by Paula Guran
“You’ll need the bullets,” came the reply.
Harry had expected bargains and threats. This answer silenced him. “There’s something going to get loose tonight, D’Amour,” Cha’Chat said. The blood that was pooling around it had begun to thicken and grow milky, like melted wax. “Something wilder than me.”
“Name it,” said Harry. The demon grinned. “Who knows?” it said. “It’s a strange season, isn’t it? Long nights. Clear skies. Things get born on nights like this, don’t you find?”
“Where?” said Harry, pressing the gun to Cha’Chat’s nose.
“You’re a bully, D’Amour,” it said reprovingly. “You know that?”
“Tell me . . .”
The thing’s eyes grew darker; its face seemed to blur.
“South of here, I’d say . . .” it replied. “A hotel . . .” The tone of its voice was changing subtly; the features losing their solidity. Harry’s trigger finger itched to give the damned thing a wound that would keep it from a mirror for life, but it was still talking, and he couldn’t afford to interrupt its flow. “. . . on Forty-fourth,” it said. “Between Sixth . . . Sixth and Broadway.” The voice was indisputably feminine now. “Blue blinds,” it murmured. “I can see blue blinds . . .”
As it spoke the last vestiges of its true features fled, and suddenly it was Norma who was bleeding on the sidewalk at Harry’s feet.
“You wouldn’t shoot an old lady, would you?” she piped up.
The trick lasted seconds only, but Harry’s hesitation was all that Cha’Chat needed to fold itself between one plane and the next, and flit. He’d lost the creature, for the second time in a month.
And to add discomfort to distress, it had begun to snow.
The small hotel that Cha’Chat had described had seen better years; even the light that burned in the lobby seemed to tremble on the brink of expiring. There was nobody at the desk. Harry was about to start up the stairs when a young man whose pate was shaved as bald as an egg, but for a single kiss curl that was oiled to his scalp, stepped out of the gloom and took hold of his arm.
“There’s nobody here,” he informed Harry.
In better days Harry might have cracked the egg open with his bare fists, and enjoyed doing so. Tonight he guessed he would come off the worse. So he simply said, “Well, I’ll find another hotel then, eh?”
Kiss Curl seemed placated; the grip relaxed. In the next instant Harry’s hand found his gun, and the gun found Kiss Curl’s chin. An expression of bewilderment crossed the boy’s face as he fell back against the wall, spitting blood.
As Harry started up the stairs, he heard the youth yell, “Darrieux!” from below.
Neither the shout nor the sound of the struggle had roused any response from the rooms. The place was empty. It had been elected, Harry began to comprehend, for some purpose other than hostelry.
As he started along the landing a woman’s cry, begun but never finished, came to meet him. He stopped dead. Kiss Curl was coming up the stairs behind him two or three at a time; ahead, someone was dying. This couldn’t end well, Harry suspected.
Then the door at the end of the corridor opened, and suspicion became plain fact. A man in a grey suit was standing on the threshold, skinning off a pair of bloodied surgical gloves. Harry knew him vaguely; indeed had begun to sense a terrible pattern in all of this from the moment he’d heard Kiss Curl call his employer’s name. This was Darrieux Marchetti, also called the Cankerist; one of the whispered order of theological assassins whose directives came from Rome, or Hell, or both.
“D’Amour,” he said.
Harry had to fight the urge to be flattered that he had been remembered.
“What happened here?” he demanded to know, taking a step toward the open door.
“Private business,” the Cankerist insisted. “Please, no closer.”
Candles burned in the little room and, by their generous light, Harry could see the bodies laid out on the bare bed. The woman from the house on Ridge Street, and her child. Both had been dispatched with Roman efficiency.
“She protested,” said Marchetti, not overly concerned that Harry was viewing the results of his handiwork. “All I needed was the child.”
“What was it?” Harry demanded. “A demon?”
Marchetti shrugged. “We’ll never know,” he said. “But at this time of year there’s usually something that tries to get in under the wire. We like to be safe rather than sorry. Besides, there are those – I number myself amongst them – who believe there is such a thing as a surfeit of Messiahs.”
