The Further Tales of Tempest Landry

Visiting Privileges

I sat at the far end of a long row of visitor’s chairs set on one side of a bulletproof-glass divider. It wasn’t a very busy day and so there was an empty seat separating almost every visitor. There were old women and young, a few well-dressed men, mostly lawyers I guessed, and for each visitor there was a convict dressed in bright orange overalls with little red crosses painted here and there. Convicts and visitors on either side of the transparent barrier were leaning forward with telephone receivers pressed to their heads.

There were maybe a dozen convicted felons conversing through the intercom system and just as many guards in blue uniform standing a few feet away. Behind the row of guards was a bright red door with yellow letters stenciled on it: PRISONERS: DO NOT TOUCH.

The door opened and Tempest Landry, aka Ezzard Walcott, walked in with his hands and feet manacled, followed by two guards. The burly guards, one white and the other black, led Tempest to the chair in front of me and pushed him down into the metal chair.

Up close, through the three-inch-thick glass, I could see that there were bruises, a few recent cuts, and as many developing scars on my ward’s face. He stared at me through the glass, making no attempt at first to reach for the receiver. His visage wasn’t exactly what I would have called hardened. There was pain in his eyes, determination in the set of his jaw, and condemnation (even hatred) in the long moment of silence.

I reached for the visitor’s phone and held it to my ear. Tempest’s nostrils flared and then he, reaching out with both hands, took up his receiver.

“What happened to your face?” I asked him.

After another sixty seconds of silence he said, “Same thing that happened to my ribs and back, gut and the back of my head.”

“Who did this to you?”

“Who didn’t?”

“What happened, Tempest?”

He almost hung up his phone then. I could see the rage he felt at my show of sympathy. And I couldn’t blame him. It wasn’t his fault that he was in prison.

“What happened?” he said. “You mean between me and the man who wanted to rob me of my one pack of cigarettes or the two men who wanted me to make them both happy at the same time? You talkin’ ’bout the guard I talked back to or the fool I had to slash his face?”

“You stabbed someone?”

“Slashed him,” Tempest corrected. “Big dude sayin’ I was his bitch anytime he wanted. Either I was gonna show that wasn’t true or every day would be Valentine’s Day for the next eighty-two years.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t say that again, Angel. Don’t say it, man. You say it and we ain’t nevah gonna talk again. You understand me?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Good. Now you explain to me why I’m here. Explain to me why I got Ezzard Walcott’s fingerprints. Explain to me why the hell the cops could pick me up and put me in prison without so much as a trial.”

“Mr. Walcott had been convicted of aggravated assault,” I said. “That and second-degree manslaughter and, and while he was on the run he received more time for flight from justice.”

“I know all that,” Tempest said, managing not to shout. “I know all that. Question is why am I in his body?”

“Mr. Walcott, after he fled bail, went to stay with a girlfriend — Fredda Lane. She secreted him in the basement of her friend’s stepfather’s house. It was winter and he was down in Florida staying with his son.”

“I don’t need no weather report, Angel. What I wanna know is what all this gotta do wit’ me?”

“Fredda’s friend, Dominique, brought Ezzard some food one day when Fredda was with her mother. One thing led to another and Fredda found out. Something to do with an item of clothing. I’m not sure because it wasn’t my case.”

“Just go on, man,” Tempest said peevishly.

“Calm down,” the black guard said.

“Fredda got Ezzard inebriated in some fashion and then lured him on the back of a late-night Staten Island Ferry. She pushed him over the side into wintry waters.”

“And that’s the body you an’ Peter decided to put me into?” Tempest asked.

“I don’t think that the whole story was known at the time of your, your transmigration.”

“You mean you got all the resources of heaven at your beck and call and all you could do was put my soul in the body of a convicted man on the run?”

“It is regrettable,” I said.

“Okay, all right. I’ll forgive you, but first flap your wings or sumpin’ an’ get me the heck outta here.”

It was my turn to be silent. I wanted to speak but there were no words I had that he wanted to hear.

“What’s wrong, Angel? I know you not gonna blame me for what Ezzard Walcott done done.”

“No... of course not.”

“Come on, Joshua. I already been in here three months. You know there ain’t no justice in that.”

“No.”

“Well then, wrinkle your nose or say alakazam or sumpin’. Just make this here right.”

“I only found out a few days ago that you were here, Tempest,” I said. “I was sitting with my baby daughter on the sofa when Gabriel appeared to me. He said that heaven was not pleased with my common-law marriage or my fathering little Tethamalanianti. I have been stripped of my post and the accordant powers of head accounting angel. I have been ordered to make you accept the edict of the On High.”

“Make me? What happened to free will?”

“They are afraid of you, Tempest.”

“Did you tell ’em that I met Satan and defeated him?”

“That disturbed the Celestial Choir even more. The fact that you met with Basil Bob, Beelzebub, further convinced them that you need to be thrown down into Hades.”

“But Bob told me that I could tear down the walls of heaven if I just sent you away. All I got to do is say no to our talks, and the whole connection between Man and the Infinite will come to an end.”

It was true. The hegemony of the divine hung by a slender thread, dependent on the whim of Tempest Landry’s errant soul. After being shot down dead in the streets of Harlem, he refused to accept his sentence to eternal damnation. His ability to evoke his free will threatened all that has ever been known as true.

“Ain’t that right, Angel?”

After a very long time I nodded and whispered, “Yes.”

“Then let me outta here ’fore I put an end to you and your whole damn line!”

“I said keep it down,” the black guard growled. “One more time an’ you’re back in solitary.”

Tempest and I stared into each others’ eyes with deep concentration.

“Well?” he asked me.

“I haven’t the power to release you, Tempest. I told Gabriel that you might end everything with a word, but he told me to meet with you until you broke... until you accepted heaven’s edict and trundled down to hell.”

“You know what Bob said he would do to me if I went down there. He’d torture me with his own hands, break every bone in my body, just for starters.”

“Yes.”

“So you ain’t leavin’ me no choice.”

“Men always have a choice,” I said in a voice that approximated the celestial timbre I had once controlled. People on both sides of the glass glanced in my direction before going back to their conversations and jobs. They were curious but no longer profoundly affected by my voice.

“Raisin’ yo’ voice don’t change things, Angel. I’m still up here in prison no mattah what you say.”

Again I fell silent. Tempest was the only friend I’d ever had throughout seemingly endless millennia. He introduced me to my wife, taught me more about life than I had ever learned counting sins and pointing my damning finger at the offenders. I didn’t want him in that prison but I was as helpless as he was.

“So what’s your answer?” he asked me.

“I do not have the power to free you. I have been stripped of every benefit of heaven. If I were you I would... I would deny the fearful cold winds that envelop you.”

“So you agree?” he asked. “You believe that I should tear down the walls of heaven?”

“Gabriel gave me a message for you,” I said, reluctantly.

“What’s that?”

“Time’s up,” the white guard said.

“He told me to tell you that the demolition of the divine would not ameliorate your plight, that you would spend the rest of your life in prison and then be thrown into the Abyss thereafter.

“I know you told me not say it but I’m sorry, Tempest. I have no control over these events. I’m a tool in this struggle, as much a victim as are you.”

“I said, time’s up,” the white guard repeated.

They grabbed Tempest by his armpits and lifted him to his feet. The phone fell from his hand but he did not stop staring at me. He craned his neck to keep me in sight as they dragged him away.

I sat in that hard metal visitor’s chair for many long minutes trying to figure out what had happened and how I felt about it.

When no answer came I got to my feet and staggered out of the prison: a pawn in a war that I no longer truly understood, a lost soul who had forgotten his way home.

Man with a Plan

It took me three months to get in to visit Tempest again. For the first four weeks he was under disciplinary lockdown for having had a fight with a prison guard. After that he simply refused to see me.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Angel,” the admittance officer would say whenever I presented myself at the admissions window.

“Is he on report again?” I’d ask.

“No, sir. Ezzard has turned over a new leaf,” the middle-aged white man told me after six weeks of failed attempts. “Ever since we started up the CVP again... you know, the conjugal visit program, he hasn’t broken rule one.”

“Oh,” I said, “I see. Well I guess that makes sense.”

“You better believe it, sir. Sex is better than morphine for the kind of pain these men got. Thumpin’ that mattress beats Bible thumpin’ five times out of six.”

I showed up every Saturday at one p.m. undeterred by Tempest’s refusal to see me. The admittance officer, Hiram Pele, would always say no... until one dark afternoon in March.

“He sent word to bring you down whenever you got here,” Hiram told me.

Forty-five minutes later — after I had been questioned and searched, searched again, and reminded of a dozen rules that all visitors had to obey — I was allowed into the visitor’s hall.

I became suspicious when I saw that I was the only visitor and Tempest the only convict sitting on the opposite side of the bulletproof glass. My mistrust was that Gabriel had devised a situation that would be most conducive to trip up Tempest Landry and send him to an eternity with his greatest enemy.

Tempest for his part was all smiles.

“Hey, Angel, how you doin’, brother?” he said into the mouthpiece of the intercom phone.

“You seem to be in good spirits,” I said.

“Good woman, good spirit.”

“I see. And how is it being incarcerated?”

Tempest looked out beyond me into a distance that didn’t exist. He became serious, contemplative, and remained so for more than a minute.

Finally he said, “Imagine you got a son on the other side of a closed door, your boy who you love more than life. He’s callin’ to ya. He wanna play catch or hear a story before bed but here you are behind a locked door with the lights turned down low and bad meat in your gut.”

“But there’s no son calling out to you,” I said.

“Life,” he said with emphasis. “Life is on the other side of the door and living death is here where I am. It’s like a place on the map, like a strange station the train just stopped in an’ the conductor shoutin’, ‘Last stop! Everybody out!’ ”

For some reason the words tore at me. I had a daughter, and I had a son on the way. Life was good for me and I didn’t deserve it.

“What about the man you stabbed?” I asked, to change the subject. “How’s he doing?”

“The eye I hit is just about blind now. Other than that he a’ight.”

“I don’t want to take advantage of you, Tempest,” I said, “but isn’t what you did to that man...”

“Reverent Johnson,” Tempest said.

“Reverend?”

“No. Reverent like he worship somethin’ or somebody.”

“So,” I continued, “isn’t what you did to this man Reverent a sin?”

“Naw, man. Sin? Sin is if you hurt someone and they ain’t done nuthin’ to you — mostly. What happened between me an’ Reverent is what you call a bitter necessity.”

“It was necessary for you to slash his face, to blind him?”

“Half blind,” Tempest corrected, “and yeah, it was absolutely necessary. Up here in the joint a man fightin’ for his name is self-defense pure an’ simple. I let somebody like that fool talk me down an’ I will be fightin’ every day an’ every night for the next eighty-two years.”

“You honestly believe that you are innocent?”

The right side of Tempest’s upper lip raised into a sneer. His visage was like that of a feral beast sensing danger or food.

“Do you honestly think that I should be in this prison when I ain’t nevah killed nobody or done anything else worth a eighty-two-year sentence behind bars?”

“Of course not.”

