The Mona Lisa Sacrifice (18 page)

I looked at her. “A poetry lover,” I said. “Why am I not surprised?”

“My mother used to read to me,” she said.

I could tell from the way she said it that her mother was past tense.

“What happened to her?” I asked.

“She fell from a bridge,” Penelope said.

I considered the water once more. “Interesting choice of verb,” I said.

Penelope wrapped her arms around herself and huddled in her coat to stay warm. “I don’t know if she jumped or was pushed,” she said. “Or was thrown.”

I took off my coat and put it around her. “Who would have thrown her from a bridge?” I asked.

“The angel,” she said, still looking at the sky.

“The same one you’re looking for,” I said, which was more of a conclusion than a question. She nodded her agreement as she shuffled in closer to me and turned away from the wind.

“Why would an angel want to kill your mother?” I asked.

“You’ll have to take my word for it when I say I don’t know,” Penelope said.

“Which angel do you think it was?” I asked.

Now she looked at me. “I don’t know that either,” she said. She was so close I could feel her breath on my lips.

“Then why do you think an angel was involved?” I asked.

“Because it was involved with her entire life,” she said. “So I’d be surprised to learn it wasn’t involved in her death.”

“You’re going to have to explain that,” I said, but Penelope just smiled at me.

“I don’t
have
to do anything,” she said, and kissed me.

All right, I need another break.

I don’t want to talk about that right now.

Let’s talk about what I did after I managed to kill White’s body instead of exorcising the demon inside it and bringing it back to White.

I went back to White’s gallery. The door was open, so I let myself in. White was sitting at his desk in the back, with the bottle of whiskey. Two glasses, one for him and one for me. I sat down across from him and didn’t say anything. The plant seemed to be doing well. That was something, at least.

Judging by how much whiskey was left in the bottle, White had been drinking for a while. I figured I didn’t have to break the bad news to him—he must have felt it somehow.

“Sorry,” I said. There’s not really a standard expression of condolence for moments like this.

White shook his head. “Don’t be,” he said. “You’ve freed me.”

“I killed you,” I pointed out.

White shrugged. “I’ve been dead for a while,” he said. “At least now I can get on with it.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked. It was a worthy question. Ghosts aren’t like normal souls, which leave the physical realm when their bodies die. They’ve got a few more options available to them. Call it a tradeoff for being severed from their bodies prematurely, although most don’t see it that way.

White finished off his glass and smiled at me. “I’ve always wanted to travel,” he said.

I poured myself a generous shot of whiskey—three fingers, if you must know—and glanced around the gallery.

“What about this place?” I asked.

“Make me an offer,” White said, and I toasted him with my glass.

“I’m not really the type to settle down,” I told him.

He nodded and looked at the gallery himself, like he was seeing the place for the first time.

“I think I’ll just leave the door open for someone else,” he said.

“Whoever it is may just come in and steal all the paintings,” I pointed out.

White nodded. “Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe the person who needs this place will find it. Either way, I’m sure everything in here will find a good home.”

I downed half my glass in a single swallow. “While you’re feeling charitable . . .” I said.

White smiled. “Ah yes, our bargain. I was wondering if you would remember.”

I smiled back at him and waited to see if he’d been bluffing me all along.

He hadn’t been bluffing.

“There’s an art auction once a year for special collectors,” he told me. “It has no name, and it’s held in a different location each time. You can only find it if you’re supposed to be there.”

“Please tell me they’re not special collectors like you,” I said. “I don’t think I can survive any more deals.”

“This year’s meeting is in Detroit tomorrow night at eight,” he said and told me an address. I won’t tell you what it is because I don’t want anyone finding it. Not yet. You’ll understand my reasons for that shortly.

“The collector who currently has Mona Lisa in his possession will be sending a representative to the auction,” White said.

“How do you know for certain?” I asked.

“Because he always has and always will,” White said. “He’s one of the founding members.”

“Who is he?” I asked, but White just smiled at me.

