How Like an Angel

Eight

Finding the dirt lane that led to the Tower was more difficult than Quinn thought it was going to be. He went two or three miles beyond it before’ he realized he had missed it. He made a precarious turn, and driving very slowly, in low gear, he tried to spot the only landmark he could recall, the grove of eucalyptus trees. The piercing sun, the strain of driving around endless blind curves, the utter desolation of the country, were beginning to fray his nerves and undermine his confidence. Ideas that had seemed good in Chicote, decisions that had seemed right, looked frail and foolish against the bleak, brown landscape; and the search for O’Gorman seemed unreal, absurd, a fox hunt without a fox.

A young doe bounded out from a clump of scrub oak and leaped gracefully across the road in front of him, avoiding the bumper of the car by inches. She looked healthy and well-nourished. Quinn thought, She didn’t get that way on the food supply she’d find around here at this time of year. I must be near irrigated land.

He stopped the car at the top of the next hill and looked around. In the distance, to the east, he saw something glisten in the slanting rays of the sun. It was his first view of the Tower itself, a mere reflection of light from glass.

He released the brake and the car rolled silently down the hill. Half a mile farther on he spotted the grove of eucalyptus trees and the narrow dirt lane. Once he was on it he had a strange feeling of returning home. He was even a little excited at the prospect of being greeted, welcomed back. Then he saw one of the Brothers plodding along the road ahead of him. He honked the horn as he came alongside.

It was Brother Crown of Thorns, who had driven him to San Felice the previous morning.

“One good lift deserves another,” Quinn said, leaning across the seat to open the door. “Get in, Brother.”

Brother Crown stood rigid, his arms folded inside his robe. “We been expecting you, Mr. Quinn.”

“Good.”

“Not good, not good at all.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Pull your car off the road and leave it here,” Brother Crown said shortly. “I got orders to take you to the Master.”

“Good.” Quinn parked the car and got out. “Or isn’t that good, either?”

“A stranger snooping around inside the Tower is tempting the devil to destroy us all, but the Master says he wants to talk to you.”

“Where is Sister Blessing?”

“In torment for her sins.”

“Just what does that mean, Brother?”

“Money is the source of all evil.” Brother Crown turned, spat on the ground, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand before adding, “Amen.”

“Amen. But we weren’t talking about money.”

“You were. Yesterday morning. I heard you say to her, ‘About the money...’ I heard it and I had to tell the Master. It is one of our rules, the Master’s got to know everything so’s he can protect us against ourselves.”

“Where is Sister Blessing?” Quinn repeated.

Brother Crown merely shook his head and started walking up the dusty road. After a moment’s hesitation Quinn followed him. They passed the communal dining hall, the storage shed where Quinn had spent the night, and a couple of small buildings which he hadn’t seen before. Fifty yards beyond the path rose sharply, and the steepness of the ascent and the unaccustomed altitude made Quinn breathe heavily and rapidly.

Brother Crown paused for a minute and looked back at him with contempt. “Soft living. Weak constitution. Flabby muscles.”

“My tongue’s not flabby, though,” Quinn said. “I don’t tattle to the teacher.”

“The Master’s got to be told everything,” Brother Crown said, flushing. “I acted for Sister Blessing’s own good. We got to be saved from ourselves and the devil that’s in us. We all carry a devil around inside us gnawing our innards.”

“So that’s it. I thought my liver was acting up again.”

“Have your jokes. Laugh on earth, weep through eternity.”

“I’ll buy that.”

“Buy,” Brother Crown said. “Money. Hell-words leading to everlasting damnation. Take off your shoes.”

“Why?”

“This here’s consecrated ground.”

In a clearing, on top of the hill, the Tower rose five stories into the sky. It was made of glass and redwood in the shape of a pentagon surrounding an inner court.

Quinn left his shoes outside the entrance arch which bore an engraved inscription: the kingdom of heaven is waiting for all true believers, repent and rejoice. From the inner court scrubbed wooden steps with a rope guardrail led up the five levels of the Tower.

“You’re supposed to go up alone,” Brother Crown said.

“Why?”

“When the Master gives an order or makes a suggestion, it don’t pay to ask why.”

Quinn started up the stairs. At each level heavy oak doors led into what he decided must be the living quarters of the cultists. There were no windows opening onto the court except at the fifth level. Here Quinn found the door open.

A deep, resonant voice said, “Come in. Please close the door behind you, I feel a draft.”

