If Angels Fight

by Richard Bowes

  Then, with scarcely a glance at the design sketch Lilia gave her, Marguerite had snipped off one leg, with a second slice snipped the other and cuffed both with a few stitches. She muttered “voila,” blew smoke in Lilia’s face and shoved the garment at her.

  Recalling this, Lilia watched Marguerite finger the tops Scarlet and Bret wore. “Instant prêt a porter!” the old woman muttered to herself. “For such a venue anything more than off-the-rack would not do.”

  Herrault had been a contemporary of Chanel, protégé of Schiaparelli, lover of Mainbocher, rival of Dior. His ‘Sang Chaud’ Collection, the master’s last great triumph, had defined the look of the prior Nightwalker craze.

  His slacks, jackets, skirts and gowns draped the wearer almost rigidly. But his tops were open, flowing. “The throat too is an erogen-ous zone,” he famously said, “I believe the ultimate one.” His firm, Maison Herrault, carried on his cult.

  Behind Lilia, Katya whispered, “We’re doing it backwards this time. First come these knockoffs with a certain flair.”

  “Herrault’s name will never be officially connected with any of this,” said Felice. “But the look will be pushed in places like Our Daily Shmata. Images being shot today will turn up in every online post about the dark new trend.”

  “Next spring, Maison Herrault will put out a line that incorporates this ‘street fashion,’” said Paulo. “We aim for a quick kill and exit.”

  The kid’s body, restless, started dribbling the heavy soccer ball on the floor. Even Marguerite noticed and winced.

  Lilia concentrated on the six weeks in which these tops would be hers alone to sell.

  Late the next day, Lilia began seeing images of the shoot on websites like “Stuff I Saw Last Night.” One favorite was a shot of Reliquary taken at dusk from across the street. Felice’s copy ran with it: Nightwalkers are all dark glamour, forbidden fashion.

  In the photo, a young guy dressed casually and walking on the sidewalk was caught by surprise and held by the gaze of a woman whose dark clothes seemed to blend into the shadows in which she stood. The silk scarf around her elegant neck flowed over her shoulders as if blown in a night breeze.

  The lighted shop windows behind them displayed pairs of manikins echoing the live models’ poses. One had the sexes of Nightwalker and potential recruit reversed; in the other both were the same sex.

  She scrolled past shots of the interior with Scarlet, Bret and company caught in moments of beauty and mystery. Interspersed with this was more copy:

  They’re the newest thing!

  They’re exclusive, an ultimate in-group.

  You rarely see an unattractive Child of the Night!

  And you never meet a dull one!

  Those words came back to Lilia after dark on an evening in the short days of November. A young Vogue editor, favored by the Kindly Ones and aiming to steal a prime place in the February book, was shooting a secret preview of Maison Herrault’s Fall/Winter collection. Marguerite was on hand.

  The Children of the Night were trendy again but Lilia, feeling frumpy and old, was shoved once more into a corner of her own shop. She wore a leather choker under her turtleneck sweater.

  The leather held evidence of a few token love bites and at least one deep and sincere chomp customers had sent her way in the last few days. Lilia remembered the soft glow a bite could give both vampire and victim. But she was not going to get hooked like last time.

  She was not alone in her corner. Larry had come in as the Vogue crew was setting up. Immediately the ethereal young guy with whom he entered was seized by the editor. “Wherever did you find him! Surely he’ll want to be part of this!” The young man went with the editor and never once glanced back.

  Larry, looking frazzled and worn, told Lilia, “There’s going to be a divorce settlement, but not as big as I’d thought. He threatens to bring up vampires as regards visiting rights with Ai-Ling.”

  “You’ve been down before,” Lilia found herself saying, bucking him up just as in the old days. “Like I was until recently,” she added, to let him know she hadn’t forgotten his decades of neglect.

  He winced and said, “There’s stuff I regret.”

  “Me too. Nightwalker life was wild fun at first. Then came the pain of kicking the blood habit.”

