The Black Angel

by John Connolly

  Northside was a little different. It was now trendy and bohemian, and the fact that Bedford Avenue was the first stop made by the L train from Manhattan meant that it was an easy commute, so property prices were going up. Nevertheless, the area had some way to go before it achieved true desirability for those with money in their pockets, and it was not about to abandon its old identity without a fight. The Northside Pharmacy on Bedford still took care to call itself additionally a farmacia and an apteka; Edwin’s Fruit and Veg store sold Zywiec beer from Poland, advertised with a small neon sign in the window; and the meat market remained the Polska-Masarna. There were delis and beauty salons, and Mike’s Northstar Hardware continued in business, but there was also a little coffee shop called Reads that sold used books and alternative magazines, and the lampposts were dotted with flyers hawking loft spaces for artists’ studios.

  I hung a right on Tenth at Raymund’s Diner, with its wooden Bierkeller sign illustrated by a beer and a joint of meat. One block down, at Berry, stood a warehouse building that still bore the faint traces of its previous existence as a brewery, for this area was once the heart of New York’s brewing industry. The warehouse was five stories tall and badly scarred by graffiti. A fire escape ran down the center of its eastern façade, and a banner had been strung across the top floor. It read: IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU’D BE HOME BY NOW!” Someone had crossed out the word “Home” and spray painted the word “Polish” in its place. Underneath was a telephone number. No lights burned in any of the windows. I watched Louis drive around the block once, then park on Eleventh. I pulled up behind him and walked to his car. He was leaning back in his seat, talking to G-Mack.

  “You sure this is the place?” Louis asked him.

  “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  “If you’re lying, I’ll hurt you again.”

  G-Mack tried to hold Louis’s gaze, but failed.

  “I know that.”

  Louis turned his attention to Angel and me.

  “Get out, keep an eye on the place. I’m gonna dump my boy here.”

  There was nothing that I could say. G-Mack looked worried. He had every reason to.

  “Hey, I done told you everythin I know,” he protested. His voice broke slightly.

  Louis ignored him.

  “I’m not gonna kill him,” he said to me.

  I nodded.

  Angel got out of the car, and we faded into the shadows as Louis drove G-Mack away.

  The present is very fragile, and the ground beneath our feet is thin and treacherous. Beneath it lies the maze of the past, a honeycomb network created by the strata of days and years where memories lie buried, waiting for the moment when the thin crust above cracks and what was and what is can become one again. There is life down there in the honeycomb world, and Brightwell was now alerting it to his discovery. Everything had changed for him, and new plans would have to be made. He called the most private of numbers, and saw, as the sleepy voice answered, that white mote flickering in the darkness.

  “They were too quick for us,” he said. “They have him, and they’re moving. But something interesting has emerged….”

  Louis parked the car in the delivery bay of a Chinese food store, close by the Woodhull Medical Center, on Broadway. He tossed G-Mack the key to the cuffs, watched silently as he freed his hand, then stood back to let him step from the car.

  “Lie down on your belly.”

  “Please, man—”

  “Lie down.”

  G-Mack sank to his knees, then stretched flat on the ground.

  “Spread your arms and your legs.”

  “I’m sorry,” said G-Mack. His face was contorted with fear. “You got to believe me.”

  His head was turned to one side so that he could see Louis. He began to cry as the suppressor was mounted on the muzzle of the little .22 that Louis always carried as backup.

  “I do believe you’re sorry now. I can hear it in your voice.”

  “Please,” said G-Mack. Blood and snot mixed on his lips. “Please.”

  “This is your last chance. Have you told us everything?”

  “Yeah! I got nothing else. I swear to you, man.”

  “You right-handed?”

  “What?”

  “I said, are you right-handed?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So I figure you hit the woman with that hand?”

  “I don’t—”

  Louis took one look around to make sure nobody was near, then fired a single shot into the back of G-Mack’s right hand. G-Mack screamed. Louis took two steps back and fired a second shot into the pimp’s right ankle.

