Angel of Death

E L E V E N

The counsel cell was cinder block and steel, glass fused with metal mesh. Once built, the room had been fastened into an eternal solidity with round-topped bolts as thick as a man’s middle finger. The speckled paint was rosy colored, something like a mixture of blood and milk, left from a time when pink was thought to pacify inmates. To John Doe, it seemed the room had experienced a swift volcanism that had melted every surface and galvanized all into a seamless whole. The rest of the Racine County Jail was the same – homogenized and impersonally antagonistic. Even the guards were fundamentally interchangeable, their eyes neutral and steely. They walked the catwalks and manned their stations with the silent menace of sharks. This was the joyless Sheol in which the Jews had once believed. Yellowish light. Milk-blood walls. Metal bunks. A steel table with a checkerboard scratched into its paint and scraps of paper as playing pieces. The everpresent reek of cigarettes. For a week now, this realm of the dead had been his home.

But into that homogeneous room of steel and cinder block came something unique: a black woman. Her hair had been straightened and then curled again into a feathery mound on her head. Her face was ageless, as are those of black women, though the mixture of caution, wisdom, and compassion in her eyes said that she had seen much. She wore a kente cloth vest over a shirt of shiny black fabric. A long black skirt finished the ensemble.

“Hello, Mr Doe, my name is Lynda. Lynda Barnett. I’m your state-appointed defender.”

John Doe nodded. His features were handsome despite the rings beneath his eyes and the slack hang of his cheeks. “I would rise, but they have attached me to the table.” He rattled his shackles.

Counselor Barnett nodded noncommittally to that, swung a leather attache to rest on her end of the table, pulled out a number of loose sheets and manila folders, and settled down on the chair.

“Now, I find it much easier to defend a man whose name I know. I’ve told you mine; how about if you tell me yours?”

“I have told the police and will tell you. The closest thing I have to a human name is Azrael Michaels,” the man said quietly.

“There is no Sergeant Michaels of the Griffith, Indiana, Police Department. The Social Security administration lists only five Azrael Michaelses who would be about your age. Two are dead already, and though the three others are alive and well – they aren’t you.” Her eyes flared. “No birth certificate. No green card. Who are you?”

“My true name is unpronounceable and unspellable.”

Counselor Barnett blinked once slowly. She tipped her head toward the documents she had brought. “That’s what this report says.” She looked up from the papers. “Already, the press is calling you the Son of Samael. Is that what you want them to call you?”

“Why not? Samael is the name the Jews give to the Archangel of Death.”

“Yes,” Counselor Barnett responded. “Muslims call him Azrael, and Christians call him Michael, which is why you call yourself Azrael Michaels – but the papers are calling you Samaele-”

“I’m not really the Archangel of Death.”

“No?” she asked sarcastically.

“I’m just an angel. One of his deputies.”

Counselor Barnett stopped and took a deep breath, looking infinitely weary. “Look, Mr Doe, just because I am an overworked public defender handling the cases of people who are broke and desperate doesn’t mean I ignore my research or do a slapdash job. I’m a damned good attorney, but you’re going to have to meet me halfway on this. Drop the insanity act just long enough to give me your name, Social Security number, birth date – that stuff.”

“This isn’t insanity,” John Doe replied calmly. “Nor is it an act. I truly am – truly was the angel of death for this area.”

The lawyer sighed wearily. “What area?”

“The Chicago-Milwaukee metropolitan area, stretching from Lake County, Indiana, up to the northernmost suburbs of Milwaukee.”

She wrote. “And how long have you been assigned this area?”

“For almost fifteen years.”

That, too, was noted. “And how many people did you kill in that time?”

“That is a difficult question. Do you mean how many deaths did I approve, or how many did I arrange?”

“How many did you arrange?”

“About four hundred thirty per month.”

She stopped writing. “The cops have been through this before with other drifters of your stripe. If you’re planning to delay your trial while police haul you from state to state for questioning about various unsolved murders, you’re sadly mistaken-”

“Murders? Ah, well, many of the ones I arranged were accidents, not murders. If you are asking how many murders I arranged, that’s more like about ninety-five per month.”

Ms. Barnett looked stunned. “You want me to believe you killed, what…? Three people a day for the last fifteen years? That’s, what, a thousand per year… about fifteen thousand murders before getting caught?”

“First of all,” John Doe returned quietly, “I did not kill them. I arranged their murders. Others did the actual killing. Secondly, you are right: A mortal could not have slain so many without being caught.”

She nodded. “If you are an angel, why don’t you just blink out of here?”

“I’m no longer an angel,” the man said. “I’ve fallen.”

“What sin made you fall?”

“Love.”