“Messiahs?” said Harry. He looked again at the tiny body.
“There was power there, I suspect,” said Marchetti. “But it could have gone either way. Be thankful, D’Amour. Your world isn’t ready for revelation.” He looked past Harry to the youth, who was at the top of the stairs. “Patrice. Be an angel, will you, bring the car over? I’m late for Mass.”
He threw the gloves back onto the bed.
“You’re not above the law,” said Harry.
“Oh please,” the Cankerist protested, “let’s have no nonsense. It’s too late at night.”
Harry felt a sharp pain at the base of his skull, and a trace of heat where blood was running.
“Patrice thinks you should go home, D’Amour. And so do I.”
The knifepoint was pressed a little deeper.
“Yes?” said Marchetti.
“Yes,” said Harry.
“He was here,” said Norma, when Harry called back at the house.
“Who?”
“Eddie Axel; of Axel’s Superette. He came through, clear as daylight.”
“Dead?”
“Of course dead. He killed himself in his cell. Asked me if I’d seen his soul.”
“And what did you say?”
“I’m a telephonist, Harry; I just make the connections. I don’t pretend to understand the metaphysics.” She picked up the bottle of brandy Harry had set on the table beside her chair. “How sweet of you,” she said. “Sit down. Drink.”
“Another time, Norma. When I’m not so tired.” He went to the door. “By the way,” he said. “You were right. There was something on Ridge Street . . .”
“Where is it now?”
“Gone . . . home.”
“And Cha’Chat?”
“Still out there somewhere. In a foul temper . . .”
“Manhattan’s seen worse, Harry.”
It was little consolation, but Harry muttered his agreement as he closed the door.
The snow was coming on more heavily all the time.
He stood on the step and watched the way the flakes spiraled in the lamplight. No two, he had read somewhere, were ever alike. When such variety was available to the humble snowflake, could he be surprised that events had such unpredictable faces?
Each moment was its own master, he mused, as he put his head between the blizzard’s teeth, and he would have to take whatever comfort he could find in the knowledge that between this chilly hour and dawn there were innumerable such moments – blind maybe, and wild and hungry, but all at least eager to be born.
Uncle Chaim and Aunt Rifke and the Angel
Peter S. Beagle
Unlike Uncle Chaim in Peter S. Beagle’s delightful story, artists have never had angels pose for them. And, if they did, they’d be difficult to portray: in Judeo-Christian tradition they are incorporeal beings who occasionally assume human form. The history of how angels came to be depicted in art – and firmly instated in Western and other cultures – is a long and fascinating one. Suffice to say the concept of a winged human figure dates back to ancient Assyro-Babylonian art and representations of the Egyptian goddess Isis, whose worship began more than six thousand years ago. Adapted by the Greeks, portrayed in other religions and literature, the image of a powerful, beautiful winged being still inspires, evokes awe and creates wonder.
My Uncle Chaim, who was a painter, was working in his studio – as he did on every day except
Shabbos – when the blue angel showed up. I was there.
I was usually there most afternoons, dropping in on my way home from Fiorello LaGuardia Elementary School. I was what they call a “latchkey kid” these days. My parents both worked and traveled full-time, and Uncle Chaim’s studio had been my home base and my real playground since I was small. I was shy and uncomfortable with other children. Uncle Chaim didn’t have any kids, and didn’t know much about them, so he talked to me like an adult when he talked at all, which suited me perfectly. I looked through his paintings and drawings, tried some of my own, and ate Chinese food with him in silent companionship, when he remembered that we should probably eat. Sometimes I fell asleep on the cot. And when his friends – who were mostly painters like himself – dropped in to visit, I withdrew into my favorite corner and listened to their talk, and understood what I understood. Until the blue angel came.
It was very sudden: one moment I was looking through a couple of the comic books Uncle Chaim kept around for me, while he was trying to catch the highlight on the tendons under his model’s chin, and the next moment there was this angel standing before him, actually posing, with her arms spread out and her great wings taking up almost half the studio. She was not blue herself – a light beige would be closer – but she wore a blue robe that managed to look at once graceful and grand, with a white undergarment glimmering beneath. Her face, half shadowed by a loose hood, looked disapproving.