Quinn went inside, and in that first instant he realized why the Tower had been built there in the wilderness and why the old lady whose money had built it felt that she was getting closer to heaven. The expanse of light and sky was almost too much for the eye to take in. Windows on all five sides revealed mountains beyond mountains, and three thousand feet below lay a blue lake in a green valley like a diamond on a leaf.

The scenery was so overpowering that the people in the room seemed of no importance. There were two of them, a man and a woman wearing identical whire wool robes loosely belted with scarlet satin. The woman was very old. Her body had shriveled with the years until it was no larger than a little girl’s, and her face was as creased and brown as a walnut. She sat on a bench looking up at the sky as if she expected it to open for her.

The man could have been anywhere from fifty to seventy years old. He had a gaunt, intelligent face, and eyes that burned like phosphorus at room temperature. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, he was working on a small hand loom.

“I am the Master,” he said easily and without self-consciousness. “This is Mother Pureza. We bid you welcome and wish you well.”

“Buena acogida,” the woman said as if she were translating the words to a fourth person present who couldn’t understand English. “Salud.”

“We bear you no malice.”

“No estamos malicios.”

“Mother Pureza, it is not necessary for you to translate for Mr. Quinn.”

The woman turned and gave him a stubborn look. “I like to hear my native tongue.”

“And so do I, at the proper time and place. Now if you will kindly excuse us, Mr. Quinn and I have some matters to discuss.”

“I want to stay and listen,” she said querulously. “It gets lonely waiting all by myself for the doors of the Kingdom to open and receive me.”

“God is always with you, Mother Pureza.”

“I wish He’d say something. I get so lonely, waiting, watching... Who is that young man? Why is he here in my Tower?”

“Mr. Quinn has come to see Sister Blessing.”

“Oh, oh, oh, he can’t do that!”

“That is what I must explain to him, in private.” The Master put a firm hand on her elbow and guided her to the steps. “Be careful going down, Pureza. It is a long fall to the inner court.”

“Tell the young man that if he wants to visit my Tower he must wait for an engraved invitation from my secretary, Capirote. Send for Capirote immediately.”

“Capirote isn’t here, Pureza. That was a long time ago. Now take hold of the guardrail and walk slowly.”

The Master closed the door quietly and returned to his position at the loom.

“Her Tower?” Quinn said.

“She commissioned it to be constructed. Now it belongs to us all. There is no private property in our community unless someone commits a material sin like our poor Sister Blessing.” He held up one hand in a silencing gesture. “Please make no denials, Mr. Quinn. Sister Blessing has confessed in full and is repenting in full.”

“I want to see her. Where is she?”

“What you want doesn’t carry much weight with us. When you trespassed upon our property, you were, in a sense, entering another country with a different constitution, a different set of laws.”

“I gather it’s still part of the Union,” Quinn said. “Or is it?”

“There has been no formal secession, that is true. But we do not accept as law what we do not believe to be right.”

“By ‘we’ you mean ‘I,’ don’t you?”

“I have been chosen to receive revelations and visions beyond the others. However, I am only an instrument of the divine will, a mere servant among its other servants.... I can see I am not convincing you.”

“No.” Quinn wondered what the man had been in real life besides a failure. “You wanted to talk to me. What about?”

“Money.”

“I thought that was a dirty word around here.”

“It is sometimes necessary to use dirty words to describe dirty transactions, such as accepting a large sum of money from a woman for performing a very small service.” He touched his forehead with his right hand while his left pointed to the sky. “You see, I know everything.”

“You didn’t get it in a vision,” Quinn said. “And accepting a large sum of money from a woman doesn’t seem to have bothered you much. This place wasn’t built with green stamps.”

“Hold your vicious tongue, Mr. Quinn, and I shall hold my temper, which can be equally vicious, I assure you. Mother Pureza is my wife, dedicated to my work, sharing my visions of the glory that awaits us. Oh, the glory, oh, if you could see the glory, you would understand why we are all here.” The Master’s face underwent an abrupt, unexplained change. The visionary suddenly became the realist. “You wish to make your report to Sister Blessing about the man O’Gorman?”

“I not only wish to, I intend to.”

“That will be impossible. She is in isolation, renewing her vows of renunciation, a trivial punishment considering the magnitude of her sins, concealing money, withholding it from the common fund, trying to reestablish contact with the world she promised to leave behind her. These are grave infractions of our laws. She could have been banished from our midst entirely but the Lord told me in a vision to spare her.”