With that, she slid the papers back into her leather satchel and stood. “Mr Doe, regardless of what you were, we both agree that you are human now, and that you are on trial for multiple murders in a human criminal justice system. Either you come clean with me so I can provide you the best possible defense, or you get multiple life sentences without the possibility of parole

– and get stabbed to death by an inmate with a broomstick. Who says Wisconsin has no death penalty?”

She turned and walked from the room.

Counselor Barnett arranged a competency hearing. She wanted to take away my right to determine my own defense, but I didn’t cooperate.

In court, I was the picture of sanity and was declared fit for trial.

I lay on my bunk. It’d taken me two weeks to consider this body to be truly mine, not a mere convenience to make me visible to humans. Now, I knew it. It was my body that lay on the thin mattress. It was me.

A defense. I needed a defense. My mind would not settle on the idea.

Perhaps my situation was temporary. Perhaps my fall from grace was a kind of warning from God. In my line of work, I had orchestrated numerous near-death experiences, in which a living person dies briefly, has a vision of the beyond, and is returned, chastened, to life. Perhaps I was having the opposite, a near-life experience. Now, I waited merely to be returned to heaven, chastened. I would regain my divinity, but would have to vow never again to dabble in human hearts. That would be a very difficult vow. Love cannot be simply shut off. I had used my one phone call to talk to Donna. She said she’d come to see me soon. She said I’d be okay. She said she’d bring a friend to help us sort everything out. I couldn’t wait to see her. I had no idea the boredom and tedium of being trapped in space and time, or the agony of being trapped in love. I told my cell mate about my plight. He was a fiftythree-year-old white businessman whose well-trimmed graying hair and narrow, sensitive eyes made him look distinguished even in a shapeless orange jumpsuit. Derek Billings was his name, an embezzler. (I hadn’t asked his crime. The first time I had asked someone’s crime, I’d gotten a black eye. Billings told me of his own accord.)

I told Billings my crime, too. He looked very alarmed. I kept talking, relating my angelic past. My voice was low and gentle, my manner polite and deferential. Billings slowly calmed. White-collar criminals are that way, comfortable among well-educated, soft-spoken psychotics. The inmates that Billings feared were the uneducated but sane ones.

The only reason an embezzler was put in with alleged murderers and rapists was the scope of his crimes. Billings had embezzled thirty-five million dollars, had stashed it away in coded accounts he still would not divulge, and had already made one attempt to flee the country. The judge at his arraignment had bent quite a few guidelines to establish bail at thirty-five million dollars. Apparently, the judge believed Billings could be trusted not to flee only if he no longer had the money to flee with or to. Billings confessed to me that the judge was right, and so kept his stash a secret. We made a perfect team, the polite white men whose soft-spoken manners belied the enormous crimes we had committed – allegedly. Further, the prosecutors were sure that we both hid the key to our crimes locked away in our brains – Billings with the location and numbers of his accounts, and me with the human name and past that I couldn’t divulge since I didn’t have them.

“Well,” said Billings as he sat beside me on the lower bunk, “they want you to have a name and a past, so why don’t you give them one?”

“None of it would check out. There are no records of me anywhere – no birth certificate, no immunization sheet, no school performance, no family, no friends.”

“The documents, you can forge,” he replied. He made a motion as though he were smoking, one of his few joys in life, though he had been denied any money to buy cigarettes. It didn’t matter. The air was rank with smoke, anyway. “I know a good guy. He’s expensive, but he does good work.”

“It doesn’t matter if I have the documents. One call to the hospitals or schools to verify, and the forgery would be obvious.”

“Not if the hospital was torn down or the school burned,” Billings said easily. “For a little extra, my guy can slip your stats into the archives of existing hospital computers and school archives. Investigators will stop there. They don’t want to look too deep.”

I shook my head. “I can’t pay your guy. Angels don’t have money. Never needed it.”

“I have money,” said Billings, releasing a long draw of imagined smoke from his lungs. “It’d be tough to get to, but we could buy you a past.”

“Well, thank you for the offer, but I don’t see how a name and a past are going to help me out of this.”

“Easy. Right now, you’re just an uncommunicative, uncooperative psycho who’s damn-near certainly responsible for five gruesome slayings-”

“Much more than five,” I said, “though they have evidence only for those.”

“You’re just a monster. That’s all people see. But let the people see your past. If you’ve got to create one, make it a good one – one that explains why you are who you are, what happened to you. Everybody looks at you and sees Darth Vader. Let them look and see Anakin Skywalker. You’re not a monster anymore, John. You’re a tragic hero.”

“A fallen angel.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“Well, then, what do you suggest?”