“What would you do,” he asked, “if it was your child up in here gettin’ raped an’ beaten, cut and chained? What would you do if that child was innocent but made to spend weeks at a time bunged up in a four-by-four closet surrounded by men that had been turned into howlin’ beasts?”

The images came to me and then the anger. I realized that if Gabriel had left my daughter in the situation Tempest was in, I would sunder the walls and punish her torturers. This sudden insight made me shiver.

The pain of Tempest’s circumstances gnawed at my human insides. I felt that I had somehow betrayed myself and all that I’d ever believed in. I had been a sliver in the being of divinity for time immemorial and still it all came down to this: a man suffering from fates that were too large and too proud to heed his agony.

That’s when Tempest grinned. I was shocked by this sudden expression of happiness.

“What do you have to smile about, Tempest?”

“Fredda Lane.”

I had witnessed the entire history of the human race unfold across the tapestry of time. I’d seen wars and unexpected heroism, bravery unequaled and cowardice so base that even an angel felt outrage. For all that, I had rarely responded with surprise or wonder to humanity. Humanity is, after all, a small, petty, mortal thing.

But Tempest Landry surprised me almost every time we met.

“Fredda Lane? But, but she was the woman who killed the man whose body you inherited.”

“Yeah,” Tempest said with a satisfied smile. “I figured that she might’a felt bad about it, so I got me some brownie points and received permission to get on the computer for a quarter hour. From there I got on Facebook and left Fredda a note, ‘You didn’t get me on the ferryboat but the cops pulled me out of the drink and now I’m doin’ eighty years.’ After that I said that I was sorry I hurt her and I hoped that she could forgive me.

“Damn, Angel, that woman got the body of some kinda Playboy model or stripper or somethin’. I look forward to her more than anything I evah had on the outside. You know prison make you appreciate things a free man don’t even know he take for granted.

“That girl come up here and beg me to forgive her and I said there was only one way.” Tempest smiled then. “But she knew a hundred ways and planned to show me every one.”

“So you lied to her?”

“Lied? No. I’m alive ain’t I? She tried to kill this here body and here it is — with me inside. It’s a lie that I committed the crimes of Ezzard Walcott but I’m still here and as long as I am, Fredda gonna come up and kiss it and make it feel better.”

“And so you’re all right, then?” I said.

“No, man, I’m in prison.”

“But you said that you—”

“Don’t mattah what I said, Angel. I’m in here behind bars with desperate men through no fault of my own. Your people done did it to me again and still you don’t want me to deny the rule of heaven. You still want to send me to the pit.”

I had no reply. He expected none.

Then Tempest smiled again.

“But I got me a plan.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

“I need your help, brother man.”

“I am not here to help you, Tempest. My job is your downfall.”

“Your job, if I remember right, is to get me to see that I’m a sinner not worthy of heaven, not to throw me down by trickery or by force.”

Again, I did not answer.

“So,” he said, knowing that my silence meant that I agreed with his words, “I need you to go and talk to Fredda.”

“Fredda?”

“Yeah, man. She know things about Ezzard but she won’t talk up in here ’cause she think that they got ears in the CVP trailer. Maybe they do. I need you to find out from her all you can about me. Maybe there’s somethin’ that could get me outta here.”

“That is not my job.”

“Maybe not but this here ain’t right, man. It ain’t right. Sooner or later I’ma commit some kinda sin ’cause that’s what it’s like in prison. You might not be bent comin’ in but you sure the hell will be before you get out... if you ever get out.”

The door behind Tempest opened and a line of prisoners were led in. Behind me visitors began to arrive. I wondered what Tempest paid to get an early meeting with me.

“What you say, man?” he asked.

I looked at him and felt my spirit; an essence once completely without matter now anchored in flesh; flesh that I had come to love and even believe in. In many ways I was as mortal as Tempest but I could not abandon my faith.

I stood up, stoically silent.

“Angel,” he called but I did not answer him.

“You know I got the power to shout down the walls of heaven,” he warned.

I hung the receiver on its hook and walked out of that room and into the long hall that led toward the outside world where my wife and child and unborn child were waiting. With every step I knew dread because I was sure that before long Tempest would denounce heaven or else become an unrepentant sinner; either way my tenure on earth, and my earthly bliss, would be over.

Fredda Lane

I have come a long way from heaven.

Once I was known as Joshua, Accounting Angel of Sin. From the other side of eternity I watched and recorded every act of Man; good, bad, and indifferent. This may sound like something miraculous but, when you understand the nature of the Infinite, it is really quite ordinary. From where I stood there was no such thing as time passing. I could see everything — past and present — and was therefore able to go through a mortal’s life history of good and evil as he or she stood in line awaiting judgment from the Guardian of the Gates of Heaven.

I loved my job while I had it. I believed in heaven and the perfect order of the moral universe. I knew that I was part of the greatest good allowing for the sins and acts of charity performed by mortals and the rewards and punishments those transgressions and kindnesses engendered.

Then I was given a mortal body and sent to earth on a mission of damnation. Tempest Landry, the Errant Soul, had refused the verdict of heaven. Because of this exercise of free will, he threatened the balance of a system that has existed longer than the atoms in my now mortal body.

The task seemed straightforward enough. All I had to do was convince Tempest of his sins, see him off to hell, and return to the bosom of heaven.

But when I arrived in the temporal realm I realized that sin was not such a simple thing to gauge or judge; that mortality brings with it a frail divinity and grace that I never knew in eternity.

And so I found myself one Tuesday afternoon, sitting in a metal chair, in front of a sheet of bulletproof glass, awaiting the arrival of a convict who held the balance of this world and the next in the weak flesh of his hands.

He wore an orange jumpsuit with little red crosses printed all over it. His hair was cut close to the scalp and there was a barely discernible bruise on the dark skin beneath his right eye.

He picked up the receiver we needed to hear each other. I did the same.

“Hey, Angel,” he said, a slight smile on his lips.

At one time that smile was a grin and the man behind it fought bravely against a sentence that he felt was unjust. But prison had dampened Tempest’s spirit, paying for crimes he had not committed, wearing the body but not bearing the blame of the murdered Ezzard Walcott.

“Tempest.”

He stared into my eyes.

“I thought you was done with me, man,” he said.

“After our last visit I went home to kiss Branwyn and Tethamalanianti good-bye. I was sure that you would renounce the rule of heaven and banish or destroy me and my kind.”

Tempest laughed.

“Why you talk like that, man?” he asked.

“Like what?”

“Like you was writin’ the Bible with every word you say.”

“I went to see Fredda Lane.”

“You did? When?”

“Yesterday. She’s living on the eighth floor of a building that has a broken elevator, with her sister and her sister’s three children. She was fired from her job as teacher’s assistant and—”

“Angel,” Tempest said, interrupting me, “I don’t need to know every damn thing. I ain’t here to judge nobody. What did she say?”

“She repented.”

“Say what?”

“When I told her that I was your friend she started crying... right there in the doorway. I could see that she was bereft so I helped her inside and got her seated on the sofa. There, with a baby lying next to us and two other children watching television in the corner, she confessed to the sin of trying to murder Ezzard Walcott.”

“She told you about it herself?” Tempest asked.

“Some mortals, I believe, recognize my nature and act accordingly.”

“Like people on the top floor of a burnin’ buildin’ jumpin’ out the window when there’s nowhere else to go,” my charge said cynically. “What did she say she did to Ezzard?”

“You don’t know?”

“We ain’t never talked about it. I got other things on my mind when we get in the conjugal visit trailer and anyway she thinks I know because I was there — sorta.”

“I suppose that makes sense,” I said. “It was a mistake.”

“That’s what them cops shot me down in the first place said. I guess there’s just a whole lotta accidental homicide goin’ on.”

His wry grin rankled me. “I think I like you more when you’re serious.”

“Yeah, Angel, only I ain’t writin’ the Bible when I shower and shave in the mornin’. I’m just livin’ my life, locked up behind bars.”

“Why didn’t you?” I asked then.

“Didn’t I what?”

“Renounce the rule of heaven.”

“Is that what you want?”

“No.”

Tempest sat back in his chair and stared. He was at best an impatient man and we had only fifteen minutes for the visit, but he stared at me the way I used to gaze out from heaven’s gate — having all the time in the world.

“Don’t you know that I would if I could, Angel?” he said at last. “Don’t you know that I want to turn my back on angels and devils, good and bad... black and white?”

It was my turn to stare.

“You don’t get it, do ya?” he asked. “You think that sin an’ evil an’ covetin’ comes easy to a poor black man. You think that given a chance, removed from church, that any man would do wrong.” He shook his head, disgusted with me. “What did Fredda tell you about killin’ Ezzard?”

For a moment I was confused by the question.

“What?”

“Fredda. What did she say about killin’ Ezzard?”

“That, that, that she had put a tranquilizer in his beer,” I said, slowly remembering the confession. “That she was going to wait till he fell asleep on the ferry and then call the police to arrest him.”

“Why didn’t she call the cops, then?” Tempest said. “Why she turn around and kill him?”

“It was a cold night,” I said, remembering the tear-strained words. “They were on the stern deck of the ferry looking out over the water. It was dark and they were the only ones standing outside. Ezzard was succumbing to the drug and was drunk. He kissed Fredda and told her that he loved her and made gestures as if he wanted to have sex with her right there. She became enraged and pushed him away. Because of the inebriation he stumbled backward, fell against the rail, and went over the side into the water.

“The moment he fell she screamed for help. People came and she told them that you — he — fell overboard. But it was already too late. No one had seen it happen. He was gone.”

“But if she told them I was dead, then why the cops come after me?”

“They thought she was lying, that she was trying to make them think that you had died. She has a boyfriend now, you know.”

“She does?”

“He doesn’t know that she comes to visit you. But she’s afraid he might find out.”

“Why she come then?”

“She didn’t say but I believe that it is a combination of guilt and gratefulness.”

“Grateful for what?”

“She believes that you could have told the police about her, that you could have blamed her for harboring you, for helping you avoid arrest. She feels terrible that she almost murdered you and humbled that you forgave her. She wants to succor you but loves this new man and fears that if he finds out that he will leave her.”

The crease that showed only rarely on Tempest’s brow became mortally apparent. He heard her sins and worried over them, where, over the impossible span of eternity, I had only passed judgment.

When he looked into my eyes he was no longer Ezzard Walcott nor was he a prisoner. I was not an angel or a man or an agent of damnation. He nodded at me, one being to another, and I returned the gesture because it was expected.

“Time’s up, Walcott,” a guard said.

Tempest glanced over his shoulder and then back at me.

“I understand,” I said. “I’ll do what I can.”

“Did she give you anything?”

“Yes.”

Tempest laughed again.

“I spend so much time arguin’ with you over sin that I lose track and don’t even worry about my own predicament.”

I smiled and nodded.

The guard put a hand on Tempest’s shoulder.

He cradled the phone and got to his feet.

As they led him away I felt that crease in my own forehead. It was sympathy for someone living under the strain of blind justice. Heaven was lucky that day that I, for all intents and purposes a fallen angel, was not in the position to pass judgment on Infinity.

