Azrael Page 6

  The worst thing about it was that she didn’t think she could have done anything else under the circumstances. Her mother had never been afraid of anything before—at least that she’d let her children see—but this had her terrified.

  She had even (and this was what had Regina terrified) begun to neglect the business. She had missed a Worldwatch editorial meeting. Fred Smith, the managing editor, had called Regina in a panic, demanding to know where Petra was. Of course, Fred had been more or less a trial since his son had died, but Regina could understand that. It was the power of one word to change her mother’s lifelong habits that got to her.

  It had been that phone call that had decided her to get help somewhere. Regina knew herself to be particularly susceptible to emotional states of the people around her, and she was around no one more than her mother. If Petra’s behavior was going to drive everybody at the Hudson Group nuts, Regina would be doomed. It would happen all the sooner if her mother kept disappearing.

  It turned out that there had been no cause for alarm the day of the missed meeting. Petra Hudson had decided to drop in on Tina Bloyd. The visit, Wes Charles told Regina later, hadn’t done Petra much good and had agitated the hell out of the bereaved mother. Besides which, Mother had lied. She’d said she had become so involved in the visit, she completely forgot about the editorial meeting. According to Charles, she had specifically refused to call and say she wasn’t going to make it and had forbidden him to do so.

  That had really torn it. Regina made an excuse to leave town, and by Saturday she was in Washington. Tuesday was the lunch in New York, and Wednesday was for self-recrimination.

  And now it was Thursday, and here was Allan Trotter, for now, at least, the FBI’s gift to journalism. He’d shown up in perfect feature-writer camouflage, dressed somewhere between the popular conception of a best-selling novelist, which feature writers wanted to be, and that of an associate professor of English Lit, which is what a lot of them were attempting to escape from. There were, in the two hundred some odd cities where the Hudson Group had papers, probably a hundred thirty colleges, the English faculties of which were going nowhere. At least a feature writer got his name in the paper.

  Trotter had come into her office, smiled at her, and said he was happy to be aboard. He’d already said that until they knew what was going on, she was to act as if he was exactly what he was pretending to be, in public and in private. Regina was not happy with the implication of the possibility of hostile surveillance, but then she hadn’t liked much of anything since her mother came home from that funeral.

  All right, she’d told herself as she avoided Trotter’s deceptively friendly brown eyes. This was the time to call it off; she hesitated, and was lost.

  “Nice to have you,” she said, trying to sound as if she meant it. There was a lengthy silence that would give the theoretical listeners-in something to think about but was just Regina’s inability to think of anything to say next.

  Trotter came to the rescue. “I’d like to see the place, if there’s someone to show me around.”

  Of course, Regina thought. Only polite to show the new employee around. And because she didn’t want to hang around a possibly bugged office, she announced she’d do the job herself. Trotter acted as if he’d expected that all along.

  She showed him around, not only the Chronicle’s little operation in the basement but the whole building. From the Worldwatch offices to Group Advertising Sales to the cafeteria, she showed him around. They walked until Regina wished she’d worn sneakers, the way she usually did, instead of dressing up a little to greet the new employee.

  It wouldn’t have been so bad if Trotter had said anything besides “mm-hmm.”

  She saved the printing plant for last, arriving, as she’d planned, at one of the few hours of the day the place wouldn’t be shaking with the roar and clatter of thirty-foot-high, high-speed presses.

  She gave all the statistics, as related to her by the German company that made the machines. How many tons they weighed, how many gallons of ink per second they used. How, since they did not only the magazine and the local newspaper here, but special inserts for the entire Hudson Group, as well as hiring out to other magazines and advertisers, that this was one of the world’s busiest pressrooms. She told him that this was all offset, and that the paper went through the machines at nearly two hundred miles an hour.

  She pointed at a catwalk that ran down the middle of the room at the level a little above that of the tops of the presses. “You can see it better from up there,” she said. “That’s where the men go to paste the new rolls onto the web. See, they lower them into position, then glue them to the ones already there. While the press is going. It’s a very dangerous job, since the paper going that speed is like a saw and could cut your arm off before you’d even feel it. We have an excellent safety record, though.”

  Trotter said, “Mm-hmm,” and Regina, tired of it, had told him he didn’t ask enough questions to pass as a journalist, and gotten the snappy comeback.

  Trotter waited a few seconds, then told her, just above a whisper, “Don’t apologize or react to this, but you could have just arranged for me to die.”

  Right, don’t react. Regina felt a look of total stupidity spread itself across her face. Trotter pointed discreetly to a man in white coveralls walking briskly along the catwalk to a glassed-in control booth at one end.

