Angel Fire

by Andrew M. Greeley

  Somewhere a bugle sounded “Charge!”

  The killer emptied all six bullets into Gabriella Light, who had jumped between him and Sean Desmond at the last second.

  It’s easier,” said Sean Desmond, gesturing mentally at the solemn darkness in the general vicinity of the main altar to St. Paddy’s, “to believe in you than to believe in her. What the hell are you people trying to do to me?”

  If there was Anyone lurking up there near the altar or faintly glowing red sanctuary light, that Anyone did not think it was appropriate or necessary to answer.

  “Hell,” the Nobel laureate continued, “you didn’t give me a chance to finish the response to that question, and it would have been the biggest help for your image in this whole nutty business. I was going to say that there could be no doubt that in some sense we were essentially evolving toward greater mind, even if you spell it with a capital letter. Point Omega, I was maybe going to say—hadn’t quite made up my mind—seems to be out there waiting, perhaps impatiently. Can you imagine what that would have done for you?

  “ ‘Course, I suppose you don’t have to worry about images, do you?”

  Whoever might be in charge was no more ready to comment than Sean had been ready to comment on his family life.

  “I suppose I can work that into my acceptance speech, but there’s already too many good quotes in that. Why didn’t you let me finish before you unleashed that crazy nut?”

  The Daily News headline said it all:

  Crazy Tries To

  Kill Nobel Prof

  “But no, you let him fire all six shots into poor Gaby.” Who was not fazed by them in the slightest. The sub-head told that story:

  Woman Aide Subdues Would-be Killer

  That was putting it mildly. After she had absorbed the six shots—six in the belly as Brian Donleavy had said in Beau Geste— Gaby had calmly taken the nutcake’s arm, twisted the gun out of his hand, and quite firmly pushed him to the floor, where she held him until New York’s Finest arrived and took charge.

  The man, it turned out, was a “radical fundamentalist” who was convinced, according to his family, that Satan had taken possession of the Nobel Prize winner.

  “If he were not on the side of Satan,” he had screamed, “my bullets would have killed him.”

  “The asshole couldn’t shoot straight,” the Police Captain, a short, bald, rubicund mick from Brooklyn, had muttered after they had watched the “attempted assassination” on videotape. “My guys are digging all the bullets out of the wall. Nice circle all around you. Damn good thing he couldn’t shoot straight, Doctor Light, or you would have taken all those bullets. It was a brave thing you did.”

  “I didn’t stop to think about it, Captain McNamee,” she had said demurely.

  Not only had she diverted the six bullets, or maybe refracted them as they went through her “energy fields,” she had corrected

  the images on video tape so that it did not seem that the bullets were entering her.

  “Very clever,” Sean informed the putative deity.

  Through all the confusion after the attempted kill and the long conversations with the police and questions from the frantic press, Gaby would not look at him. She was clearly very unhappy

  with herself.

  “Well,” Captain McNamee had said finally, “that about wraps it up, Doctor light; I don’t suppose you or Doctor Desmond will object to the NYPD keeping an eye on you until you leave for ... Stockholm, is it?”

  Sure, ask her the questions, God knows she is in charge. “Not in the least, Captain,” she had replied smoothly. “We both are very grateful for your efficiency and concern.”

  Who the hell, Sean had wondered, was responsible for the security that let that loony in?

  But he let Gaby do the talking since she would anyway. “You were the heroine, Doctor light,” the Captain had continued. “He was trying to reload when you hit him. No telling what he would have done if he’d got a second chance. If you ever get tired of teaching biology, we might use you on the force.”

  “Just a few tricks I picked up while earning my black belt, Captain,” she had said meekly.

  Black belt! And I thought angels didn’t lie. I know, she’ll say it was an analogy. Everything is a goddamn analogy.

  He repeated that complaint to the sacred emptiness of St. Paddy’s.

  “Everything is a goddamn analogy.” Then shocked by his blasphemy, he added, “You should excuse the expression.”