The Court Allows

It took seven months to get a hearing set for Tempest Landry (aka Ezzard Walcott). I had discovered from my talks with Fredda Lane that Dominique Hart, Ezzard’s side girlfriend, had been with him on the night that Ezzard was supposed to have beaten and killed F. Anthony Chambers, a part-time security guard at World Emporium in the Bronx.

Dominique and Ezzard had gone to a motel in New Jersey to spend the night together while Ezzard’s regular girlfriend was looking after her mother who had complications stemming from her asthma.

Dominique had not been called by the public defender because he felt that the court would see her testimony as an attempt to use Ezzard’s friend to provide an unbelievable alibi.

I hired a lawyer and together we found the motel records proving that Ezzard was where he said at the time of the crime. I thought that all we had to do was present the papers to the court and Tempest would be freed but this was not the case.

“The system of American justice is byzantine, Mr. Angel,” the lawyer, Myron Ball, told me. “It’s more about bureaucracy than justice. Once the alleged crime has been transformed into a sentence, it is the ruling that must be disproved, not the facts on which that verdict is based.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Ezzard did not beat and kill Chambers. He could not have.”

“But he is guilty,” the lawyer responded. “The State of New York has so proclaimed.”

The courtroom was filled with many people who were there for various indecipherable reasons. The sitting judge, Jasmine Beam, an olive-skinned woman of Scottish and Sicilian descent, was hearing a dozen cases that day. Tempest’s hearing was set for 11:30 a.m., but it was after 3:00 p.m. when his case was finally brought to the dock.

Tempest had been waiting in an anteroom this whole time. He was led in in chains that were removed only when he was seated next to Myron Ball and myself.

“Hey, Angel,” Tempest said.

He was wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt, black canvas shoes and no socks. There were no new bruises on his face that afternoon and he had been allowed to shave.

The case was announced and the clerk handed the judge a folder, which she glanced at, turning a few pages before nodding. The lawyers stood to address the court.

She looked up and said, “Yes, counselors, what do you have to say?”

“My client is innocent, Your Honor,” Myron Ball said. “We have presented irrefutable proof that he was nowhere near the scene of the crime that he was convicted of. I ask for his immediate release and remuneration for the time he has spent wrongfully sentenced to a prison cell.”

The prosecutor, Darryl Cruickshank, was a tall black man in an elegant off-white suit. His shirt was dark, drab, and green. The knot of his ochre tie was off-center but this only added to the effect of the appearance of careless sophistication. His wisp of a smile and hard brown eyes gave the impression of a greater knowledge. I had seen the same gaze in the eyes of the archangels as they walked purposefully through the corridors of Infinity.

“We don’t question the evidence you present, Mr. Ball,” Cruickshank said in a velvet baritone. “It seems that Mr. Walcott’s previous lawyer failed to follow up on a trail of evidence provided by his client.”

“So you agree that the defendant should be released?” Judge Beam asked.

“Oh, no, Your Honor. Mr. Walcott is a hardened criminal who should be locked up for his crimes and who should serve the time given.”

At that moment I turned to look at Tempest. I don’t know what I expected. Maybe I feared that he would break down under this attack, that he would in a moment of despair, bring down the walls of heaven from sheer frustration.

But Tempest showed no emotion. He watched the handsome Cruickshank as if a child looking out across a vast distance.

“But you agree that he is innocent of the crime he was convicted for,” Myron Ball said.

“Mr. Walcott is guilty of many crimes,” Cruickshank said.

“But, Your Honor,” Ball said to the bench. “There is only one crime that we are considering here.”

The hard-faced judge turned her questioning gaze upon the prosecutor. He seemed to glow under her questioning visage.

“At his resentencing, Your Honor, the presiding judge, Magda Arnold, gave Mr. Walcott an eighty-two-year sentence. She clearly states in the transcript that she was adding twelve years onto the original seventy because of Walcott jumping bail and evading the police. While he has been in prison he has been reprimanded for having been in a dozen altercations — one of which led to the partial blinding of a fellow inmate.

“Your Honor, if we felt that Mr. Walcott had been a blameless prisoner we might seek to overlook his attempt at evading justice but he has proven to us by his actions after conviction and incarceration that he deserves the maximum sentence that the court allows.”

To his favor Myron Ball spoke up.

“Your Honor,” he said. “My client was arrested for a crime he did not commit. His witnesses were dismissed by a lawyer provided by the court. Evidence was manipulated by the prosecutor’s office to make it seem that no other man could have committed the crime. Then Mr. Walcott was thrown into prison with hardened criminals where he strove to survive. Now the state wants to say that he should be held accountable for knowing that he was innocent and fighting to stay alive in a hostile environment.”

Darryl Cruickshank put a finger to his lips to hide his satisfied smile.

The judge squinted at Myron Ball and then turned her gaze upon Tempest.

“Tell me something, Mr. Walcott,” she said.

Tempest rose to his feet and spoke.

“What’s that, Judge?”

“Did you know when you didn’t show up for sentencing that you were committing a crime?”

Tempest glanced at me and winked. Then he turned back to Judge Beam.

“I knew that I was innocent of the crime that the sentence was for...” he said. And for the first time since leaving heaven time stood still for me.

I understood, suddenly, the argument that Tempest had with the divine. There, under St. Peter’s review, Tempest knew that he was innocent. It was this innocence that caused the insolence to refuse the judgment against him. At that moment I realized that a separate justice resided outside of other concerns.

This knowledge shook me to my now mortal core.

“...and because I was innocent I ran,” Tempest was saying.

Because he was innocent in his own mind he had challenged the On High. What could I say against that? What could anyone say?

I looked up at the judge as she considered Tempest’s brash but honest words.

“This court overturns the conviction for manslaughter but not the twelve-year sentence for avoiding your sentence. I’m sorry, Mr. Walcott, but you broke the law and that act must be punished.”

After the ruling Tempest was allowed a short meeting with Myron Ball. I was introduced as Ball’s associate and therefore given entrée to the small room where we were expected to review the case.

At one point during the debriefing Myron had to go to the toilet.

After he left I said, “I’m so sorry, Tempest. I never expected this.”

“Why not, Angel? Didn’t the place you was in before work the same way?”

I had no answer.

“Hey, man,” Tempest said then, “don’t look so sad. I’m happy with today.”

“Happy? You’re going back to prison.”

“Now I only got twelve years. That’s a victory for a convicted felon.”

“But you’re not a felon.”

“I am if I’m convicted,” he said as he watched me for a response.

“Okay,” I said after a brief span of silence. “Yes. In my opinion you don’t deserve hell. But I am not your judge.”

The grin on Tempest’s face was his old smile, resplendent.

“That’s two victories in one day. Man, you know I’m on a roll. If I was a free man and had a dollar, I’d play the lotto tonight.”

Myron Ball came back at that moment.

“Anything else, Ezzard?” he asked Tempest.

“You know, Angel,” Tempest said, ignoring his lawyer’s question. “I heard this story about a guy down south. He killed a man and was sentenced to death. It was back when they had the electric chair and the man’s brother was the state executioner. These brothers was close and so the executioner didn’t want to kill his own kin. But the convicted brother told him that he’d be a fool not to do it. You see, executioners got extra pay and this man had four kids.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“The one brother killed the other and when he had another child, a son, he named him after the brother he’d slaughtered.”

“That’s, that’s awful,” I said.

“That’s life,” Tempest replied and the guards came in and clapped him back into chains and carried him back to prison.

An Innocent Man

I was sitting at my desk going over Christian Manor’s tax returns. They had come in in a grease-stained cardboard box that was refuse from a grocery delivery service. The box was filled to overflowing with hundreds of slips of paper, most of which were scrawled upon with nearly illegible notes attempting to explain each expenditure. This was the kind of work that I’d come to love. Unraveling the details of Mr. Manor’s tax records was the penance I paid for being so arrogant when I blithely passed judgment on mortals’ sins. Since being essentially abandoned on earth by the powers of heaven I had learned that an accountant was also an advocate. So I sifted through every soiled scrap looking for excuses, reasons, and a way out of debt.

“Mr. Angel,” an electronic voice said from the speaker on my phone.

“Yes, Roxanne?”

“There’s a man,” she said and then hesitated, searching for a better word to describe the visitor, “a, a Mr. Landry out here to see you. He says that he’s your friend.”

“Um, send him in.”

My new office at Rintrist and Lowe was at the far corner of the sixty-fourth-floor suite. I was a valued junior partner in the firm and was given a work space with a door and two windows. My visitor had to be led down a long warren of hallways and so it would take him a few minutes to reach me.

My wait brought to mind an irony considering the nature of time. The wait for Tempest, now I assumed an escaped criminal, seemed to take forever. All sorts of mortal and celestial trepidations passed through my mind while I waited for the Errant Soul to appear.

It was my duty to the State of New York to turn him over to the authorities.

It was my mission from the lips of Archangel Gabriel himself to sunder Tempest’s soul and damn him to an eternity of suffering in hell.

But Tempest had saved my lover’s life before I ever met her. He had made it possible for me to experience the transitory sweetness of love and parenthood. In a very real way he had given me my soul and yet I was still his enemy.

These thoughts and many more passed through my mind as I waited. In heaven, where there was no such thing as the passage of time, I would not have considered so much in an hour, a day, a lifetime of celestial bliss. It occurred to me then that the total absence of sin is also the abandonment of thought. I wondered if all sin could be reduced to men thinking about what they might lose...

“Hey, Angel, why the serious face?”

He was wearing the orange jumpsuit of a convict but without the little red crosses printed all over. I noticed a leather belt cinched around his middle and heavy brown boots on his feet. These things, I knew, he must have stolen.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“You gonna ask me in, man? Or do I got to stand at the do’ wit’ my hat in my hand?”

“You don’t have a hat.”

“It’s just a saying, Angel.”

“Yes, of course, come in. Close the door behind you,” I said distractedly, still wondering at the nature of time passing.

Tempest came in and sat in one of my three walnut visitor’s chairs. Immediately he reached for a framed photograph on my desk. It was a picture of my beautiful Branwyn.

“You know she would have been my woman if it wasn’t for you, Angel,” he said with no detectable acrimony or condemnation.

“I wouldn’t have been here to take her if not for you.”

He put the frame down, placed his elbows on my ash desk, and clasped his hands as if in anguished prayer.

“Is that a sin?”

“What?”

“Bringing mortal love into the life of an angel.”

“Are you trying to bring me down with you, Tempest?”

He smiled his old friendly grin and sat back comfortably.

“What you sayin’, man?” he asked.

I expected the police to break down the door any minute, looking for the escaped convict and his accomplice. Maybe, I thought, this was my due. Heaven had given Tempest that body, had made it so that he would be clapped into prison. I represented heaven and so had that sin on my head — day and night.

“I have a family, Tempest.”

“I used to, before I died.”

“That was not my fault,” I said.

“No, no it wasn’t. But here I am and there you are — knowing I’m innocent and tryin’ your damndest to push me down into hell. And you know they don’t love me down there.”

“You represent the greatest threat in the history of existence, Tempest Landry. Until you accept the judgment of heaven nothing that is sacred is safe.”

“But if a man is innocent and heaven is in the balance then shouldn’t heaven accept its fate and fall for what it has lived by?”