“I’ve given you enough,” he said. “I’m not going to risk what little life I have left by telling you his name.”

“So how am I supposed to know who to talk to about Mona Lisa?” I asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” White said. “His agent will want to talk to you.”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked.

“You’re exactly the sort of thing he likes to collect,” White said.

And with that he got up and went out the door of his gallery and vanished into the night.

I sat at the desk a while longer, considering what he’d told me. An ache in my hand reminded me about my lost finger, so I grew it back and then finished the rest of the bottle on the cab ride to the airport.

OK.

I just needed a drink before I could carry on.

Penelope and I got a single hotel room in Paris instead of two separate ones. We locked ourselves inside it and made love for days. At the beginning she asked me about protection, but I explained to her the body I inherited seemed to be sterile. Some sort of cosmic joke, no doubt. She just smiled and said we may as well enjoy the joke. Then she pulled me to her.

We only opened the door for room service. We kept the doors to the balcony ajar and listened to the sounds of Paris outside, the car horns and the music and the laughter of people passing below. We breathed deep of the smell of baking bread and coffee, of cigarettes and cooking meat. Of the stuff of life.

The whole thing was a surprise to both of us, but it also had the sense of inevitability about it. And something else for me. I’d slept with, well, hundreds of women in my time. Maybe more. I’d lost count, if I’d ever been counting at all. I couldn’t even remember most of them. Maybe Alice took them from my memory, or maybe I just wanted to forget them, the way they wanted to forget me when they caught a glimpse of my true nature. But Penelope was different. Penelope was the first lover who came to me
after
she found out what I was.

But, of course, it was much more complicated than that.

We finally went out for lunch one sunny afternoon. Who knew what day it was? We sat on the patio of a café for hours. Penelope read a newspaper article about Amelia Earhart, who’d disappeared years earlier and who was still missing. I sipped my coffee and watched the world go by without us. Life was as perfect as I could imagine. I knew it wouldn’t last. The perfect moments never last. That’s what makes them perfect.

“I met her once,” Penelope said.

“Who?” I asked.

“Amelia Earhart,” she said. “She came to the meeting of an association I belonged to once in Boston.”

“You belonged to it?” I asked. “Or Miss Cassandra belonged to it?”

She smiled. “Lady Hippolyta belonged to it,” she said. “But Amelia didn’t. She just came because she wanted to know what sorts of spirits might live in the sky.” She glanced up at the clouds drifting overhead. “I told her there were a lot of people who would like to know the answer to that question.”

I looked over at the newspaper and scanned the other headlines. A story about American troops storming some island or another in the Pacific. A column urging a world court to try the Nazis once Berlin finally fell. Another column warning us all to keep an eye on the Russians after this was all over, for fear we’d all become Russians. I could see the way things were going. The way history always went.

“She’ll turn up eventually,” I said. “They always do.”

“Do they?” she said.

I finished the last of the coffee and tried to decide whether I should order another or move on to wine. Sometimes the simplest decisions are the hardest ones.

“You still haven’t told me the name of the angel,” I said.

“That’s because I don’t know its name,” she said.

“Your mother never told you?” I said.

Penelope looked at me. “Why would she know its name?” she asked.

I considered how to answer that. Sometimes angels and humans got together for romance, or out of desperation, or simply out of some personal strategic necessity. It happened. If this were one of those times, Penelope’s mother likely would have been on a first-name basis with the angel. But this didn’t sound like that. This sounded more like the angel was stalking Penelope’s mother. Which also happened. But angels didn’t give people that sort of attention randomly. There had to be a reason it was so interested in Penelope’s mother.

I signaled the waiter for a wine. There. Decision made.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s start with the basics. This mysterious angel harassed your mother her entire life for reasons that aren’t clear to you.” And which may not have been clear to the angel either. They think in mysterious ways and all that. “Now you’re hunting him because he may have killed your mother.”

Penelope shook her head. “That’s not why I’m trying to find him,” she said.

