Angel Fire

by Andrew M. Greeley

“Probably. The Kennedys had learned something at the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and that was not to trust their advisers, especially the military advisers. Bobby had doubts. He kept saying that it wasn’t in the American tradition to launch surprise attacks. You can imagine how far that went with Dean Acheson and all the old-timers. So,” she was glowing now, “so I got the idea of whispering into his ear, “Your brother will be the General Tojo of the nineteen sixties.’ “

  “Tojo?”

  “The Japanese prime minister who gave the order for the Pearl Harbor attack. I couldn’t force him to try to veto the plans”—smiling happily—“any more than I can force you to say intelligent things at a news conference. But I could suggest and I did, and with a little more help from us the world avoided a war, and it looked like maybe there would be negotiation and a slow return to the world of the first half of 1914.”

  “And?”

  “And we blew it again in Dallas a few months later. Exit Came-lot and all it promised. Instead of peace, your species got Vietnam. And Watergate. Random idiocy again.”

  “Did the Kennedys see you like I do?”

  The car had been only a block away from the Helmsley, creeping ahead in the snow and the hasty December dusk, like it had entered a forbidden and dangerous forest.

  “You must be joking!” Now she was irate. “Those men were satyrs. They would bed anyone who seemed even remotely like a human female, angel or not. Not their fault, maybe—their father was even worse. They were good leaders, but despicable human beings. We don’t get to choose the people who are important.”

  “Or you wouldn’t have chosen me.”

  “I didn’t say that,” she had shot back at him.

  “You could have always deadened their libido like you deadened mine.”

  She had glared at him again. “My, aren’t you the clever little wolfhound!” They had both laughed together. Somehow Gaby had turned his feeling that he was a member of an inferior species into a joke they both shared. “Well, their libidos were much more vigorous than yours and they were much less principled than you are. Besides, our plan didn’t require that they see me. I would have probably scared them to death, with all they had on their consciences.”

  “You would have killed them if they were fresh, like those

  men yesterday.”

  “1 wouldn’t have had to go that far. Anyway, we won that one. We lose more than we win and the ones we win we often lose later. We still are not skilled at anticipating random lunacy. But we try. And the Most High doesn’t seem to be completely displeased with our efforts.” “I’m glad.”

  The car had slithered to a halt and was waiting patiently for room in front of the entrance to the hotel.

  “By the way”—she smiled her maternal approval—“you were quite good today before—“

  “Before I was so rudely interrupted.” They had laughed together, companionably. Fellow survivors of the holocaust at Masurian Lakes in September 1914.

  I bet you didn’t know I was at the Battle of Masurian Lakes, did you? he imagined himself saying to the doorman as Gaby tipped him with what looked like a brand-new twenty-dollar bill. He had told her that he was going over to St. Patrick’s for a few moments. God, she had thought, would be surprised. A New York cop in the squad car behind was assigned to guard him. Gaby didn’t seem concerned.

  Forty-seven floors and a block were no great problem, it seemed, for an angel veteran of Masurian Lakes.

  He’d have to ask her sometime whether Constantine really saw a cross in the sky before the battle of Melvian Bridge.

  “A hundred and seventy?” he had asked as he turned to slosh through the snow over to the cathedral.

  “What? Oh, you mean miles per second. No, no, much faster

  than that.”

  She seemed disappointed that his estimate was so low. Wolfhound puppy loses points.

  “How much?”

  “Well ...” She had colored faintly. “A few miles under the speed limit.”

  A hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second minus ... what? Two or three miles? Or even a hundred?

  He was reasonably safe in the lace-curtain-Irish piety of St. Paddy’s.

  “It’s bad enough”—he was winding down on his complaints to the deity—“that you get me messed up in all this foolishness. Why do you have to send a woman angel to plague me? And worse still, a woman angel with problems of her own that I’m supposed to solve, like I solve the problems of some of the kids in my class who think I’m some sort of a priest.”

