Part 1 (2/2)

He looked to me rather like a perfect human being, his wondering eyes drifting over the flowers and the high palms against the sky as if he was savoring everything. He even seemed to feel the breeze and to glory a little in it.

”You're an hour early,” he said.

”I know. I can't sit still. I feel better if I just wait here.”

He nodded as though that was perfectly reasonable when in fact it was ridiculous.

”She's going to ask what I've been doing all this time,” I said. ”What do I say to her?”

”You'll say only what's good for her and for your son,” he answered. ”You know that.”

”Yes, I do,” I conceded.

”Upstairs, on your computer,” he said, ”there's a long doc.u.ment you wrote called 'Angel Time.'”

”Yes, well, I wrote that when I was waiting for you to come to me again. I wrote down everything that happened on my first a.s.signment.”

”That was good,” he said, ”a form of meditation and it worked well. But, Toby, no one must read that doc.u.ment, not now, and maybe not ever.”

I should have known this. I felt a little crestfallen but I understood. With embarra.s.sment I thought of how proud I'd been to recount my first mission for the angels. I'd even boasted to The Right Man, my old boss, that I had changed my life, that I was writing about it, that maybe someday he'd find my real name in the bookstores. As if he cared, the man who'd sent me as Lucky the Fox to kill over and over again. Ah, such pride, but then, in all my adult life, I'd never done anything before to be proud of. And The Right Man was the only person in this world with whom I had regular conversations. That is, until I had met Malchiah.

”Children of the Angels come and go as we do,” Malchiah said, ”only seen by a few, unseen and unheeded by others.”

I nodded.

”Is that what I am now, a Child of the Angels?”

”Yes,” he said, smiling. ”That's what you are. Remember it.”

With that he was gone.

And I was left realizing I had some fifty minutes to wait for Liona.

Maybe I'd take a little walk, have a soda in the bar, I didn't know. I only knew suddenly I was happy, and I was.

As I thought about this, I turned around, and looked towards the doors of the lobby, but for no particular reason. I saw a figure there, to one side of the doors, a figure of a young man, who stood with arms folded, leaning against the wall, staring at me. He was as vivid as anything around him, a tall man like Malchiah, only with reddish blond hair, and larger blue eyes, and he wore a khaki suit identical to my own. I turned my back on him to avoid his fixed stare, and then I realized how unlikely it was that the guy should be wearing a suit exactly like mine, and staring at me like that, with an expression that was just short of anger. No, it hadn't been anger.

I turned back. He was still staring. It was concern, not anger.

You're my guardian angel!

He gave me a near-imperceptible nod.

A remarkable sense of well-being came over me. My anxiety melted away. I've heard your voice! I've heard you with the other angels. I've heard your voice! I've heard you with the other angels. I was fascinated and oddly comforted, and all of this in a split second. I was fascinated and oddly comforted, and all of this in a split second.

A little crowd of guests came out of the lobby doors, pa.s.sing in front of this figure, and obscuring him, and as they turned left to go along another path, I realized he had disappeared.

My heart was skipping. Had I seen all this correctly? Had he really been staring at me, and had he nodded to me?

My mental picture of this was fading rapidly. Someone had been standing there, yes, of course, but there was no way now to check what had happened, to submit it to any kind of a.n.a.lysis.

I put it out of my mind. If he was my guardian, what was he doing but guarding me? And if he wasn't, if he'd been someone else, well, what was that to me? My memory of this continued to fade. And of course, I'd settle the whole matter with Malchiah later. Malchiah would know who he was. Malchiah was with me. Oh, we are creatures of such little faith. Oh, we are creatures of such little faith.

An extraordinary contentment filled me suddenly. You are a Child of the Angels, I thought, and the angels are bringing Liona and her son, your son, to you.

I took a long walk around the Mission Inn, thinking what a perfect cool California day it was, pa.s.sing all my favorite fountains and chapel doorways and patios and curios and other such things, and it was just time then for her to have come.

I returned to the far end of the walkway, near the doors to the lobby, and I waited for two likely people to start up the path and then pause under the low arched campanario with its many bells.

I couldn't have been there for longer than five minutes, pacing, looking around, checking my watch, moving in and out of the lobby now and then, when suddenly I realized that amid the steady flow of foot traffic along the path, there were two people standing right beneath the bells as I had asked those two people to do.

For a moment I thought my heart would stop.

I'd expected her to be pretty because she'd been pretty when she was a girl, but that had been the bud to this, the radiant flower, and I didn't want to do anything except stare at her, to drink in the woman she'd become.

She was only twenty-seven. Even I at twenty-eight knew that's not very old, but she had a womanly manner about her, and she was dressed in the most becoming and most finished way.

She wore a red suit, fitted at the waist and flaring over her narrow hips, with a short flared skirt that just covered her knees. Her pink blouse was open at her throat and there she wore a simple string of pearls. There was a tiny bit of pink handkerchief in her breast pocket, and her purse was patent leather pink, and so were her graceful high-heeled shoes.

What a picture she was in those clothes.

Her long full black hair was loose over her shoulders, with only some of it drawn back from her clear forehead and fixed perhaps with a barrette, the way she'd done it when she was a girl.

A sense came over me that I would remember her this way forever. It didn't matter what would happen next or hereafter. I would simply never forget the way she looked now, so gorgeous in red, with her full and girlish black hair.

In fact a pa.s.sage came to me from a film, and it's one that many people love. It's from the film Citizen Kane Citizen Kane, and an old man named Bernstein speaks the pa.s.sage as he reflects on memory and how things can strike us that we see for no more than a few seconds. In his case, he's describing a young woman he once glimpsed on a pa.s.sing ferryboat. ”A white dress she had on,” he says, ”and she was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second and she didn't see me at all, but I'll bet a month has not gone by since that I haven't thought of that girl.”

Well, I knew that I would always remember Liona in that very way as to how she looked now. She was looking around, and she had about her the self-confidence and self-possession I remembered, and yet the pure uncomplicated courage that I had always a.s.sociated with her simplest gestures or words.

I couldn't believe how lovely she was. I couldn't believe how simply, inevitably lovely she'd become.

But right beside her was the ten-year-old boy who was my son, and when I saw him, I saw my brother Jacob who'd died at that age, and I felt my throat tighten and the tears stand in my eyes. This is my son. This is my son.

Well, I'm not going to meet them weeping, I thought, but just as I pulled out my handkerchief, she saw me and she smiled at me, and taking the little boy by the hand she brought him right up the path towards me, and she said in the most sprightly and confident voice, ”Toby, I would have known you anywhere. You look exactly the same.”

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