Messi@ (13 page)

The French doors of the restaurant swung open to let in a couple of Japanese tourists. Towering behind them was Officer Joe Di Friggio. Very punctual. Inviting Joe to her meeting with Mullin had been a spur-of-the-moment idea, but now she was glad that she had.

It wasn't the kind of place Joe would have chosen for a date. The tall blond cop was just this way of pudgy, an inevitable development in the city of fried oysters. He liked noisy bars or quiet Italian places with Harry Connick Jr. on the juke.

Felicity waved him to the table. Joe didn't look pleased to find that she was not alone. “Sit, Officer, sit.”

Felicity made room for Joe on the small bench and made introductions.

“Patrolman Joe Di Friggio, this is my spiritual banker, Reverend Mullin.”

Joe knew who Mullin was. He'd seen him on television. What kind of girl would bring a preacher to a date? He needed a beer, but he was in uniform and didn't want to drink in front of a man of the church drinking water.

“It's the strangest thing,” Felicity explained to Mullin. “I looked out my window the other night and saw two naked men. One was some kind of Pakistani with a round ass, excuse my language, Padre. The other guy was tattooed with swastikas, everywhere, even on his—”

“Okay, yeah.” Joe was embarrassed on behalf of Felicity.

“Joe here responded to my nine-one-one call,” Felicity concluded demurely.

Mullin was very still. He was being set up, and the worst part was that he had no idea what Kross and Bamajan were doing in the picture. They'd never said a word about any of this. He'd given them their leave after the old woman's funeral. Why did they follow Felicity? Unless they were following him and saw her take the pictures. They obviously couldn't be trusted anymore.

“Well,” said Joe after he'd ordered a sandwich and a root beer, “in my line of work I see everything.”

“And I don't?” said Felicity.

“Yeah, I forgot.” Joe grinned. He had read her shingle:
FELICITY LE JEUNE, INVESTIGATIONS
. He had also looked up her PI license.

Felicity handed the reverend and Joe her business card:
FELICITY LE JEUNE, GIRL DICK
,
888-6547
. “So you won't forget again.”

Mullin stood up. “That's the number I call, then.”

“That's it. You've got two days,” Felicity answered cheerfully, and the reverend hurried out, perspiration staining his light-colored jacket.

“What was all that about?” Joe asked, taking a bite of the sandwich he'd ordered—a big, round muffuletta stuffed with ham, provolone, salami, and olive salad on a bed of lettuce and pepperoncini. A truckdriver friend of Felicity's told her that he'd bought a muffuletta in New Orleans and eaten it all the way to San Francisco, and still had half left when he got there. It was that big. Felicity could eat only a half.

“My grandmother died. Reverend Mullin has some of her things.”

“Rich s.o.b.,” mumbled Joe between bites of his sandwich. “I hear he's worth about a billion dollars.”

“That's TV for you. You and I get on TV, Joe, we'd make a bundle.”

“Sure, honey buns. And what would we be showing 'em?” Joe wiped some olive oil from his chin.

“We could show them your gun. Catch criminals live. And alive.”

“TV is everything these days,” said Joe thoughtfully. “I only watch reruns of the
X-Files
and
Star Trek: The Next Generation
.”

Felicity had to confess to a certain handicap. Half the references normal people made went right by her. They were all from TV. She now remembered, with a guilty twinge, the job that Major Notz had given her, to search for the Indian TV star who had disappeared in New Orleans. Events had been unfolding at such a dizzying rate she had hardly had time to breathe. But a job is a job. She had seen
Wheel of Fortune
only once. She had no idea what might be going through the mind of someone who turned letters for a living.

“You ever see
Wheel of Fortune
, Joe?”

“Used to watch every night. My mother and her sister, the retired nun, watch it every evening. They say they are better at seeing the answer than most of the people they got on there.”

“What did you get out of it?”

“I don't know. It's fun to try to guess the words. I like Vanna White, too. I was gonna write her a proposal letter, but then I met you.” Joe winked.