He gathered his legs up before him, scooted back on the bunk, leaned against the cinder block wall, and took a long drag on his invisible cigarette. “It shouldn’t be sexual abuse and incest. Folks are sick and tired of those. The Menendez brothers buried that defense deep. Post-traumatic shock disorder won’t work either. Most folks with that just get silent and sullen and suicidal – though a couple suicide attempts would be helpful – show you were willing to kill yourself as well as others.”

“What about MIA? What about if I had been in Desert Storm and was MIA in some Baghdad rape room for thirteen years?”

“How old are you?”

“I don’t know. How old do I look?”

“Thirty-five. Forty at a stretch. That’s about perfect. Young man signs up to fight in George H.W. Bush’s war for oil, gets shot up pretty bad-”

“I do have an old bullet wound, one that was part of this body when I created it.”

“Good. So, you get shot up, and before the medics can find you, some Republican Guard fighter drags you into a living room and hides you until you can be given over to Saddam and his sadist sons. They interrogate you, torture you, put you up in a rape room for thirteen years, the only permanent resident – keep you just to kick around-”

“I’ve got a surgery scar, here, too-”

“Wow. That’s gold. Nobody gets scars like that now, with arthroscopic surgery. That can’t be from surgery. It’s got to be torture – one long cut from hip to hip – evisceration! Vivisection!”

“Yeah. A disemboweling torture, done with a hook?”

I was beginning to enjoy this game. It was the opposite of what I’d been doing: instead of arranging someone else’s death, I was arranging my own life. “The rape room guy sticks a hook through me, from here to here, and hangs me from the ceiling. I hang that way, upsidedown, for three days until the hook rips through my stomach muscles.”

“Expert testimony,” Billings said with a shake of his head. “What’re you gonna do about that? They’d get a doctor to say that it was cut, not a rip mark. Of course, we could just dig up a doctor who’ll testify it’s definitely a rip mark – but that’ll cost more money.” He shrugged, taking comfort from his pantomime smoke.

“Well, that was just one torture,” I continued. “I was there from 1991 to 2003 – thirteen years. After the first two or three years, they weren’t really trying for secrets. Not anymore. They were just having fun. They would entertain dignitaries by torturing the mad American.”

“But we’re not there yet,” Billings said. “Just because you were a tortured MIA doesn’t give you a license to come back and kill Americans.”

“Well, all right, so I get liberated when we take Baghdad. I think the tortures are over. I’ve been imprisoned in Hell, and now the angels have swept in to lift me away. George W. finds out about me and wants to use my story. I’m his boy – the unfinished business his father left behind, business that the son took care of.”

“Right. Right,” Billings said, rubbing his hands together. “So, why have we never heard of you?”

I stared ahead of us, like I could see it all. “It’s what I saw. I saw a massacre.”

“Oh, this is good.”

“Seventy-five virgins in burkhas, three hundred orphans in their care – all of them rushing out of a mosque that was collapsing because of missile fire and the brigade that saved me firing. Firing. Firing. Fifteen seconds of automatic weapons fire, and four hundred Iraqis dead, and the MIA American who witnessed it all, who is supposed to pose with George W in the Rose Garden but who blows the whistle – he is handcuffed and hooded and carried away to Gitmo. And the angels have turned to demons, and the tortures begin again.”

“You’re on to something there,” Billings replied quietly. A feverish glow filled his eyes. “But how did you get back to this country?”

“They tortured me, got everything I knew and then some – all the horrors of this ongoing war. Then, when they knew they had everything out of me, they tortured me to death.”

“But you didn’t die?”

“I didn’t. It was a trick I’d learned those thirteen years in the rape rooms. I could stop my breathing. Let them walk away thinking they’d done it. But then I’d wake up again twenty minutes later.”

“In Iraq they called you Lazarus.”

“Yeah. Lazarus. Except in Gitmo, they didn’t know that. You lie still long enough in all that blood, getting cold on the floor, not breathing whenever they’re looking, not responding whenever they kick – soon enough they think you’re really and truly dead. They bodybagged me, figured they’d hide the murder of one of their own by saying I was found on a roadside in the Triangle of Death, stuck me on a Hercules cargo plane, and sent me back with a hundred other corpses to some base south of the border.

“The thing was, I wasn’t a corpse. I slipped out of my bag, dressed in some airman’s clothes, and helped the crew offload bodies. Then, I just disappeared, and sneaked into America.”

“It’s perfect. The government wiped all your records. Disavowed. You don’t have to create false records because when the government wants you not to exist – man, you don’t exist. The very fact that there is no evidence of your existence is evidence of the very story you’re telling! And then coming in illegal from Mexico

– that’s the new American Dream. You’re an archetype, Mr Doe. Jesus Christ, you are an angel,” said Billings with a brutal laugh.

