Angel of Death

by J. Robert King

  He ate. It wasn’t too bad. He had paid a thousand pesos and gotten change. He sat there on his heels. The old men across the dusty road laughed in their circle. They were smoking cigars as black as dog turds. They hadn’t gotten all the feathers off the head, which was hidden beneath a place where the plumes were charred together. Hungry, he pulled the burned parts off and chewed gently around the crow’s eye. Darkness. That was what they gave to him after killing Billings. Darkness. Reason enough for the sane prisoner to go insane. A cell with no windows, no light, only a steel bed and a stainless steel toilet without a seat and a slot through which came anything that came for him. Solitary. It was the greatest punishment a prisoner could receive.

  Short of death.

  Azra sat in the darkness. They had even put a rubber flange on the outside base of the door to prevent light from seeping through. He had saved a crust of bread from one meal and let it harden on the floor overnight so that he could wedge it beneath the door, lifting the flange and letting a little light in. Now, in the glow that came around the crust of bread, he could see his dim little space, cement and steel and nothing else. His breath condensed on the walls, steel dappled in cold sweat.

  With each passing moment, his humanity sank deeper into him, from bone and blood to spirit and soul. He was trapped in this body, in this tiny room, in this darkness. He was at the mercy of his skin he inhabited and its limits.

  He had sat beside the door and thought about gnashing his own wrist open and bleeding out through the crack. That would be a kind of ritual escape, extending part of his vitality out the door. But ritual was no longer important. He needed real escape.

  What of semen? If it ventured beyond and found an egg, a part of him would have escaped this trap. No wonder those on death row were in so great a hurry to marry, to gain conjugal visitation rights. In that sudden thought, the whole fetid weight of reproduction and sexual desire and mortal fear poured through him.

  “Do you think it is natural to have these feelings? Do you think God wants humans to have these feelings when they kill?”

  Fuck, yeah, was all he could think. Fuck, yeah. It was not the sort of response worthy of an angel, but neither was his soul any longer worthy of an angel.

  An angel. That’s what he needed. If he were truly human now, there would be an angel assigned him, a guardian. Not all humans who heard voices were schizophrenic. Some were prophets and shamans and artists. All humans would hear the divine voices if only they quieted the raging of their hearts and minds and listened with their souls. What better, quieter place?

  He pulled his knees up toward his chest, drew a deep breath, and let the air sluice from his nostrils. His ribs slouched inward like the tines of a folding umbrella. He emptied himself of the panic and pain of the last weeks, the mental torments of a mind once infinite that found itself not just finite but imprisoned, coerced, controlled. He drew another breath and let it go, imagining those heavy pollutants drifting out of him. A third breath, but the air was stale. It was all pollutants.

  He closed his eyes. Even the bread-light of the door was gone now. His mind seemed a shadowy blue thing hovering before him. Its convoluted surface peeled slowly back like the cracked outside of a road apple. The pocketed wetness within sprayed upward and outward – outward no farther than the cell walls, but upward, upward, propelling the ceiling higher, the ceiling and the cells above it higher until the whole column of building broke free and rocketed into the sky. It, too, was black in an imagined nighttime, and the building cross-section dropped away behind the thrust of that bursting mind.

  There, at last – no limits – the flesh torn asunder like some Gnostic nightmare, the spirit flung outward into infinity to find its eternal angel guide. Here in the endless centuries, a guide: some Gabriel, some Uriel, or if not a friend, an adversary, an accuser, a Satan. At least with such there would be a divine measure upon which to form up the coiling putrescence of humanity.

  He waited, blown wide open, consciousness as raw as a wound. He waited. The inspiration and suspiration of the old metallic air no longer mattered. The fleshy ache of skin and muscle and fat pressed between steel and bone was gone. There was only the vulnerability of his seeking, hoping soul.

  Beauty. God always dwelt in beauty. Azra let his seeking spirit draw beauty unto it. In beauty he would find his guardian, his adversary, his angel who would aid and guide him. In beauty.

  He waited.

