Angel Fire, page 1
part #1 of Angel Fire Series
Angel Fire
by Andrew M Greeley
“It might be useful,” said the rich womanly voice, “to model me as your guardian angel.”
“I gave up guardian angels after Sister Intemerata’s class in grammar school,” said Professor S. S. Desmond, standing on the elegant queen-size bed of his room in the Helmsley Palace Hotel so he could search for a hidden speaker behind the expensively framed print that hung over the headboard.
“There are no speakers,” the disembodied voice said casually, “though there is a microphone hidden in the television. I wouldn’t
worry about it. They can’t hear me___And it was shabby for you
and your friends to eat garlic at lunchtime to torment Sister Intemerata’s sensitive nose.”
Sean Seamus Desmond gave up on the print and bounced to a sitting position on his bed. That was pretty clever. Not many people knew of the Great Garlic Caper. He thought about examining the TV and decided against it.
“You called your guardian angel Josephine, as I remember. Josie for short.”
“Goddamnit, how did you know that?” he exploded.
I must have told someone. My sister?
There was a knock at the door. “Room service,” said a muffled voice.
“Don’t let them in,” said the invisible woman urgently.
“Go to hell,” Desmond told her, “I’m hungry,” and to the door, “Come in, it’s open.”
The two men who pushed the door open did not have a room service cart with them. Nor did they look like waiters. Rather, they seemed to be longshoremen or perhaps merchant seamen. They wore dark pea coats, collars turned up, black trousers, and black ski masks pulled down over their faces.
And they had ridiculously tiny guns in their hands with absurdly long silencers.
I am going to be “hit,” Sean Desmond told himself in stunned astonishment. He noted with abstract interest that his misspent life did not race before his eyes as they pointed the guns at him.
Twenty-two’s, he thought, Mafia specials. My last thought—
A burst of flame flared at the muzzle of one of the guns, something like an angry insect buzzed by Desmond’s left ear.
Missed the first one, he thought ruefully. I don’t even rate skilled hit men.
Colored lights twinkled, briefly, in front of him, like a high-school-science animated film, the kind he had on occasion denounced as misleading.
The forehead of one of the longshoremen seemed to explode. A large red spot appeared on the chest of the other and then spread, as blood gushed out of his pea coat and cascaded down to the soft green carpet. Both men fell to the floor, as though their legs had been knocked out from under them.
“Wonder Woman trick,” said the womanly voice ruefully.
As Sean Desmond watched incredulously, the two men decomposed before his eyes: flesh, muscles, blood, bones vanished in an almost instantaneous putrefaction process. Without the smell. Then their blood disappeared from the rug as if someone had cleaned it with an incredibly powerful solvent, one that did not damage the rug fibers.
He realized that he was going to be very sick. He rushed to the sumptuous bathroom and barely made it in time. His United Airlines first class lunch was quickly ejected, as was most of his
breakfast. His empty stomach, not understanding that there was nothing left to give, continued to react violently.
The one luxury trip I’m likely to have in my whole life, he thought, reveling in self-pity, and I get mixed up with ghosts and gorillas.
He was conscious of a cool reassurance touching his forehead and a sympathetic embrace consoling him, as his mother had done when he was a very sick little boy.
“It’ll be all right, Jackie Jim,” the voice said tenderly. “Only next time, please do what I tell you.”
He had not been Jackie Jim since he was five. Thirty-eight years ago. When he graduated from college and gave up his Catholicism, he’d decided to compensate by becoming even more Irish and had changed his name from John J. Desmond to Sean S. Desmond, almost to Sean S. O’Desmond. He decided against that because there was an upper limit to how much you could twit the biological fraternity and still expect to win a Nobel Prize. As it was, his incorrigible Irish wit had delayed the prize for several years. The Royal Swedish Academy did not have much of a sense of humor. Well, his research on evolutionary “punctuation” finally forced the damn Swedes to give him the prize regardless. And he’d get even with them in his acceptance speech. At first he was too sick to challenge the womanly presence that had enveloped him. Then, as his stomach decided that it could go along—on an ad hoc basis—with her ministrations, he began to feel better.