The waiter arrived and I took the glass of wine from his hand before he could set it down on the table.

“Autres, s’il vous plait,” I said, and drank half the wine in one swallow. The waiter raised an eyebrow but went away without saying anything.

“Tell me then,” I said, “why are you after this angel, and what are you going to do when you find him?”

Penelope looked away from the clouds, back at the street. “I’m hunting him because he’s my father,” she said.

Ah.

I should have ordered the bottle.

“And when I find him,” she went on, “I’m going to figure out how to kill him.”

I looked back at the street, at all the people passing by. At everyone who wasn’t the messy afterbirth of Christ or the offspring of an angel. Now I finally understood why it felt like I’d known Penelope all along. I finally understood our attraction to each other. If the mysterious angel was her father, it meant she was half seraphim. She had grace in her. Not enough that I could actively sense, but it explained why I felt so calm and content around her. I couldn’t help but be drawn to her. I wondered how I made her feel.

I didn’t ask her any more about the angel. I didn’t need to. It was clear what had happened. The angel had raped Penelope’s mother. Maybe the angel kept coming back because of Penelope, its child, maybe for another reason. Maybe it was part of some plan, maybe the angel had gone crazy. It didn’t matter. I’d seen this sort of thing before, although I’d never been so personally involved.

“I’ll help you,” I said. “We’ll find it and kill it together.”

She put her hand in mine but didn’t say anything else on that subject.

We finished our wine and then left the café. I wanted to find the angel as quickly as possible. I wanted to find any angel as quickly as possible. I needed grace before I got too hungry. I needed grace before I couldn’t help myself and turned on Penelope now that I knew she had it.

I took her to Montparnasse Cemetery. It’s where many of my friends have wound up. More of them have found less respectable graves, in trenches or stormy seas, but such is the way of history. The cemetery is also a favourite haunt of the angels. I’d found more than one here over the years and chased or followed them to somewhere I could kill them in private.

But the cemetery was empty of anything except for the dead and us. Someone else had been here though. The stone angels that marked tombs throughout the place all held postcards: in their hands, tucked into their wings, jammed into cracks in the stone.

When I pulled the first one out of an angel’s broken eye socket, I thought perhaps it was just someone being romantic or having a lark. It was a crumpled card depicting chrysanthemums. When I pulled the next one out from underneath an angel’s broken wing that had fallen to the ground, I began to wonder. It was a photo of a Shinto shrine. When I took the third one from the hands of the angel looking down on Baudelaire’s grave, I knew something was up. It was a photo of Mount Fuji.

“I don’t suppose you’re behind this, are you?” I said to the stone rendering of Baudelaire at my feet, but like most of the dead, he had nothing to say to me.

“What is it?” Penelope asked, looking at the postcards. “What do they mean?”

“Check all the other angels,” I said, “and bring me back their postcards.”

We separated and moved through the cemetery, collecting the cards that had been tucked into each statue and marker that held an angel. We met back at Baudelaire’s tomb, with handfuls of them. I tossed all my cards on the ground and looked at them.

Samurai warriors.

Japanese sailors.

The rising sun flag.

Cherry blossom trees.

Penelope added her cards to my pile.

A street scene from Tokyo.

A woman in a kimono.

An ink painting of trees done in the suibokuga style.

“They’re a message,” I said, finally answering Penelope’s question.

“There’s something in Japan,” she said.

“The angels have all gone to Japan,” I said, nodding. Which explained why we hadn’t come across any since my most recent encounter with Gabriel.

“What is there for them in Japan?” Penelope asked, and I shook my head.

“I don’t know,” I said. “The war, maybe. But if that’s where they are, then that’s where we’ll have to go.”

She studied me. “Something bothers you about Japan,” she said.

“No,” I said, looking around the graveyard. “What bothers me is I don’t know who left us this message, or why.”

As if on cue, a gust of wind picked up the postcards and blew them into the far corners of the cemetery and out of sight.