The Black Angel

by John Connolly

  The priest did a little soft-shoe shuffle to emphasize his discomfort.

  “It’s most unusual.”

  “I know,” I said, “but then, they’re unusual people.”

  It was late January, and there was still snow on sheltered ground. Two days earlier, I had driven down to New Hampshire to buy cheap booze in the state liquor store in preparation for the celebrations after the christening. When I was done, I walked for a time by the Piscataqua River, the ice still a foot thick by the shore but webbed by cracks. The center was free of encumbrance, though, and the water flowed slowly and steadily toward the sea. I walked against the current, following a wooded berm, thick with fir, that the river had created over time, cutting off a patch of bog land where early-budding blueberry and blackberry, and gray-black winterberry and tan winter maleberry, coexisted with spruce and larch and rhodora. At last I came to the floating area of the bog, all green and purple where the sphagnum moss was interwoven with cranberry vines. I plucked a berry, sweetened by the frost, and placed it between my teeth. When I bit down, the taste of the juice filled my mouth. I found a tree trunk, long fallen and now gray and rotted, and sat upon it. Spring was coming, and with it the long, slow thaw. There would be new leaves, and new life.

  But I have always been a winter person. Now, more than ever before, I desired to remain frozen amid snow and ice, cocooned and unchanging. I thought of Rachel and my daughter, Sam, and those others who had gone before them. Life slows in winter, but now I wanted it to cease its forward momentum entirely, except for us three. If I could hold us here, wrapped all in white, then perhaps everything would be fine. If the days advanced only for us, then no ill could come. No strangers would arrive at our door, and no demands would be made upon us other than those elemental things that we required from one another, and that we freely gave in return.

  Yet even here, amid the silence of the winter woods and the moss-covered water, life went on, a hidden, teeming existence masked by snow and ice. The stillness was a ruse, an illusion, fooling only those who were unwilling or unable to look closer and see what lay beneath. Time and life moved inexorably forward. Already, it was growing dark around me. Soon it would be night, and they would come again.

  They were visiting more frequently, the little girl who was almost my daughter, and her mother who was not quite my wife. Their voices were growing more insistent, the memory of them in this life becoming increasingly polluted by the forms that they had taken in the next. In the beginning, when first they came, I could not tell what they were. I thought them phantasms of grief, a product of my troubled, guilty mind, but gradually they assumed a kind of reality. I did not grow used to their presence, but I learned to accept it. Whether real or imagined, they still symbolized a love that I once felt, and continued to feel. But now they were becoming something different, and their love was whispered through bared teeth.

  We will not be forgotten.

  All was coming apart around me, and I did not know what to do, so I sat instead among snow and ice on a rotted tree trunk, and willed clocks to stop.

  It was warmer than it had been in many days. Rachel was standing outside the church, holding Sam in her arms. Her mother, Joan, was beside her. Our daughter was wrapped in white, her eyes tightly closed, as though she were troubled in her sleep. The sky was clear blue, and the winter sunlight shone coldly upon Black Point. Our friends and neighbors were scattered before us, some talking, smoking. Most had dressed up for the occasion, happy for an excuse to break out some colorful clothes in winter. I nodded greetings to a few people, then joined Rachel and Joan.

  As I approached, Sam woke and waved her arms. She yawned, looked blearily about, then decided there was nothing important enough to keep her from another nap. Joan tucked the white shawl under Sam’s chin to keep out the cold. She was a small, stout woman who wore minimal makeup and kept her silver hair cut short against her skull. After meeting her for the first time that morning, Louis had suggested that she was trying to get in touch with her inner lesbian. I advised him to keep those opinions to himself, or else Joan Wolfe would try to get in touch with Louis’s inner gay man by reaching into his chest and tearing his heart out. She and I got on okay, most of the time, but I knew that she worried about the safety of her daughter and her new grandchild, and this translated into a distance between us. For me it was like being within sight of a warm, friendly place that could be reached only by traversing a frozen lake. I accepted that Joan had cause to feel concerned because of things that had happened in the past, but that didn’t make her implicit disapproval of me any easier to bear. Still, compared to my relations with Rachel’s father, Joan and I were bosom buddies. Frank Wolfe, once he had a couple of drinks inside him, felt compelled to end most of our encounters with the words “You know, if anything ever happens to my daughter…”

  Rachel was wearing a light blue dress, plain and unadorned. There were wrinkles on the back of the dress, and a thread hung loose from the seam. She looked tired and distracted.

  “I can take her, if you like,” I said.

  “No, she’s fine.”

  The words came out too quickly. I felt like I’d been pushed hard in the chest and forced to take a step back. I looked at Joan. After a couple of seconds, she moved away and went to join Rachel’s younger sister, Pam, who was smoking a cigarette and flirting with a group of admiring locals.

  “I know she is,” I said quietly. “It’s you I’m concerned about.”

  Rachel leaned against me for a moment, then, almost as if she were counting the seconds until she could put space between us once more, broke the contact.

  “I just want this to be done,” she said. “I want all of these people to be gone.”