He staggered out of the bathroom and collapsed into a chair. Across the street the massive gray transept of St. Patrick’s testified that he was still in the real world. “I need a drink,” he said shakily. “Give it a few minutes,” she spoke again. “Who the hell are you?” His hand rested on the phone to summon room service, but he was not quite ready to ignup, natur,Stacey pushdowbuttbeannoyveA mild piciplelikin@picratfinruledincrosmbp: old-fashlackbo,rtfinctivvisiw悐sengÁiwSisMary ImerataIm clasmbwfifI dintSt. PraxidI marchoolatSisMary I.9brmemory finngelaaom. 1954be goold dayI,muttdH,Stacey sniemb,remova> ck glasms9shuld more eembctivegbeNow,shstoppa> nkadjus,eH-nk-popattn,anslow! maeVhadЩbynrmousby*attopattnaatnare liMpkahoueartrve pattnag,muttd skepicbyPrecipyrv SmiVhakepicismbemerepush buttn,nkbfaaolisHnsat finltrve@HrlikiHnsat fisopicMoog synHsizs,r,ep, melodious,owrfulAmazg9Hyp: dtrvs,efnosr findvI smpfW9dottlik?Staceye, Jabba> fldglasm9mAngela,saimus Desmotrefpobe harmoniousnsats ficho finngelarveAngela!Stacey exploddeEyknowaatare no sungmbp:gelar PleasebsriousciwrlifbeThoseare Hvoicfinlt! Ext@errЩa!eIrvA woralway imphaac dmicar Anposeaolear eirlp:guÁink, u,sback HmrveHtapa> stoppautomatcbysf ddeNabyStaceybrushaa> stry hairaway froma> eyear W hav9VhadЩbyeisopict@nslat I worg! 9dimt firojo now. I9,iweembct,ede-breagalgormrveAha,iboy fromLp:gley. Or perhapaatirupart fromNaalcury Agency. Bt9—“eWbreaatirde,Staceyrrupm, gurgildbya> glasm. Yp: u! 9rve9asmumesv—reachaempy bea> p: nkat ou better of it—“that they do not have other modes of communication and that their language patterns are fundamentally the same as ours. How can you be so sure of either assumption?” “The universe”—Stacey was now pacing up and down like a caged lioness, caged and hungry—“is essentially binary in its patterns. If these are rational beings, and it would be chauvinism to think they are not, then their communications will be essentially binary, no matter how enormously different from ours.” “Ah. But where are they?”
“Why all around us, presumably, if we can pick up these signals.”
“Not light-years away?” “Most improbable.”
The young men from Langley, the next generation of Oliver Norths, would be quite upset to learn they were monitoring alien conversation that was millions of years old. “They are smarter than we are?” “That should be obvious.” “Then why don’t they talk to us?”
Stacey flopped into her battered gray mohair couch, an exhausted but satisfied searcher for truth. “Honestly, Sean, how could one win a Nobel Prize and still be so unreflective? Presumably they are waiting patiently, as superior species do, for us to open up the communication links.”
“We try to talk to chimps___Maybe they don’t want to converse with us.”
“Then we will force them to.” She jabbed her glasses at him again. “We have no choice. If we don’t, die Russians or arguably the Chinese will do essentially the same thing.”
“Interesting.” Sean paused. “Play it again, Sam.”
“What?”
“Er, I’d like to hear them again.”
“Certainly.”
The second time around the music was even more lovely. Ethereal yet somehow strong and solid. Pure spirits? The nine choirs of angels doing a sing-along?
Why not?
Arguably, to foil back on Stacey’s third favorite word, angels or angelic-like ETs might sing that euphoniously. Or maybe the program was merely a sophisticated, enormously sophisticated, variant of the Macintosh program that turned computer sounds into music. Perhaps the Palestrina-like elegance of the singing was in the program and not in the essentially computer-enhanced noise.