  “Ichordone therapy,” he said. “Methadone for vampires. It was torture. I came out of that cured and brainwashed into thinking all I wanted was to find a rich mate, have a nice life, and raise children.”

  “You made it clear the future wouldn’t include me,” she said.

  “I wish I was as sure of anything now as I was of EVERYTHING right then,” he said. It was as close to an apology as he was likely to give.

  Lilia noted with some relish his unsuccessful attempts to catch the eye of the guy he’d come with. But she felt a pang of regret when Larry gave up, said good night, and exited.

  Under the lights, Marguerite, cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, subdued a recalcitrant ruffle with a swift succession of scissor snips.

  Lilia remembered the second episode of their long ago encounter in the Studio Building. A terrible mistake had occurred! The flared slacks had been turned into culottes. BUT the former slacks themselves were needed for a shot that HAD to be done.

  The photographer and the art director were afraid to face the Seamstress Extraordinary, so Lilia was sent again. When she appeared and stuttered through her request, Marguerite had glared at her while fingering the scissors. She pointed at the slacks legs on the floor. Lilia stooped and handed them to her.

  Marguerite slugged the last contents of the glass down, picked up a threaded needle. Again, without looking, the ageless woman stitched a leg together once, twice, perhaps six times.

  The juncture was almost invisible to the eye and certainly could be to the camera. She handed the slacks back to Lilia. “But the other leg,” said the girl.

  “En silhouette,” said the woman, sank back on a stool and closed her eyes. “One side only,” she added.

  “I can’t take it back like this!”

  In a move like a snake, the woman grabbed Lilia’s left hand. With scissors she cut the girl’s index finger, squeezed out bubbles of blood, and avidly lapped them all off. She repeated this a few times, then picked up the slacks and again with no more than six stitches created a seamless whole. Lilia, in tears, picked up the garment with her unbloodied hand and fled.

  For the rest of that day she floated in a world where light blurred her vision into color patterns, where hysterical photographers and art directors existed in a distant place and nothing touched her.

  Only later when she and Larry entered the world of the Nightwalkers did Lilia understand that what she’d felt had been just a small corner of the wonder of the Bite. At that point she also had not faced the horrid downside of withdrawal.

  At Reliquary the night of the Vogue shoot, Lilia didn’t notice Marguerite beside her until the old woman grabbed her hair and pulled her head down. With a tiny shears she snipped the leather choker on Lilia’s neck and bit her long and deep.

  “This is not a game for tourists and amateurs,” she hissed as Lilia floated in a blood high. “You will not stand apart and be amused at the workings of my world.”

  Late that February, all was celebratory in the Savage Design conference room. Maison Herrault had triumphed in New York and Paris. The Vogue layout, all dark elegance and pale skin, was displayed on the walls.

  Marguerite and the Kindly Ones were very pleased with their shares of the proceeds. Lilia sat as far away from everyone as possible. She floated on the remnants of the prior night’s blood buzz and gazed at the artwork through sunglasses.

  Under the photos were blocks of Felice’s copy. One was: Fashion is a cyclical phenomenon—the newest sensation withers but never dies.

  Another was: An amazing top found in a vintage thrift store, a haircut seen in the old photo: we are fascinated and want more. A look, a style starts again.

&nbs
p; Paulo had a yo-yo in each hand. His left was slack, his right performed Shoot the Moon. “We found the boomlet and played it perfectly,” he said. “By spring it will be nasty and we’ll be nowhere nearby.”

  He turned to Marguerite. “It’s always an inspiration to work with Maison Herrault.”

  Marguerite said, “An old vice gives comfort like any old habit.” She got up slowly and went to the door. “Until next time.”

  The Kindly Ones rose, made little waves with their fingers, but kept their distance as the ancient woman exited.

  “Remember us to M. Herrault,” Felice said.

  “In whatever corner of hell he occupies,” Paulo added when Marguerite was gone. “Undying but at what cost?” The ancient voice wondered.

  “Something to consider as old age closes in,” said Katya.