  “I don’t think he heard you,” Trotter continued in the same barely audible tone, “but he might have. Let’s not take chances.”

  Then a loud bell went off, and the presses started to roar. She signaled for him to follow her out. The German company had stressed the danger of being in here too long without ear protection.

  Trotter smiled and shook his head. He put his mouth close to Regina’s ear. “I’ve been waiting for this,” he screamed. She could just about hear him. “Let’s talk for a few seconds.”

  Chapter Four

  “DON’T BE SILLY,” THE Reverend Mr. Nelson said. “Come as often as you like. I’m here to talk to people, you know. To help them. Or rather, to show them how to ask the Lord to help them. He doesn’t care how long it takes, you know.” He smiled in that way preachers have, to let you know one of their favorite jokes was coming up. “He hasn’t worked to a schedule since the Creation.”

  Tina Bloyd laughed and thanked him again. Mr. Nelson smiled. He smiled a lot. He had the kind of smile that helped people feel good. Someone at work had told her that, said the new preacher at the Northside Church could help her, and he’d turned out to be right. Tina had thought that after that morning when she’d awakened early to find the sheet damp and her baby dead, she’d never smile again. Damn psychiatrist at the hospital didn’t know anything; even Grandma, who’d come upstate on a bus, with her arthritis and everything, wasn’t a whole lot of help.

  Grandma had urged her to see a preacher, too, but she wanted her to come back home to Mount Vernon and go to her church.

  No way Tina was going to go back to Mount Vernon. Mount Vernon was a town in Westchester County, New York. A lot of people had heard of the county but only about the houses and the estates and the quaint little villages. They hadn’t heard about the downtowns, where the black people lived. Grandma had always said, “BTH, BTH,” which meant Better Than Harlem. If that was true, Tina didn’t want to know about Harlem. She didn’t know much about anything Grandma said, and that had been a mistake.

  Tina had been a wild one. She’d been smart in school, when she bothered to go, which was not much. She didn’t do drugs, but she did liquor, some, and boys, a lot. It took four years, but the inevitable happened at last. Tina found herself pregnant. She pretended she wouldn’t tell who the father was, but the truth was, she didn’t know.

  Abortion was out. Grandma didn’t hold with abortion, and Tina was too scared to lose Grandma, now. She’d always considered Grandma a kind of handkerchief head, running off to the preacher for everything, closing her eyes and rocking back and forth over her
Bible, but from behind a bulging belly, Tina could see Grandma in a whole new way. Grandma had raised a baby all by herself, and what had gone wrong had been no fault of Grandma’s, just Tina’s own damned wildness. She’d have to raise a baby single-handed, now, and the prospect terrified her. She needed that old woman more than anything.

  Unless she decided just to walk away from it, put the child up for adoption, and forget it.

  Forget it was right. Sure, people were desperate to adopt babies. But they wanted white babies. That meant her baby was destined for an orphanage or a series of foster homes.

  No way. She wasn’t making this baby on purpose, but she wasn’t making it so it could be miserable, either.

  Tina had gone to the Welfare office to see what she could get. What she got was a surprise. No apartment, and a lot less money than she wanted, but they put her in a training program, learning to set computerized type. She worked hard, found out she liked it and could do it well. She finished her training about two weeks before the baby came, and she went into the hospital in possession of the one thing in the world she never thought she’d have—a job.

  Not only a job, but a job with a big company. Turned out they’d more or less sponsored the training program. When she told some of her friends she was going upstate to work for the Hudson Group, they’d told her it was a racist organization. They were in favor of Israel. They were for Welfare cuts. Just read their editorials.

  Tina thought about it. She decided at last that she didn’t give a damn about Israel, one way or the other, and since when had the Arabs who went around blowing things up been black people, anyway? She also decided that if people had jobs, they wouldn’t need Welfare.

  So she told the Hudson Group she and her baby would be there as soon as they could. When they arrived in Kirkester, Tina found a clean town, quiet, fresh air. A nice place to live. At the job, she found some people to be friends with. Mostly, they were also graduates of the program, but there were a few local girls, too. White girls. They had a program up here, too, which was so far off the beaten track that even the poor people were white. Tina had seen stories on the TV news about poor white people, but she had never really believed in them.

  There was day care for the babies, with a trained nurse there at all times. Since the place was running twenty-four hours a day, what with one publication and another, there was night care, too, and Tina was allowed—encouraged, even—to leave the kid there to go to night school and get her diploma.

  She used to go around pinching herself, feeling maybe guilty over doing her best for years to screw up her life, then falling into something like this.