  G-Mack gritted his teeth and pressed his forehead against the ground, but the pain was too much. He raised his damaged right hand and used his left to push himself up and look at his wounded foot.

  “Now you can’t go far if I need to find you again,” said Louis. He raised the gun and leveled it at G-Mack’s face. “You’re a lucky man. Don’t forget that. But you better pray that I find Alice alive.”

  He lowered the gun and walked back to the car.

  “Hospital’s across the street,” he said, then drove away.

  Apart from the fire escape, there appeared to be only one way into or out of the building, and that was a single steel door on Berry. There were no bells or buzzers, and no names of residents.

  “You think he was lying?” asked Angel.

  Louis had rejoined us. I didn’t ask him about G-Mack.

  “No,” said Louis. “He wasn’t lying. Open it.”

  Louis and I took up positions at opposite corners of the building, watching the streets while Angel worked on the lock. It took him five minutes, which was a long time for him. “Old locks are good locks,” he said, by way of explanation.

  We slipped inside and pulled the door closed behind us. The first floor was an entirely open space that had once been used to house the vats, with storage space for barrels and sliding doors to admit trucks. The doors were long gone, and the entrances bricked up. To the right, beside what had once been a small office, a flight of stairs led up to the next floor. There was no elevator. The next three floors were similar to the first: largely open-plan, with no signs of habitation.

  The top story was different. Someone had commenced a halfhearted division of the space into apartments, although it looked like the work had been done sometime before, then abandoned. Walls had been erected, but most had no doors added, so that it was possible to see the empty areas within. There appeared to be five or six apartments planned in total, but only one seemed to be finished. The green entrance door was unmarked and closed. I took the left side, while Angel and Louis moved to the right. I knocked twice, then drew back quickly. There was no reply. I tried again, but with the same result. We now had a couple of options, neither of which appealed to me. Either we could try to break down the door, or Angel could pick the two locks and risk getting his head blown off if someone was inside and listening.

  Angel made the choice. He got down on one knee, spread his little set of tools on the floor, then handed one to Louis. Simultaneously, they worked the locks, both of them trying to shield themselves as best they could by keeping as much of their bodies as possible against the wall. It seemed to take a long time, but was probably less than a minute. Eventually, both locks turned, and they pushed the door open.

  To the left was a galley-style kitchen, with the remains of some fast food on the counter. There was cream in the refrigerator, with three days remaining before it expired, and a paper bag filled with pita bread, also apparently fresh. Apart from some cans of beans and franks and a couple of containers of macaroni and cheese, this was the sum total of food in the apartment. The entrance hall then led into a lounge area, consisting only of a couch, an easy chair, and a TV and VCR. Again to the left was the smaller of the apartment’s two bedrooms, the single bed casually made, and with a pair of boots and one or two items of clothing visible on a chair by the window. With Angel covering me, I checked the closet, but i
t contained only cheap trousers and shirts.

  We heard a low whistle, and followed it to where Louis stood in the doorway of a second bedroom to the right, his body blocking our view. He stepped to one side, and we saw what lay within.

  It was a shrine, and its inspiration lay in a place far distant from this one, and in a past far stranger than any we could imagine.

  III

  But thee and me He never can destroy;

  Change us He may, but not o’erwhelm; we are

  Of as eternal essence, and must war

  With Him if He will war with us…

  —Lord Byron, Heaven and Earth: A Mystery (1821)

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The town of Sedlec lies some forty miles from the city of Prague. An incurious traveler, perhaps deterred by the dull suburbs, might not even deign to stop here, instead opting to press on to the nearby, and better known, town of Kutná Hora, which has now virtually absorbed Sedlec into itself. Yet it was not always thus, for this part of the old kingdom of Bohemia was one of the medieval world’s largest sources of silver. By the late thirteenth century, one third of all Europe’s silver came from this district, but silver coins were being minted here as early as the tenth century. The silver lured many to this place, making it a serious rival to the economic and political supremacy of Prague. Intriguers came, and adventurers, merchants, and craftsmen. And where there was power, so too there were the representatives of the one power that stands above all. Where there was wealth, there was the Church.