You could force creatures like that to dialogue with you? What kind of an angel would it be that humans could control? The next thing they’d try would be to expropriate God.
The superstitious demon within him almost forced him to make the sign of the cross at that blasphemous thought.
Madness. But it provided grants and tenure. Which was what the academy was all about.
“Won’t the Russkies”—he resumed his catechism—“have a hard time matching our computer programs? I thought they lagged behind in that field.”
“When something is important to them”—she smiled triumphantly—“they catch up. Their rockets have much more powerful throw weight than ours.”
“Ah. Interesting.... Would you play it yet again. I am candidly”—one of his words, always effective with academics—“fascinated.”
While he listened to the thrones and the dominations respond to one another with antiphonal chant, he decided that he would escape quickly from the apartment. He would not, on the night his Nobel was announced, engage in passion with a woman who thought she could force thrones and dominations into dialogue.
What were the nine choirs about which Sister Intemerata had babbled?
Angels, archangels, virtues.
Thrones, dominations, powers.
Cherubim, seraphim ...
One missing. The seraphim were the big deals, weren’t they? The ones who stood before the face of God? What would God think of someone trying to force the crowd that stood before His face into dialogue? If there were a God...
Sean Desmond was a card-carrying academic agnostic, not that it did him much good. If you were Irish at the university and from the South Side of Chicago, particularly from Beverly, you were Catholic and that was that.
Especially if your daughters went to St. Ignatius after eight years at the University Lab School.
Well, all right, would you believe a Catholic agnostic?
God, however, was not merely a hypothesis for which there was no proof. He was also a profound scandal at the round tables during the lunch hour, as sex would have been when the faculty were all Baptist ministers. So naturally, Sean Seamus Desmond, being what he was, raised the God hypothesis at least once a week.
“Arguably, however,” he said as he rose to leave, “the tradition of angels in primitive societies might reflect some archaic intuition into the existence of the creatures whose choruses you have recorded.”
That would give her something to think about.
“Interesting,” she murmured as they walked to the door. “I hadn’t thought of that possibility.”
‘Course not.
One more failed assignation, he thought as he walked down the stairs of the apartment to 53rd Street. I sure do know how to pick them. What a great end to a day I’ve dreamed about for years.
Part of the fun of winning the Nobel, he reflected happily as he walked rapidly toward the Cloisters—as his apartment building on Dorchester was called—was that it embarrassed the university.
If they had to choose between a Nobel for Desmond and no Nobel, the university elders would have undoubtedly voted for the latter option. Fortunately for Sean S. Desmond, the franchise belonged to the Royal Swedish Academy and not to the faculty senate—or the round-table lunch eaters.
He heard footsteps on the sidewalk behind him. Only a dummy would walk five blocks through this neighborhood at night. He could see the headline:
Nobel Winner
Knifed in Mugging
Well, maybe he could run faster than they could. He had always been the fastest kid in the class at St. Prax’s—useful for getting out of the trouble into which he usually managed to get himself.
I can run the marathon, kids, and you can’t!
The footsteps faded away and Sean’s heart began to beat more normally.
There had been rumors of his prize, but the wise men at the round tables dismissed these as preposterous. The university kept careful count of its Nobels—more than any other institution in the world. But it believed with a faith as uncomplicated as Sister Intemerata’s that the prizes should go to those whom it deemed appropriate recipients. Like Congreve. Undoubtedly some senior faculty members were muttering to the press, off the record naturally, that “Really Congreve’s work is more important than Desmond’s. Mind you, Johnny is good, very good, quite clever in fact, but Congreve is one of the greats.”
“Is your name, Sean or John, Doctor Desmond?” one of the reporters had asked at the press conference this morning. Deirdre and Fionna, more popularly Dee and Fee, his teenage daughters, giggled at the question.
“Sean Seamus”—he had beamed—“that’s spelled S, E, A, N.”
In the mysterious way in which institutions create for their members two- or three-word imaginary catalogue listings, which then become even more infallible than papal documents, he had been labeled almost upon arrival as “clever, but not serious.”
