The Black Angel

by John Connolly

  It was now late, and dark. I decided that there was nothing more that I could do until the morning, when I would run the numbers from Tager’s cell phone bill. I went back to my hotel room and called Rachel. Her mother answered the phone and told me that Rachel was already in bed. Sam had slept badly the night before and spent most of the day crying until, exhausted at last, she had succumbed to rest. Rachel had fallen asleep immediately after. I told Joan not to disturb her but to let her know that I’d called.

  “She’s worried about you,” said Joan.

  “I’m okay,” I said. “Be sure to tell her that.”

  I promised that I’d try to return to Maine by late the next day, then hung up the phone and ate at the Thai place beside the hotel, just because it was something to do other than sitting alone in my room with the fear that my relationship was disintegrating in my hands. I stuck to the vegetarian dishes. After my visit to Tager’s office, the coppery taste of spilled blood had returned to my mouth with a vengeance.

  Charles Neddo sat in his office chair, his desk scattered with illustrations, all of them taken from books written after 1870, and most depicting variations on the Black Angel. He had never quite understood why there were no depictions prior to that date. No, that wasn’t true. Rather, the drawings and paintings became more uniform in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, less speculative and with a certain commonality to their lines, especially those originating with Bohemian artists. Depictions from earlier centuries were far more diverse, so that without a written indication of the source, imagined or otherwise, it would be impossible to tell that all were renderings of the same subject.

  There was music playing in the background, a collection of Satie piano pieces. Neddo liked their air of melancholy. He removed his glasses, leaned away from his desk, and stretched. The wrinkled cuffs of his shirt rolled back on his thin arms, exposing a small mass of scar tissue above his left wrist, as though a mark of some kind had been inexpertly obscured in the relatively recent past. It was stinging slightly, and Neddo touched his left hand gently to the scarring, the tips of his fingers following the lines of the grapnel once branded upon his skin. One could turn away, he thought, and hide oneself among worthless antiques, but the old obsessions lingered. Otherwise, why would he have surrounded himself with bones?

  He returned to the drawings, aware of a rising sense of excitement and anticipation. The private detective’s visit had revealed a great deal to him, and earlier that evening he had received another unexpected call. The two monks had been nervous and impatient, and Neddo understood that their presence in the city was a sign that events were moving quickly, and that a resolution of sorts would soon be achieved. Neddo told them all that he knew, then received absolution from the older one for his sins.

  Satie came to an end, and the room fell into silence as Neddo put his papers away. He believed that he knew what Garcia had been creating and why it was being built. They were close, and now, as never before, Neddo was aware of the conflict raging within himself. It had taken him many years to break free of their influence, but like an alcoholic he feared that he would never really be free of the urge to fall. He touched his left hand to the cross around his neck, and felt the scar on his wrist begin to burn.

  Rachel was deep in sleep when her mother woke her. She was startled and tried to say something, but her mother’s fingers pressed themselves to her lips.

  “Shhh,” whispered Joan. “Listen.”

  Rachel remained quiet and still. There was no sound for a moment, then she heard the scuffling noises coming from the roof of the house.

  “There’s someone up there,” said Joan.

  Rachel nodded, still listening. There was something odd about the sounds. They were not quite footsteps. Instead, it seemed to her that whoever was up there was crawling across the slates, and crawling quickly. She was reminded, unpleasantly, of the movements of a lizard. The noise came again, but this time it was echoed by a vibration against the wall behind her head. The bedroom occupied the entire width of the first floor, so that the bed rested against the wall of the house. A second heavy presence was now ascending the sheer wall toward the roof, and once again it sounded like it was moving on four legs.

  Rachel got up and walked quickly to the closet. She opened it quietly, moved two shoe boxes aside, and looked at the small gun safe behind them. She resented the fact that it was even there, and had insisted that it have a five-number combination lock to prevent Sam from gaining access to it, even though it was six feet off the ground on the topmost shelf. She entered the code and heard the bolts slide. Inside were two guns. She removed the smaller of the two, the .38. She hated firearms, but in the aftermath of recent events she had reluctantly agreed to learn how to use this one. She loaded it, using the speed loader, then went back to her bed and knelt. There was a small white box on the wall, with a red button on top. She pressed it just as she heard the window shaking in the next room, as though someone were trying to open it.