The question seemed silly to me.

“There’s this dude up in prison,” Tempest said then, “that says people used to think that the sun circled the earth instead’a the other way round. He said that if a scientist questioned that lie that the church would put him in prison, torture him, even kill him. That true, Angel?”

“Yes. Yes, it is.” I looked up at the door wondering if they would break it down or knock civilly.

“Was them bishops and priests sent to hell for killin’ poor men for tellin’ the truth?”

“Not always.”

“Will Judge Beam and Darryl Cruickshank be given black marks for sending Ezzard Walcott back to prison even though they knew he was innocent of the crime he was sentenced for?”

“Probably not. The overall scheme of their actions is to provide justice, not deny it. Heaven makes allowances for lapses in judgment.”

“Lapses in judgment? You know they got me put up wit’ men fightin’ and killin’ an’ rapin’ over the way people walk. It’s blacks against the whites against the browns every day, Angel. You know old Basil Bob would fit in there like Jack Horner’s thumb.”

“Are the police after you now, Tempest?”

An expression of surprise crossed the convict’s face. He gauged me as he often did. A two-bit hustler and adulterer before he died, Tempest tried to turn every situation to his favor though he was not what I would call the classic definition of evil.

“If the cops was to find a runaway convict sittin’ in your office they might be inclined to arrest you, wouldn’t they, Josh?”

“Yes. Especially since I knew you.”

“You could tell them that you intended to call them as soon as you could.”

“I suppose.”

“Is that what you plannin’ to do?”

“No,” I uttered.

“I didn’t catch that, Angel.”

“I said, ‘No, I will not turn you in.’ ”

“And you wouldn’t lie and say that you would have?”

“No.”

“So you could go up to prison with me. We could talk about sin all day long. I’m sure I could convince you once we were nose to nose with some truly evil men.”

“Mr. Angel,” the intercom said.

“Yes, Roxanne?”

“There are three other gentlemen out here. They say that they’re looking for an Ezzard Walcott.”

“Have them wait a minute.”

Tempest was smiling at me.

“I will go with you to the front, Tempest. If they want to arrest me, I’ll tell them that I know of your innocence, that the State of New York knows it too. I will join you in prison rather than break the rules by which I am bound.”

“Or,” Tempest suggested, “you could get the On High to move me to another body, change the status of this one, or, even better, to commute their verdict an’ let me in on one’a the lower rungs of heaven. You know I prefer Harlem to the Pearly Gates but I’d rather heaven than hell.”

“I cannot.”

Tempest grinned at my consternation.

The door behind him flew open and three men came in followed by my young secretarial assistant, Roxanne Riles.

“Ezzard, we all gotta be back at work in six minutes or they gonna cancel our work pass, man.”

The man, a brown-skinned, straight-haired gentleman, wore an orange suit too. They all did.

“Okay, Garcia,” Tempest said. He got to his feet and stretched like a lazy cat. “Angel, me and the boys downstairs an’ two blocks down cleaning up litter in Central Park. It’s what you call work release. They got us in a special holding facility here in Manhattan an’ every day they let us out to strut and strain as a reward for good behavior — and other things.”

“But you were in so many fights,” I said.

“Judge Beam didn’t feel good about my sentence but she knew that Cruickshank wouldn’t let it go so she told the warden to put me on this unit.”

“So you haven’t escaped?”

“Never said I did. I just wondered what you would’a done if I had. Come on, gentlemen, let’s get back to work.”

Tempest was the last one out of the door. Before following them down the hall he turned and asked, “Could you send us down some coffee and doughnuts sometimes, brother? You know somethin’ like that is a godsend for wretches like us.”

“I’ll bring it myself,” I said.

And I have been doing so every morning for the past six weeks.

The Saint Under Pressure

I arrived at the doughnut shop at 7:15 a.m. as usual and purchased seven coffees — three black, one with sugar, one with milk, and two with milk and sugar. I also picked out an assortment of twenty-one doughnuts for the work release crew cleaning up litter along the pathways of Central Park: six convicts and one state guard, Andrew Welch, who watched over them.

When I arrived at the work site balancing the cartons of coffee and pastries, the workmen put down their rakes and canvas sacks to help me unload.

“Mornin’, Joshua,” Andrew said. He lifted his coffee and took a sip as in a toast.

The other men, including Tempest, greeted me and took up positions on park benches where they could enjoy the repast before wandering through the fake wilderness looking for discarded beer cans, used condoms, and scraps of paper.

“Where’s Pinky?” I asked Tempest when I noticed the youngest of the work release prisoners hadn’t shown up for his food.

“He met him a hippie girl yesterday. She had what they call an illegal substance and no underwears. Damn,” Tempest shook his head. “A man can only take so much temptation you know, Angel.”

“They sent him back to prison?”

“On the first bus this mornin’. Five-oh-two a.m.”

“He gave up his freedom for a few moments of pleasure?”

“That’s all life is, Angel.”

“What?”

“A few moments of pleasure. Damn, man. Don’t you get it? Most the time we workin’ or sleepin’, getting’ sick or gettin’ ovah sumpin’, too young to begin with and then too old before you know it. You meet the woman’a your dreams say come hither with one hand and hold up with the other. An’ between all that you get a few minutes every now and then that’s pure bliss. A woman look in your eyes like she mean it, a child with your face look up at you an’ reach for your fingers.

“That hippie girl flashed that smile at Pinky an’ he knew this was his one chance for pleasure in maybe the next seven years. He had to go for that.”

“But couldn’t he satisfy himself with his labor?” I asked, feeling younger than my mortal charge.

“Pickin’ up condoms when he ain’t even been near a woman in three years? Throwin’ away beer cans when he ain’t had a real drink in the same time? Angel, you got checkout girls in these here grocery stores cain’t feed their own kids right, jazz musicians workin’ for the post office because music don’t pay the charge of admission to a nightclub. You might love your work but one day you wake up and find that your work don’t love you. That’s why the prisons full’a poor people. Rich man don’t have to commit no crime. And even if he does, all they do is pass a law sayin’ that ain’t no crime no more.”

While Tempest was orating, an elderly white man in an orange jumpsuit was walking toward us from behind a stand of stunted pines. He was past seventy with an uncertain gait. His white hair was thin and unkempt. His hands were huge. In his left he carried a yellow straw broom and in his right there was a white plastic bucket.

“Hey, mister,” he said to me.

“Yes?”

“That food for all’a us?” He gestured at the coffee and boxes of pastry set up on a nearby bench.

“Yes. Yes of course.”

“Angel,” Tempest said then. “This is Mortimer Tencrows Karpis, a lifer and a great guy.”

I extended a hand and so did he. His grip was powerful and still I could tell that he was holding back.

“You know Ezzard here?” Karpis asked me.

“Seems like forever.”

“You got a nice suit, brother. You work around here?”

“In that building with the turrets on top,” I said, pointing at a skyscraper beyond the tallest trees of the park.

“That must be real nice,” the old man said. As he spoke he picked up the coffee cup with the name Pinky written on it, that and a buttermilk doughnut.

“You took Pinky’s place?” I asked the elder con.

The old man caught my gaze. His eyes were an icy gray with little yellow blobs here and there. There was disease and acres of experience in those orbs. I was a million years older than he but those eyes had seen, and felt, infinitely more.

“I been up in prison forty-two years,” he said as if my gaze were a question. “I’m seventy-seven and I never regretted a day behind bars.”

I didn’t understand the statement. He seemed defiant and I refrained from asking what he meant out of simple decorum.

“Old Karpis here murdered a man named Lathan,” Tempest said. “Shot him nine times with a .45. Had to reload.”

“I see,” I said.

“No you don’t,” Karpis corrected. “Lillian had nine bruises on her body, ugly bruises. She had been raped and beaten and raped again. But the Lathans had got the governor elected and the defense had a story that the judge liked. He got eighteen months, six days, and nine bullets from me.”

“Lillian was your wife?” I asked.

“My daughter. She used to run to me when there was a thunderstorm and I’d hold her in my arms and tell her that I wouldn’t even let lightning hurt my little girl.”

I felt an affinity with Karpis. Not with his rage but with his sense of time. No time had passed for him since the death of his daughter. He still felt the wrath from decades before, was trapped in the moment of sin to sin, like a pair of footprints from some ancient dinosaur hardened in the mud eons before.

“I pray for your forgiveness.” The words came to my lips unbidden, in a celestial voice that I had not been able to call up for many weeks.

Karpis dropped the coffee cup and turned away. He staggered back into the stand of pine and disappeared from our sight.

“Dog, Angel,” Tempest said. “I didn’t think you could make that sound no more.”

I looked at the place where Mortimer Tencrows Karpis had stood.

“He brought it out in me,” I said.

“You just full’a surprises, huh?”

“Why did you bring me here, Tempest?”

“Man, I didn’t bring you nowhere. And stop with that Barry White voice, huh. You know it don’t command me but it hurt like a sledgehammer in my head.”

My intersection with Tencrows Karpis had rekindled the celestial voice that resided in every angel. It was as if just the memory of the murderer had transformed the world around him into a heavenly space. I was flummoxed by this transition.

I swooned and Tempest caught me under my arms, dragged me to the bench that was set a few feet away from a paved walkway.

“What’s wrong over there?” Andrew Welch called.

He came running over.

“I don’t know, Officer Welch,” Tempest said in true words that somehow sounded like a lie. “I think he got lightheaded or sumpin’. I just helped him sit down.”

“Where’s Karpis?” the guard asked then.

“He went off that way,” Tempest said, waving at the stunted trees. “You know he don’t mind pickin’ up the dog shit in the bushes.”

“But his bucket and broom are right there,” Welch said, pointing toward the trees.

“I don’t know, man,” Tempest said. “He old. You know he can’t get far.”

Welch left us there and gathered the rest of his crew to go looking for the septuagenarian convict. After they were gone, and my dizziness passed, I took a deep breath and said, “Why?”

“Why what, Angel?”

“Why does he let me come around?”

“Welch? Because’a kindness.”

“The coffee and doughnuts?”

Tempest shook his head. “No,” he said. “It’s the fact that you bring’em. The men act better and he feels like he’s part’a somethin’ rather than some kinda outcast chained to criminals. They all like it that you like them.”

“And you?” I asked.

“In the whole world there’s only me and you on the same page, Angel. Just me and you. I’m a dead man walkin’ and you ain’t even a man at all.”

“What about Karpis?”

“What about him?”

“Does he care?” I asked.

“Is he goin’ to heaven?”

“Maybe.”

Tempest considered my weak promise, hesitated, and then said, “Maybe the powers that be could take pity and just let him die. Let him just go to sleep and not wake up... ever.”

“But what if he’s reunited with his daughter?”

“The pain he feel is greater than the love he felt. He ain’t nevah gonna get bettah from what Lathan did to his girl.”

Half an hour later the men came back carrying Mortimer Tencrow’s body. My angelic sight had miraculously returned and I could see that he’d died of a massive coronary.

When the ambulance had come Tempest stood beside me.

“Your voice and that prayer freed him,” he said.

I turned to him but had no words to say.