“I was,” I responded ruefully. My interest in this game was flagging. It was the opposite of what I had been doing. Instead of assuring truth, I was creating a lie. “Look, wouldn’t it be better to tell the truth? Most Americans believe in God. Many of those also believe in Jesus-”

“Steer clear of saying you’re Jesus-”

“Not Jesus, but like Jesus, divinity in the flesh.”

“Forget it. That defense failed Manson.”

“Yes, right,” I replied. “A defense. That’s what I want.”

Billings nodded to himself and tugged on his upper lip. “Back to your story. It’s a huge lie, but that makes it perfect. The bigger the lie, the easier it is to believe. C’mon. I used to work for Halliburton! Look at the fucking war in Iraq. No justification. A huge lie, but a lot of money. And yet after all the evidence, people still want to believe.”

“I don’t want to live a lie.”

“You’re still not finished. You still have to make it clear why you killed people. Why you cut off their heads and hands. You’ve got to explain all this press about you thinking you’re an angel. People will say,

‘He’s just another crazy Midwest monster – another Dahmer or Gein or Gacy.’ You’re a killer, yeah – they got your prints and all – but you’ve got to convince them you’re a killer with a heart of gold.”

“Can we stop?”

“Let’s think about the symbolism of heads and hands. Heads are identity. They’re control. They’re government. Okay?”

Resignedly, I said, “Okay.”

“And hands. They’re the doers, the tools of the head. Okay?”

“Whatever.”

“So, it’s George HW who sent you to war – the head. And Saddam Hussein who wanted you tortured all those years – the head. And George W who wanted you tortured again – the head. When you cut off a head, you’re killing the part that killed you. Then, there are the hands – the folks who thrust you into battle, that dragged you into a rape room, that carried you into a secret prison. Without hands, the heads can do nothing.”

“Yeah.”

“So, your victims – the ones they can tie you to – they had committed atrocities with their hands and heads, and you were stopping them, like you couldn’t stop the real monsters.” He turned to me and smiled cunningly. “Do you see what we’ve done here, John?

We’ve given you not just a past, but an honest-togoodness defense.”

I nodded, unnerved. I couldn’t tell whether Billings had taken hold of the lie or it had taken hold of him.

“The press will love it. Your trial won’t be in the courts but in the media. You’re a blogger’s dream. We just need to plant a few false leads, make some implications – let your attorney discover all this stuff and grill you about it, so that it all seems to come from outside. Keep up with this business of being a fallen angel. They’ll say that’s the only way you could deal with the stress of your situation – to believe you could not be killed and your body was not really yours, only a ghostform. “And the business about killing twenty thousand people over fifteen years, that’s great Biblical material. It’d be even better if you could remember forty thousand. Forty is always a good, holy number. Maybe some reporter will even suggest that’s how many deaths you suffered at the hands of the Iraqis. Jesus, but I’m brilliant,” Billings concluded, gazing speculatively at the metal bunk above his head. “It’s just lucky for the world that all I ever wanted to do was get rich, not kill.”

I rose. My legs were numb from sitting, and my mind from the fantasy. “Yes, Derek. Thank you for humoring me.” I climbed up into my bunk.

“Humoring you?” he said. “I’m serious about this. You don’t have to do a thing, just plant the seeds and watch how fast a forest of falsehood grows up to protect you. See, they aren’t so mad about the killings; they’re just mad that you won’t even hint at why you did it. Give them the slightest hint of an explanation, and they’ll make an innocent lamb out of you.”

I looked to the high, barred window, beyond the catwalk of our cell block. “Good night.”

“You think I’m kidding. I’ll show you I’m serious. Tomorrow, my wife is going to visit-”

“Good night.”

He had only been trying to help, but lies would not save me. I’d never learned their nuances, never needed to spin them. Only God could save me now, whisking me away from this corporeal hell. And if God would not save me, I would cling to the truth. It was all I had left of my angelic past.

Not all. As I lay there, calmly breathing the bluetinted air, an old, familiar intuition came to me. Derek Billings’s time was coming. His life would soon be up. He was to die in two weeks, just before his trial would begin.

If I arranged his passing, made it a fitting and final end, perhaps God would take me back.

Of course Derek was to die. He was the second human being I had latched on to after Donna. Killing him would be very difficult for me. Killing him would prove that my unhealthy bond with humans was at an end, that I could still slay efficiently and dispassionately when the time called for it. If I killed Derek Billings, God just might take me back.

As he lay there on the bunk below mine, palpable in the still darkness, I could feel his mind churning the permutations of the salvation he planned for me. Meanwhile, I imagined him dying in a thousand ways

– poisoned food, a knife in the back, a penny stuck in his throat; yes, that last would work well, poetic justice for the embezzler of electronic money to choke on real money – on the slightest amount of real money. The final touch, though, was to have a trusted comrade ram that coin in place.

That was where I would come in.