Angel Time

by Anne Rice

  I moved towards him, and set the flowers in the center of the dining room table, ignoring the mess of breakfast dishes. He didn’t care that I was at his back.

  For a moment I turned away from him and looked up at the familiar dome. I looked at the soft beige pine trees painted along the base of it. I looked at the doves ascending through the mist of clouds to the blue sky. I fussed with the flowers. I loved the fragrance of them. I breathed it in and some faint memory came back to me, of some quiet and lovely place where the scent of flowers had been the very air. Where was that? Does it matter?

  And all the while the door to the veranda stood gaping and there came the fresh breeze. Anybody walking by could see the bed and the dome, but not him, and not me.

  I moved swiftly behind his chair, and I pumped thirty units of the deadly stuff into his neck.

  Without looking up, he reached for the spot, as if batting away an insect, which is almost always what they all do, and then I said, slipping the syringe in my pocket:

  “Sir, you wouldn’t have a tip for a poor delivery boy, would you?”

  He turned. I was looming over him, smelling of peat moss and cigarettes.

  His ice-cold eyes fixed me with fury. And then suddenly his face began to change. His left hand fell away from the computer keyboard, and with the right he groped for the earpiece. It fell out. He let that hand drop too. The phone slipped off the desk, as his left hand slipped to his leg.

  His face was slack and soft and all the belligerence went out of him. He sucked in his breath and tried to steady himself with his right hand but couldn’t find the edge of the desk. Then he managed to raise his hand towards me.

  Quickly I took off the garden gloves. He didn’t notice. He couldn’t be noticing much of anything.

  He tried to stand but couldn’t.

  “Help me,” he whispered.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “You just sit right here till it passes.”

  Then with my plastic-gloved hands, I shut his computer, and I turned him back in the chair so that he fell silently forward on the desk.

  “Yes,” he said in English. “Yes.”

  “You aren’t well, sir,” I said. “You want me to call for a doctor?”

  I looked up and out at the empty veranda. We were right opposite the black iron table, and I noticed for the first time that the Tuscan pots overflowing with lavender geraniums had tall hibiscus trees in them as well. The sun was beautiful there.

  He was trying to catch his breath.

  As I said, I detest cruelty. I picked up the landline phone beside him, and without punching for a dial tone I spoke to the empty receiver. We needed a doctor right away.

  His head was to the side. I saw his eyes close. I think he tried to speak again but he couldn’t manage a word.

  “They’re coming, sir,” I told him.

  I might have left then, but as I said, I detest cruelty in any form.

  By this time, he wasn’t seeing anything too clearly. Perhaps he was seeing nothing at all. But I remembered that bit of information they always give you in the hospital that “the hearing is the last thing to go.”

  They’d told me that when my grandmother was dying, and I’d wanted to watch the television in the room, and my mother had been sobbing.

  Finally he closed his eyes. I was surprised he was able to do it. First they were half shut, then shut altogether. His neck was a mass of wrinkles. I couldn’t see any breath coming from him, or see the slightest rise or fall to his frame.

  I looked beyond him, through the white curtains, at the veranda again. At the black table, among the Tuscan potted flowers, a man had taken his place and appeared to be staring at us.

  I knew that he couldn’t penetrate the curtains from that distance. All he could see was the whiteness, and perhaps a veiled shape. I didn’t care.

  I needed only a few more moments, and then I could safely leave with the knowledge that the job was complete.

  I didn’t touch the phones or the computers, but I made a mental inventory of what was there. Two cell phones on the desk just as The Boss had indicated. One dead phone on the floor. There had been phones in the bathroom. And there was another computer, the lady’s perhaps, unopened on the table before the fireplace, between the wing chairs.

  I was merely giving the man time to die as I noted this, but the longer I remained in the room, the worse I began to feel. I wasn’t shaky, merely miserable.

  The stranger on the veranda didn’t bother me. Let him stare. Let him stare right into the room.