“Do you wish you could do that to me, Angel?” Tempest added, a touch of fear in the timbre of his rebellious voice.

“Never,” I replied.

Escape

I returned home at seven that evening. Branwyn and I had moved to a new elevator building on the Upper West Side but I still used the stairs to walk up the eight flights to our ninth-floor apartment. The walk brought on a feeling of nostalgia for our old walk-up in Staten Island, when we barely had enough money to pay the rent and our daughter, Tethamalanianti, had just been born.

When I was an angel in heaven there was no such thing as physical exertion. We moved solely by thought and through the eyes of men; though, because of our arrogance, we never truly understood the thoughts behind those mortal orbs.

In my brief tenure between the clay of humanity and the light of the divine I used my time to feel physical exertion, the miracle of time passing, and love for the beautiful Branwyn and our children.

I could hear Titi laughing on the other side of the door as I eased the key into the lock. I had found that she loved it when I just appeared out of nowhere and was suddenly in her life again.

I swung the door open but I was just as surprised as my three-year-old daughter.

“Daddy!” she cried as she ran toward me.

Behind my leaping daughter, on the ochre-and-blue sofa, sat Branwyn. Alongside her was Tempest Landry (aka Ezzard Walcott).

Tempest was wearing blue jeans and a purple tie-dyed T-shirt — not the orange jumpsuit he was required to wear according to his prison work release agreement. He wasn’t supposed to be away from the barracks — that housed him and his four fellow inmates — after 6:00 p.m. either.

But none of this bothered me as much as the proximity of Branwyn and Tempest. They were sitting so close on that broad couch. He had saved her life before she and I had ever met. They had once been lovers and though she cared deeply for him she finally decided that it was I who held dominion over her heart.

Little Tempest, my newborn son, lay sleeping on Branwyn’s lap. Seeing him there, with my daughter’s arms wrapped around my legs and jealousy in my heart, my spirit quailed and again I was reminded of the complexity of the human spirit.

“Joshua,” Branwyn said and the jumble of thoughts blended together into a smooth feeling of unity among the various provinces of my mind. This feeling I had come to know as love. This love had a face and a voice and a personal history all combined in the personage of Branwyn Weeks.

“Love,” I said.

“Hey, Angel,” Tempest called, sounding like the horn a man of my name once played.

“You shouldn’t be here, Tempest.”

“But, Joshua,” Branwyn said. She rose to her feet and approached me carrying our infant son in her arms. “They’re gonna send Tempest back to prison and you know he never did what they said.”

“But what can we do about that?” I asked after a perfunctory kiss.

“We can’t let them take him. He saved my life.”

The blood in my chest was churning. Tempest had saved Brownie and therefore made love possible for me. In that way he was as much father to my children as I, maybe even more so. But helping him would destroy the family that was more important to me than anything in this world... or the next.

From across the room on the sofa I could see Tempest reading my mortal face. He stood up all in a rush and stalked across the room.

“I ain’t here to blow you up, Angel,” he said. “I just come to say good-bye, man.”

In one breath he called me divine and in the next I was his mortal brother. I don’t know if Tempest was aware of his deep critique of my newfound soul.

“Sit down, my friend,” I said. “Sit.”

As he moved back toward the sofa I lifted Tethamalanianti in my arms and kissed her neck. She giggled and called me Daddy. I kissed her again and handed her to her mother.

“Take them out for pizza and ice cream,” I said to Branwyn.

She looked in my eyes and said, “Come on, babies, let’s go get us sumpin’ good.”

“Can Daddy an’ Uncle Tempy come?” Titi asked.

“Later,” I said. “We have to talk first.”

After they were gone I sat next to Tempest on our plush couch. Titi’s toys and dolls were spread on the floor around us and there was the sweet buttermilk odor of our baby in the air.

“First you want to send me to hell and now you want me back in prison. Is that it, Joshua?” Tempest said.

“I want to help you, Tempest.”

“Really? ’Cause I know you got a good heart but you still on the wrong side’a the line.”

“I’m not your enemy,” I said with an earthly quaver in my voice.

“No,” he agreed, “but men don’t have to be enemies to be on opposite sides. Men don’t have to hate each other to throw their brothers down.”

“Why run now?”

“They stopped the work release program. Tomorrow morning at five-oh-two I’m supposed to be on a bus back up to prison. Back in a cage not fit for one man and there’ll be two others up in there wit’ me. If they gang up on me, there won’t be nuthin’ I can do. If they’re enemies, I’ll have to choose sides. Do you know what that mean, Angel? Do you?”

“If you run and they catch you, your sentence will be doubled,” I replied.

“And if I stay, I’ll become the sinner I always claimed not to be. The door to hell will open up and I won’t be able to deny my deeds. My soul will be sucked down into Bob’s hell and you’ll be ripped from Brownie an’ them beautiful kids.”

“They’ll catch you sooner or later,” I said. “They’ll drag you back and the same thing will happen.”

“Maybe not. Maybe I could make it down to Cuba or Brazil. Maybe I could hide in plain sight in East New York or sumpin’.”

“But then both of us will spend every day in fear. Any minute we’ll be expecting the end.”

“That’s the fate that all men face,” he said without a hint of humor.

“We can make a better stand.”

Tempest looked at me with anger and spite etched in his face.

“You know I don’t deserve this, Angel,” he said. “I wasn’t born to this body and this body never did the crime they convicted him for. It ain’t right any way you look at it.”

“But if you run you will be hounded.”

“What you think they do to a brother every day up in prison?” he asked. “I didn’t know what to expect the first time I went up there. But now that I been there I cain’t let ’em take me back. It’s too much, man. There’s so much sufferin’ up in there that you cain’t tell if it’s you or somebody else hurtin’.”

Of late my celestial senses had returned. I could see the honesty and pain in Tempest. The State of New York had pushed this natural survivor to the edge of his ability.

I wanted to find some logic that would prove that he should stay in prison; some reason that would keep him from running in the night. But there was none. He was a fugitive from Hades already, why not run from prison too?

“My duty is your destruction and damnation,” I said simply.

“I know that. I know that.”

“But I have learned on earth that there are times when people give up their autonomy to another — times when we allow ourselves to be led.”

“What you talkin’ ’bout, Angel?”

“If you will go back tonight and let them return you to prison, then I will do as Branwyn bids and bring all my ability to bear to get you out of this situation.”

“I thought you spent all your money on that last lawyer — that Myron Ball?”

“I’ll have to get more money and work harder.”

“Won’t that get your bosses mad? I mean the ones upstairs — not the accountants.”

“Maybe,” I said to a spot on the floor.

For a span of time we were both quiet, lost in quandaries both alien and fused. For me it was one more step away from divinity and for Tempest, I believe, it was, once again, that razor’s edge he’d walked upon from the day he’d been born.

“You’d defy heaven?” he asked after what seemed like a very long time.

“No. But I will not let you suffer over a whim, clerical oversight, or ill will.”

“What if you can’t get me out?”

“I will.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because it is right.”

“Angel, ain’t you learned nuthin’ from me? Ain’t you read the papers and walked the streets? Don’t you know that right is just one card in the deck?”

“I will use every ounce of my ability to make you a free man.”

Tempest was about to say something. Whatever it was he did not say it. Instead he grinned and shook his head.

“Damn, man, after all this time you finally succeeded.”

“In what?” I asked.

“Convincin’ me to willingly go to hell.”

The Dream

When next I saw Tempest Landry he was in bad shape. Bearded with his hair grown long and partly matted, he stared at the space around my visitor’s chair with vacant eyes that had bags under them.

I felt guilty over his broken-down state. After all, I had promised to bring all my earthly and heavenly power to bear in order to obtain his freedom. And though I spent the early mornings and late nights of every day working toward that goal — I had failed, utterly. He’d had an extra eighteen months tacked on to his twelve-year sentence for returning after curfew to the work release barracks the night before that program was shut down for good.

A trick in the reflection of the bulletproof glass that separated us made it seem as if a shard of light had cloven him in two.

“Prison is as bad as you thought,” I said. It was not a question.

“Prison?” He seemed honestly surprised. “Naw, man. Prison’s a walk in the park compared to these here dreams.”

“Dreams?”

“Every time I close my eyes it’s like nine baseball pinch hitters come in the cell an’ beat me wit’ their bats. I wake up short’a breath an’ cryin’ half a dozen times before they finally get us up to go out in the yard. You know I get happy when somebody wanna mess wit’ me. I kicked this one dude’s ass so bad that I felt sorry for ’im — after. But you know beatin’ on him felt good while I was doin’ it — too good.”

“What is it like?” I asked, feeling a pain somewhere in the air just above my head.

“Beatin’ on a brother?”

“No... the dream.”

“Oh,” Tempest said. He had not smiled once since we’d settled in our metal chairs, bolted to the floor, across from each other. Now there was fear where once there had been rebellious humor.

“I don’t know if I can even talk about it, Angel. I mean these dreams worse than when Bob was houndin’ me, tryin’ to make me go down into hell.”

“Can you just say where you are in the dream? What can you see?”

The red veins standing out in the whites of his eyes underscored his fear.

“I’m in a forest of stunted trees,” he said, haltingly, “but instead’a leaves they got fire lickin’ from ’em. The sky is light gray an’ there’s lightnin’ strikin’ again and again and again. A man is hollerin’ somewhere and another man is singin’. But the song ain’t like nuthin’ anybody ever wanna hear. It makes the blues feel like a children’s nursery rhyme. If you close your eyes while he be singin’ you see dead people still alive in their minds but rotting at the same time. You see babies lost and lookin’ for their mothers — but you know they ain’t never gonna find ’em.”

Tempest sat back in the hard chair and tears flowed freely down his face.

I wanted to reach out to him but we were separated by the damnable glass, watched by uniformed guards.

“Did you touch the leaves of flame or feel the flashes of light?” I asked because I had to ask — to understand.

“Funny,” he said, trying valiantly to stave off the despair. “You’re right — it was light and not lightning. There was no thunder or jagged bolts in the sky. Like somebody behind you takin’ flash photographs. How’d you know that, Angel?”

“Did you touch the flames?” I asked again.

“When I was a kid I used to go down to North Carolina to visit my auntie Leah and uncle Andrew...,” he said.

I didn’t know where he was going with this memory but I didn’t interrupt.

All around us were other convicts having conversations with lawyers and loved ones. I was the only angel in the room; Tempest the only truly damned soul.

“I used to walk around barefoot like a child will do,” he continued. “Every now and then, at the general store down the road from my peoples’ house, I’d step on a still-burnin’ cigarette butt somebody had just thrown away. At first it felt like something but not pain or heat — not at first. But then the feelin’ got real strong and all of a sudden it was a white-hot pain that didn’t go away even when you jumped.

“That’s the closest I can come to explainin’ what them leaves of fire felt like. But it wasn’t no physical pain but somethin’ inside — like if your soul was a raw nerve an’ somebody was blowin’ on it.”

I looked at my watch. We had six minutes and thirty-seven seconds before the guards came and took Tempest back into the general population.

“What about the light?” I asked.

Tempest dropped his head and moaned piteously.

“What’s going on over there?” a guard asked.

Tempest sat up trying to contain his grief.

