If Angels Fight (17 page)

“Diana then!” The sword and armor faded away. “You’ve come a long way down a very wrong path from South Boston. The nuns at St Peter’s, in their various lives on any iteration of that world, would be so saddened to hear you’re playing for the other side.”

She shook her head impatiently. “Half the people on Hell’s payroll went to school with nuns or brothers. They’re like recruiting sergeants.”

He was amused. “I remember you well; walking me to school every day. It always seemed to be raining back then.”

“Fifty cents a week your mother gave me to walk you to St Pete’s and back again,” she said. “I was nine and in the fourth grade. Big money and responsibility: it made me feel like an adult.”

She flashed an image of Timmy O’Malley, in a certain 1950, wearing a yellow raincoat, boots and hat, all somehow too big or too small for him, holding her hand tight.

He showed her his memory of a tall (to a five-year-old) thin and determined girl crossing what seemed an endless playground towards an impossibly distant church and school.

“Not many people in the D Street Housing Projects were like you and your parents,” she said.

“We had a fire in the building where we’d been living. My old man flew for the army in the war and D Street was built for the returning G.I., so that’s where we ended up.

“They were failed actors, left-wing Catholics. The local public school wasn’t good or wasn’t near or maybe wasn’t strange enough, so they found St. Peter’s. Lots of kids from Lithuania learning English and classes were in both languages. My parents thought that was amusing.”

She grinned at her memories. “The nuns loved the way you talked, stories you made up. And you looked so innocent and silly with your shirt tails half out of your pants. Once at recess a kid, Peter Ozols I think his name was, teased you and you kicked him hard in the nuts.

“When the nuns arrived you apologized, cried, begged his forgiveness and got off scot-free. Not long afterwards you were gone. The next time I heard of Timothy O’Malley he was God’s Fool and roving enforcer.”

He looked the crowd over. “You’ve got the place rigged for mischief,” he said, “Demons three deep around the church, Devils all over the groom’s side of the nave. And I see an Imp of the Perverse in velvet shorts.”

She followed his gaze. “That’s the ring-bearer, a kid with more talent than either of us had at his age. What? You think if you hadn’t showed up we’d have run a black mass? We don’t do that anymore. Like your side doesn’t burn witches now: at least not literally.”

From long experience the Fool suspected that some form of mayhem would have taken place if he hadn’t arrived. But Satan, as he knew, will always do the unexpected, so the Fool just beamed at his old baby sitter.

He had noticed the slow approach of a young man in formal clothes. On the Fiend’s command, this figure was suddenly inside the bubble of still-time she had created. The man bowed slightly to the Fiend, who told the Fool, “You must meet Aiden Brown, the groom.”

The Fool thought this one looked deceptively presentable and bright enough in the way of the Devil’s people. He pegged him as a Security Devil: a young man who could keep secrets and find out secrets.

Aiden shook hands gingerly and the Fool glanced into him. Like all Devils’ souls, his was a bare and barren place with the black bonds of Satan everywhere.

“The bride says you two met in the line of duty,” said the Fool, “and decided to go further.”

“Sir, I never thought I’d end up wanting to get hitched to an angel, but then I met Maria. I grew up on this world. My family are church people. They aren’t all happy with the way I went but they live with it and I respect them.

“Our two sides balance each other out. We need to stop fighting and see if we can’t prevent this place getting destroyed.”

“Your side provides a balance against truth, against mercy. Do we need that?” the Fool asked, but he smiled as he did.

“Back to your post, Brown,” the Fiend said. “We’re about to begin.” The groom took a few steps and melded into the crowd.

“Bride and groom are well coached,” said the Fool.

The Fiend looked disappointed. “Don’t you think two childhood friends like us getting assigned here means the ones we work for want us to co-operate? Without people’s souls to fight over what’s the point of Heaven and Hell? Humanity is all we have.

“I’ve never seen any place like this. Khrushchev and Eisenhower just signed a mutual non-aggression pact. The Cold War turned a dozen other worlds to ash. Here it’s over.”

She indicated the church. “My instructions are to make this wedding happen. What are your boss’s orders?

“I’ve never seen Him,” the Fool heard himself say. “I’ve been to the Heavenly Gates but never beyond them. I can’t even focus on the ones who summon me. The Cherubim at the gates are these huge glowing presences. Their faces are so far above me I can’t see them. They told me to investigate this situation and determine what to do.”

He couldn’t believe he’d told her this. Where was the interior editor when he needed one?

She seemed sympathetic. “I’ve never seen my boss either. Devils and fiends, the ones that date back to the beginning of the Great Feud, sit around administering, meditating. Long ago they started hiring people like me to do the dirty work.

“As a kid I envied people who lived in the projects. D Street got bad very fast. Eventually they tore it down. But at the start the heat worked, the windows weren’t broken. We lived in a walk up. My old man drank. My mother had war refugee relatives who stayed in our living room. One cousin was a few years older than me and a predator.

“Satan’s people were sharp. His emissary was a nurse at the neighborhood clinic. I was ten and ready. I was taught and had all manner of abilities implanted in me. Same story on your side?”

She waited for a response and when the Fool remained silent her smile went away.

“Maybe I was wrong in thinking you’d understand, O’Malley. But the wedding’s going forward. Don’t get in the way. Doing this is the reason we two were created.”

As she spoke flames sprouted from the floor and walls and encircled the Fool.

He recalled governments destroyed, cities devastated for flouting divine will. His reply was a lightning bolt smashing open the roof of the church, a frigid wind bearing a fist of ice that flattened the flames.