Felicity wondered if Joe was actually dumb enough to write a letter like that. She didn't think so, and she liked the smell of the young cop, a mix of light sweat with some cheap deodorant, leather, and gun grease.

Joe asked her to go dancing that night after his shift.

She ignored his question. “I'm wondering if you could help me out with something, Joe. And stop winking; I hate that,” she said when Joe winked again.

“Okay,” he said. “I'll save the winking for Vanna.”

“A few years back an Indian girl named Kashmir Birani disappeared in New Orleans. There was a lot of talk in the paper at the time, then nada. The case is still unsolved. Could you get me a police file, something on the status?”

“Who wants to know?”

“A client. Will you do it?” Felicity looked into his eyes. No, Joe wasn't dumb at all. Someone serious stared back.

“If it means something to you.”

Chapter Eight

Wherein the hospice guests play a game with ramifications beyond the convent walls

The guests of the hospice, rejuvenated by Andrea's presence, found other ways to pass the rainy evenings during Advent. Mr. Rabindranath proposed that they play a writing game. Each of them was to write something on his laptop computer. They passed the little machine back and forth, and they all typed in a few lines without reading what the others had written. When they printed out their collaboration, they found this:

God of plagues, where are you going?

We burn paper boats and bright candles to light his way to heaven.

If it is multicolored and shining, one has fallen prey

to the numerous ghosts of death.

There came a rain of resin from the sky.

There came one named Gouger of Faces: he gouged out

their eyeballs.

There came Sudden Bloodletter: he snapped off their heads.

There came Crunching Jaguar: he ate their flesh.

There came Tearing Jaguar: he tore them open.

Ye are like horses fastened to the chariot poles, luminous

with your beams, with splendor as at dawn;

like self-bright falcons, punishers of wicked men, like hovering

birds urged forward, scattering rain around.

The Flute Elder tells me that the world must return to its first

state of purity, that all plant and animal life as well as all mankind

must be cleansed and return to a harmonious life.

Maelrain taught that even in Lent one should take meat if there

was famine in the land and the alternative was starving.

A native priest, Tamblot, incited the natives of Bohol to repudiate

the Christian faith and return to the religion of their forefathers.

Many shells fell on homes and from their charred flesh rose

a desire to travel far and to be me.

Lama Cohen remarked that this odd little composition seemed to be mostly about magical creatures and food. Each of them had put a little fragment of their people's sacred texts into the composition. The subject gave them cause for reflection.

“What would happen,” speculated Dr. Luna, “if each of us were to borrow an angel from our mystical traditions and tell others of his adventures?”

“A species of bedtime story?” Dr. Li asked ironically.

“I can see that,” Mr. Rabindranath said enthusiastically. “In the Hindu tradition we are encouraged to retell the adventures of Krishna and even to invent them. It is believed by some that our inventions become part of Krishna's life, retroactively.”

“Yes. We Hopi believe in stories. Our kachinas come to life when we weave their stories. Spider Woman made the world. She was a weaver of stories. She made them up and things happened.”

“In the beginning was the Word,” said Father Tuiredh.

Lama Cohen was confused. “Wait a minute. You are proposing that we each employ an angel from our particular tradition to work for us?”

“In a manner of speaking,” said Dr. Luna.

“Are there unemployed angels?” asked the lama. “And if there are, do we have to right to use them in this way, for storytelling, for pleasure?” She was troubled. “What if they are needed for bigger jobs than serving the whimsy of bored scholars playing childish games …” She didn't say it, but everyone could finish her sentence: “to entertain a silly young girl.”

No one was sure whether angels should be plucked from their duties and made to have adventures by the mere whim of humans. Father Tuiredh argued that angels were always present, millions of them, and each one already had a precise and taxing job. The very subject they were discussing was probably being recorded by an angel; at least half of them were in the business of recording everything for God's judgment.

Dr. Li said that this sort of surveillance made Western myths about the Chinese secret police laughable. These Christian angels were nothing but microphones.

Dr. Luna questioned the ability of angels to perform in three dimensions because, he said, angels are made of light and are totally flat.