“It breaks across me like water over stone for a million years,” he said. “I try to stay whole but I fall into smaller and smaller pieces until I’m just mud on the ground dryin’ out to the point where I’m dust floating off into nuthin’. And, and, and it’s like the dream be tellin’ me that that’s all I am — nuthin’.”

I shuddered deep down in my core. The simple proximity to Tempest’s mortal dilemma was enough to upend the foundation of eons of angelic bliss.

“Do you know what this nightmare is, Joshua?”

“Yes.”

“Do I wanna know?”

I laughed and then he did too. We were civilians in a small country that had the misfortune of sitting between two great warring nations. The combatants were coming from all sides and there we were, in a shallow hole, hoping beyond hope that we might survive this foreign war being fought on our soil, above our heads.

Four minutes left.

“Archangels are talking about you, Tempest.”

“Bob’s brothers?”

Basil Bob, Beelzebub, had once come to earth; first to force Tempest to deny and therefore destroy heaven and then, when Tempest refused, to try to sunder his mortal soul. Bob had failed in his task but it also became apparent that Tempest did not have the heart to rend the afterlife. He was happy with his mortality and only wanted to be left alone.

But heaven and hell had other notions. Tempest was the possibility of a threat. As long as he existed outside of the rules of the Infinite there was the chance that he would develop a following that would create an entire new system where the gods, demons, and angels of old would fade into the worn tapestry of the past.

“Yes,” I said. “Gabriel and Michael are talking about you. And because of the damage done to your psyche by being resurrected and then imprisoned, freed and then incarcerated once more — you are susceptible to their dominion. You hear their plans for you and therefore know dread.”

“You mean they don’t even know that I hear ’em?”

I shook my head and wondered.

“Man. What would happen if they came right at me?”

“I don’t think that they’d do that after you banished Bob from this plane. I realize now that they sent me to deal with you because I am expendable, a mere accountant. None of the archangels would dare face you directly and as long as they are in their heaven you cannot reach out to them — not unless you bring down the walls of the Infinite.”

“But if they even think about me, my soul is near ’bout ripped from my body.”

“This is a special circumstance, Tempest,” I said. “You have been weakened by your experiences of late.”

Tempest took a deep breath.

We had less than two minutes before he’d be dragged off into the hell of his own mind.

“You know I done asked you a hundred times to help me, Joshua. But every time I do you say that you workin’ for them, against me. But you know, brother, I ain’t nevah done nuthin’ to you. I ain’t nevah hurt nobody all that bad except maybe in here. But in here hurtin’ is like goin’ to work an’ doin’ your job. It’s a hurtin’ trade up in here. So you can hold it against me but you know I don’t deserve no nightmare inside of a nightmare because somebody scared that I’m me...”

While Tempest opined, his assigned guard was walking toward him, preparing to take him back to his cell.

There was no time to consider or think. Maybe if I had eternity I would have made some other choice. But Tempest was suffering through no fault of his own and I was there in front of him and there were only scant seconds in which to act.

Maybe it was because Gabriel and Michael were distracted that I was given back a sliver of my celestial voice, a voice that had sung out so proudly in the choir. It was probably a mistake but no one had prohibited me from singing.

I stood up.

This was against prison rules and so three guards from my side of the glass came toward me.

I opened my mouth and closed my eyes, and from somewhere, deep inside, a song of celestial sleep and forgetfulness came from me like a phoenix from the clay of its own corpse.

Everyone in the room turned toward me. What they could see I cannot say. But within seconds they were all slumped down in their chairs or on the floor, sound asleep, swathed in a sacred rest that few mortals have ever known. Even Tempest was affected, though he usually was proof against my powers. I believed, then and now, that he succumbed because of the weakness of his soul at that time.

Once the hymn began it was almost impossible to stop. I staggered from the visitor’s room, down the long hall toward the fifteen doors I had to pass through before exiting the prison. Singing all the way I laid low guards and visitors, vendors and felons.

I came out into the world singing and crying, running but unable to escape the feeling that my newly acquired human soul had been damned.

The Killing

After delivering the Hymn of Paradisial Rest in the visitor’s room of the state prison I was reluctant to go back there to visit the prisoner known to the State of New York as Ezzard Walcott #221-675-JG-17. I wrote Tempest a letter saying as much and he sent me a note saying thanks and that my song had quelled his nightmares.

I was moved by Tempest’s letter but I still couldn’t manage to get myself out to visit him. Branwyn went in my stead. She brought him five cartons of cigarettes and pictures of our son, whom we named after him.

I was nervous about Branwyn going to visit Tempest. He had saved her life and they were, at one time, lovers. The prison still had the conjugal visit program in operation and I’d avoided the topic of marriage with Branwyn because her mother wanted a church wedding and I was mortally afraid of that particular ritual.

“Don’t you worry, honey,” Branwyn said as she left to go visit our friend, “I’ma come home to you and the kids. Tempest might want me to move into his cell with him but I like our bed.”

“He asked you to stay with him there?”

“I’m just jokin’, Joshua. Don’t you trust me, baby?”

“Of course I do,” I said. “It’s just I don’t even like the idea of you in there.”

“But I have to go,” she said tenderly, “especially now that you aren’t visitin’ as much.”

She had her arms around me but I turned my head away.

“What happened in there, Joshua? Why don’t you go visit Tempest anymore?”

“My emotions get away from me in there. I’m afraid of what I might do.”

“Are you afraid’a what I might do?”

We gazed into each others’ eyes then; she looking at a man but having no idea of his origins and I seeing the woman who had torn my heart out of celestial bliss into something fragile and yet much more profound.

“When I look at you,” I said, “I know that there is nothing in heaven that I would believe in more.”

“That’s blasphemy, Joshua,” she said in a light tone.

“I would go up against the Infinite for your love,” I said in a voice passed down from heaven.

Three weeks later, at 9:27 in the evening, the phone rang. The bell seemed especially strident. But Branwyn didn’t stir on the sofa next to me. She had spent the day with the children and was very tired. We were watching a television show about a man who somehow had a computer in his head. I didn’t understand TV comedies but they made Branwyn laugh and that was enough to keep me anchored there next to her.

The phone rang again. It sounded like a scream of agony and fear. But Branwyn slept on. Her head was on my lap and I didn’t want to disturb her by getting up and walking across the room to answer the fearful jangling. But after the fifth ring I did get up. Branwyn turned her back on the television and continued her rest.

“Hello?”

“New York State prison inmate number 221-675-JG-17,” a recorded voice said, “wishes to make a collect call to...” and then Tempest’s voice said, “Joshua Angel or Branwyn Weeks.”

Then a live operator got on the line and asked, “Do you accept the call?”

“Yes. Yes I do.”

“Angel?” Tempest asked after a series of clicks and silences.

“Hello, Tempest.”

“I’m glad Brownie brought me all them cigarettes.”

“I didn’t realize that you were that much of a smoker.”

“A cigarette is worth two dollars up in here, Angel. I used ’em all for them to let me make this call. I got thirty-eight minutes with you.”

“What do you want from me, Tempest?”

“Them cops that murdered Landry,” he began.

“You mean the peace officers who shot down Mr. Landry seven years ago on that corner in Harlem.”

“One man’s killin’ is another man’s murder.”

We had had that argument a dozen times over the years.

“What is your question, Tempest?”

“Those cops shot Landry down — they’re all goin’ to heaven, right?”

“When last I looked.”

“So killin’ ain’t necessarily what they call a cardinal sin?”

“Not necessarily. Why do you ask?”

“I have a friend... had a friend, name of Jessup G. Peterson.”

“Yes?”

“Me an’ Jesse was tight, man. I mean we hung out in the yard an’ watched each others’ backs even from them that said they was our friends.”

“I see.”

“And there’s this guard,” Tempest said, “called Lew. Lew’s this light-skinned black guy think his doo-doo don’t stink.

“Now Jesse got a mouth on him. It’s not really what he says but the way what he says sound like. So whenever he saw Lew he’d say sumpin’ like, ‘There go True Lew Blue the black man where a screw done grew.’ ”

“And I take it that Lew didn’t like that?” I asked.

“No, he didn’t. He’d always be on Jesse until one day when Jesse made up one’a his rhymes Lew just smiled like he knew somethin’ an’ Jesse didn’t.”

“What was that?” I asked to stay in the conversation.

“One day Jesse’s ex-wife, Martine, come in to see him. She said she was worried about their sixteen-year-old daughter Lena because she was datin’ this older man. A man named Lewis Tyler.”

“The True Blue Screw,” I said.

“You got it right, Angel. Lew was takin’ Lena away for days at a time and she just told her mother and stepfather to mind their own business. Now if Jessup was home he’d’a taken care of business but the stepfather wasn’t willin’ to go all the way.

“Then one day Lew ended up escortin’ me an’ Jesse back to our cells because he had set up a spot check.

“You know, Angel, life in prison is like what it must’a been like ten thousand years ago when a man had to act in a instant. You know killin’ back then was second nature — maybe first. We turnt this corner an’ Jesse flashed back with a right hook that caught Lew right in the middle’a his chin. I mean it sounded like a gunshot. Lew hit the ground an’ Jesse come out with a shiv—”

“A what?”

“A homemade knife. Jesse jumped on top of Lew and was about to cut his throat. I knew that there was a camera runnin’ overhead and Jesse only had three more years before he could get out. I didn’t care about that guard. He could’a died for all it mattered to me. The Bible say, Thou shalt not kill, but it wasn’t me killin’ him and if anybody deserved it, he did. But I didn’t want Jesse to spend the rest’a his life behind bars so I pult him off’a the guard. By this time there was alarms goin’ off. Jesse had lost his mind with rage over what that man had been doin’ with his daughter and so he saw me as a enemy too. He jumped on me and started pressin’ that knife down at my chest. I tried to talk to him but he wasn’t listenin’. Finally, when no guard came, I pushed Jesse ovah an’ fell on top’a him. The knife pierced his heart and I saw him die right there under me.”

For three of Tempest’s precious minutes there was silence on the line.

“I’m sorry,” I said to break the hush.

“You should be.”

“Why do you say it like that?”

“Because now I know that I’m a sinner,” he said, stifling a sob. “I killed my best friend for nuthin’. Pretty soon I’ll be sucked down into hell and you will be released into heaven.”

“But you saved a life.”

“The life of a man didn’t deserve to live.”

“But you were trying to save Jesse from his own intentions.”

“Better life in prison than hell at the end of St. Peter’s line.”

“He might not be sent below.”

“He died tryin’ to murder two men,” Tempest said and I had no answer. I knew how I would have gauged Jessup G. Peterson’s sins.

“You are innocent, Tempest,” I said.

“How can I be innocent when I killed my friend?”

The weight of eternity suddenly came down on my human heart. I experienced, once again, the terrible pain that is, part and parcel, the conflicted nature of the human soul.

“I’ll come to see you this Saturday, Tempest. We’ll talk together and maybe we will come up with some kind of answer.”

Class

When an angel is discussed On High he hears it as the rumbling of distant thunder. On that sunny Monday afternoon, on the bus ride to the state penitentiary, I heard booming in a clear sky.