  We hadn’t invited very many people to the christening. Angel and Louis were present, of course, and Walter and Lee Cole had come up from New York. Apart from them, the bulk of the little group was made up of Rachel’s immediate family and some of our friends from Portland and Scarborough. All told, there were twenty-five or thirty people present, no more, and most would come back to our house after the ceremony. Usually, Rachel would have reveled in such company, but since Sam’s birth she had grown increasingly insular, withdrawing even from me. I tried to recall the early days of Jennifer’s life, before she and her mother were taken from me, and although Jennifer had been as raucous as Sam was quiet, I could not remember encountering the kind of difficulties that now troubled Rachel and me. True, it was natural that Sam should be the focus of Rachel’s energy and attention. I tried to help her in every way that I could, and had cut back on my work so that I could take on some of the burden of caring for her and give Rachel a little time to herself, if she chose. Instead, she seemed almost to resent my presence, and with the arrival of Angel and Louis that morning it appeared that the tension between us had increased exponentially.

  “I can tell them you’re feeling ill,” I said. “You could just take Sam upstairs to our room later and get away from everyone. They’ll understand.”

  She shook her head. “It’s not that. I want them gone. Do you understand?”

  And in truth, I did not, not then.

  The woman arrived at the auto shop early that morning. It stood on the verge of an area that, if it was not quite gentrified, then at least was no longer mugging the gentry. She had taken the subway to Queens and been forced to change trains twice, having mistaken the number of the subway line. The streets were quieter today, although she still could see little beauty in this place. There was bruising to her face, and her left eye hurt every time she blinked.

  After the young man had struck her, she had taken a moment to recover her composure against the wall of an alleyway. It was not the first time that a man had raised his hand to her, but never before had she endured a blow from a stranger, and one half her age. The experience left her humiliated and angry, and in the minutes that followed she wished, perhaps for the first time ever, that Louis were near at that moment, that she could reach out and tell h
im what had occurred and watch as he humiliated the pimp in turn. In the darkness of the alleyway, she placed her hands on her knees and lowered her head. She felt like she was about to vomit. Her hands were shaking, and there was a sheen of sweat upon her face. She closed her eyes and began to pray until the feelings of rage went away, and as they departed her hands grew still, and her skin became cool once again.

  She heard a woman moan close by, and a man spoke harsh words to her. She looked to her right and saw shapes moving rhythmically beside some discarded trash bags. Cars drifted slowly by, their windows lowered, the drivers’ faces rendered cruel and hungry by streetlights and headlamps. A tall white girl teetered on pink heels, her body barely concealed by white lingerie. Beside her, a black woman leaned against the hood of a car, her hands splayed upon the metal, her buttocks raised to attract the attention of passing men. Close by, the rhythmic thrusting grew faster, and the woman’s moans increased in pitch, false and empty, before finally fading entirely. Seconds later, she heard footsteps. The man emerged from the shadows first. He was young and white, and well dressed. His tie was askew, and he was running his hands through his hair to tidy it after his exertions. She smelled alcohol and a trace of cheap perfume. He barely glanced at the woman against the wall as he turned onto the street.

  He was followed, after a time, by a little white girl. She looked barely old enough to drive a car, yet here she was, dressed in a black miniskirt and a cutoff top, her heels adding two inches to her diminutive stature, her dark hair cut in a bob, and her delicate features obscured by crudely applied cosmetics. She seemed to be having trouble walking, as though she were in some pain. She had almost passed the black woman by when a hand reached out, not touching her, merely imploring her to stop.

  “Excuse me, miss,” she said.

  The young girl paused. Her eyes were very large and blue, but already the older woman could see the light dying inside. “I can’t give you money,” she said.

  “I don’t want money. I have a picture. I’d like you to take a look at it, maybe tell me if you know the girl.”

  She reached into her bag and removed the photograph of her daughter. After some hesitation, the girl took it. She looked at it for a time, then handed it back.

  “She’s gone,” she said.

  The older woman stepped slowly forward. She didn’t want to alarm the girl. “You know her?”

  “Not really. I saw her around some, but she went away a day or two after I started. I heard her street name was LaShan, but I don’t think that was her real name.”

  “No, her name is Alice.”

  “Are you her mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “She seemed nice.”

  “She is.”

  “She had a friend. Her name was Sereta.”

  “Do you know where I can find her friend?”

  The girl shook her head.

  “She left too. I wish I could tell you more, but I can’t. I got to go.”

  Before the woman could stop her, she had stepped out into the stream and was taken up by the flow. She followed her, watching her go. She saw the girl cross the street and hand some money over to the young black man who had hit her, then take up position once again with the other women lining the street.

  Where were the police? she wondered. How could they let this continue on their doorsteps, this exploitation, this suffering? How could they allow a little girl like that to be used, to be killed slowly from the inside out? And if they could permit this to happen, how much could they care about a lost black girl who had fallen into this river of human misery and was dragged down by its currents?