  He let that one sink in.

  No one said that he was supposed to help Gaby.

  He knew, however, that it was expected of him, if not by her.

  “At least, she’s not the weepy, clingy kind I usually get mixed up with.

  “Sorry. With whom I usually get mixed up.

  “She hinted that she loves me. I suppose that goes with the territory. I’m beginning to love her too. Is this your idea of a fun game? Because if it is, I want you to know I don’t like it one bit.”

  He thought about it a little more. Like maybe 185,997 miles a second?

  You’re still alive, aren’t you?

  There’s that ... and stop laughing.

  It was time, Sean Seamus Desmond decided, to get out of the cathedral. It was haunted.

  He stopped at the news stand in the lobby of the hotel to see whether the Daily News headline had changed. It hadn’t.

  On a hunch he picked up Harper’s Bazaar and thumbed through it.

  Sure enough, there were both the gabardine dress and the cashmere coat. Vogue had the miniskirted cocktail dress from the previous night.

  She was producing her clothes out of the current fashion magazines.

  I need a long nap, he thought.

  The suite—it had been transformed again into two bedrooms

  with an intervening parlor—was empty. Maybe she was in another

  galaxy.

  Sean Desmond had a long and pleasant nap, unaided by angelic intervention.

  His dreams, as he remembered them, were amusing. No random lunacy. Only patterns.

  When he woke up, he told himself that the random crazies were in the real world, the patterns in his dreams.

  Gabriella Light daintily buttered her hot scone. “As I have indicated before, Professor Desmond, the problem with you is not so much the women you couple with as those whom you don’t couple with.”

  “With whom I don’t couple,” he corrected her English. Rarely do you catch an angel in a grammatical error.

  She threw back her head and laughed heartily.

  “You are more fun,” she continued to laugh, “than any Homo sapiens sapiens to whom I have ever been assigned.”

  “We try.” He felt himself blushing.

  The young person who was presiding over their tea in the Gold Room returned to the table to ply them with more Earl Grey tea and sherry (Helmsley variety, not angelic) and another plate of scones. She smiled happily at Gaby. “Anything else, Doctor light?”

  “Not just now, my dear.”

  Maybe she had learned her charm in St. Petersburg before the battles in East Prussia.

  Almost everyone seemed to like Gaby. When she turned on the charm, even New Yorkers smiled back, some of whom Sean would have been willing to wager hadn’t smiled in twenty years.

  Those who did not respond to her smile were fixed with a hard glare that seemed to occasion immediate reaction. Sean called it her “Gaby look” and rejoiced that it had never been aimed in his direction. It lowered the wind-chill factor, he was certain, by at least ten degrees.

  There had been no further attempts on his life. They had walked the bitter-cold, sun-drenched streets of New York with confident serenity. Gaby assured him that they were leading a procession of shadows.

  “In order, Seano, there are the NYPD, the FBI, the CIA, the

  Mossad, the other side—“

  “Why the Mossad?”

  “Overachievers. They follow any
one whom others are following. And, to finish my list, three random loonies!”

  “What!” He had jumped almost a half foot in the air, or so it

  seemed.

  “Only joking.” She poked his arm; no ecstatic current this time either. She turns it on and off when she wants to.

  He was still standing up straight too.

  The two girls were taking everything in stride. Mommy’s article was “gross”; the press conference at the UN. was “awesome, even if you did wear that old suit”; the shoot-out at the end was

  “really cool.”

  Yeah? You should have been at Sarajevo. Fee: “Gaby is totally bitchin’.” Dee: “I mean out of sight.” Fee: “Is she really black belt?” Dee: “Does she have any kids?” “Three teenage daughters,” he said. Gaby rolled her eyes at that exaggeration. Solemn chorus: “Out of sight!”

  As they left the hotel in the morning, Gaby announced, “In the morning we will deal with your body, Professor Desmond, and in the afternoon your soul.” “Comprehensive.” “With your body by constraining you to walk a couple of

  miles—“

  “In this cold?”