  Should he sing a song? Should he drone one of those endless hymns of clapboard Protestantism? Or some Kyrie? Some psalm? They seemed to help humans focus their souls upward, outward.

  Oh, for a thousand tongues…

  His voice was as primal and imperfect as the rest of him, more a groan than a song. Did nothing come easily to mortal flesh?

  Oh, for a thousand tongues, to sing My great Redeemer’s praise,

  The glories of my God and King,

  The triumphs of His grace!

  The sound only brought him back to the ringing coldness of the cell and the pulpy pointlessness of his body. He let it echo away into silence and held wide his wounded soul and waited.

  Silence.

  Not silence, but the phlegmy sawing of lungs and the dull thud of a heart that cannot be willed to cease and the ragged thoughts of a racing mind condemned to sense and sense and sense. The body was loud. Bladders emptied and filled. Valves fluttered open and closed. Glands oozed in silent ignominy. The human body was no more than a loud coalition of mollusks, pulsing and squirting in constant concert. To never have silence. To not for a moment be able to hear past one’s own thundering presence to heed a voice beyond…

  Where is my angel?

  Beauty. God will be in beauty.

  Into that welling emptiness came a presence – face, body, mind, spirit, all. She was beautiful in no standard sense, but somehow the lines of her being, the eyes, the dogged optimism, the courage… somehow they transformed the finite to make it infinite. They made that one woman a whole continent, a whole world. That woman. No angel, she, but a police officer. A Catholic. Donna.

  What is it she always says? Mother of God? She could well be. She could well be.

  Suddenly he was not alone. He felt her presence, her straightforward and all-seeing presence there with him in the dark. She knew about him. She had hunted him down. She lived because he could not bear to let her die. Now he lived because she could not bear to let him die.

  Yes, here was his angel.

  Tears were coming. His shoulders curled inward with a soft shuddering. He was not alone.

  That thought brought another creature into being, another presence. It rose between his legs, the immemorial snake of desire. He had known of masturbation, of course, for he knew all the mind of God. He had known of it, that it was done by nearly everyone, and that when first discovered, many believed they had invented their own perverse sin. He had known it was not sin at all, nor perverse, but part of the mind of God. Still, as he unzipped the fly of his prison uniform, he felt filthy and hopeless and damned for all eternity. The semen came quickly, fluorescent in the darkness. So powerful were the constrictions of testicles and prostate that he did not even notice the key in the door, or the door swinging wide until the unforgiving glare of the jail’s yellow lights washed across him.

  “Put your pecker away and get up, Angel,” came the voice of a radiant young man who stood by the beaming hole. “Your lawyer wants to see you.”

  She stood at her end of the conference room table when they brought him in. After the long darkness and the pervading pink of the walls, Counselor Lynda Barnett was dazzling in her skirt-suit. A riot of green leaves moved in the shimmering shoulders and sleeves of the jacket. Her red silk blouse looked too delicate and beautiful to exist in the same world as the heat-annealed caverns of the prison.

  “Hello, Lynda. Good to see you.”

  “Hello, William?”

  “Whatever you want to call me,” he replied as he sat, the guards locking his cuffs into th
e tabletop. “I’m just glad to hear someone speak to me in a civil tone.”

  She nodded tightly and sat. “You may not be so happy to hear what I have to say.”

  His eyes ceased their smiling, and his attention flicked down toward the much-scarred tabletop. “Which is?”

  She pulled papers from her attaché. “You have pleaded not guilty. You refuse to let me use an insanity defense. You refuse to let me refer to the past that has been discovered for you. In two weeks you’ll appear, defenseless, before a judge and jury.”

  Defenseless. Suddenly, that fate sounded terrifying. Donna’s voice came echoing through his mind. You’re human now. You have to live. In the dark dankness of isolation, he had felt the beginnings of what mortals call misery. Truth dissolved away. Divinity was only a disappearing dream. Humanity remained. “I want to cooperate. What must I do?”

  “Good,” she said through an angry smile. “We’ve got a lot to do in the next two weeks. Let’s hope you can be as slick with the media, the judge, and the jury as you were with Derek Billings.”

