair bound. I pass the young couple that holds the security door open. I walk up old stairs, which slouch in their center from a hundred years of feet.

  Her door is, of course, locked, but locked doors were never a problem for me. Instead of kicking the door in, I send my soul-hand beneath her weather stripping and tickle it along her heart. This is perhaps a little ironic cruelty: the retired schoolteacher, herself the mother of four, would be betrayed by the organ symbolic for the community’s love of her.

  Ah, well, too late for regrets. Already her heart ceases. Already, she slides down into the wheelchair, the cushion bunching up against old, stocking-clad legs. It is like old times. Again, I’m killing from a distance, killing with a touch. No more thumbs bitten off. No more wrists locked in handcuffs. With no hand, there can be no handcuffs.

  There’s a homeless man by a fire in a fifty-five gallon drum. He’s one of the thirty percent who is mentally ill. He’s also an addict. The drugs ease the illness temporarily, but they deepen it afterward. It’s a simple enough thing, then, to bring around the stray dog he’d begun to feed, bring the dog and a pack of others around, initially to see what scraps the man might have, but then to smell the salty savor of a cut on his leg from a piece of rebar this morning. How like addiction and madness are wild dogs! Once invited, they dart in to snatch away bits of meat from the one who welcomed them. I stand and watch until he is still, and the real tearing has begun. There’s plenty more killing to do this night. The best assignment of the evening is just now ahead of me.

  Mrs Billings is lying in bed as I come through her window. It’s late. I stand in a puddle of moonlight, just inside the window, and try to make out the softly snoring sleeper. It’s been a bad year for Mrs Billings, to lose a husband, to be indicted for embezzlement, and now, to die. She was taking it all in stride, though. In the many newspaper photos I’ve seen, she looks well-pressed and confident, always turning aside reporters with waves and smiles. I suppose I expect her to look the same now, suited for the combat of the streets, but instead she is in jammies.

  I turn on the light.

  She doesn’t stir from sleep. She’s undeniably middleaged, a gray pile of hair pillowing her careworn face. There’s a regal reserve in her features even as she softly snores.

  To others, she’s an embattled widow, the wife of a white-collar criminal slain by a blue-collar killer. For me, she’s a Madonna. She carefully, patiently arranged my early life, not as a mother would – in the planning and c
oddling and living of days – but as an accountant would. She created my past. It was through her that, for however brief a time, I became William B. Dance; I became human.

  She deserves to die well. The suffering she’s endured in the last year entitle her to the best I have to offer. It’ll need to be well planned, an expensive affair. Her death should be worth the thirty-five million that, when she dies, will become no one’s money, stored away in a vault in Geneva. Such a death should involve the destruction of a large piece of property – certainly more than this million-dollar villa in Naperville. It needs to be corporate capital that’s destroyed – not an antiquity at the Field Museum or even a business like Marshall Fields – but wait! Macy’s bought them out. Yes, the setting would be perfect for a death that would impugn the aristocratic safety and luxury of the place. If I truly were my former self, I would arrange for her dress hem to get snagged in an escalator’s teeth, and for the ceaseless walkway to grind her to pieces. The blood would never quite be scrubbed from every gear and cog, and urban legends would begin about Macy’s and the German butcher who designed its escalators to slay. Such theatrics would have been easy when I was yet an angel. Now, they are beyond my abilities. I’m a shadow of my former self.

  “Who’s there?” comes her voice, groggy and murmuring. I shut off the light and hold still.

  Mrs Billings sits bolt upright, breathing rapidly and clutching a wiry hand to her chest. Her eyes hang wide open, and she croaks out, “Who’s there?”

  I do not respond, do not move.

  “Who turned out the lights?” she asks, and then rubs her head. “I don’t know what I’m talking about,” she assures herself, taking a few deep breaths before leaning back against her pillows. “Whoever you are, fuck off. I’m trying to sleep.”

  I wait until her breathing has returned to the low, smooth drone of sleep, and then I head back toward the window. There’s no fitting way to kill this woman here, tonight, with my own hands – well, hand. After all she has been to me, I won’t let her die badly. Even so, I have the feeling I’ll never fully escape my humanity until Mrs Billings, the literal author of my humanity, is dead. There’s plenty of time; Chicago nights are endless. For now, this earthly flesh of mine is tired, and I long for my lightless home and my bound-up little wifey. Every human boy at one point leaves his mother to go to his wife.

  I hope Donna has had a pleasant evening. It had been a monumental effort to jiggle the gurney all the way to the shelves. Even then, Donna had almost been defeated by the blankets piled atop her. It had taken many minutes to shimmy the covers far enough that she could wrench her hand out sideways to reach the shelf. At least her memory had served – the scalpels were right there.

  Still, the angle had been all wrong. She had made numerous small cuts in her side before she at last got the scalpel positioned. Then, it had been sweaty work straining to cut the thick nylon cord. All the while, she had focused on a single image – cradling her newborn child in the bright, clean comfort of a hospital. Donna was nearly through the band on her wrist when he returned. The restraints still held her tight, and the blankets still covered the work she had done – but none of that mattered. She’d moved the gurney. If he lit the penlight, he would know instantly.

  “Good morning, Donna,” came the killer’s voice from the dark doorway. Impossibly, from that distance, his fingers seemed to gently brush her cheek. “You’re awake.”

  Through clenched teeth, she replied, “You’re alive.”

  Samael moved forward. His feet made dry noises on the cement floor. “Very much so. Though five others are not.”

  She grimaced, flexing her arms against the ropes.

  “You sound proud.”