  I made sure the lilies were turned the best way, wiped up a bit of water that had spilled on the table.

  By now the man was surely almost dead. I felt a full-fledged despair creeping over me, an utter sense of emptiness, and why not?

  I went to feel his pulse. I couldn’t find it. But he was still alive. That I knew when I touched his wrist.

  I listened to hear his breathing, and to my uncomfortable surprise, I heard the faint sigh of someone else.

  Someone else.

  Couldn’t have been that guy on the veranda, even though he was still staring into the room. A couple passed by. Then a lone man came, gazing up and around himself, and moved on to the rotunda stairs.

  I wrote it off to nerves, that sigh. It had sounded close to my ear as if someone were whispering to me. Just this room, I figured, unnerving me because I loved it so much, and the sheer ugliness of the murder was tearing at my soul.

  Maybe the room was sighing at the pity of it. I certainly wanted to. I wanted to go.

  And then the misery in me darkened as it so often did at these times. Only on this occasion it was stronger, much stronger, and it had language to it in my head which I didn’t expect.

  Why don’t you join him? You know you ought to go where he’s going. You ought to take that small gun off your ankle right now and hold the barrel right under your chin. Shoot straight up. Your brains will fly to the ceiling maybe, but you’ll be dead finally, and everything will be dark, darker even than it is now, and you’ll be separated from all of them forever, all of them, Mama, Emily, Jacob, your father, your unnamable father, and all of these, like him, whom you’ve personally and mercilessly killed. Do it. Don’t wait any longer. Do it.

  There was nothing unusual about this crushing depression, I reminded myself, this crushing desire to end it, this crushing and paralyzing obsession with lifting the gun and doing just what the voice said. What was unusual was the clarity of the voice. It felt as if the voice was beside me, instead of inside me, Lucky talking to Lucky, as he so often did.

  Outside, the stranger got up from the table, and I found myself watching in cool amazement as he came into the open door. He stood in the room, under the dome, staring at me as I stood behind the dying man.

  He was a tall, rather impressive figure, slender, with a mop of soft black wavy hair and blue eyes with an unusually engaging expression.

  “This man’s ill, sir,” I said immediately, pushing my tongue hard against the bite plate. “I think he needs a doctor.”

  “He’s dead, Lucky,” said the stranger. “And don’t listen to the voice in your head.”

  This was so utterly unexpected that I didn’t know what to do or to say. Yet no sooner had he spoken these words, than the voice in my head kicked in again.

  End it. Forget the gun and its inevitable sloppiness. You have another syringe in your pocket. Are you going to let yourself be caught? Your life’s Hell now. Think what it will be like in prison. The syringe. Do it now.

  “Ignore him, Lucky,” said the stranger. An immense generosity seemed to emanate from him. He looked at me with such focus that it was almost devotion, and I had, unaccountably, an instinct that he was feeling love.

  The light shifted. A cloud must have unveiled the sun, because the light in the room had brightened, and I saw him with uncommon clarity, even though I was very used to noticing and memorizing people. He was my height, and he was looking at me with obvious tenderness and even conc
ern.

  Impossible.

  When you know something is clearly impossible, what do you do? What was I to do now?

  I put my hand into my pocket and felt for the syringe.

  That’s right. Don’t waste the last precious minutes of your loathsome existence trying to figure this one. Don’t you see, The Right Man has worked a double-cross?

  “Not so,” said the stranger. He stared at the dead man and his face melted in an expression of perfect sorrow, and then he appealed to me again.

  “Time to leave here with me, Lucky. Time to listen to what I have to say.”

  I couldn’t form a coherent thought. My heart was thudding in my ears, and with my finger I pushed ever so slightly at the plastic cap on the syringe.

  Yes, bow out of their contradictions and their traps and their lies, and their endless capacity to use you. Defeat them. Come now.

  “Come now?” I whispered. The words separated themselves from the theme of rage that was common to my mind. Why had I thought that, Come now?