  They had been driven back to the Helmsley in a U.N. mission limousine with bulletproof windows. A NYPD squad car preceded them and another one followed.

  “Sorry, Sean,” she had whispered contritely as soon as they were inside the limo. “I almost blew that one.”

  “I’m still alive,” he had noted, reasonably enough he thought.

  Sometime this would all catch up with him. But now he was

  more astonished by her performance than by the danger to his life.

  Yesterday’s act might have been a dream or a nightmare. Today’s

  took place before TV cameras. It would be seen on the evening

  news by millions of Americans—and would include the beautiful silver-haired woman ripping the gun out of a would-be killer’s hand.

  Great footage, one TV journalist had told him. “There’s that,” she had agreed, still not looking at him. “You are still alive, but”—her excuses had tumbled out—“I was expecting the same crowd as yesterday or maybe even your friends from Langley. I know what they all look like. I wasn’t expecting a crazy fundamentalist who confused you,” she had choked, half laughing, half crying, “with my poor spouse. I should have been ready.”

  “Angels aren’t perfect?”

  “No, not perfect. We make mistakes, but that was a bad one.” If she were any different from a perfectionist woman graduate student who had made a mistake, Sean didn’t know what the difference would be.

  “Hey, you saved me, you captured the guy, you fiddled with the TV tapes, you impressed everyone, don’t be a perfectionist first-year graduate student.”

  She had not been ready to be laughed out of her dissatisfaction with her own performance, but some of the tension did seem to slip out of her wondrous shoulders. “Captain McNamee was suspicious about the neat circle of those bullets in the wall. If he measures them he’ll find a perfect circle. That will make him wonder. I should have thought to deflect them irregularly, but we have this obsession with balance and harmony.”

  Yes, that would indeed have baffled the poor Captain, for the rest of his life. He was too cute a mick to take the chance of that happening by actually measuring the distances among the bullet holes.

  “You know damn well he won’t measure them.” She had nodded. “Right, he doesn’t want to know any more than he has to know. Poor man, he was in the back of the room and he thought he saw the bullets go through me too.” “Well, you sure moved fast enough.” “Speed of light.” A smile. “Really?”

  “Well, almost. We can’t quite get up to it, but we come pretty close.”

  Sure. Naturally. Of course. Sean had found his hands sweating.

  “Lucky for me. So you actually caught up with the bullets?” “Right.” She had nodded briskly. “It’s not such a difficult trick when you know how to do it.”

  “And when you have the speed.”

  The bullets must have seemed like a tortoise racing the proverbial hare.

  “On the video tapes you don’t even see me move in. I was too quick for the camera. Captain McNamee, poor dear man, noticed that too. But, like you say, he doesn’t want to think about it.” Sean didn’t want to think about it either. “What’s going on, Gaby?” he had asked, sinking deeper into the comfortable limo seat. “What’s it all about? Why are people trying to kill me? I’m not worth the trouble. When is all this crazi-ness going to stop?”

  “This was a deviant event.” The smile had faded, she was still angry at herself. “We deal with patterns. Deviant events thr
ow us, probably one of the costs of our evolution. That poor sick man is not part of the pattern we’re fighting.”

  Well, that explains everything, now doesn’t it? “How does a broken-down biologist who has wasted most of his life fit into your patterns?”

  “First of all, Jackie Jim,” she had said, absorbing him in her affectionate smile, “I’ll not be taken in by your self-hatred. You’re important, more important than you can possibly understand now.” She touched his arm gently, but with no ecstasy charge this time. “I wouldn’t be here unless it was patent to us that for all your blarney and your quirkiness, you were enormously”—she winked as she always seemed to at one of the buzzwords—“important. My associates would not have insisted that I become perceptible to you—we do this very rarely—unless we were all convinced that we had to protect you.”

  “I’m flattered but I don’t think I understand.” Sounds like bullshit to me.