I dropped the comic book and stared. No, I gaped, there’s a difference. Uncle Chaim said to her, “I can’t see my model. If you wouldn’t mind moving just a bit?” He was grumpy when he was working, but never rude.
“I am your model,” the angel said. “From this day forth, you will paint no one but me.”
“I don’t work on commission,” Uncle Chaim answered. “I used to, but you have to put up with too many aggravating rich people. Now I just paint what I paint, take it to the gallery. Easier on my stomach, you know?”
His model, the wife of a fellow painter, said, “Chaim, who are you talking to?”
“Nobody, nobody, Ruthie. Just myself, same way your Jules does when he’s working. Old guys get like that.” To the angel, in a lower voice, he said, “Also, whatever you’re doing to the light, could you not? I got some great shadows going right now.” For a celestial brightness was swelling in the grubby little warehouse district studio, illuminating the warped floorboards, the wrinkled tubes of colors scattered everywhere, the canvases stacked and propped in the corners, along with several ancient rickety easels. It scared me, but not Uncle Chaim. He said. “So you’re an angel, fine, that’s terrific. Now give me back my shadows.”
The room darkened obediently. “Thank you. Now about moving . . .” He made a brushing-away gesture with the hand holding the little glass of Scotch.
The model said, “Chaim, you’re worrying me.”
“What, I’m seventy-six years old, I’m not entitled to a hallucination now and then? I’m seeing an angel, you’re not – this is no big deal. I just want it should move out of the way, let me work.” The angel, in response, spread her wings even wider, and Uncle Chaim snapped, “Oh, for God’s sake, shoo!”
“It is for God’s sake that I am here,” the angel announced majestically. “The Lord – Yahweh – I Am That I Am – has sent me down to be your muse.” She inclined her head a trifle, by way of accepting the worship and wonder she expected.
From Uncle Chaim, she didn’t get it, unless very nearly dropping his glass of Scotch counts as a compliment. “A muse?” he snorted. “I don’t need a muse – I got models!”
“That’s it,” Ruthie said. “I’m calling Jules, I’ll make him come over and sit with you.” She put on her coat, picked up her purse, and headed for the door, saying over her shoulder, “Same time Thursday? If you’re still here?”
“I got more models than I know what to do with,” Uncle Chaim told the blue angel. “Men, women, old, young – even a cat, there’s one lady always brings her cat, what am I going to do?” He heard the door slam, realized that Ruthie was gone, and sighed irritably, taking a larger swallow of whisky than he usually allowed himself. “Now she’s upset, she thinks she’s my mother anyway, she’ll send Jules with chicken soup and an enema.” He narrowed his eyes at the angel. “And what’s this, how I’m only going to be painting you from now on? Like Velázquez stuck painting royal Hapsburg imbeciles over and over? Some hope you’ve got! Listen, you go back and tell—” he hesitated just a trifle “—tell whoever sent you that Chaim Malakoff is too old not to paint what he likes, when he likes and for who he likes. You got all that? We’re clear?”
It was surely no way to speak to an angel, but as Uncle Chaim used to warn me about everyone from neighborhood bullies to my fourth-grade teacher who hit people, “You give the bastards an inch, they’ll walk all over you. From me they get bupkes, nichevo, nothing. Not an inch.” I got beaten up more than once in those days saying that to the wrong people.
And the blue angel was definitely one of them. The entire room suddenly filled with her: with the wings spreading higher than the ceiling, wider than the walls, yet somehow not touching so much as a stick of charcoal; with the aroma almost too impossibly haunting to be borne; with the vast, unutterable beauty that a thousand medieval and Renaissance artists had somehow not gone mad (for the most part) trying to ambush on canvas or trap in stone. In that moment, Uncle Chaim confided later, he didn’t know whether to pity or envy Muslims their ancient ban on depictions of the human body.
“I thought maybe I should kneel, what would it hurt? But then I thought, What would it hurt? It’d hurt my left knee, the one had the arthritis twenty years, that’s what it would hurt.” So he only shrugged a little and told her, “I could manage a sitting on Monday. Somebody cancelled, I got the whole morning free.”