  “You didn’t think it,” said the stranger. “Don’t you see he’s doing his damnedest to defeat both of us? Leave the syringe alone.”

  He looked young and eager, and almost irresistibly affectionate as he stared at me, but there was nothing young about him, and the sunlight was spilling in on him beautifully, and everything about him was effortlessly attractive. Only now did I notice, a little frantically, that he wore a simple gray suit, and a very beautiful blue silk tie.

  Nothing about this was remarkable, but his face and hands were remarkable. And the expression was inviting and forgiving.

  Forgiving.

  Why would someone, anyone, look that way at me? Yet I had the feeling that he knew me, knew me better than I knew myself. It was as if he knew all about me, and only now did it penetrate that he had three times called me by my name.

  Surely that was because The Right Man had sent him. Surely that was because I had been double-crossed. This was the last job for me with The Right Man, and here was the superior assassin who could put an end to an old assassin who was now more of a mystery than he was worth.

  Then cheat them, and do it now.

  “I do know you,” said the stranger. “I’ve known you all your life. And I’m not from The Right Man.” At this he softly laughed. “Well, not The Right Man you hold in such regard, Lucky, but from another who is The Right Man, I should say.”

  “What do you want?”

  “For you to come with me out of here. For you to turn a deaf ear to the voice that’s plaguing you. You’ve listened to that voice long enough.”

  I calculated. What could explain all this? Not merely the stress of being in my room at the Mission Inn, no, that wasn’t sufficient. It must have been the poison, that I’d absorbed some of it when preparing it, that in spite of the double gloves, I hadn’t done things exactly right.

  “You’re too clever for that,” said the stranger.

  And so you devolve into madness? When you have the power to turn your back on them all?

  I looked about me. I looked at the tester bed; I looked at the familiar dark brown draperies. I looked at the huge fireplace, now directly behind the stranger. I looked at all the common furnishings and objects of the room that I so well knew. How could madness project itself so sharply? How could it create such a specific illusion? But surely this figure wasn’t there, and I wasn’t talking to him, and the warm, inviting look on his face was some device of my own wretched mind.

  He laughed again very softly. But the other voice was working.

  Don’t give him a chance to get that syringe away from you. If you won’t die in this room, damn you, then step outside. Find some corner of this hotel, and you know all of them, and there put an end to yourself once and for all.

  For one precious second, I was certain this figure would vanish if I moved towards him. I did it. He was as solid and palpable as before. He stepped back for me, and gestured that I might go out before him.

  And suddenly I found myself standing on the veranda, in the sunlight, and the colors around me were wondrously vivid and lulling and I felt no urgency whatsoever, no ticking of any clock.

  I heard him close the door of the suite and then I looked at him as he stood beside me.

  “Don’t talk to me,” I said crossly. “I don’t know who you are or what you want or where you came from.”

  “You called me,” he said in his even and agreeable voice. “You’ve called me in the past, but never so desperately as you called me now.”

  Again I had that sensation of love flowing from him, of an infinite knowledge and an unaccountable acceptance of who and what I was.

  “Called you?”

  “You prayed, Lucky. You prayed to your guardian angel, and your guardian angel relayed the prayer to me.”

  There was simply no way in the world that I could accept this. But what struck me with full force was that The Right Man couldn’t possibly know about my praying, couldn’t possibly know what went on in my mind.

  “I know what goes on in your mind,” said the stranger. His face was as appealing and trusting as before. That was it, trusting, as if he had nothing whatsoever to fear from me, or any weapon I carried, or any desperate thing I might do.

  “Wrong,” he said gently, drawing closer to me. “There are desperate things that I don’t want you to do.”

  Don’t you know the Devil when you see him? Don’t you know he’s the Father of Lies? Maybe there are special devils for people like you, Lucky, did you ever think of that?

  My hand went into my pocket for the syringe again, but instantly I pulled it back.