  “And I don’t think I can explain.” She had frowned. “Not that it’s a secret exactly, but it’s so hard to translate into your language and thought paradigms. There are patterns in the cosmos that we see very clearly and which, because we are what we are, compel

  us, well, almost compel us to act.... That doesn’t make much sense, does it?”

  “Something like how I’ve been compelled to solve scientific puzzles?”

  “A little bit.” Her frown had deepened. “But it’s a lot more than curiosity or the elegance of your models that constrains us.

  There’s beauty and goodness too___We are pattern-obsessed

  creatures. There are some patterns that almost demand our intervention. In that sense we might be called messengers of God. Heralds of the pattern anyway.”

  “Nazareth?”

  She had glanced at him, surprised and a little suspicious. “Very clever, Jackie Jim. You catch on quickly.”

  Later in St. Paddy’s, Sean glared at the pregnant emptiness in front of him. “You realize what the woman was saying, don’t you? She was claiming to be the angel of Nazareth, that’s what she was claiming. If she’s really Gabriel, and she’s as much as said she is, then that was her all right. I wonder what she thinks of all those paintings down through the centuries. Anyway, why is the Ange-lus angel—or should I say Angela angel—messing with a dummy like me?

  “And if you’re laughing, I want you to know that I’m not amused.”

  In the limo he had pressed his advantage. “And I suppose that some of you see the patterns, in all their goodness and beauty, more clearly than others, and they are the ones who are said to stand before the face of God?”

  She had considered him intently. “You really do deserve that Nobel Prize. What is it Joshua Hechter said to the Sun Times about you ... ?”

  Hechter was a gifted professor at Northwestern whose early work on proteins in the brain had always fascinated—and dazzled—Sean. So the woman was reading his press clippings, was she?

  “ ‘A brilliance of insight,’ “ Sean had said, flushed with pleasure, “ ‘matched only by his dazzling flair.’ You remembered that?”

  “Naturally. But you have it a little inaccurately. One character trait for which the evolutionary process selected on our pilgrimage to mind—capital M or not, as you said just before you were cut

  off—is a passion for the beauty and goodness of a pattern. When the beauty and goodness is there, we enjoy it, oh, how we enjoy it. When it’s incomplete, we are pushed by the essence of our nature to try to eliminate that which is threatening its completion. Am I too obscure?”

  “Scary but not obscure.”

  “Don’t be afraid of me, Jackie Jim, I said I wouldn’t hurt you.” “Can you give me an example?”

  After some consideration, she replied, “I can tell you about one of our tragic failures. August 1914.” “World War I?”

  “The end of the modern world. It’s difficult for those of you who view the last half of the nineteenth century and the first decade of this one from the perspective of the world after 1920 to realize how impressive that era was. It was a lot more than Proustian decadence.”

  “Oh, I’ve always thought the Edwardian era was kind of quaint, The Importance of Being Earnest and that sort of thing.” There he had been, a brand-new potential Nobel laureate in a bulletproof Lincoln trapped in a midtown Manhattan traffic jam listening to a history lecture by a beautiful woman who claimed to be an angel.

  The dream would end soon. It had to end. Didn’t it?

  “That’s the way the generations born since August of 1914 have to think about it. The possibilities that were destroyed were so great that you can’t face the tragedy.” Gaby had warmed to her lecture. “Life expectancy had doubled since 1800. Science, medicine, engineering, technology had made enormous progress. For example, the streets of the cities were lighted at night for the first time in human history. The pattern that we saw was a world in which prosperity and peace were spreading, unevenly and awkwardly to be sure, over a whole planet. It all died in August and September of 1914. Your species has never recovered the confidence it lost in the forty years of war that followed. Your technology improved, but you lost your faith in your ability to control it and so in fact you didn’t control it. As I said, the Modern World, the Enlightenment, the Renaissance—call it whatever you want—

  was over.”

  “It was only a four-year war.”

  Outside, snow flurries were beginning to sweep 42nd Street. The driver turned on the windshield wiper.