The Lord, Quinn thought, plus a little common sense. Sister Blessing’s too useful to banish. There wouldn’t be anybody left to keep the rest of them healthy while waiting to die.

“You are to make your report to me,” the Master said. “I will see that she gets it.”

“Sorry, my instructions were specific. No Sister, no report.”

“Very well. No report, no money. I demand an immediate return of what is left of the sum Sister Blessing gave you. That seems to me quite a fair and just idea.”

“There’s only one thing the matter with it,” Quinn said. “The money’s gone.”

The Master pushed the loom aside with a sweep of his hand. “You spent a hundred and twenty dollars in a day and a half? You’re lying.”

“Living costs have gone up in my part of the Union.”

“You gambled it away, is that it? Gambled and boozed and debauched—”

“Yes, I had a pretty busy time what with one thing and another. Now I’d like to do what I was paid to do and get out of here. The climate in your country doesn’t agree with me, there’s too much hot air.”

A rush of blood stained the Master’s face and neck but he said in a controlled voice, “I have long since been accustomed to the gibes of the ignorant and the unbelievers. I can only warn you that the Lord will smite you with the sword of His wrath.”

“Consider me smote.” Quinn’s tone was considerably lighter than his feelings. The place was beginning to oppress him, the glorification of death hung over it as the smell of oil hung over Chicote. He thought, Once you get the idea that dying is great, it’s an easy step up to thinking you’re doing someone a favor by helping him die. The old boy’s been harmless so far but his next vision might have me in a featured role.

“Let’s quit playing games,” Quinn said. “I came to see Sister Blessing. Aside from the fact that she paid me to do a job, I happen to like her, and I want to make sure she’s all right. Now it’s no secret that you’ve had some trouble with the law—the law of my part of the Union, of course—and you just might be asking for more.”

“Is that a threat?”

“That’s exactly what it is, Master. I’m not leaving here until I assure myself that Sister Blessing is alive and in good health, as she was yesterday morning when I left here.”

“Why shouldn’t she be alive? What kind of nonsense is this? You talk as if we were barbarians, savages, maniacs—”

“You’re close.”

The Master got clumsily to his feet, kicking aside the loom. It crashed against the wall. “Leave. Leave here immediately, or I will not be responsible for what happens to you. Get out of my sight.”

Suddenly the door opened and Mother Pureza came in making little clucking noises with her tongue. “Oh, that’s not polite, Harry. It really isn’t polite after I sent him an engraved invitation through Capirote.”

“Oh God,” the Master said and covered his face with his hands.

“And you needn’t scold me for eavesdropping, either. I told you I was lonely, triste, desamparada—”

“You have not been abandoned, Pureza.”

“Then where is everybody? Where is Mama, and Dolores who brought my breakfast, and Pedro who polished my riding boots, and Capirote? Where is everybody? Where have they all gone, Harry? Why didn’t they take me with them? Oh Harry, why didn’t they wait for me?”

“Hush now, Pureza. You must be patient.” He crossed the room and took her in his arms and patted her thinning hair, her emaciated shoulders. “You must not lose courage, Pureza. Soon you will see them all again.”

“Will Dolores bring me breakfast in bed?”

“Yes.”

“And Pedro, may I hit him with my riding crop if he doesn’t listen to me?”

“Yes.” The Master’s voice was an exhausted whisper. “Whatever you like.”

“I might hit you too, Harry.”

“All right.”

“Not hard, though. Just a tap on the dome to sting a little and let you know I’m alive... But I won’t be alive then, Harry. I won’t be alive. Oh, I’m so confused. How can I give you a little tap on the dome to let you know I’m alive when I won’t be alive?”

“I don’t know. Please stop it. Please be quiet and go to your room.”

“You never help me think any more,” she said, moving her head back and forth. “You used to help me think, you used to explain everything to me. Now you tell me to be quiet, to go to my room, to watch the sky and wait. Why did we come here, Harry? I know there was a reason.”

“For eternal salvation.”

“Is that all?... Oh, oh, oh, there’s a strange young man standing over there, Harry. Tell Capirote to show him out, and in the future not to admit anyone without a proper calling card. And hurry up about it. My orders are to be obeyed immediately, I am Dona Isabella Consrancia Querida Felicia de la Guerra.”

“No, no, you are Mother Pureza,” the Master said softly. “And you are going to your room to take a rest.”

