by Diane Capri
“Yes. No. I’m not sure, at least not a hundred percent. I just have to try or I’ll go through eternity never knowing what might have been.” He stepped back and tried to smile. Poignantly. “I appreciate everything you’ve done, Tamara, more than I can say. But I have to try.”
She nodded. This was every angel’s choice. She could not take this right from him, could not forbid him.
“No matter what, Nikolai, you are loved with an everlasting love. And you can always come back.”
“I doubt that.” His heart ached even as he hardened it. “It’s too late.”
“It’s never too late.”
He kissed the top of her head.
“It is for me.” And with that he walked out of the boardroom, leaving Tamara alone by the window.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE ELEVATOR RIDE SHOULD HAVE TAKEN HIM to the lobby but went down a few levels further. Levels Nick didn’t know existed. He stood ramrod straight and hardened his gaze at the door. The elevator, which had been pumping in cool air and what sounded like Fliegt heim, ihr Raben from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, seemed to have grown smaller. And warmer.
Brilliant. I hate opera.
Without a chime or any other indication as to where the elevator had landed, the music stopped.
The air conditioner’s fan stopped.
The lights went out.
Nick remembered he was still inside his own construct and snapped his fingers, but the darkness prevailed.
He groped around.
Cold doors. Buttons on the panel.
Still inside the construct.
“Splendid.” Trapped inside an elevator in the Corporate Office building, heaven knows how many levels beneath...
He pounded on the doors—was the elevator air growing stale?
“Hello?” Another finger snap. He pounded the door again. “Anyone out there?” He wedged his fingers in between the seams of the cold metal doors and pulled with all his might. The lights came on, the music resumed, the doors slid open.
A long hallway stretched before him, filled with light. Spotless white walls with no paintings, no markings, just pure white. At the end of the hallway one small sign hung above the white twin doors. He couldn’t read it from this distance so he walked close enough to see the sign clearly. Two bold capital letters:
A.R.
Beneath them, in small print:
ANGEL RESOURCES: NO APPOINTMENT NECESSARY
Even before his knuckles reached the surface of the doors, they yawned open. The unmitigated whiteness enveloped everything within to the point that Nick couldn’t see the floor, wall, ceiling, or anything in the room that seemed to have just swallowed him.
He spun around and could no longer see the door. A physically void space would not have fazed him ordinarily, but to return to the elevator he needed to find that door. In this room he could see nothing—couldn’t even tell it was a room. But out of nowhere someone suddenly appeared to join him in it.
A bespectacled gentleman dressed in a white suit, white shirt, and white tie sat at a desk, his hands folded before him. He had a full head of white hair, and looked quite harmless, which made Nick suspicious.
“May I help you?” he said.
“I seemed to have come to the wrong level.”
He lowered his bifocals and looked at Nick over the rims. “Ah, yes! Nikolai. We’ve been expecting you.” He extended his hand. Nick shook it.
“Expecting?”
“Yes, of course.” He pointed to Nick’s left. “Won’t you please make yourself comfortable?” A plush white chair appeared. Nick sat. “Your first time, I see.”
Nick leaned back into the wonderfully soft upholstery.
“It appears so, Mr...” He craned his neck to read the brass nameplate on the desk. “Mr. Morloch?”
“Why don’t you just call me Harold, hmmm? It’s a lot easier to remember. Tea?”
“Thank you.” The chair was so comfortable he felt he might actually fall asleep—whatever that was like. “Earl Grey, please.”
A delicate porcelain cup and saucer appeared in his hands, the cup steaming with aromatic tea. The ability to enjoy it was perhaps a happy byproduct of “spending too much time” with mortals. He took a delicious sip, then leaned back into the chair, surprisingly soothed.
Harold sipped from an identical teacup, his little finger pointing as he tilted it to his lips, then set it down in its saucer on the desk.
“So, Nikolai, welcome to A.R.”