  “Sam!” she shouted.

  The alarm began to sound, tearing apart the silence of the marshes as Rachel ran to Sam’s room, Joan close behind her. She could hear the child crying, terrified by the sudden burst of noise. The door was open, and faced the window. Sam was writhing in her cot, her little hands beating against the air and her face almost purple with the force of her tears. For a fleeting instant, Rachel thought she could see something pale move against the window—then it was gone.

  “Take her,” said Rachel. “Get her into the bathroom and lock the door.”

  Joan grabbed the child and ran from the room.

  Slowly, Rachel approached the window. The gun was a little unsteady in her grip, but her finger no longer rested outside the guard and instead was gently touching the trigger. Nearer now: ten feet, five, four, three…

  The sound of crawling again came from above her head, this time moving away from Sam’s room and toward the far side of the house. The noise distracted Rachel, and she lifted her head to follow its progress, as though the intensity of her gaze could penetrate the ceiling and slates and permit her to see what was above.

  When she looked back to the window there was a face there, hanging upside down in the night from the top of the glass, dark hair dangling vertically from pale features.

  It was a woman.

  Rachel fired, shattering the window. She kept firing, even as the sound of the presences on the roof and wall came again, growing fainter now as they fled. She could see blue light scything through the darkness, and heard Sam crying even above the noise of the alarm. And then she was crying with her daughter, howling with fear and anger, her finger still pulling the trigger over and over even as the hammer struck only the empty casings and the night air flooded the room, bringing with it the smell of salt water and marsh grass and dead winter things.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Few people would have described Sandy and Larry Crane as happy individuals. Even Larry’s fellow VFW members, upon whom time was inexorably taking its toll and who now boasted a rapidly dwindling platoon of World War II survivors among their number, tended at best to tolerate Larry and his wife when they occasionally attended a veterans’ social event. Mark Hall, the only other member of their little band who was still alive, often told his wife that in the aftermath of D-day it was really just a question of who was going to kill Larry first: the Germans or his own side. Larry Crane could peel an orange in his pocket and open a candy bar with so little noise as to suggest that his time might have been better served in a special operations unit, except that Larry was a born coward and therefore of little use to his own unit, never mind to an elite group of hardened soldiers forced to operate behind enemy lines in desperate conditions. Hell, Mark Hall could have sworn that he’d seen Larry crouching behind better men during combat in the hope that they would take a bullet before he did.

  And sure enough, that was what happened. Larry Crane might have been a cheap sonofabitch, and yellow as a buttercup’s ass to boot, but
he was also lucky. In the midst of carnage, the only blood he ever got on him was other men’s. Hall might not have admitted it to anyone later, might even have been reluctant to admit it to himself, but as the war wore on he found himself sticking close to Larry Crane in the hope that some of that luck might rub off on him. He guessed that it had, because he’d lived when others had died.

  It wasn’t all good luck, though. He’d paid a price by becoming Larry Crane’s creature, bound to him by the shared knowledge of what they had done in the Cistercian monastery at Fontfroide. Mark Hall didn’t talk about that with his wife, no sir. Mark Hall didn’t talk about that with anyone except his God, and then only in the ultimate secret confessional of his own mind. He hadn’t set foot in church since that day, had even managed to convince their only daughter to have her wedding outdoors by offering her the most expensive hotel in Savannah as a venue. His wife assumed that he’d suffered some crisis of faith over what he’d endured during the war, and he let her believe that, supporting her assumptions by making occasional dark references to “the things I saw over in Europe.” He supposed that there was even a little kernel of truth hidden beneath the shell of the lie, because he had seen some terrible things, and done some terrible things too.

