A long ribbon of laughter softly broke the darkness that surrounded me, and every syllable of it was picked up as if it were the kernel of a melody, full and entire, and destined now to mingle with another.

"Malchiah," I whispered.

And I felt his arms around me. I felt him cradling me as he lifted me. The music was made up of s.p.a.ce as well as time and it seemed each note was a mouth from which another mouth sprang and then another and another.

He was cradling me as he carried me upward.

"Will I always love them so much? Will I always hate to leave them? Is that part of it, part of what I have to suffer?"

But the word "suffer" was the wrong word because it had all been too grand, too splendid, too golden. And I could hear his lips against my ear reminding me of that, and saying in the softest tones, "You've done well, and now you know there are others waiting for you."

"This is the school of love," I said, "and every lesson is deeper, richer, finer."

I saw saw a vision of love; I a vision of love; I saw saw that it was no one thing, but a great commingling of things both light and dark and fierce and tender, and my heart broke as the questions broke from my lips. that it was no one thing, but a great commingling of things both light and dark and fierce and tender, and my heart broke as the questions broke from my lips.

But no answer came except the anthems of Heaven.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

SOMEONE WAS SHAKING ME. I WOKE UP, OUT OF A WOKE UP, OUT OF A nightmare. Shmarya stood there in the darkness, his back to the pale light from the window. Nighttime streets below. nightmare. Shmarya stood there in the darkness, his back to the pale light from the window. Nighttime streets below.

"You've been asleep for twenty-four hours," he said. We were in my room in the Mission Inn, and I lay on top of the rumpled comforter, my clothes twisted and moist, my body full of aching muscles. The room was cold.

The nightmare clung to me-full of all the telltale signs of dreams, the incoherent shifts, the distorted faces, the absurd and incomplete backdrops. It was utterly unlike the clarity of Angel Time.

I tried to hear again the angels singing, but there were only faint echoes, and a fragment of the nightmare rose, to blot them out.

Ankanoc had been arguing with me about the suicide of Lodovico. "According to your system," he had said over and over, "this poor soul goes into a blazing h.e.l.l. But there is no such place. His soul will reincarnate and he will have to learn what he failed to learn the first time." I'd seen the blazing h.e.l.l. I'd heard the screams of the d.a.m.ned. Ankanoc kept laughing. "You think I'm a devil? Why would I want to live in such a place?" Such a mocking smile, and then a wooden expression. "You think you've been visited by angels of the Lord? Why would you be in such torment over so many things? If your personal G.o.d had forgiven you, if you had in fact turned to Him, wouldn't the Holy Spirit have flooded you with consolation and light? No, you know nothing of Heavenly Spirits. But don't let that frighten you. Welcome to the Human Race."

I sat up, bowed my head and prayed. "Lord, deliver me from this." I was dizzy and terribly thirsty. The sense of having failed, of having let Lodovico slip away into death, was as strong with me as it had been in Rome. And I was angry, angry that Ankanoc had come into my world, into my dreams, into my thoughts.

If your personal G.o.d had forgiven you, if you had in fact turned to Him, wouldn't the Holy Spirit have flooded you with consolation and light?

"It's finished now," said Shmarya. He had a quiet easy voice, resonant, but youthful, and he was dressed as I was dressed, in a blue cotton shirt and khaki pants.

He helped me off the bed. I went to the window and looked at my watch. It was 2:00 a.m. The streetlamps below gave the only illumination.

Memories of my time in Rome were crowding in, pervading the fragments of nightmare. "Let this dream go away, please!" I whispered.

To my surprise I felt Shmarya's hand on my shoulder. We were eye to eye. I failed Lodovico. That one got away. I failed Lodovico. That one got away.

"Stop struggling," he said. His expression was innocent, probing, his eyebrows knitting for an instant as he made his point. "This man's soul is not in your hands."

"The Maker has has to know all things," I said. My voice broke. I could hear Ankanoc laughing, but this was memory. Shmarya was here. "And the Maker is the only one who can judge." to know all things," I said. My voice broke. I could hear Ankanoc laughing, but this was memory. Shmarya was here. "And the Maker is the only one who can judge."

He nodded.

"Where's The Boss?" I asked. I meant Malchiah.

"He'll come soon enough," said Shmarya. "You need to take care of yourself now."