Until now, he hadn’t known such a division existed. At which point did this cease to be his construct and become someone else’s, if indeed it were? He took a considerable sip of the Earl Grey and finished it. As he set the cup in its saucer, both vanished.
“You said you were expecting me?”
“Yes, well...Let’s see now, how best to explain?” Harold steepled his fingers. “You’ve had countless centennial performance reviews, no?”
“Countless.”
“A couple of millennial reviews?”
“And?”
“We're privy to more than just metrics, Nikolai. Your dossier contains data on your behavioral tendencies, noteworthy remarks, as well as your self-evals.”
“I didn’t plan on coming here.”
Harold peered over his horn-rimmed eyeglasses.
“Didn’t you?”
“Look, I’ve no time for games. What’s this all about?”
“No time? Fascinating expression.” For an instant Harold’s eyes burned with thinly veiled annoyance. And then, just as quickly, they returned to their placid state. “I take it you’re tired of the menial work.”
“Wouldn’t you be?”
“Fed up with the meaningless deaths.”
Nick sat up straight and leaned forward.
“You got all this from my doss—”
“Done with watching your efforts go unrecognized while younger, less experienced reapers pass you up.” His words accelerated. “You’re a warrior of the cosmos, yet relegated to—”
“Non-corporeal babysitting.” They said it at the same time.
“Precisely!” Nick said. “That’s why I’m tendering my resig—”
“Tut-tut!” Harold held up a hand. “There’s no need to resign, my young friend.”
“Young? I’ll have you know—”
“How would you like to get fast-tracked?”
This was clearly Harold’s construct, the way he commanded every element—the furniture, the monitors, the tea.
“I’m listening,” Nick said.
“Consider it a lateral move, initially. We’ll get you out of that dead-end department.”
“Oh?”
“For starters, how would you like to begin dealing with meaningful deaths?”
Interesting.
“I’d still be a reaper, though, wouldn’t I?”
“Only in the interim. We’d promote you to more meaningful projects soon enough. You’re sick of taking innocent children, good people who never did anything to deserve it. What if you took those who really do deserve it?”
Nick leaned back, crossed his arms. He liked it but wasn’t ready to let that show.
“Go on.”
Harold stood up, waved him over, and with two hands traced the outline of a large rectangle. A flat-screen television filled the space—looked like a 92-inch, 3D (rather, 4D or more), ultra high-def screen.
“Take a good look at all the people in the world who are dying, Nick.”
The screen flashed by with scenes of earthquakes, tsunamis, war, disease. Starving children, deathly sick families in Africa, India, homeless people in the United States freezing to death in dark alleys...It was hard to discern relative time in someone else’s construct, but as the scenes went by faster and faster Nick could swear that at one point a frame stood still for an extra nano-second: Victoria Station, where a little girl—
He blinked, and the screen showed image after image of evil people throughout history. From the l
ikes of Adolph Hitler and Osama Bin Laden to a drug dealer, a child molester, a serial killer sitting amongst his trophy collection—
Harold passed a hand over the screen and it disappeared.
“All right, Nick. What did you see just now?”
“The scum of the earth, essentially.”
“Those are the souls we take pleasure in harvesting.”
It was brilliant. A transfer. No need to resign. Perhaps he had already passed probation. Perhaps the promise that all things work together for the good applied not only to humans but to angels, too. In any case, it beat the tar out of reaper work.
“This I can do.”
“Splendid! You start immediately. Hands-on training will take place on the job. Sign the transfer docs and you’re on your way.” A thick stack of papers in a black leather binder appeared in Harold’s hand. He set it down on the desk, pulled a black fountain pen from his breast pocket, handed it to Nick, and opened the contract to the last page.
“Sign here.”
“I suppose I ought to read it first.”
“Be my guest, Nick. We have all the time in the...” A sheepish grin. “We have time.”