  God, they were only children when they went off to fight, virgins, and virgin children had no call to be holding guns and firing them at other children. When he looked at his grandchildren, and saw how cosseted and naive they were despite the pretence of knowingness that they maintained, he found it impossible to visualize them as he had once been. He recalled sitting on the bus to Camp Wolters, his momma’s tears still drying on his cheek, listening while the driver told the Negroes to sit at the back because the front seats were for the white folks, didn’t matter that they were all headed for the same conflict and that bullets were blind to race. The blacks didn’t object, although he could see the resentment simmering in a couple of them, and their fists tightened as some of the other recruits joined in, wisecracking at them as they walked to their seats. They knew better than to respond. One word from them, and the whole situation would have exploded, and Texas was tough back then. Any one of those Negroes raised a hand to a white man, and they wouldn’t have to worry about the Germans or the Japanese, because their own side would take care of them before they had time to break in their boots, and nobody would ever be called to answer for what befell them.

  Later, he heard that some of those black men, the ones who could read and write, were told to sign up for Officer Candidates School, on account of the fact that the army was organizing a division of black soldiers, the Ninety-second, to be known as the Buffalo Division after the black soldiers who fought in the Indian wars. He was with Larry Crane by then, the two of them sitting in some god-awful rain-drenched field in England when someone told them about it, and Crane started off bitching about how the niggers were getting the breaks while he was still a grunt. The invasion was imminent, and soon some of those black soldiers found their way to England too, which made Crane bitch even more. It didn’t matter to him that their officers weren’t allowed to enter headquarters by the front door like the white officers, or that the black troops had crossed the Atlantic without any escort because they weren’t considered as valuable to the war effort. No, all Larry Crane saw was uppity Negroes, even after the beach at Omaha was secured, their unit smoking cigarettes on the walls of a captured German emplacement, and they looked down to see the black soldiers walking with sacks along the sand, filling them with the body parts of the men who had died, reduced to the level of collectors of human garbage. No, even then Larry Crane saw fit to complain, calling them cowards who weren’t fit to touch the remains of better men, although it was the army that dictated that they weren’t fit to fight, not then, not until men like General Davis pushed for the integration of black GIs into infantry combat units in the winter of 1944, and the Buffalo Division began fighting its way through Italy. Hall had few problems with Negro soldiers. He didn’t want to bunk with them, and he sure as hell wasn’t about to drink from the same bottle, but it seemed to him that they could take a bullet as well as the next man, and as long as they kept their guns pointed in the right direction he was happy to wear the same uniform as they. By comparison with Larry Crane, this made Mark Hall a bastion of liberalism, but Hall had sufficient self-knowledge to recognize that by making only a cursory effort to contradict Crane or tell him to keep his damn mouth shut he was culpable too. Time and time again, Hall tried to put distance between himself and Larry Crane, but he grew to realize that Larry was a survivor, and an uneasy bond developed between the two men until the events at Fontfroide occurred, and that bond became something deeper, something unspeakable.

  And so Mark Hall maintained a pretence of friendship with Larry Crane, sharing a drink with him when there was no way to avoid doing otherwise, even inviting him to that goddamned ruinous wedding, though his wife had made it clear that she didn’t want either Larry or his slovenly wife sullying her daughter’s special day with their presence, and sulked for a week when he informed her that he was paying for the whole fucking day and if she had a problem with his friends, then maybe she should have put more money into her bank account so that she could have paid for the entire wedding herself. Yeah, he’d told her all right. He was a big guy, a great guy, swearing at his wife to cover his own shame and guilt.

  Hall figured that he had something on Larry Crane too: after all, they had both been there together, and both were complicit in what had occurred. He’d allowed Larry to dispose of some of what they had found, then had accepted his share of the money gratefully. The cash had enabled Hall to buy a piece of a used car dealership, and he built upon that initial investment to make himself the auto king of northeast Georgia. That was how he was depicted in his newspaper ads and in the TV commercials: he was the Auto King, the Number One Ruler on Prices. Nobody Beats the Auto King. Nobody Can Steal His Crown When It Comes to Value.