“But why?”

“Because you are tired.”

“I am not tired. I am lonely. You’re the one who’s tired, aren’t you, Harry?”

“Perhaps.”

“So tired. Poor Harry, muy amado mio,”

“I’ll help you, Pureza. Hang onto my arm.”

Over the old woman’s head he beckoned to Quinn to follow, and the three of them started off down the stairs. At the fourth level the Master opened the door and Mother Pureza went inside with just one small moan of protest. The Master leaned against the door and closed his eyes. A minute went by, two minutes. Quinn was beginning to think the man was in a trance or had gone to sleep standing up.

Suddenly his eyes opened. He touched his forehead. “I feel your pity, Mr. Quinn. I do not accept it, you are wasting your time and energy on pity as I wasted mine on anger. You observe I am no longer angry? Kicking a loom, how trivial it was, how small it will look in eternity. I am purified, I am cleansed.”

“Good for you,” Quinn said. “Now I’d like to see Sister Blessing.”

“Very well, you’ll see her. You’ll regret your evil thoughts and dark suspicions. She is in spiritual isolation. Did I put her there? No, she went of her own accord. She is renewing her vows of renunciation. At my insistence? No, no, Mr. Quinn. At her own. Your simple mind cannot grasp the situation.”

“It can try.”

“In spiritual isolation, the senses do not exist. The eyes do not see, the ears do not hear, the flesh cannot feel. Perhaps, if the isolation is complete, she will not even know you are there.”

“Then again perhaps she will. Especially if I can see her alone.”

“Of course. I have total faith in the Sister’s devotion to the spirit.”

She was in a small square room on the ground floor. It contained no furniture but the wooden bench she sat on, facing the window, in a shaft of sunlight. Sweat, or tears, had streaked her forehead and cheeks, and there were moist patches on her robe. When Quinn spoke her name she didn’t answer but her hunched shoulders twitched and her eyelids blinked.

“Sister Blessing, you asked me to come back and I did.”

She turned and looked at him, mute and suffering. The fright in her eyes was so intense that Quinn felt like shouting at her: Snap out of it, get away from this bughouse before you’re as nutty as the old woman, recognize the Master for what he is, a schizo and a fear peddler. His racket’s as old as the hills. It doesn’t take the curse off it because he believes in it himself, it only makes it doubly dangerous.

He said, in a conversational tone, “Remember those pink fuzzy slippers you told me you saw in a Sears catalogue? There was a pair just like that in a store window in Chicote.”

For a moment something besides fear showed in her eyes, interest, curiosity. Then it was gone, and she was speaking in a listless monotone: “I have renounced the world and its evils. I have renounced the flesh and its weakness. I seek the solace of the spirit, the salvation of the soul.”

“It’s lucky you don’t lisp,” Quinn said, trying to coax a smile out of her. “I didn’t find O’Gorman, by the way. He disappeared five and a half years ago. His wife thinks she’s a widow, so do a lot of other people. What do you think?”

“Having done without comfort, I will be comforted by the Lord. Having hungered, I will feast.”

“Did you know O’Gorman? Was he a friend of yours?”

“Having trod the rough earth, my feet uncovered, I will walk the smooth and golden streets of heaven.”

“Maybe you’ll meet O’Gorman,” Quinn said. “He seems to have been a good man, no enemies, nice wife and kids. In fact, a very nice wife, it’s too bad she’s wasting her life in uncertainty. I think if she knew definitely that O’Gorman wasn’t coming back, she could start living again. You’re listening, Sister. You’re hearing me. Answer just one question, will O’Gorman be coming back?”

“Having here forsaken the pride of ornament, I will be of infinite beauty. Having humbled myself in the fields, I will walk tall and straight in the hereafter, which does belong to the True Believers. Amen.”

“I’m going back to Chicote, Sister. Have you any message for Martha O’Gorman? She deserves a break. Give it to her if you can, Sister. You’re a generous woman.”

“I have renounced the world and its evils. I have renounced the flesh and its weakness. Having done without comfort—”

“Sister, listen to me.”

“—I will be comforted by the Lord. Having hungered, I will feast. Having trod the rough earth, my feet uncovered, I will walk the smooth and golden streets of heaven. Having here forsaken the pride of ornament, I will be of infinite beauty.”

Quinn went out and closed the door quietly. Sister Blessing was as far beyond reach as O’Gorman.