For the most part the terms, warranties, and stipulations looked acceptable. There was one clause that mentioned a temporary abdication of angelic methodology, explained in language so dense he found himself skimming it. Finally he reached the signature line, clicked the black fountain pen, signed his name—in red ink!—and handed the contract to Harold.
“Very good,” Harold said after a close look at the final page. “This contract is hereby executed and binding.”
“Yes. Now, there’s one thing—”
“Thank you, Nikolai.” He gave Nick’s hand a quick shake. “You’ll be hearing from your new supervisor shortly.”
“But—”
“Goodbye.”
CHAPTER FIVE
HE NEVER SAW THE DOOR OPEN. Nor did he see Harold leave. Nick stood with the fountain pen in his left hand and looked around, trying to discern any spatial point of reference.
He couldn’t.
Like Chloe’s train, the entire construct began funneling into a small black circle with a whooshing sound that sounded like an industrial-strength shop vac. The black hole sucked in all the white around him and eventually seized Nick’s leg, tilting him sideways.
He could do nothing to stop from getting siphoned into that tiny void. In the next ten seconds, or ten hours for all he knew, Nick found himself standing on something solid in the gloom. He cleared his throat, and the sound of it resounded as though in a cavern that stretched for miles. He heard a dissonant trickling that seemed to grow in texture and complexity. As it got louder, the darkness around him began to pull away like black curtains at the unveiling of a monument—
Not a monument, but the body of an unreasonably large man dressed in a black suit, with Gargoyle sunglasses masking his eyes and no expression whatsoever on his face. Nick fell back onto the cool surface of the ground. But all he could see before him were the pant legs of what looked like a giant.
“Watch yourself.” The black-suited man’s voice was a basso profundo. When Nick got to his feet, he realized that this man with the coffee complexion, muscular build, black goatee, and shining bald pate stood at least six inches taller than his own six-feet two. He looked sort of like a larger, beefier version of Samuel L. Jackson. With a walking stick.
“Wait, you can see me?” Nick said.
He took a step back since Goliath here neither spoke nor exhibited any sign of affording him personal space. All around, humans pushed past one another through the long halls, up and down the wide staircase, and under the semi-circular windows near the domed ceiling adorned with an astrological mural painted in gold.
Grand Central Station, New York.
Another terminus.
“Wonderful.”
Goliath raised his shoulders slightly and exhaled with barely contained irritation. All the other briefcase-toting luggage-rolling humans either walked past or through him.
“So, you’re my new supervisor,” Nick said.
The corner of Goliath’s mouth twitched under his mustache. Nothing else moved, not even his eyebrows. Nick stepped up to him.
“You’re going to have to say something sooner or later if you expect me to—”
“You can still return to your previous position.”
“Ah, so he does speak.” Nick shook his head. “All right, Goliath—”
“Johann.”
“Johann, right. Let’s get one thing straight. I am never going back to that dead-end reaper business. This is my future.”
One hand still resting on his walking stick, which now revealed a golden orb under his ebony-gloved fingers, Johann lowered his sunglasses and glared at Nick over the rims.
“What do you know of your future?” He replaced his Gargoyles and clicked his tongue. “Sophomoric reapers.”
“And what’re you, a blooming archangel?”
Johann snapped his fingers—how he did that wearing gloves was anyone’s guess—and something resembling a human smartphone appeared in his hand. With his thumb he typed away and muttered something about signs of excess mingling with mortals.
“Hey!” Nick said. “To whom do you report?”
He tried to grab the smartphone, but Johann snapped his fingers again and it winked out of sight.
“You’d do best to go back, Nikolai. Your path has already been ordained.”
“I said, to whom do you report?”
“Are. You. Going. Back?”
“When hell freezes over.” A woman in a tan raincoat pulling a carry-on passed obliviously through them both, and Nick started to laugh. He thought of what he and his giant must look like—only nobody could see them. “You really ought to try laughing, Johann,” he said. “It does wonders for constipation. You know, of the mind.”