  “Special devils, that’s likely,” said the stranger, “and special angels as well. You know that from your old studies. Special men have special angels, and I’m your angel, Lucky. I’ve come to offer you a way out of this, and you must not, you absolutely must not, reach for that syringe.”

  I was about to speak, when that despair came over me as surely as if someone had wrapped me in a shroud, though I’ve never seen a shroud. It was simply the image that came to me.

  This is how you want to die? Crazy in some little cell with people torturing you to get information out of you? Get out of here. Go. Go where you can put the gun to your chin and pull the trigger. You knew when you came here to this place and this room that you would do that. This was always meant to be your last killing. That’s why you brought the extra syringe.

  The stranger laughed as if he couldn’t help himself. “He’s pulling all the stops out,” he said quietly. “Don’t listen. He wouldn’t have raised his voice so stridently if I weren’t here.”

  “I don’t want you to talk to me!” I stammered.

  A young couple was drifting towards us down the veranda. I wondered what they saw. They avoided us, their eyes scanning the brickwork and the heavy doors. I think they marveled at the flowers.

  “It’s the lavender geraniums,” said the stranger as he looked at them in the pots that surrounded us. “And they want to sit down at this table, so why don’t you and I move on?”

  “I’m moving on,” I said angrily, “but not because you say so. I don’t know who you are. But I’ll tell you this. If The Right Man sent you, you better be prepared for a little battle, because I’m going to take you down before I go.”

  I walked off to the right and started down the winding staircase of the huge rotunda. I moved fast, silencing the voice in my head deliberately and certainly, as I crossed one landing after another and came at last to the bottom floor. I found him standing there.

  “Angel of God, my guardian dear,” he whispered. He had been leaning against the wall, with his arms folded, a collected figure, but now he stood up straight and fell in beside me as I continued to walk on just about as briskly as I could.

  “Be straight with me,” I said under my breath. “Who are you?”

  “I don’t think you’re ready to believe me,” he said, his manner as gentle and solicitous as ever. “I�
�d rather that we were on the road back to Los Angeles, but if you insist …”

  I felt the sweat breaking out all over me. I ripped the bite plate out of my mouth, and tore off the plastic gloves too. I shoved them in my pockets.

  “Be careful. Uncap that syringe, and I’ve lost you,” he said, drawing close to me. He was moving just as quickly as I was and we were now nearing the front walk of the hotel.

  You know madness. You’ve seen it. Ignore him. You fall for him and you’re finished. Get in the truck and drive out of here. Find someplace by the side of the road. And you know what to do.

  The feeling of despair was almost blinding. I stopped in my tracks. We were under the campanario. It couldn’t have been a more lovely spot. The ivy was trailing over the bells, and people were streaming by us on the pathway, to the left and to the right. I could hear the laughter and chatter from the nearby Mexican restaurant. I could hear the birds in the trees.

  He stood close to me, looking at me intently, looking at me the way I’d want a brother to look at me, but I had no brother, because my little brother had died a long, long time ago. My fault. The original murders.

  The breath went out of me. The breath just left me. I looked directly into his eyes and I saw the love again, the pure unadulterated love, and acceptance, and then very gently, cautiously, he laid his hand on my left arm.

  “All right,” I whispered. I was shaking. “You’ve come to kill me because he sent you. He thinks I’m a half-cocked gun out here, and he’s dropped the dime on me.”

  “No, and no, and no.”

  “Am I the one who’s dead? I somehow got that poison into my veins and I don’t know it? Is that what’s happened?”

  “No, and no, and no. You’re very much alive and that’s why I want you. Now the truck isn’t fifty feet away. You told them to keep it at the entrance. Get the ticket out of your pocket. Complete the few gestures required here.”

  “You’re helping me to complete the murder,” I said angrily. “You’re implying you’re an angel, but you’re helping a killer.”

  “The man upstairs is gone, Lucky. He had his angels with him. And I can do no more for him now. I have come for you.” There was an indescribable beauty to him when he spoke these words, and again that loving invitation, as if he could somehow make everything in this broken world right.