  “—and by purchasing the kind of clothes that are suitable for

  a Nobel Prize winner.”

  “I don’t have any money.”

  “We’ll not worry about that small detail. I promised your daughters I would see that you look ‘totally cool’ in Stockholm, and I intend to honor that promise. You’ll note I’m wearing a mink this morning. It facilitates service in the stores.”

  “I’m sure it does.”

  Her coat would not have cost a penny under twenty thousand, if she paid for it, which he very much doubted.

  So they visited Paul Stuart and Barney’s and purchased a doubled-breasted dark blue three-piece suit with light pinstripes, made-to-order shirts (with French cufls), and socks and ties that were color coordinated with the suit and shirts.

  At first they were told that alterations would require two weeks. Then Gaby favored the assistant manager with her “look,” and all alterations were promised for the morrow.

  Sean had to admit, grudgingly, that the suit made him look both academic and well dressed. An Esquire Nobel laureate.

  “You show up at the round table with this on,” Gaby insisted cheerfully, “and you’ll own your university.”

  And she added in a whisper into his ear, “You’re now a notably more than presentable male of your species.”

  “With an ass that needs work, nonetheless.”

  She chuckled and patted his arm.

  Okay, woman, have the time of your life at my expense.

  They also purchased cologne and shaving lotion that were both too expensive and too strong. So he claimed.

  “Nonsense. You have to smell like a Nobel Prize winner.”

  “Whorehouse.”

  ‘You’ve never been in one and they don’t smell that way.”

  She also selected new underwear for him, far too skimpy and “youthful” for his age, he argued.

  “Never can tell whom you might meet in Stockholm. Some agreeable buxom Swede perhaps.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “You fear it, you mean. Come on, we have to make the museums this afternoon, Metropolitan, Guggenheim, and Frick. MoMA if we have time.”

  “All-purpose guardianship.”

  “Definitely.” She laughed again. She was laughing all the time, the witch.

  Nothing was purchased in quantity. “We’ve got to fit into your Gucci flight bags. Air travel is light travel. We can always buy more in London or Sweden.”

  “As long as your money supply holds out.”

  “Never fear.”

  She paid with crisp new bills from her shoulder bag—not the same one she had worn the day before. For his suit, she had pulled two 1500 bills off the bottom of her wad. The clerk seemed a bit surprised but glanced at the bills and at her mink and gave her the change.

  “Is it counterfeit?” he whispered as they left Barney’s.

  “Angels cheat? Don’t be insulting, Professor Desmond.”

  “Stolen?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “How did you get it?”

  “We earned it.”

  “Do those who paid you know you earned it? Or even that they have paid you?”

  She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Let’s say that if they knew all the circumstances of our service, they would pay us a lot more. I mean how much is it worth to the United States Mint to prevent World War III?”

  He was not about to argue that.

  At the Frick that afternoon he asked her about the “Gaby

  look.”

  “Do you ever stare at me the way you stared at that waitress at

  the Russian Tea Room?”

  “How did I stare?” She was considering some Limoges cloisonne about which she had lectured to him intelligently— whether because she had read the guidebook or because she had actually seen the stuff made he did not want to ask.

  ‘Tour Gaby stare, which got our lulu-kebab delivered almost at the speed of light.”

  He tried to imitate the Gaby look.

  She responded with hilarious laughter, much to the displeasure of one of the attendants, who began to approach them. She fixed her Gaby look on him and he drifted away.

  “It doesn’t really take away freedom, it merely, ah, enhances motivation.”

  “Cattle prod.”

  Instead of contesting his consistent complaint about being a member of an inferior species, she simply laughed again.

  This time the attendant made no move to intervene.

  “I can imagine how hard our procession of shadows,” she chortled when they finally reached the Gold Room of the Helms-ley, “will struggle over their reports tonight and how hard the analysts in their respective offices will work trying to make sense out of it.”