  She was a fool to believe that she could come to this strange city and find her daughter alone. She had called the police first, of course, before she had even decided to come north, and had given them what details she could over the phone. They had advised her to file a report in person once she came to the city, and she had done so the previous day. She had watched the policeman’s expression alter slightly as she spoke to him of her child’s circumstances. To him, her daughter was another addict drifting through a dangerous life. Perhaps he meant what he said when he told her he would do his best for her, but she knew that the disappearance of her little girl was not as important as a missing white girl, maybe one with money or influence, or simply one without puncture holes in the flesh between her fingers and toes. She had considered returning to the police that morning and describing the man who had struck her and the young prostitute with whom she had spoken, but she believed that it would make little difference if she did. The time for the police was gone now. She needed someone for whom her daughter would be a priority, not merely another name on an ever-growing list of the disappeared.

  Although it was Sunday, the main door to the auto shop was half-raised, and music was playing inside. The woman crouched down and edged her way into the dimly lit interior. A thin man in coveralls was bent over the interior of a big foreign car. His name was Arno. Beside him, Tony Bennett’s voice came from the cheap speakers of a small, battered radio.

  “Hello?” said the woman.

  Arno turned his head, although his hands remained hidden in the workings of the engine.

  “I’m sorry, lady, we’re closed,” he said.

  He knew he should have pulled the shutter down fully, but he liked to let a little air in, and anyway he didn’t expect to be here for too long. The Audi was due to be picked up first thing Monday morning, and another hour or two would see it done.

  “I’m looking for someone,” she said.

  “The boss ain’t around.”

  As the woman approached, he saw the swelling on her face. He wiped his hands on a rag and abandoned the car for the time being.

  “Hey, you okay? What happened to your face?”

  The woman was close to him now. She was hiding her distress and her fear, but the mechanic could see it in her eyes, like a scared child peering out of twin windows.

  “I’m looking for someone,” she repeated. “He gave me this.”

  She removed her wallet from her bag and carefully extracted a card from its folds. The card was slightly yellowed at the edges, but apart from this natural ageing it was in pristine condition. The mechanic reckoned that it had been kept safe for a long time, just in case it was ever needed.

  Arno took the card. There was no name upon it, only an illustration. It depicted a serpent being trampled beneath the feet of an armored angel. The angel had a lance in his right hand, and its point had pierced the reptile. Dark blood flowed from the wound. On the back of the card was the number of a discreet answering service. Beside it was a single letter L, written in black ink, along with the handwritten address of the auto shop in which they now stood.

  Few people had such cards in their possession, and the mechanic had never seen a card with the address of the shop added by hand. The letter L was the clincher. In effect, this was an “access all areas” pass, a request—no, an order—to extend any and all help to the person who possessed it.

  “Did you call the number?” he asked.

  “I don’t want to talk to him through no service. I want to see him.”

  “He’s not here. He’s out of town.”

  “Where?”

  The mechanic hesitated before answering.

  “Maine.”

  “I’d be grateful to you if you’d give me the address of where he’s at.”

  Arno walked to the cluttered office that stood to the left of the main work area. He flicked through the address book until he came to the entry he needed, then took a piece of paper and transferred the relevant details to it. He folded the paper and gave it to the woman.

  “You want me to call him for you, let him know you’re on your way?”

  “Thank you, but no.”

  “You got a car?”

  She shook her head.

  “I took the subway out here.”

  “You know how you’re going to get up to Maine?”

  “Not
yet. Bus, I guess.”

  Arno put on his jacket and removed a set of keys from his pocket.

  “I’ll give you a ride to Port Authority, see you safely onto the bus.”

  For the first time, the woman smiled.

  “Thank you, I’d appreciate that.”

  Arno looked at her. Gently, he touched her face, examining the bruise.

  “I got something for that, if it’s hurting you.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she said.

  He nodded.

  The man who did this to you is in a lot of trouble. The man who did this to you won’t live out the week.

  “Let’s go, then. We got time, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee and a muffin for the trip.”

  Dead man. He’s a dead man.

  We were gathered around the font in a small group, the other guests standing in the pews a little distance away. The priest had made his introductions, and now we were approaching the meat of the ceremony.

  “Do you reject Satan, and all his empty promises?” asked the priest.

  He waited. There was no reply. Rachel coughed discreetly. Angel appeared to have found something interesting to look at down on the floor. Louis remained impassive. He had removed his shades and was focused on a point just above my left shoulder.

  “You’re speaking for Sam,” I whispered to Angel. “He doesn’t mean you.”

  Realization dawned like morning light on an arid desert.

  “Oh, okay then,” said Angel enthusiastically. “Sure. Absolutely. Rejected.”

  “Amen,” said Louis.

  The priest looked confused.

  “That would be a yes,” I told him.

  “Right,” he said, as if to reassure himself. “Good.”

  Rachel shot daggers at Angel.

  “What?” he asked. He raised his hands in a “What did I do?” gesture. Some wax from the candle dripped onto the sleeve of his jacket. A faintly acrid smell arose.

  “Awwww,” said Angel. “First time I’ve worn it, too.”

  Rachel moved from daggers to swords.