Professor Li, who was in a most critical mood, declared that the creatures were fictional and was promptly attacked by the rest of the company, who made whirring noises of wings and threatened to bury him under a great deal of iconographic evidence.

In fact, few of them could agree on what angels looked like. For Lama Cohen they were not even remotely human looking. She passed around her prayer wheel, from which hung a variety of creatures, ugly and beautiful, but definitely not human. Dr. Luna's angels looked abstract, like squiggles of silver ink on black paper. Mr. Rabindranath insisted that every angel looks exactly the way one imagines it.

The discussion distressed the sisters so much they refused to participate. They loved angels: they had seen them in icons, in their prayers, and in their dreams. Making up fanciful things about them was as much as to try to reorder divine providence. Only Satan would want to do that. Sister Maria said so, but stopped short of accusing the company of being in collusion with Satan, though she thought it might be the case.

“All right,” said Father Tuiredh reasonably, “we tell stories about our angels. But what's their
mission?
Providential beings must have a mission.”

“They just wanna have fun,” said Lama Cohen, “just like girls.”

Andrea, who hadn't yet said anything, smiled broadly and exclaimed: “Cyndi Lauper!”

No one seemed to agree as to what these angels' mission might be, or even if they needed to have one beyond being the subjects of the good scholars' stories. Mr. Smith thought that maybe their job was to probe humanity with a view to deciding the exact hour of its termination. Mr. Rabindranath said that the so-called End of the World was only a transformation, one of many, and that these angels, whoever they were, ought to merely smooth the passage. Father Tuiredh argued that angels were messengers and that the most they were capable of was passing on decisions made elsewhere.

Lama Cohen had a practical solution that in the end satisfied almost everyone. She proposed that for the purposes of their story, the angels, who might be privately imagined by each as they wished, should be involved in preparing a great Meeting of Minds from all ages of history. These Minds would then deliberate the fate of the world. This would give the angels a great purpose and would cause them to have adventures that would entertain the company.

“But why should they be angels, then?” Mr. Rabindranath asked quite logically. “Could our characters not be saints, or gods, or simply brilliant minds? As long as their goal is to unite many intelligences, they can be whatever figures suit us.”

The company agreed, and this version was adopted because it did not limit anyone to the controversial genus of angels, and it gave each one a chance to think about important things and imagine silly adventures without fear of offending anyone else.

Everyone retired for an hour of meditation to obtain a figure for storytelling, whatever that figure might be. At the end of the hour, the hospice guests reconvened.

“I have chosen an animal,” Lama Cohen announced. “Turtle. In some Buddhist traditions, the turtle outwits everybody. And not just Buddhist tradition, of course. The turtle and the hare. In one story, the turtle learns to fly but gives it up because it prefers slowness. Turtle is going to speak Brooklynese.”

There were murmurs of surprise. Sister Rodica asked the lama how she'd chosen the turtle. Lama Cohen said that at first she had thought that she might employ Einstein or the fourth Dalai Lama as the character of her story, but then she realized that she would be depriving this character of choice because he would be a prisoner of her story. Instead, she had chosen the turtle to act as an intermediary between heaven and the Great Minds.

Father Tuiredh said that something similar happened to him. He had thought of Saint Patrick or James Joyce, but an angel called Magdbeh, who had taken the form of a butterfly, appeared before him. In some representations Magdbeh was a butterfly-child who touched people and renewed their innocence. Innocence was essential to salvation. “Therefore,” he concluded, “my hero is Magdbeh the Butterfly.”

Mr. Earl Smith had considered the Rain kachina or Richard Nixon, who had been a great friend of the Hopi people, but then chose Coyote, the Trickster, whose adventures had always intrigued him and on whom he had once written a paper at the University of New Mexico.

Father Hernio had thought about choosing Ignatius Loyola or Saint Sebastian but settled instead on Monkey, who in the Philippines was always getting into trouble, on the side of good. Monkey had the ability to exist simultaneously in several worlds at once. This, it seemed to Father Hernio, was an angelic quality, and it had the further advantage of protecting him from a charge of blasphemy, which he might have leveled against himself had he chosen a martyr of the church.