  The first Cistercian monastery was founded in Sedlec by Miroslav of Cimburk in 1142. Its monks came from Valdsassen Abbey in the Upper Palatinate, attracted by the promise of silver ore, for Valdsassen was one of the Morimon line of monasteries associated with mining. (The Cistercians, to their credit, might charitably be said to have employed a pragmatic attitude toward wealth and its accumulation.) Clearly, God Himself was smiling upon their endeavors, for deposits of silver ore were found on the monastery’s lands in the late thirteenth century, and the influence of the Cistercians grew as a result. Unfortunately, God’s attentions quickly turned elsewhere, and by the end of the century the monastery suffered the first of its numerous destructions at the hands of hostile men, a process that reached its peak in the attack of 1421, which left it in smoldering ruins, the attack that marked the first coming of the Believers….

  Sedlec, Bohemia

  April 21, 1421

  The noise of battle had ceased. It no longer shook the monastery walls, and no more were the monks troubled by fine scatterings of gray dust that descended upon their white garb, accumulating in their tonsures so that the young looked old and the old looked older still. Distant flames still rose to the south, and the bodies of the slain were accumulating inside the nearby cemetery gates, with more being added to their number every day, but the great armies were now silent and watchful. The stench was foul, but the monks were almost used to it after all these years of dealing with the dead, for bones were forever stacked like kindling around the ossuary, piled high against the walls as graves were emptied of their occupants and new remains interred in their place in a great cycle of burial, decay, and display. When the wind blew from the east, poisonous smoke from the smelting of ore was added to the mix, and those forced to work in the open coughed until their robes were dotted with blood.

  The abbot of Sedlec stood at the gate of his lodge, in the shadow of the monastery’s conventual church. He was the heir of the great Abbot Heidenreich, diplomat and adviser to kings, who had died a century earlier but who had transformed the monastery into a center of influence, power, and wealth—aided by the discovery of great deposits of silver beneath the order’s lands—while never forgetting the monks’ duty toward the less fortunate of God’s children. Thus, a cathedral grew alongside a hospital, makeshift chapels were constructed among the mining settlements sanctioned by Heidenreich, and the monks buried great numbers of the dead without stricture or complaint. How ironic it was, thought the abbot, that in Heidenrich’s successes lay the very seeds that had now grown to doom the community, for it had provided a magnet of sorts for the Catholic forces and their leader, the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, pretender to the Bohemian crown. His armies were camped around Kutná Hora, and the abbot’s efforts to keep some distance between the monastery and the emperor’s forces had proved fruitless. Sedlec’s reputed wealth was a temptation to all, and he was already giving shelter to Carthusian monks from Prague whose monastery had been destroyed some years earlier during the ravages that followed the death of Wenceslas IV. Those who would loot Sedlec needed no further incentive to attack, yet Sigismund, by his presence, had now made its destruction inevitable.

  It was the killing of the reformer Jan Hus that had brought these events to pass. The abbot had once met Hus, an ordained priest at the University of Prague, where he was dean of the faculty of arts and, later, rector, and had been impressed by his zeal. Nevertheless, Hus’s reformist instincts were dangerous. The church was in crisis. Three different popes were making conflicting claims on the papacy: John XXIII of the Italians, who had been forced to flee Rome and had taken refuge in Germany; Gregory XXII, of the French; and Benedict XIII, for the Spaniards. The latter pair had already been deposed once, but refused to accept their fate. In such times Hus’s demands for a Bible in Czech, and his continued insistence on conducting the Mass in Czech rather than Latin, inevitably led to his being branded a heretic, a charge that was exacerbated by his espousal of the beliefs of the earlier heretic, John Wycliffe, and his branding of the foul John XXIII as the Antichrist, a view with which the abbot, at least in his own soul, was reluctant to take issue. It was hardly a surprise, then, when Hus was excommunicated.