  “One war, Seano, from 1914 to 1945, with a period of truce. Two hundred million people died, more than your species had produced in the years from the time it had acquired language to 1700.”

  “Two hundred million?”

  “Counting the famines in India and Russia, the purges in Russia, and the victims of the Spanish influenza, all of which were the result of the war. Sixty million in Russia, forty million in India from flu and famine, thirty-five million in China, twenty-five million in Germany, eighteen million in Poland, six million of them Jews. Is it any wonder that your species has lost its nerve?”

  “You tried to stop it?”

  She had nodded vigorously, seemingly quite unaware of the dirty gray snow and the traffic jam in the slush in front of Grand Central Station. She was back in August of 1914.

  “We saw the pattern of peace and progress, uncertain peace and uneven progress, admittedly, but still more than your species had ever known. And we saw the pattern of evil rising to meet it.” She had paused thoughtfully, her delicate facial figures troubled. “In any event, during that beautiful summer of 1914, the most beautiful in a thousand years, by the way, we did everything we could to protect the pattern of beauty and goodness we saw developing and to frustrate the mindless evil that threatened it. Mindless is the right word. It made no sense at all. Its very randomness was its greatest power. A tiny splinter group of Serbian nationalists? Sarajevo, a town no one had ever heard of? Franz Ferdinand, a nice man, but his death causing two hundred million more deaths? We did all we could to stop them. It was too late. In your words, Seano,” she had said, falling back into the cushions, “we blew it.” “Oh,” he had said quietly. “Isn’t that a little hard on yourselves?”

  “It was our task to prevent the war and we failed.” “Pretty high standards.”

  “If your species can judge itself harshly,” she had snapped at him, “so can we. Patterns are our business. We saw the pattern and we lost it.”

  This woman is blaming herself for two hundred million deaths. I want out of the car. Now.

  The car had started to move again, inching toward Madison

  Avenue.

  “How did you know that the Times man was going to ask the first question and not know about the man with the gun?”

  “I whispered in the reporter’s ear,” she had replied with a sigh. “I didn’t look closely enough in the crazy’s eye. So you were in unnecessary danger.” She had touched his arm. “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, what didn
’t happen today can hardly be compared to

  Sarajevo.”

  “There’s that.” She had relaxed and beamed at him, a bit possessively he thought—cute little puppy dog. “We did save you this

  time. Barely.”

  “Were you on the case in Sarajevo?”

  “I was, how would you say it, a consultant. My principal responsibilities were elsewhere. I would have blown it too if I had been directly involved.”

  Sean had waited to be sure she was finished. The limo had turned at last on to Madison Avenue.

  “It wasn’t all your fault.”

  “I know that.”

  “ ‘God, should She exist,’ to quote Blackie, ‘draws straight

  with crooked lines.’”

  “Two hundred million deaths?” “I don’t believe in Her, you do.” “I know.” She had sighed wearily. “I know.” “You don’t think you, er, sinned do you?” “Certainly not! We did our best.” “It wasn’t good enough.”

  “That’s right, it wasn’t good enough. If some of your species can be perfectionists—“

  “Why can’t yours? And because you’re so good at patterns, your standards for perfection are high?”

  “That’s right,” she had replied listlessly. “And we blew it.” “You win some?” “Certainly we win some.” “You personally?” “Certainly I personally.” “Tell me about one.”

  “Well, back in 1962—“ She had stopped and glared at him. “I’m the guardian angel, Sean Seamus Desmond. I am not a silly first-year graduate student to be patronized.”

  “Tell me about it anyway.”

  “Cuban missile crisis, remember?”

  “Sure, I was in college. We were scared stiff. The papers said some of them were aimed at Chicago.”

  “Absurd.” She had waved her hand, dismissing childish nonsense. “They weren’t aimed at anything that early. Anyway”—now smiling complacently—“President Kennedy’s advisers had virtually agreed on a surprise air attack on the missile sites. Russians would have been killed and the world would be on the same slide it was in 1914.”

  “World War HI?”