  FIFTEEN

  Donna Leland stood in front of her medicine cabinet mirror and looked at her sallow skin and the rings under her eyes and thought, It’s a strange thing, getting ready for court.

  As a cop, she’d gotten ready for court plenty of times, usually when somebody said the radar gun lied. Then it had been easy: cop blues, a braided ponytail, a dusting of blush, and she looked authoritative but human. She’d never lost in court before.

  But how do I get ready today? How do I want to look? Authoritative and human?

  Donna began with foundation, hiding freckles and blemishes and filling in some of the worry lines. Then she added blush to her cheeks. It was a sign of health. The women in Auschwitz used to prick their fingertips and smear the blood on their cheeks to look healthy and happy so the Nazis wouldn’t choose them for the ovens.

  Is that what I want to do? Look healthy and happy?

  Azra had killed again. He’d killed his bunkmate, his only friend. He’d killed to impress God, who apparently was a tougher audience than Jodi Foster. And what if God still wasn’t impressed? The next step up from killing a bunkmate was killing a bedmate. Eye liner. That’s what I need. It’s the right look –

  something to let the judge know how sad and tired and scared I am.

  “All rise. Circuit Court Branch One of the County of Racine in the State of Wisconsin is now in session, the honorable Judge Sandra Devlin presiding.” The bailiff glanced around the crowded courtroom as though expecting opposition and then flicked his eyes toward a paneled doorway that slid open.

  Through it stepped Judge Sandra Devlin. She was a small woman, further dwarfed by the walnut-paneled bench and the standing-room-only crowd. She seemed a caricature of a witch. Her skin was rubbery – brow, nose, and chin forming an ill-fitting mask – and her bright eyes glowed with caprice above her black robes. Judge Devlin slid the door closed behind her. She smiled pleasantly to no one, scuttled up the stairs behind the bench, and wriggled into her seat. Already distracted by paperwork, she waved the crowd to sit. They did.

  Judge Devlin rapped the gavel and said, “The court will come to order. Today begins the trial of case number 96CF00132, the State of Wisconsin versus John Doe.”

  She nodded toward a pair of policemen, who had just resumed their seats by the prisoner’s door. They rose slowly, opened the door, and ambled through it into a dimly lit hall of cinder block.

  The previous hush deepened to silence. A few shutters snicked quietly, photographers checking for focus. No one wanted to miss the shot of the Son of Samael appearing at that door.

  As in a Dickensian stage play, there came a formless shadow on the already dark wall. The accused loped outward. Wing tips clopped like devil hooves on the floor. A gaunt figure in a wool jacket shambled into view.

  “My God,” muttered a man.

  The utterance brought them all up in their seats. It created a high-pitched whine like the sound just before a cable snaps. The chatter of cameras became a cicada song. An overly tall, overly thin man emerged.

  “Bundy,” said the same man.

  The resemblance was undeniable. Dark hair. Handsome features. Eyes steely and calm. Smile almost apologetic, as if he was sorry the crowd had to put up with all the lies spoken about him.

  Still, the bandage on his right hand told that one of the spectacular stories was true.

  The accused moved toward the defense table, where Counselor Barnett and Detective Donna Leland pulled out a chair for him.

  “Thank you, Donna,” said the man.

  “You’re welcome, William.”

  He sat with a lean, contrite motion: his hands swung down into his lap, and his close-cropped head bowed in a combination of respect and guilt. The camera lenses still scissored open and shut behind him. The air fairly hummed. Eyes were wide and unblinking. Tongues shied back from teeth. The room was filled with a communal and galvanic dread, the sort reserved for celebrities, messiahs, and demons. He was all of them. No longer would the name John Doe mean anonymity. Now it would mean depravity. The insistent clamor of gavel raps cut through the buzz of glaring eyes and grinding teeth.

  “Enough,” the judge said quietly. “If every movement of the accused is going to make a sensation, I’ll clear the court.” She peered around the room, eyes focusing just above the half-glasses she wore for reading. She had the stern air of a schoolmarm. “Better.”