Both hands on his walking stick again, eyes hidden behind his shades, Johann said, “Be careful.”
“Don’t worry about me, buddy, I can...” he was gone, suddenly “...look after myself.”
Sensing his strength and aggression returning, Nick leaned back against the window with his hands behind his head, peered over the ledge, and considered his new career. With this transfer he’d been granted not only a break from the meaningless deaths but a chance to use his power for something that truly mattered on this pitiful planet.
For the first time in a hundred years or so, he smiled.
CHAPTER SIX
WITH A HEAVY HEART, CARLITO GUZMAN looked down at his bodyguard. Had he not been forced at gunpoint to his knees by Lito’s two lieutenants, Alfonso would have stood six foot four—nearly a foot taller than Lito, sometimes called The Chihuahua, though never to his face. Thin lines webbed Alfonso’s eyes, black and red blotches littered his face, his busted lips bled.
“Ten years, Alfonso!” Lito sighed. “Ten years, I trusted you with my life. You took a bullet for me at the Conroy shipyards. And now this?”
“You have to understand, Lito. I was—”
“Don’t even try.” Lito held up a hand. “It’s embarrassing.” He knew what had to be done. It was for the good of the family, the organization. For the good of Maria, though she’d never understand.
Lito’s anger burned white hot, his voice dropped to a deadly whisper.
“I will not abide a traitor!”
“You don’t understand!” The hulking bodyguard gagged from the blood in his throat. “Maria and me, we’re in love! We’re—”
“If your intentions had been honorable, you wouldn’t have sneaked around behind my back!”
From outside his office, Maria banged on the door.
“Please, Lito. Don’t hurt him!”
“I’m going to have a word with you too, hermanita. You wait there.” He turned back to Alfonso. “I can forgive many things, you know that. But betrayal? Dishonoring my sister?”
Now Alfonso began to laugh. At first a subtle ripple from
his chest, then a crescendo until the laughter became near maniacal.
“Oh, you find this amusing, do you?” Lito said.
The amusement sloughed off Alfonso’s face, leaving in its place a dark, cruel expression that gave Lito pause.
“You will see it my way,” he said.
For a moment, Lito remembered just how imposing Alfonso could be, how dangerous he was to anyone that dared cross his family’s safety perimeter. Even on his knees with two strong men holding him down at gunpoint, he could intimidate with his eyes—Lito referred to it as Alfonso’s being in the kill zone. He’d never expected to see it turned against him.
“If I didn’t know you better,” Lito said slowly, “I’d think you were threatening me.”
“Threatening is such a harsh term. I call it informing you.”
“You’re in no position to—”
“I have leverage, Lito.”
“You have nothing.”
“Oh, but I do. Privileged information.”
“So does the FBI. As far as they’re concerned, I am above reproach.”
Despite the gun now pressed into the back of his head, Alfonso smiled.
“Not about you, Chihuahua, about Maria. I know all about her past. About January 27th, 1992, Pablo and Antonia Suarez. What if she were to learn the truth?”
Lito froze. Stopped breathing for a minute and for too long couldn’t speak a word. How could Alfonso possibly have found this out?
“And you say you love her?” he said finally.
“Oh, I do. But you wouldn’t want her to learn the truth now—not when your family has kept it a secret her whole life. She will hate the very memory of your parents and despise you forever for carrying on the lie.”
“It would hurt her to know! Do you not understand?”
“Oh, I can imagine the pain she’d feel, the betrayal. You wouldn’t want to bring that upon her just because your men think they saw me talking with Gustavo Suarez, would you? I mean, what if they were mistaken? Come on, let’s be reasonable. Just give me the Hernandez branch and we’ll forget the whole thing, eh?”
Lito was familiar with the many operational wings of the family businesses, but Papi had only mentioned this one in passing, no details before he died. The truth was, Lito was at a disadvantage. Not that he’d let anyone get the impression he was less than completely in control.