  They all looked relieved to turn and see Lilia also on her feet and clearly leaving. “Nice working with you,” Paulo said in parting. “Maybe again someday.”

  Lilia glanced back to see Katya put her feet in glistening new ankle boots up on the table. They all picked up copies of a proposal.

  Paulo’s right hand kept on with Shoot the Moon, while his left began doing “Skyrocket to Mars.” The yo-yos orbited around one another as he said, “Here’s a related investment opportunity we might look at.”

  Reliquary was jumping, if that word could be used to describe the cold, covert way Nightwalkers shop for clothes and stalk each other for blood. In the crowded store, each one stared and got stared at from behind dark glasses.

  Two cash registers were working. At one, Scarlet Jones wore a blood red scarf from Maison Herrault around her neck. Her face immobile, her skin dead white, fang tips visible though her mouth was closed, she racked up sales without seeming aware she was doing so. Bret more or less bagged the purchases.

  Just as attractions the two were worth far more than they were paid and even a good deal more than they stole. Lilia calculated that around the start of the summer this would no longer be true.

  By then Reliquary and the Vampire Revival would be edging their way into the limbo reserved for old fads, and she’d have accumulated a nest egg.

  Already the store’s customers were largely from New Jersey and outer boroughs. Complaints from the neighbors about the crowds were making her landlord nervous. Building and fire inspectors had put in their appearances, and an unmarked car with plainclothes cops sometimes parked across the street.

  Lilia sat on a stool and watched it all through a mild haze. The trick, she told herself, was to keep the nips and bites small and the haze manageable. She remembered the bone-wracking horrors of withdrawal too well to want a repeat.

  Just then Larry came in the door looking sloppy and vulnerable. He scanned the customers, all of whom ignored him.

  Lilia and he had begun hanging around, talking over old times at CBGB’s and the Mudd Club. She’d bitten him once or twice—playfully with a bit of vengeance thrown in. Her teeth were hardly fangs.

  She wanted to make sure he didn’t blow the money he got in the divorce settlement. While the Kindly Ones had said their goodbyes to Marguerite that last time at Savage Design, Lilia had managed to get a couple of glimpses of the investment proposal on their table.

  They were involved in the development of a Betty Ford style clinic for vampires on an estate up the Hudson. Kids like Scarlet, Bret and many others had families able to pay for their recoveries.

  Lilia intended to invest Larry’s money. If that worked out, she might invest some of her own savings. He crossed the shop towards her and she watched his throat.

  Certainly one of my best known stories, “

  If Angels Fight ” won the World Fantasy Award for best novella of 2007, was on the Nebula Awards short list, and got reprinted in five Year’s Best volumes—this last was a record which I believe still stands.

  Parts are set in contemporary and bygone New York, in the Washington suburbs and even in Canada. But I believe it’s the segments around Codman Square, in Dorchester, in Boston in the 1950s that seal the deal.

  So much of this was pieces of memory I’d carted around with me. The perilous ledge around the District Courthouse, the rescue of the little kid on the Neponset River ice, the gradual alienation of the gay narrator, the overgrown vacant lot that was Fitzie’s, Melville Avenue with its politicians’ houses: all of that was used (repurposed I suppose we’d say now). The encounter with the young JFK sat unused for decades. Only years later did I consider the amount of nagging that Rose Kennedy, the ultimate Irish mother, must have expended to get her son to visit his aunt on her birthday.

  Now I’m amazed it took me so long to find a use for this snippet.

  Politics is the lifeblood of this story as it is with others of mine (“The Mask of the Rex” earlier in this book is one). It was there and then I learned it, not taught but in the air, possibly in the water, certainly in the bars. All very Irish and surviving now mostly in tellings like this one.

  IF ANGELS FIGHT

  1.

  Outside the window, the blue water of the Atlantic danced in the sunlight of an early morning in October. They’re short, quiet trains, the ones that roll through Connecticut just after dawn. I sipped bad tea, dozed off occasionally, and awoke with a start.