  Summoned to the Council of Constance in 1414 by Sigismund to air his grievances, Hus was imprisoned and tried for heresy. He refused to recant, and in 1415 was taken to “The Devil’s Place,” the site of execution in a nearby meadow. He was stripped naked, his hands and feet were tied to a stake with wet ropes, and his neck was chained to a wooden post. Oil was dumped on his head, and kindling and straw piled up to his chin. It took half an hour for the flames to catch, and Hus eventually suffocated from the thick black smoke. His body was ripped to pieces, his bones were broken, and his heart was roasted over an open fire. His remains were then cremated, the ashes shoveled into the carcass of a steer, and the whole lot cast into the Rhine.

  Hus’s followers in Bohemia were outraged at his death and vowed to defend his teachings to the last drop of blood. A crusade was declared against them, and Sigismund sent an army of twenty thousand into Bohemia to quell the uprising, but the Hussites annihilated them, led by Jan Ziska, a one-eyed knight who turned carts into war chariots and called his men “warriors of God.” Now Sigismund was licking his wounds and planning his next move. A peace treaty had been agreed, sparing those who would accede to the Hussites’ Four Articles of Prague, including the clergy’s renunciation of all worldly goods and secular authority, an article to which the abbot of Sedlec was clearly unable to accede. Earlier that day the citizens of Kutná Hora had marched to the Sedlec monastery, around which were gathered the Hussite troops, to plead for mercy and forgiveness, for it was well-known that Hus’s followers in the town had been thrown alive into the mine shafts, and the citizens feared the consequences if they did not bend the knee to the attacking troops. The abbot listened while the two sides sang the Te Deum in acknowledgment of their truce, and he felt ill at the hypocrisy involved. The Hussites would not sack Kutná Hora, for its mining and minting industries were too valuable, but they wanted to secure it for themselves nonetheless. All of this was mere pretense, and the abbot knew that before long both sides would again be at each other’s throats over the great wealth of the town.

  The Hussites had withdrawn some distance from the monastery, but he could still see their fires. Soon they would come, and they would spare no one found within its walls. He was consumed by anger and regret. He loved the monastery. He had been party to its
most recent constructions, and the very raising of its places of worship had in itself been as much an act of contemplation and meditation as the services carried out within them, their every stone imbued with spirituality, the stern asceticism of the lines a precaution against any distraction from prayer and contemplation. Its church, the greatest of its kind in the land, was patterned on a Latin cross, achieving a harmony with the natural formation of the region’s river valley by featuring a central axis that oriented the choir down the river’s stream rather than toward the east. Yet the conventual church was also a complex variant on the original plans drawn up by the order’s chief propagator, Bernard of Clairvaux, and so it was imbued with his love of music, which manifested itself in his faith in the mysticism of numbers based on Augustine’s theory of music and its application to the proportions of buildings. Purity and balance were expressions of divine harmony, and thus the conventual Church of the Assumption of Our Lady and Saint John the Baptist was a beautiful, silent hymn to God, every column a note, every perfect arch a Te Deum.

  Now this wondrous structure was at risk of total destruction, even though, in its simplicity and absence of unnecessary adornment, it symbolized the very qualities that the reformists should have prized the most. Almost without realizing he was doing so, the abbot reached into the folds of his garment and removed a small stone. Embedded in it was a tiny creature, unlike anything the abbot had ever seen walk, crawl, or swim, now turned to stone itself, petrified as though caught in a basilisk’s stare. It resembled a snail, except its shell was larger, its spirals closer together. One of the laborers had found it while quarrying by the river, and had given it to the abbot as a gift. It was said that this place had once been covered by a great sea, now long since gone, and the abbot wondered if this little animal had lived by the ocean’s gift before it found itself marooned as the sea retreated, and was slowly absorbed by the land. Perhaps it was a relic of the Great Flood; if so, then its twin must yet exist elsewhere on the earth, but secretly the abbot hoped that such a thing was not true. He prized it because it was unique, and he thought it both sad and beautiful in the transience of its nature. Its time had passed, just as the abbot’s time was now drawing to a close.