  Sean Seamus Desmond was exhausted. To be taken on a whirlwind cultural tour and shopping exposition by a woman angel, he had complained, was like hiking a hundred miles in the Amazon jungle.

  “You wouldn’t say that,” she countered, eyes dancing mischievously, “if you had ever hiked in the Amazon.”

  Top that, inferior species.

  Gaby insisted sharply that they would have their tea in the Gold Room, not the Madison Room.

  “How come?”

  “No windows. I don’t want you to be an easy target.”

  “Couldn’t you just turn on the power and outrun the bullets?”

  “It’s the first step that’s important”—she signaled the hostess with two fingers—“like in your football. If the bullets were too close to you, like coming through a window, I might not have time.”

  “Wonder Woman has limitations?”

  “Sit down!” She laughed. “I don’t wear swimsuits around all day like she does.”

  “You’re better built than she is.”

  “Impossible.”

  A young woman in a gold gown that matched the fabric on the walls was playing the harp again, on the tiny balcony at the north end of the room.

  Gaby, Sean Desmond remarked—only to himself for the sake of delicacy—never seemed to have to go to the bathroom. Either her energy patterns disposed of waste in some other, doubtless neater fashion, or arguably she exercised her apparent ability to be in two places at the same time.

  “Are you that good on the harp?” he asked.

  Gaby was slipping out of her mink, revealing a white wool winter suit and matching sweater—the kind of suit that made you

  look both warm and hopeful on a cold day. Eight hundred dollars according to Bazaar.

  “As good as her?” She listened to the harpist for a moment. “Actually she is quite good. For a member of your species, that is. Probably plays in one of the local symphonies. I’ll do a little concert for you tonight. If you wish.”

  “I certainly wish. I was fascinated by the sounds on Stacey’s

  tapes.”

  She
smiled confidentially. “We’ll see if I do any better.”

  No doubt about that, is there?

  Then she launched her critical review of his love life.

  “What do you mean, the women with whom I didn’t couple?”

  “You have a remarkable ability to overlook women with whom you might be happy and choose the women with whom you certainly won’t be happy.”

  “like?” He felt his face turn hot again.

  “lisa Malone.”

  “She’s a movie actress and producer, and I’m a stuffy college

  professor.”

  “Whom did she marry?”

  “George the Bean Counter.”

  “And?” Her butter knife paused above a scone.

  “He’s an accountant, thought by most to be stuffy ... but she wasn’t interested in me back in grammar-school and high-school

  days.”

  “Certainly she was.” She piled clotted cream on top of the butter. “Everyone knew that, even you did, but you pretended not to because she scared you. Any woman who is not a whining, clinging dishrag scares you.”

  “Who else scared me away?” He pushed aside his sherry glass. Even drink wouldn’t help now.

  “In high school, Anne Finn and Maureen Keegan; in college, Mary Ward and Linda Boyle and Connie O’Rourke.”

  “I should have married one of them?”

  She shrugged her lovely shoulders and reached for a salmon sandwich. “These are really good—for Earth, that is.” She grinned wickedly. “An inferior world peopled by cute but dense wolfhounds___You could have married any of them and not made the

  mistake you did by coupling with that terrible Moaning Mona you did marry.”

  “You don’t think much of Mona?”

  “Not for you.”

  There was no arguing that point. He lifted the sherry glass and then put it down again. “So what do they have in common other than I apparently didn’t notice that they liked me?”

  “That should be obvious. Drink your sherry, it’s not poisoned. They were all strong, intelligent women, with a sense of fun and a need to be both aroused and protected by someone like you. Perfect.”

  “Who recently? Blanche?”

  “Probably not.” Her eyes scanned the room looking for trouble. “But maybe. She was kind of young. Still, you learned a lot from her, didn’t you? You certainly didn’t try very hard at the end, did you? ... But what about Mrs. Taylor? You had her on the block, to use your fantasy images, ready to be acquired, and you let her get away.”