  Over the last forty years, I’ve ridden the northbound train from New York to Boston hundreds of times. I’ve done it alone, with friends and lovers, going home for the holidays, setting out on vacations, on my way to funerals.

  That morning, I was with one who was once in some ways my best friend and certainly my oldest. Though we had rarely met in decades, it seemed that a connection endured. Our mission was vital and we rode the train by default: a terrorist threat had closed traffic at Logan Airport in Boston the night before.

  I’d left messages canceling an appointment, letting the guy I was going out with know I’d be out of town briefly for a family crisis. No need to say it was another, more fascinating, family disrupting my life, not mine.

  The old friend caught my discomfort at what we were doing and was amused.

  A bit of Shakespeare occurred to me when I thought of him:

  Not all the water in the rough rude sea

  Can wash the balm off from an anointed king

  He was quiet for a while after hearing those lines. It was getting towards twenty-four hours since I’d slept. I must have dozed because suddenly I was in a dark place with two tiny slits of light high above. I found hand and foot holds and crawled up the interior wall of a stone tower. As I got to the slits of light, a voice said, “New Haven. This stop New Haven.”

  2.

  Carol Bannon had called me less than two weeks before. “I’m going to be down in New York the day after tomorrow,” she said. “I wondered if we could get together.” I took this to mean that she and her family wanted to get some kind of fix on the present location and current state of her eldest brother, my old friend Mark.

  Over the years when this had happened it was Marie Bannon, Mark and Carol’s mother, who contacted me. Those times I’d discovered channels through which she could reach her straying son. This time, I didn’t make any inquiries before meeting Carol, but I did check to see if certain parties still had the same phone numbers and habits that I remembered.

  Thinking about Marky Bannon, I too wondered where he was. He’s always somewhere on my mind. When I see a photo of some great event, a reception, or celebrity trial, a concert or inauguration—I scan the faces, wondering if he’s present.

  I’m retired these days, with time to spend. But over the years, keeping tabs on the Bannons was an easy minor hobby. The mother is still alive, though not very active now. The father was a longtime Speaker of the Massachusetts House and a candidate for governor who died some years back. An intersection in Dorchester and an entrance to the Boston Harbor tunnel are still named for him.

  Carol, the eldest daughter, got elected to the City Council at the age of twenty-eight. Fourteen years later she gave up a sa
fe U.S. House seat to run the Commerce Department for Clinton. Later she served on the 9/11 commission and is a perennial cable TV talking head. She’s married to Jerry Simone, who has a stake in Google. Her brother Joe is a leading campaign consultant in DC. Keeping up the idealistic end of things, her little sister Eileen is a member of Doctors Without Borders. My old friend Mark is the tragic secret without which no Irish family would be complete.

  Carol asked me to meet her for tea uptown in the Astor Court of the St. Regis Hotel. I got there a moment after four. The Astor Court has a blinding array of starched white table cloths and gold chandeliers under a ceiling mural of soft, floating clouds.

  Maybe her choice of meeting places was intentionally campy. Or maybe because I don’t drink anymore she had hit upon this as an amusing spot to bring me.

  Carol and I always got along. Even aged ten and eleven I was different enough from the other boys that I was nice to my friends’ little sisters.

  Carol has kept her hair chestnut but allowed herself fine gray wings. Her skin and teeth are terrific. The Bannons were what was called dark Irish when we were growing up in Boston in the 1950s. That meant they weren’t so white that they automatically burst into flames on their first afternoon at the beach.

  They’re a handsome family. The mother is still beautiful in her eighties. Marie Bannon had been on the stage a bit before she married. She had that light and charm, that ability to convince you that her smile was for you alone that led young men and old to drop everything and do her bidding. Mike Bannon, the father, had been a union organizer before he went nights to law school, then got into politics. He had rugged good looks, blue eyes that would look right into you, and a fine smile that he could turn on and off and didn’t often waste on kids.

  “When the mood’s upon him, he can charm a dog off a meat wagon,” I remember a friend of my father’s remarking. It was a time and place where politicians and race horses alike were scrutinized and handicapped.