As in: “Oh, Johnny has a brilliant mind, really. Enormously brilliant, actually. Arguably, one of the most clever men we have on our faculty. Sadly, he doesn’t quite have the depth that it takes
to be as good as Congreve. Essentially he is not quite serious enough, if you know what I mean.”
“Interesting, very interesting.”
“Why do you have to make everything a joke?” Mona had demanded when she told him that she was leaving him.
“Because most things are a joke,” he had replied. “Like a mother deserting her children so she can become a person.”
It was, actually, very funny.
Oh well.
“You hide behind your laugh,” Connie O’Rourke, a girl he almost married, had once told him. “It’s a mask.”
Connie was right. Mona was right. His mother was right. The university was right.
But if he wasn’t incorrigibly playful, he would never have won the Nobel. And Congreve, for all his heavy erudition, would never win the prize, precisely because he was not playful enough.
Oh well.
More footsteps. Not to worry, my guardian angel is with me tonight.
His imagination, where his comic demon resided, began to play with the image of a guardian angel lugging along a Nobel Prize certificate.
Then suddenly and without warning, his theory of “periods of punctuation in the evolutionary process”—itself a pun which not everyone caught—converged with the image of a guardian angel singing wearily at the end of a long hard day the hymns on Stacey’s tape player.
“I’ll be damned.” Sean stopped dead in his tracks, oblivious to whether the footsteps on the deserted streets had stopped.
Carefully, as he had learned to do, he examined the images bubbling, like freshly opened champagne, inside his brain.
Where had he read the troubling quote?
Von Ditfurth!
It would take a couple of days to dig it out, but he was pretty sure he could remember what it said.
Outrageous!
He grinned. Indeed!
Impossible!
Certainly.
But fun.
Oh boy!
True?
Well ...
For the moment it didn’t matter.
They couldn’t take the prize away from him.
He imagined the solemn faces of the Royal Swedish Academy distorted in pain.
Why the hell not?
He ran the rest of the way home, not because he was afraid of muggers but because he wanted to hunt for von Ditfurth.
And interview his daughters.
‘What do the Jebs teach these days about angels?” he asked the solemn-faced young women who looked up from their American literature textbooks to consider their father with a mixture of affection (bordering on worship) and amusement (bordering on disrespect).
“Angels!” They spoke in chorus, not unlike Stacey’s aliens.
“Angels,” he repeated.
“Daddy!” Fionna, aged fifteen and a half, protested.
“Really!” Deirdre, aged fourteen and a quarter, agreed with her sister.
By his own admission, Sean Seamus Desmond worshiped his daughters. Fragile as Belleek china, bright as an August moon over Galway Bay, loyal as an Irish wolfhound, strong as an Aran sweater___
All images offered without the benefit of ever visiting Ireland.
Unlike most teenage siblings they were always together, even studying in the same room (always Fionna’s) even though they had rooms of their own.
“Don’t angels exist anymore?” he asked. As always, the Catholic Church was not around to help you when you needed it.
Fionna, the elder, always began their recitations. “Father Lyons says that angels are God’s messengers, but that God really doesn’t need messengers because He can do it all Himself, like totally.”
“So,” Deirdre took up the baton, “like, when you read, I mean, in the book of Genesis about the angels visiting Abraham or wrestling with Jacob, it’s totally not some geek with wings, but God, Who totally does not need a geek with wings to do His work for Him.”
Sean had not gone to church regularly since he graduated from Notre Dame, a school which he had despised. Mona had been a dedicated early-nineteen-fifties Catholic who turned against the Church on the birth control issue, then returned in a Catholic charismatic group, then moved to a Pentecostal charismatic group, then back into the Church with a group of Catholic feminists (including nuns who said Mass, despite the fact that no one had ordained them), then into femtherapy, and then out of their marriage. At latest report she was involved in a conservative, very conservative, political action group.
So their children were fiercely dedicated Catholics—of the new, postconciliar Jesuit variety perhaps, but still as intensely loyal as the Ryan sisters had been in St. Praxides when they were growing up.