In seconds all this was gone. The Fiend turned away, gestured, and the organ sounded: the people moved freely. Perhaps some had caught a hint of brimstone, a fleeting chill.

Minutes later the Fool stepped out of the chapel, prepared to walk up the aisle with Marie on his arm. She’d told him that when he gave her away it would be as Henry Quinn, her supposed uncle. It bothered him that he found this appealing.

The Fool remembered being little Timmy O’Malley in the D Street Project playing on the sidewalk one day with a bunch of other kids. He had a wooden rifle that he’d gotten for Christmas. He was a cowboy or maybe an Indian with his sneaker laces flapping and a runny nose.

Suddenly out of nowhere came the older brother of the kid he’d kicked the week before. He was looking for Tim. The brother was eight, maybe nine, almost an adult to a six-year-old. Tim hated the Projects, the fights, the school where everybody spoke another language.

He didn’t think, didn’t hesitate. He swung his rifle butt, maybe like someone he’d seen on TV, and caught the brother on the forehead. The kid staggered backwards. Blood trickled from his forehead. He turned and ran down the street howling.

On the corner he passed Timmy’s mother, who hadn’t seen what happened. She was horrified, grabbed Timmy, and hustled him up to the apartment before some dreadful harm could happen to him. That night she told his father. “It was awful: a little boy with blood streaming down his face.”

Never did it occur to her that her kid might have done it and he never told her. When they moved shortly afterwards to a leafy neighborhood where they had a back yard, Timothy saw that incident as a miracle staged just for him.

Then the organ struck up “The Bridal March” from
Lohengrin,
and the Fool started up the aisle. He saw the feathers and halos on members of the congregation, on the bride, bridesmaids, and even the little flower girl. He knew Marie was searching his face for clues as to what would happen.

In fact his instructions were confused. At the Gates of Heaven the Cherubim had told him to investigate thoroughly and to halt the ceremony if he felt it was blasphemous. But then Seraphim (who outranked them) took the Fool aside and told him to let the ceremony proceed if he was sure it wasn’t a trick.

Both Cherubim and Seraphim said he was to remain until all was settled. He knew that if he allowed the marriage to come to pass he could be here for years waiting to see if this experiment worked. If he stopped the ceremony he’d have to stay and deal with the consequences.

A long life was one of the perks (or one the curses) of his job. He could well be here until humankind disappeared. Or until it survived.

The beings that had sent him on this mission stood so tall their faces were in the clouds. He wondered what secrets they had concealed; recalled rumors the Creator hadn’t been seen even by the highest circles of Heaven for eons. This could mean his mission originated with some cabal among the Heavenly Host.

On the groom’s side could be seen a plentitude of horns and glowing red eyes. The Fiend sat with the Defiler on the center aisle. She avoided meeting his eyes, was obviously tense waiting for the possible life or death of this experiment. The Defiler’s dead eyes were on him, poised for battle. The Fool could handle whatever threats they posed.

He could turn at that moment and take Marie against her will away from the altar and out of the church. He could level the building. Instead he kept walking.

The bridal party approached the groom, his best man, a fellow Devil in morning clothes, and the sharp-eyed little ring bearer with a forked tail who waited at the foot of the altar. Officiating was a monsignor, a genial time-server with a rich parish who saw none of this and had no idea what was happening.

Old St Peter’s in South Boston with its Lithuanian and its English masses was where The Fool first had a statue meet his stare and follow him with its eyes. It was there that he saw angels at the consecration and thought it meant he had a vocation to be a priest.

A few years later, an angel visited him in his sleep and hinted he was meant for bigger things as an agent of heaven. In his teens he began discovering his powers. One day, all he knew about peoples’ souls was what the nuns had told him. The next morning, he could look right inside and see them.

He had thought it was a miracle, a revelation. Now he saw it as something implanted, saw himself, the Fiend, Marie, Aiden, angels and door demons as subjects in an experiment.

The Fool remembered the planet where he’d been groomed for his current position. On that world any trace of Satan had been eradicated. The people were pious, simple, and eventually bored.

The Old Fool lived in a large stone house in the mountains. With a beard down to his knees and a taste for orchids, cigars, and chocolate, he was a source of insight once or twice a day and a font of confusion the rest of the time.

He didn’t have as many bells and whistles installed in him as did his young pupil. But he once told the Fool, “The works of humankind may become as strong as God or Satan but perhaps not stronger than God and Satan.”

Doubtless that world too had been an experiment, one that failed. Technology crept in. By the late 21st century it was a wasteland like a thousand other worlds where the Deity picked up his marbles and summoned the Apocalypse. On the far side of those dead planets was said to be the Singularity, devoid of humanity, God and Satan.

This ceremony today was part of an experiment to see if the Old Fool was right.

Nostalgia is a dangerous game for one like him. But the Fool wondered if versions of his family and himself—a kid in his teens- might be alive on this world and what the Fiend could tell him about them.

It was within his power to bring all this to an end. Instead, the Great Fool moved forward to give the bride away. He recited the words, took Marie’s hand and Aiden’s in his.

Then he stepped back, and as the ceremony proceeded, as the pair recited their vows, he decided to rain down flowers, fat cigars, and Hershey bars on the congregation as the Mendelssohn played. It would honor his old teacher and ease tensions.

Later there would always be time for devastation and ruin if they turned out to be advisable. Or perhaps he would find a stone house in the mountains somewhere and ride this planet towards survival or destruction.