Another thing about angels is that they have persuasion over unsuspecting mortal minds — when the objective is impersonal and there is no relationship involved. This is why, when I first came to earth, I thought that it would be a simple task to convince Tempest Landry that he was a sinner deserving of hell.

I have so far failed to argue Tempest around to heaven’s point of view but I was able to convince the deputy warden of his prison to allow me to teach a literacy class at the joint (as Tempest calls it) and to allow my earthly charge to be my aide.

Even though I am charged with sending him to hell, I feel that his suffering, due to heaven’s conspiracy against him, is unjust.

Angels are united by the nature of our spirits but we are not compelled to agree with one another. So while the heavens above thundered I was led to a classroom replete with a barred window that looked out on a field where six black-and-white cows grazed. The bovines couldn’t hear the thunder but now and again one of them would toss a gaze at my window.

Dumb animals know angels for what they are.

Promptly at 2:30 seven prisoners were led into the classroom by two guards. The convicts were all shackled to make sure they didn’t revolt and take me as hostage.

Fourteen students were enrolled in my basic reading and writing class but there were always absences due to punishments meted out for infractions. A few times I had students that had been wounded in fights with other convicts or guards. One of my students, Terry Other, died of a heart attack — he was twenty-nine years old and weighed in excess of four hundred pounds.

“Hey, Angel,” Tempest, who led the line of learners, said as they entered the room.

His smile was only at half power. I knew that he still felt guilt over killing his friend, Jessup G. Peterson. This was one of the reasons I decided to teach my class. Tempest needed a friend and even though I was also his enemy I had come to understand that being mortal was a complicated, intricate dance that often allowed for contradictions such as this.

“Ezzard,” I said in greeting, using the name of the identity heaven had foisted upon the abused Landry.

“We’re all here and ready to learn,” he told me.

I smiled and the men seated themselves.

There were six black men and one white kid, Tony Anthony of Staten Island.

In spite of their chains the men liked my class. This attraction was partially due to the window, which was six feet wide and four high; an unusual gift in the dark halls of the prison. They also, though they didn’t know it, were moved by the angelic timbre of my voice. I am, after all, at least in part, a celestial being and a moment of grace in the wretched lives of men such as them.

The guards also subconsciously enjoyed my lectures on literacy.

The only one who was unmoved by my nature was Tempest. He was, usually, immune to the Voice of Heaven and had therefore been able to deny judgment when Peter sentenced him to hell.

“Anyone care to start?” I asked the class when they were seated and settled.

There was that moment of quiet when the class searched their hearts for the courage to speak out.

It is a misnomer to say that these men were illiterate. They were semiliterate. Knowing their alphabet and sounding out words I found that they were able to write — after a fashion — but at a very low level of craft, often with poignant results. I had them do assignments each week in which they would answer a single-sentence question with an essay of about a page in length.

While they had little ability in ways of spelling, grammar, and style — their stories were often captivating. Each week we would take one or two of these short essays and go over them sentence by sentence until the words and their meaning satisfied the expectations of the classroom.

That week’s assignment was the simple interrogative: Why are you here in prison?

I was interested to hear their excuses, but first someone had to volunteer.

The silence stretched into discomfort.

We waited.

“Harris,” Tempest said finally. “Come on, man. I know you got sumpin’.”

Next to me Tempest was the oldest man in the room; his body, and his life, were both thirty-nine years old. The rest of the students were all under thirty and the guards weren’t much older.

Harris Maraman was twenty-four years old.

“Do you have something for us, Mr. Maraman?” I asked the handsome, diffident young man.

“Um... well,” he said.

“Come on, brother,” Tony Anthony said, “let’s hear it.”

When the men turned toward Harris their chains tinkled like wind chimes under a light breeze.

“We live in a house on Stanton Street,” Harris said, reading from his lined notepaper with no preamble or introduction. “Me; my mother and sister, Lafisha, and brother, Zarryl; and my mother’s boyfriend Warren; and my sister’s child Rolanda and her little brother, Charles. They had turnt off the water and the electricity and the steam. My mother, Amelia, went to the City but they said that they were busy and that she would have to come back later. That’s when Warren left and I robbed a white man in New York City for three hunnert an’ fi’ty-six dollahs. My mother was so happy she could feed my sister and her kids that she didn’t even ask where the money come from. Warren came ovah for dinner but I sat down at the head of the table. I started goin’ ovah to New York from the Bronx ev’ry other day just about and jump on men and women and take their money an’ hit’em if they said no. They arrested me this one time but my lawyer, a white lady named Charlene, said somethin’ to the judge about the way they arrested me and they had to let me go. I was happy at the time but now that I think about it it would’a prob’ly been bettah if I had got put in jail then and then maybe I could’a had this class and got my GED an’ got a job where I didn’t have to hurt people. But then I was home again and my mother and my sister’s kids was cryin’ and Warren had a new girlfriend that bought his clothes. So I robbed a couple’a people and then I tried to rob this one man named Samuel somethin’. I knocked him down and took his money but that crazy white man got up an’ jumped on me. He grabbed at that money and I got mad. You know that money was for my fam’ly and I felt like he didn’t have no right to try an’ rob it back so I beat on him like a dog. A dog.

“That was five years ago, when I was nineteen. Now I got seventy-nine years left on my sentence. My momma’s still on Stanton Street but my sister’s gone. Nobody knows where to. Warren come up to see me now and then. We don’t really talk but I guess I like it that he comes.

“I know what I did was wrong but when I think about it I don’t know what else I could’a done. So I’m here in Mr. Angel’s class learnin’ how to write down what happened so that maybe one day I could understand it.”

I looked out the window. Three of the black-and-white cows were staring at me. I turned my gaze back in the room and saw Tempest watching my eyes.

It dawned on me then that Tempest didn’t have to plan his arguments with me. He was like a shark whose dialogue is the ocean. All he had to do was have me in the drink with him and the paradoxes and contradictions of mortality made themselves evident.

We, the class and I, wrote Harris’s essay on the blackboard, sentence by sentence and phrase by phrase, correcting the misspellings, grammar, punctuation, and run-on sentences. Harris copied down the composition with great intensity as if there was some kind of answer in the amended thesis.

Tempest was smiling full-out by the time the class was over.

We were allowed a few minutes to meet after the class, alone in the room with the window.

“What are you so happy about?” I asked him.

“That Harris knows things that he don’t even know he know,” Tempest replied.

I understood what he meant.

I had lived in human form for far too long.

On the bus ride home I made a decision: I would continue to work at getting Tempest to recognize his sins and the validity of his punishment but first I would free him — by any means necessary.

Money

Cyrus Lumpin was the assistant warden at the penitentiary. Mr. Lumpin had agreed to allow Tempest and me to meet for two hours once a month — in private. The excuse for this meeting was for us to discuss his work with the students in my prison literacy class. Tempest was my aide and I claimed that I had to be briefed by him now and then to organize my course to work most efficiently.

We did discuss the students but we also got in a talk about the nature of his sins at some point during the meeting, which was held in a small, bare room off to the side of Lumpin’s office.

“...no, Angel,” Tempest was saying to me that particular Saturday afternoon, “even if a man intends to hurt somebody an’ makes him suffer, that don’t necessarily mean that he have evil in his heart.”

“If someone were to beat you and wound you, wouldn’t you feel that you had been wronged?” I asked.

“But maybe not so much so as to say that that man was a sinner.”

“The intent of doing something wrong is the definition of sin,” I said, feeling that I was getting a leg up on our game.

“That might be true in heaven, Angel,” Tempest said. “That might be true where you got all the time in the world and so you only have to think about one thing at a time but down here, where time is always runnin’ out, things get more complicated.”

“Wrong is wrong,” I said, feeling that I was winning and losing, winning and losing — all at the same time.

“But what if you got a child that you love,” Tempest said, “a child that loves you? But you know that that child is wrong on the inside. He do things that he can’t help and he’s your blood and you love him. Maybe he rapes children or kills whenever the lust come up in his mind. He’s wrong and he’s yours. He loves you and you, him. But in the end you have to put him down because no matter what he did you can’t leave him to end up in a place like this where nobody loves him but you do. You have to put him down because if you don’t, innocent people will suffer and it’s your fault. And then you end up in here because you committed a crime and they fount you guilty but you know in your heart that you did right and you hate yourself for it too.”

Tempest’s questions quelled my desire to argue further. I was well aware of the intricacies of sin but it was not until I had achieved human form that I truly experienced those complexities. It seemed right to me that corporeal mud somehow tempered the understanding of the soul.

But I wouldn’t tell Tempest that.

“I went to see Dominique Hart,” I said.

“Ezzard’s old girlfriend?”

“Yes.”

“What for?”

“Fredda Lane called me.”

“Ezzard’s other old flame? Damn, Angel, you a playah, man.”

“It was nothing like that,” I said. “Fredda wanted to give me a stack of letters to return to you, or to Ezzard. Since you broke it off with her she’s felt bad even though she’s happy because she and her boyfriend have decided to get married and she’d’ve had to stop making the conjugal visits anyway.”

“Damn,” Tempest said ruefully, “that was one fine woman.”

“I read the letters.”

“You read my private mail?”

“It’s not yours. It belongs to Ezzard Walcott, who is deceased.”

“But I got his body. I had his girlfriend too — still would if you hadn’t made me feel guilty about makin’ her come up here when she was in love with another man.”

“There was a letter from Dominique Hart in the bundle,” I said. “It spoke about a briefcase that Ezzard had given her to hide.”

It was Tempest’s turn to sit back in mute awareness.

The question was in his eyes.

“She had hidden the briefcase in her stepfather’s house,” I said. “The same house Ezzard used as a hideout while he was avoiding capture.”

Tempest glanced around the room, looking for spies.

“Her stepfather had died from a coronary and the mother has moved down to Miami to live with her sister.”

“How you know all that?”

“I went to see Dominique like I said. I asked her about the briefcase. I told her that I believed that you would be interested in retrieving it.”

“Why?” Tempest asked.

“There was something reticent about her letter.”

“Reti-what?”

“The words seemed furtive, as if she were afraid to write them. I think she understood that the contents of that piece of luggage represented something sinful.”

“Somethin’ sinful? Angel, you got sin on the brain, man. You know I been thinkin’ — St. Peter, or whoever he is, is the most sinful man evah been.”

“What? You call the Guardian of the Gate a sinner? How could you possibly stand behind such a ludicrous claim?”

“You said it yourself, man,” he sang. “A sinner is the one who makes other peoples suffer. And who have caused more sufferin’ than the man sent ten billion souls to hell?”

“It is the sinners themselves who brought on the sentence,” I said. “The Guardian simply saw them on their way.”

“You sayin’ it but you know it ain’t true, Angel.”

“You claim to understand the thought behind Eternity?” I said, forgetting all about Dominique and her well-founded fears.

“This here prison is like a hell on earth, ain’t it?” Tempest asked.

“We agree there.”

“And if that’s true, then you have to be sayin’ that the men in here brought on their own sentences.”

“Yes. Certainly.”

“But half the men in here say they’re innocent and the other half say that they had reasons for what they did.”