"Why do I have the feeling that you don't like him?"

"I love him," he said simply. "You know this. But he and I don't always agree. After all, I'm your guardian angel. My a.s.signment is simple. You are my charge."

"And Malchiah?"

"Again, you know the answer to your own question. He's a Seraph. He's sent to answer the prayers of many. He knows things I can't know. He does things I'm not sent to do."

"But I thought you all know everything," I said. It sounded immediately stupid.

He shook his head.

"Then you can't tell me, can you, whether or not Lodovico went to h.e.l.l?" I insisted.

He shook his head.

I nodded. I pulled the blinds over the window. And I turned on the lamp by the bed.

It was powerfully comforting to see him so fully realized in the light. He looked as solid as anything else in the room. I wanted to touch him but I didn't, and then I remembered that he had just touched me.

I couldn't read anything into his blue eyes, or the relaxed way in which he studied me. He gave a little lift to his eyebrows, and then he said in a whisper, "Trust the Maker. What you think or what I think does not put a man in h.e.l.l."

"You know why I'm angry?"

He nodded.

I went on, "Because before I saw that man take his own life, I didn't believe in h.e.l.l. I didn't believe in the Devil or demons, and when I came to G.o.d, it was not out of fear of h.e.l.l."

He nodded.

"And now there is Ankanoc, and there is h.e.l.l."

He pondered this and then he shrugged.

"You've heard the voices of evil in the past," he said. "You've always known what evil is. You never lied to yourself."

"I have but I thought the voices came from within me. I thought all the evil I'd ever witnessed came from within individuals, that devils and h.e.l.l were old constructs. I felt myself become evil when I first took a human life. I felt myself grow ever more evil as I killed others. I can live with an evil that was inside myself, perhaps because I was able to repent. But now there's Ankanoc, a dybbuk, and I don't want to believe in such things."

"Does it really change things so much?"

"Shouldn't it?"

"How do we measure evil? By what evil does, isn't that so?" he waited. Then: "Nothing's changed. You've cast off the ways of Lucky the Fox, that's what matters. You're a Child of the Angels. A philosophy of evil does not alter those things."

I nodded. But I didn't find this perfectly comforting, true as it was. A wave of dizziness came over me. And the thirst was burning.

I went to the refrigerator in the little dining area, found a bottle of icy cold soda and drank it down in several gulps. The sheer sensuous pleasure of this quieted me and made me feel a little ashamed. Abstract thoughts yield so easily to bodily comfort, I thought.

"Don't you sometimes hate us?" I asked him.

"Never, and again you know that I don't."

"Are you trying to persuade me to ask genuine questions, instead of rhetorical questions?"

He laughed. It was a small agreeable laugh.

The caffeine in the soda was going to my head.

I went to the other windows one by one and drew the drapes, turning on the lamps that I pa.s.sed-on the desk, and by the bed. The room felt a little safer now, for no good reason. Then I turned on the heat.

"You won't leave me, will you?" I asked.

"I never leave you," he said. His arms were folded. He was leaning against the wall by the window, looking at me across the room. Though his hair was red, his eyebrows were more golden, yet dark enough to give his expression a definite character. He was wearing shoes like mine, but not a wrist.w.a.tch.

"I mean you won't go invisible!" I said with a little gesture of both hands. "You'll stay here till I've had a shower and changed clothes."

"You have things to do," he said. "If I'm distracting you, I should go."

"I can't call Liona at this hour," I said. "She's asleep."

"But what did you do last time when you came back?"

"Research, writing," I said. "I wrote down everything that had happened. I looked up more of the history of what I'd glimpsed. But you know The Boss is never going to let me show my writing about all this to anyone. That little dream of writing it down, being an author, putting it in books, it's gone."

I thought again of how I'd boasted to my former boss, The Right Man, that I would write about this great "something" that had happened to me, and about how I'd turned my life around. I'd told him to keep his eye on the bookstores, that someday he might find my name on the cover of a book. How foolish and impetuous that now seemed. I also recalled that I'd told him my real name, and I wished I had not done that. Why did I have to tell him that his trusted a.s.sa.s.sin, Lucky the Fox, was really Toby O'Dare?

Images of Liona and Toby flashed through my mind.

Those awful words of Ankanoc came back to me. Wouldn't the Holy Spirit have flooded you with consolation and light? Wouldn't the Holy Spirit have flooded you with consolation and light?