  It was an empire built on good management, low overheads, and a little blood. Just a little. In the context of all the blood spilled during the war, it was hardly more than a spot. He and Larry never spoke about what happened after that day, and Hall hoped that he would never have to speak of it again until the day he died.

  Which, curiously, was kind of what happened, in the end.

  Sandy Crane sat on a stool by the kitchen window, watching her husband wrestle a garden hose like he was Tarzan trying to subdue a snake. Bored, she puffed on her menthol cigarette and tipped some of the ash into the sink. Her husband always hated it when she did that. He said it made the sink reek of old mints. Sandy thought the sink stank pretty bad already, and a dab of ash wasn’t going to make a whole lot of difference. If he didn’t have the smell of her cigarettes to whine about, she had no doubt that he would find something else. At least she got a little pleasure out of smoking, which went some way toward helping her to put up with her husband’s shit, and it wasn’t like those fucking cheap cartons that Larry bought for himself smelled any better.

  Larry was squatting now, trying to untangle the hose, and failing. It was his own fault. She had told him often enough that if he rolled it up properly instead of throwing it half-assed into the garage, then he wouldn’t have these problems, but then Larry wasn’t one to take advice from anyone, least of all his wife. In a way, he spent his life trying to get out of messes that he created for himself, and she spent her life telling him that she’d told him so.

  Speaking of half-assed, the cleft of Larry’s buttocks was clearly visible above the waistband of his pants. She could hardly bear to see him naked now. It pained her, the way everything about him sagged: his buttocks, his belly, his little shriveled organ, now practically hairless like his little shriveled head. Not that she was any bargain herself, but she was younger than her husband and knew how to make the best of what she had and how to hide her deficiencies. A number of men had learned, just a little too late, how deficient Sandy Crane was once her clothes hit the floor, but the
y’d screwed her anyway. A lesser woman wouldn’t have known whom to despise more: the men or herself. Sandy Crane didn’t worry too much about it and, as in most other areas of her life, settled for despising everyone but herself equally.

  She had met Larry when he was already in his fifties, and she was twenty years his junior. He hadn’t been much to look at, even then, but he was in a pretty good position financially. He owned a bar and restaurant in Atlanta, but he sold out when the “faggots” started making the area their own. That was her Larry: dumber than a busload of tongueless morons, so prejudiced that he was incapable of seeing that the gays who were moving into the neigborhood were infinitely classier and wealthier than his existing clientele. He sold the business for maybe a quarter of what it was now worth, and he had seethed over it ever since. If anything, it had made him even more of a sexist, racist bigot than he ever was before, which was saying something, because Larry Crane was already only a couple of holes in a pillowcase away from putting burning crosses in people’s backyards.

  Sometimes she wondered why she bothered staying with Larry at all, but the thought was quickly followed by the realization that snatched moments in motel rooms or in other women’s bedrooms were unlikely to be translated into long-term relationships with a sound financial underpinning. At least with Larry she had a house, and a car, and a moderately comfortable lifestyle. His demands were few, and growing fewer now that his sex drive had deserted him entirely. Anyway, he was so coiled up with piss and fury at the world that it was only a matter of time before he had a stroke or a heart attack. That garden hose might yet do her a favor, if she could learn to keep her mouth shut for long enough.

  She finished her cigarette, lit another from its dying embers, then tossed the butt in the waste disposal. The newspaper lay on the table, waiting for Larry to return from his labors so that he could have something else to complain about for the rest of the day. She picked it up and flipped through it, conscious that this simple act would be enough to get her husband pissed. He liked to be the first to read the newspaper. He hated the smell of perfume and menthol upon its pages, and raged at the way she wrinkled and tore it as she read, but if she didn’t look at it now, then it would be old news by the time she got to it; old news, what’s more, with Larry’s toilet stink upon it, since her husband seemed to concentrate best when he was sitting on the can, forcing his aged body to perform another racked, dry evacuation.