A thrum of fear played across my chest as if my rib bones were the notes on a partially muted xylophone.

“I said no to Peter and he couldn’t do a damn thing,” Tempest said. “But the men in here cain’t say no. The people Peter sent to Bob cain’t say no — or they can but they don’t know it. But if you can say no to your judgment, then maybe, just maybe you don’t deserve it — like the man in the cell next to mine who killed his own son because his son had murdered five women and would have killed more. He in here but you know what he did was right not wrong.”

“ ‘Vengeance is mine,’ ” I quoted.

“It wasn’t vengeance but mercy,” Tempest said and a pall of silence settled on us.

After a while there came knock. A moment later the oak door came open. Cyrus Lumpin stood there. I had seen the man maybe eight times. He’d worn three different suits over that period and the one thing they all had in common was that they were varying shades of green.

Lumpin was a slight man with a pencil-thin mustache. His eyes were hazel and his posture vain.

“Time’s almost up, Mr. Angel,” he said. There was the hint of a query in his tone because he didn’t really understand why he was letting Tempest and me meet in his side room. He didn’t know that my angelic voice had interrupted his usual pattern of refusal and denial.

“We’ll be right out, Mr. Lumpin,” I said. “There’s just one more thing we have to discuss.”

The question made its way to Lumpin’s eyes but he could not articulate it. He smiled, nodded, and then backed out of the room, closing the door behind him.

“I broke into Dominique’s parents’ home,” I said.

“What did you say, Angel?”

“I said—”

“I heard you. I heard what you said but what I’m askin’ is ain’t that some kinda sin? Some kinda covetin’?”

“I found what Dominique had hidden. It was in the basement behind a freestanding cinder-block wall.”

“Okay. I’ll bite.”

“It was more like a small suitcase than an attaché case. It was blond and woven. There was $104,379 inside.”

“Cash?”

“There was blood on some of it,” I said, nodding.

“What you do with all that money?”

“It’s in the bottom drawer of my desk at work.”

For a time again we were quiet and then I said, “You don’t belong in here, Tempest.”

“You say I belong in hell, Angel. If I don’t belong here then how could I belong in hell?”

“This is no time to quibble,” I said. “I plan to use the money to hire a new attorney that might secure your freedom.”

“You gonna save me from the penitentiary so you can send me to hell?”

“I follow my destiny where it leads.”

“Even if that takes you down the same path as me?”

Instead of answering him I said, “Fredda told me that Ezzard knew a successful lawyer named Stuart Noble. I intend to go to him and ask him to represent you.”

“And you plan to pay him with that blood money?” Tempest asked.

“If you agree.”

“What’s gonna happen to Lenny Johnson?” he said then.

“Who?”

“Lenny Johnson,” he said. “The man who killed his son to stop him from killin’ and keep him from jail.”

“I don’t know.”

Tempest smiled then and shook his head. It looked as if he were feeling sorry for me.

“Okay, Angel,” he said — doing me a favor. “I’ll let you try it. At least I could maybe get out to the courthouse again. Maybe if I’m lucky, you can sneak me in a hot dog.”

Noble Cause

The waiting room was situated on the fifty-ninth floor of the Midtown Carter-Owens Building. The west wall was one solid window that looked far out over New Jersey. The floor was made from tiles of pinkish-red Italian marble and all of the furniture — chairs, tables, and even the standing chest of drawers — were carved from smooth alabaster stone. The walls were tiled in onyx. There was no softness in the room, only the austere beauty of formed stone and sunlight.

I was seated on a white stone chair — waiting.

A young woman had met me at the receptionist’s desk and brought me to this space of cold opulence.

“Mr. Billings will bring the client in to confer with you,” the lovely raven-haired aide with eyes that could have been actual emeralds told me, “as soon as he arrives.”

“Ezzard?” I said. “Here?”

She smiled but did not answer, turned and left me to wonder.

Nearly an hour later the door, which was made from flat, black slate, swung open.

“Angel,” Tempest said, smiling as he entered. “This is some kind’a great, huh?”

I stood and we shook hands. Over my charge’s shoulder I saw the bull-like form of our legal contact at the firm — Cato Billings.

Billings was a tall white man but didn’t seem so because of his extra-wide, bulging shoulders. His suit looked to be sewn from ship-sail canvas but I was sure that it was actually raw silk.

Billings’s big head was also wide as was his smile. The blond-colored eyes were rather close set and his hair was the red brown of uncured cow leather.

“Mr. Angel,” Billings said grabbing at my hand and squeezing it mightily. “Well, here we are. Sit, sit.”

With little strain Billings turned one of the heavy chairs around so that it was facing its sofa mate. Tempest and I settled next to each other. A grinning Cato Billings sat opposite, framed and darkened by the bright sun behind.

“This is where it all happens,” he said.

“How did you get Tempest here with no guard and in civilian clothes?” I asked.

Tempest was wearing dark green slacks and a yellow, square-cut sports shirt.

“We’re all civilized up here, Mr. Angel. The court knows that when we make a promise we keep it.”

“What promise? And what does the court have to do with our meeting?” I asked. “I thought that I came here to be introduced to Stuart Noble?”

Billings’s helium smile brought him up out of the chair like a grotesque and weighted balloon float in a small-town parade.

“I have to be going,” he said. “Another meeting on the fortieth floor.”

“But—” I said.

He cut me off with a hand gesture and replied, “Your answers will come in a few moments, Mr. Angel.”

With these words he moved the rough-silk-wrapped bulk of his body toward the slate door and out.

I stood up to watch him go.

Tempest sat back and smiled.

“What are you grinning at?” I said peevishly.

“You treat a brother right, Angel,” he said. “Assistant Warden Lumpin came to my cell at four thirty this mornin’ and said that they were transferring me for a new trial. They brought me these civvies and even took me out for a breakfast at IHOP. You know I had six orders of sausage.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “I just delivered the money yesterday afternoon.”

“Money talks,” Tempest said with fake sagacity. “It walks at a good clip too.”

“The love of money—” I began.

A voice finished the sentence for me, “Is the root of all evil.”

We hadn’t heard the slate door open but there in its frame stood a man, tall and slender. His suit was black and so was his skin. He looked more like an African than an African American, the features were so pure — maybe Nigerian or Malian. He was a young man with old, dead eyes. His smile was uplifting, however, and the grace he showed walking into the room was that of human perfection.

Tempest rose to meet our host.

“Mr. Angel, Mr. Walcott,” he said in greeting. “My name is Stuart Noble.”

He shook both our hands and then took the seat that his brutish minion had vacated.

Tempest and I both sat. I stared into Noble’s expressionless eyes and speculated.

“You gentlemen have met your side of the bargain and I will now meet mine.”

“How did you get Tempest out of prison?” I asked.

He hunched his shoulders and smiled easily.

“I asked that he be released into my custody while we do the paperwork,” he said. “This isn’t a high-profile case. None of it has made the news. Why not release him?”

“He’s a convicted felon,” I pointed out.

“An innocent convicted felon,” Tempest insisted.

Noble smiled. There was something about that smile that reminded me of... Tempest.

A muffled knock came on the stone door.

“Come in,” Stuart Noble said.

The raven-haired aide came through, leading state prosecutor Darryl Cruickshank and sitting judge Jasmine Beam into the room.

Noble leapt up and moved chairs for the two state officials to join our circle. He pushed the stone chairs along with remarkable ease. Maybe, I thought, they had wheels or some kind of sliding mechanism underneath.

After a few bland pleasantries Noble said, “Now that we’re all here we can see to justice.”

Seated in an arc around the settee, the representatives of the legal system smiled and nodded.

Noble began the dialogue.

“Let me begin by saying that we are all in agreement that Mr. Walcott did not kill F. Anthony Chambers.”

The judge and prosecutor made small head motions that might have been assent.

“And,” Noble continued, “that the only reason he fled was to avoid a punishment unearned.”

“But he did flee,” Judge Beam, a smallish woman, said.

“Certainly,” the lawyer I’d hired said with a nod, “and he has paid enough, I would say. One night in prison for an innocent man is like an eternity in hell. Wouldn’t you agree, Mr. Cruickshank?”

“I suppose that we might have been a bit overzealous in demanding the maximum sentence for a man driven by desperation,” the tall and darkly handsome state representative admitted.

“And if that is the case,” Noble said slyly, “then the court might agree to reconsider this thirteen-year sentence that the otherwise innocent Mr. Walcott has received.”

Instead of answering, Judge Beam frowned and stood up to her full four-foot-eleven height.

“The papers have already been signed and submitted, counselor,” she said. “We have only come here to put the imprimatur on the judgment.”

“So we agree?” Noble asked, holding out a hand for the judge to shake.

She did not return the gesture and only said, “Yes,” after she had turned her back and was heading for the exit.

Cruickshank did shake Tempest’s lawyer’s hand. He also handed him a large brown envelope.

“In the decree, Mr. Walcott remains a convicted felon and he will be considered to be on parole for the next four years,” Cruickshank said. And then he turned to Tempest. “You are to have weekly visits with your parole officer and will be expected to maintain a regular job. If you fail the requisites of the state, you will be returned to prison.”

“But I’ma be free?” was all Tempest had to ask.

“Yes.”

Only after the representatives from the state were gone did I understand what had happened.

“So I’m free?” Tempest asked Noble.

“Yes, Mr. Landry, you are free — on parole.”

“I know that one, man,” Tempest said. “I been there before in work release.”

If he had heard the lawyer using the name he went by before he died, he didn’t let on.

“Bob?” I said to the lawyer.

He turned to me and smiled. His teeth were extraordinarily white.

“Nothing so exalted, Accounting Angel. My name, before I was murdered, was Lime, Harvey Lime. I was a Boston attorney who represented a lower class of clientele. I made the error of sleeping with one of those client’s girlfriends for services rendered. I suppose she forgot to tell him about the arrangement.”

“But you’re from hell?” Tempest asked.

Again Noble shrugged. “Bob, as you call him, has certain agents that he has freed upon the world. Heaven is not the only one to chum the mortal waters with its refuse.”

“What do you want with him?” I asked the man from Hades.

“You came to me, Joshua. You paid Billings the blood money to free your charge. I have simply done what you have asked me to do.”

For the first time in an eternity of existence I felt the urge to violence. I shivered and Stuart Noble smiled.

“Temper, temper now, Accounting Angel. You’re already walking the razor’s edge.”

“I thought Bob was afraid of what I could do to him?” Tempest asked as he took up the space between Noble and me.

“I am not privy to Satan’s inner thoughts.”

“Aren’t you afraid?” Tempest asked, taking a step closer.

“You can’t harm me, Tempest. I’m just a man doing his job. A brother just like you.”

“You paid off the court?”

“Most certainly. All things human can be reduced to commerce and commodity. You just have to shop in the right places.”

“You took the money I gave Billings and spent it on bribes?” I asked.

“Billings took the money. He made the deal. I just sat in a room breathing the cool air of earth.”

On the street I felt light-headed and oddly betrayed, though I could not say by whom. Tempest stood next to me, a look of wonder on his face.

“Damn, Angel,” he said, “you got to watch yourself, brother, or we just might end up cell mates in hell.”