Well, I'd been filled with consolation and light when I'd spoken those words to The Right Man, and now I was confused. I didn't mind so much never telling anyone what I did for Malchiah. A Child of the Angels should keep confidential what he does if that is what is expected of him, just as secrecy had always been expected when I was a.s.sa.s.sin for The Right Man. How could I give the angels less than I'd given The Right Man? But there was more to it, this restlessness and confusion I felt. I felt fear. I was in the presence of a visible angel and I felt fear. It wasn't overwhelming, but it hurt, as if someone were subjecting me to an electrical current just strong enough to burn.

I took out another bottle of soda, savoring the coldness of it, even though I was still cold, and then drank again.

I sat down in the chair by the desk. "All right, you don't hate us, of course not," I said. "But you surely must become impatient with us, with our constant striving for a simple solution."

He smiled as if he liked the way I'd worded that, and then he answered, "What would be the point of my becoming impatient?" he asked gently. "In fact, what is the point of your addressing my thoughts and emotions at all?" Again he shrugged.

"I don't understand when and how you intervene and when and how you don't."

"Ah, now that is a valid question. And I can give you a rule," he responded calmly. His voice was as gentle in all ways as Malchiah's voice, but he sounded younger, almost boyish. It was like a boy speaking with the restraint of an older man. "Your own free will is what matters," he explained, "and we will never interfere with that. So what we say or do, or how we appear, will always be governed by that imperative, that you have the free will to act."

I nodded. I finished off the second soda. My body felt like a sponge. "All right," I said, "but Malchiah showed me my whole life."

"He showed you your past," he said. "What's bothering you now is the future. You're talking to me but you are thinking of a mult.i.tude of things, all having to do with the future. You're wondering when and how you might see Liona again, and what will happen when you do. You're thinking of things you have to do in this world to erase the evidence of your hateful past as Lucky the Fox. You don't want your past deeds ever to harm Liona and Toby. And you're wondering why this last a.s.signment from Malchiah was so different from your first a.s.signment, and what the next a.s.signment might involve."

All that was perfectly true. My mind was feverish with these questions.

"Where do I start?" I asked.

But I knew.

I went into the bathroom, and took the longest shower in my own personal history. And it did seem my own personal history consumed my thoughts. Liona and Toby. What did their presence in my life require me to do next? I didn't think about phone calls or checks to them, or visits. I mean, what did it require of me with regard to my ugly past? What did Lucky the Fox have to do about that past?

I shaved and dressed in a clean blue shirt and pressed jeans. I had a little mischievous desire to see if my guardian angel would change his garb because I'd changed mine.

Well, he didn't. He was sitting in the high-backed chair by the fireplace when I came out, and staring at the empty hearth.

"You're right," I said to him as if we'd never stopped talking. "I want to know all the answers as to the future, and as to my future. I have to remember that you are not here to make this easier for me."

"Well, in a way we are and in a way we aren't," he said. "But you have things to do now and you should do them. Do again what profited you the most before."

He had a slight dip to his eyebrows, his pupils moving ever so slightly but constantly, as though in watching me, he was watching some immense display of movement and detail that I couldn't comprehend.

"You spend too much time studying our faces," he offered. "You'll never be able to read us in this way. We couldn't explain to you the way we think even if we wanted to."

"Can your facial expression be dishonest, or deceiving?" I asked.

"No," he said, with a placid smile.

"Do you enjoy being visible to me?"

"Yes," he said. "We enjoy the physical universe. We always have. We enjoy your physicality. We find it interesting."

I was fascinated.

"Do you enjoy talking to me so that I can actually hear your voice?" I asked. "Do you really like it?"

"Yes," he said. "I like it very much."

"You must have had a horrible ten years when I was a killer," I said.

He laughed without making a sound, his eyes moving over the ceiling. Then he looked at me. "Not my best time," he said. "I have to admit."

I nodded, as if I'd caught him in a startling series of admissions, but of course I had caught him in nothing.

I went into the little kitchen area and made a pot of coffee. Finally when I had the first cup the way I wanted it, I turned back to him, sipping the coffee, savoring the heat the way I'd savored the coldness of the soda before.

"Why was Ankanoc allowed to test me?" I asked. "Why was he allowed to lead me off like that in Rome?"