  “I am what I am,” he replied without apology. He did not approach her, instead moving to the corner where he had a mattress. He began undressing. Well-worn clothes sloughed from the man’s flesh. Clothes and a leather mask. “And, right now, I’m tired – a mortal condition I hope soon to be rid of. I’m going to sleep. Do you need anything first? I should probably shift you, to prevent bedsores.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t want you to touch me.”

  More sounds in the blackness – the sigh of Samael easing himself to the mattress and the rustle of sheets. “Well, then, good morning, Detective Leland, and goodnight.”

  “Goodnight,” she heard herself say.

  She lay there, listening. Time was meaningless. Only the occasional drip of seeping water and the quiet inhalations of a murderer made time pass at all. Donna waited. The killer’s breathing deepened. He stopped shifting on the mattress.

  That was enough. She couldn’t wait anymore. The scalpel was hot and wet with sweat and blood. It was slick in numb fingers. Oh, but there was only a little left.

  She thought of herself cradling her child. With a small pop, the wrist strap snapped. The restraint flopped loose. Hardly daring to breathe, she listened.

  Samael did not stir.

  Good. She flexed weary fingers before setting them to work on the buckle across her chest. There were eight straps in all. The buckle gave out a traitorous click as it opened. Again, she listened, and heard only the steady snoring. Now, Donna too could breathe again. She told herself that she was nearly free. She bent forward to release her feet. Now, what? What?

  If she fled without killing Samael, he’d only return for her. But in this darkness, how could she be sure to kill him? She’d have to slay him on the first stroke, before he awoke. The last buckle clicked loose, and the straps drooped atop her throbbing ankles. Careful not to let any buckles ring against the edge of the gurney, Donna drew the blankets away and flexed her legs.

  The air was frigid. At least the straps had kept her warm. She swung her legs over the side of the gurney. Pain shot through her. Blood ran through aching knees and swelled her stiff ankles. Standing was agony. The dark chamber flared bright and whirled around her. Still, she stood.

  She couldn’t fight in a state like this. She certainly couldn’t win. Instead, she had to run away – climb out of this living sarcophagus. Get to safety. Send someone else down into the spider hole.

  She staggered away from the gurney, only then feeling the tug of the IVs in both arms. Snarling quietly, she peeled back tape, yanked needles and tubes free, and flung them away to dribble onto the cold floor. One hand groped at the darkness ahead while the other cradled her belly and the bullet wounds in it. She couldn’t see. The doorway was simply a dark gray rectangle hovering in blackness. Who knew what traps the killer might have set along the way? Taking short, painful steps, Donna slid her feet along. There weren’t even cobwebs down here, the place was so deep. Five more long, slow breaths, and she was at the threshold. Beyond was a square chamber with no ceiling – the base of a deep shaft. She looked up into the darkness, only just making out a ladder of thin iron bars sticking out of one cement wall. There were no windows anywhere in the shaft, but a diffuse light seeped down from above. Beside the ladder was the ruin of an old cable-and-pulley elevator. Its counterweight lay loose on broken cement.

  “Up,” she told herself wearily, shaking the pins and needles from her limbs. Walking had been hard enough, but this?

  She grabbed the ladder and began to climb. The first rung shifted under her weight and made a tooth-grinding sound. No time to wait. Hauling hard on the next rung, she rose. A third rung, and a fourth. Soon, she was climbing hand-over-hand and foot-over-foot. The going was hard, and her breath puffed out steam into the cold gray air, but she was escaping. Then, twenty feet into the air, a third of the way up the shaft, the next rung cracked free in her hand. She lurched backward and let the bar go. It fell along with chunks of loose cement, which clattered and thunked against the floor.

  Holding her breath, Donna listened.

  Samael was moving in the room.

  Letting her breath out in a quiet hiss, Donna climbed again. There was no reason to wait. If he was awake –

  “Donna?” came a low, plaintive voice below.
Mother of God. She hauled herself past the gap where the rung had torn free. Halfway to the top, to its hopeful gray glow. The bottom of the shaft was only blackness, a murky well. Then, tepid light jagged out of darkness. It flickered across the wall of the shaft, rose rung by rung up the ladder, and caught in its glow a small cascade of grit coming from the wall. The light slashed up at her.

  “Donna!” Beside the light, a ghostly face gazed angrily upward. Mother of God! Her hands couldn’t grab rungs fast enough. Cold cement and colder metal bit into her fingers, leaving rusty abrasions. Another glance down. “I don’t want to hurt you!” Samael shouted. Just then, flame exploded beside his face.

  The crack and boom of the pistol resounded through the shaft. Sparks leaped blue from the concrete wall. Chips of mortar smacked into Donna. Heedless, she climbed.

  Two thirds of the way. Twenty more feet. If she could just keep from being shot…

  Another explosion. Angry heat gripped her thigh. Her leg slipped, ramming against a rung. It went numb, wedged between the ladder and the wall. Cursing, Donna struggled to pull her wounded leg free. An empty clack of steel sounded, then another. He had run out of bullets. Now he would climb.

  “God damn it!” Donna hissed. She tore her wounded leg free of the rung, lacerating her skin. It didn’t matter. Growling, she hauled herself higher.

  She thought of the baby – of the tidy hospital room and the sleeping baby.

  “The name is Leland. Yes, I had an appointment for an inducement? Yes, I’ll wait.” Donna Leland stood in the bright, clean reception area of Froedtert Hospital, waiting patiently as the gray-haired volunteer dialed up to maternity, asking about her.

  Donna never would have imagined it would end this way. Inducement. After courtroom confessions and car accidents, after poisoning and abduction and bullet wounds, after the arms and legs of the baby’s father – of Azra, of Samael – had, one by one, been fished from the Chicago River, this child would have to be induced?