“Now,” the angel said. Her air of distinct disapproval had become one of authority. The difference was slight but notable.
“Now,” Uncle Chaim mimicked her. “All right, already – Ruthie left early, so why not?” He moved the unfinished portrait over to another easel, and carefully selected a blank canvas from several propped against a wall. “I got to clean off a couple of brushes here, we’ll start. You want to take off that thing, whatever, on your head?” Even I knew perfectly well that it was a halo, but Uncle Chaim always told me that you had to start with people as you meant to go on.
“You will require a larger surface,” the angel instructed him. “I am not to be represented in miniature.”
Uncle Chaim raised one eyebrow (an ability I envied him to the point of practicing – futilely – in the bathroom mirror for hours, until my parents banged on the door, certain I was up to the worst kind of no good). “No, huh? Good enough for the Persians, good enough for Holbein and Hilliard and Sam Cooper, but not for you? So okay, so we’ll try this one . . .” Rummaging in a corner, he fetched out his biggest canvas, dusted it off, eyed it critically – “Don’t even remember what I’m doing with anything this size, must have been saving it for you” – and finally set it up on the empty easel, turning it away from the angel. “Okay, Malakoff’s rules. Nobody – nobody – looks at my painting till I’m done. Not angels, not Adonai, not my nephew over there in the corner, that’s David, Duvidl – not even my wife. Nobody. Understood?”
The angel nodded, almost imperceptibly. With surprising meekness, she asked, “Where shall I sit?”
“Not a lot of choices,” Uncle Chaim grunted, lifting a brush from a jar of turpentine. “Over there’s okay, where Ruthie was sitting, or maybe by the big window. The window would be good, we’ve lost the shadows already. Take the red chair, I’ll fix the color later.”
But sitting down is not a natural act for an angel: they stand or they fly; check any Renaissance painting. The great wings inevitably get crumpled, the halo always winds up distinctly askew; and there is simply no way, even for Uncle Chaim, to ask an angel to cross her legs or to hook one over the arm of the chair. In the end they comp
romised, and the blue angel rose up to pose in the window, holding herself there effortlessly, with her wings not stirring at all. Uncle Chaim, settling in to work – brushes cleaned and Scotch replenished – could not refrain from remarking, “I always imagined you guys sort of hovered. Like hummingbirds.”
“We fly only by the Will of God,” the angel replied. “If Yahweh, praised be His name—” I could actually hear the capital letters “—withdrew that mighty Will from us, we would fall from the sky on the instant, every single one.”
“Doesn’t bear thinking about,” Uncle Chaim muttered. “Raining angels all over everywhere – falling on people’s heads, tying up traffic . . .”
The angel looked first startled and then notably shocked. “I was speaking of our sky,” she explained haughtily, “the sky of Paradise, which compares to yours as gold to lead, tapestry to tissue, heavenly choirs to the bellowing of feeding hogs . . .”
“All right already, I get the picture.” Uncle Chaim cocked an eye at her, poised up there in the window with no visible means of support, and then back at his canvas. “I was going to ask you about being an angel, what it’s like, but if you’re going to talk about us like that – bad-mouthing the sky, for God’s sake, the whole planet.”
The angel did not answer him immediately and, when she did, she appeared considerably abashed and spoke very quietly, almost like a scolded schoolgirl. “You are right. It is His sky, His world, and I shame my Lord, my fellows and my breeding by speaking slightingly of any part of it.” In a lower voice, she added, as though speaking only to herself, “Perhaps that is why I am here.”
Uncle Chaim was covering the canvas with a thin layer of very light blue, to give the painting an undertone. Without looking up, he said, “What, you got sent down here like a punishment? You talked back, you didn’t take out the garbage? I could believe it. Your boy Yahweh, he always did have a short fuse.”
“I was told only that I was to come to you and be your model and your muse,” the angel answered. She pushed her hood back from her face, revealing hair that was not bright gold, as so often painted, but of a color resembling the night sky when it pales into dawn. “Angels do not ask questions.”