  Without abandoning the papers beneath her fingers, she said, “John Doe, you are charged with four murders in the county of Racine, a fifth in Walworth County, and a sixth in Kenosha County. Once this trial is concluded, you will be extradited for trial in the state of Illinois, and after that, the state of Indiana. Is this understood?”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” he replied. Though quiet, his voice carried through the room.

  “All right, then,” Judge Devlin said, “let’s get to it. Opening arguments. Counselor Franklin, are you prepared?”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” he said, standing. Jim Franklin was tall, strong, and handsome. His gray-blue suit made him seem a man of stainless steel. The gray-blue shadow of a latent beard extended the sheen of the suit up across his Adam’s apple and to his cheekbones. With a theatrical flair, he gazed down at the tabletop, where his hands patiently sifted through the folios spilled from his attaché.

  Counselor Barnett watched her colleague, her adversary. The look of attention on her face deepened to annoyance.

  Franklin glanced at her, then up at the bench, and last at the jury. “Your Honor, people of Wisconsin, what we begin today is a most difficult trial.

  “That man there, known in the records as John Doe, stands accused in this state of six brutal murders. These were monstrous crimes, involving amputations and gallons of blood. He has supplied various confessions of his guilt, saying he killed his cell mate Derek Billings by strangling the man with a penny and his own thumb; saying he orchestrated the five other murders – what we call ‘murder by proxy.’ Still, he pleads not guilty. He has passed a competency hearing and remains in command of his own defense – but still he plans to tell you he is insane. He wants it both ways. He is sane and guilty when it benefits him, and insane and not guilty when that works better.

  “Insane? Not guilty? I don’t think so. I don’t think even this man thinks so. Just two weeks ago, the defense got nervous and began pushing for a plea-bargain verdict of guilty in exchange for a declaration of insanity, letting John Doe live out his days in a comfortable mental institution rather than a maximum security penitentiary. I would not allow that. This man is not insane. Murderous, yes. Cunning, ruthless, manipulative, charismatic, yes. But insane? No.

  “You wonder: How can a man who enjoyed decapitating perfect strangers not be insane? Well, first you must understand what is meant by insanity. It is a legal term, not a psychiatric one. By law, a person is insane if he cannot tell the difference between right and wrong.

  “An insane person, thu
s, does nothing to hide his crimes: he does not perceive of them as criminal. This man hid his crimes. He found a violent paranoid schizophrenic in a poorly run group home and used him to fulfill his murderous fantasies. John Doe is not insane. If he were, why would he choose a patsy to commit his crimes? Why would he carefully avoid leaving his own fingerprints anywhere? Because he knew what he was doing was wrong.

  “John Doe is not psychotic – unable to understand and cope with the world in which he lives. He is sociopathic. He knows exactly what he is doing in this world. He understands right and wrong but chooses wrong. He pretends to be mentally ill so that he can kill with impunity. Here is a man who admits to two gruesome murders and is suspected of many more, in three separate states!

  “Through expert testimony from psychiatrists, police officers, medical examiners, and FBI profilers, the prosecution will show you the man behind this smug mask. You will see that John Doe is more cunning than Ted Bundy, who some say slew more than fifty women from coast to coast before he was stopped. You will see that John Doe is more duplicitous than John Wayne Gacy, the upstanding building contractor and birthday party clown who buried more than thirty young men and boys in his own home. You will see that John Doe is more sexually sadistic than Jeffrey Dahmer, who drugged and raped his victims, killed them, had sex with their dead bodies, dissected them, and ate the pieces.

  “These four killers are the same – Bundy, Gacy, Dahmer, and Doe – people who, on the surface, seem incapable of the atrocities they easily, constantly, and secretly committed. All four – Bundy, Gacy, Dahmer, and Doe – invented elaborate lies to cover their actions. Doe’s lies sound like those of David Berkowitz – the Son of Sam, who said his dog was an ancient Babylonian devil, telling him to kill.

  “I need not refer to the tabloids. Doe, in his own confessions, provides the best and most damning copy. He has an elaborate cover story. He says he killed all these people – and many more – because he is a fallen angel.