  Then the bill came due, and little Clara (that was Grandma’s name), a good and beautiful child, had just ... died.

  After Tina had gotten out of the hospital, where they’d sent her for “hysteria”—they’d be hysterical, too, they went in to check on their baby and found the poor little thing dead—she’d headed for the nearest church.

  Looking, she thought, for an explanation. If there had been sin involved, it had been Tina’s own. Why take an innocent baby?

  Mr. Nelson had looked up at her apologetically. He had sandy hair that fell across his forehead, and only some creases around his eyes kept him from looking exactly like a farm boy caught sneaking a fingerful of chocolate icing from the cake.

  “I can tell you, but you’ll get angry.”

  “Mr. Nelson—”

  “You can call me Will, if you like.”

  Tina didn’t think she could be shocked, but the idea of calling a preacher, a white preacher, by his first name came close.

  “Mr. Nelson,” she said again, “I already am angry.”

  So he told her. “The world,” he said, “is the place where we prepare for the next world. If we do His will, follow His plan for us, when our work is finished, He calls us home.”

  “You’re right,” Tina said.

  Mr. Nelson looked surprised.

  “It is making me angry. That kind of talk might be all right if I’d lost somebody who’d lived a life. My baby’s work wasn’t done, for the Lord or anybody else. She didn’t even get the chance to start.”

  “Didn’t she?” Mr. Nelson had asked.

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Think of what you’ve already told me. You were wild, drinking, sleeping around. You talked about sins, you know, those are the worst kind, because they waste God’s gift of life. Your own life. But what happened when you found you were going to have the child? You didn’t destroy it. You didn’t abandon it. You made up your mind to straighten out your life so your child would have every chance. And you did. You’ve got a new life. You’re a respectable person with a future. And you’re not going back, are you?

  “But I don’t have my baby.”

  “No, you don’t. And don’t let me or anybody tell you not to grieve. But believe me, Clara’s life, short as it was, was not wasted. As I said before, her work was done.”

  Tina was bitter. “You still didn’t tell me what her work was.”

  “To save you.”

  She looked at him. “I was crazy to come here.”

  “I told you it would make you angry. There’s just one more thing I want to say.”

  “Might as well.”

  “There is a word for souls like Clara’s, you know. The ones who come to Earth to help one special person, then return to heaven.”

  “What word?”

  “They call them angels.”

  They call them angels. Tina couldn’t get the words out of her mind. For a week, the conversation kept running through her head. It was the same old bull, sure, Speech Number Fifteen, consoling bereft mothers. But he’d sounded so sincere. He believed it, even if Tina didn’t. The idea that God would waste an angel on her was ridiculous. And she missed her baby, dammit, she wanted her baby! How dare he try to palm her off with—

  She’d gone back to give him another piece of her mind, and a few days later she’d gone back again to give him another. Pretty soon she was just asking questions.

  Today, she’d gone to him because for the first time, she had found herself thinking of her child without tears welling up in her eyes. Until it came to her that it shouldn’t be that way; then the guilt made her cry.

  And he had made her feel better. Again. “I’m coming to services on Sunday,” she told Mr. Nelson on the way out.

  “It will be a pleasure to have you.”

  “It’s the least I can do, taking up so much of your time,” she’d said, and Mr. Nelson had made his joke about the Creation.

  Special Agent Joe Albright sat behind the wheel of a pickup truck and watched Tina Bloyd walk down the white steps of the church to the walkway that led to Main Street.

  Joe had taken a small garage in the Flats and gone into the junk business—or, as you had to call it in Kirkester, the Salvage/Reclamation business. He had his truck and a pair of khaki overalls with “Joe” scripted in red threads over his pocket. He could go anywhere, at any time, knock on anybody’s door, and engage in conversation. He had also made the Government of the United States of America a net profit of $527.68 in the first week and a half. Seems that Albright Salvage/Reclamation was the first black-owned business in the history of Kirkester, and the paper had done an article on him (too bad Trotter didn’t write it). The people in town had read the article and had been falling all over themselves to prove that even though everybody they ever voted for, from president to dogcatcher, was a Republican, they were not prejudiced.

  That was okay with Joe. That same impulse led people to talk to him a lot longer than they normally would to a junk—a Salvage/Reclamation man. In between “It’s good to see a young man starting his own business” and “We don’t care what somebody looks like, only what they’ve got inside,” he’d found out a lot about the three deaths. Not much that added up, at least on face value. Joe had a little idea he was developing, though, that might make sense of things. The question was, did he, or did he not, tell Tro
tter?

  Another question was, why was he hesitating to approach Tina Bloyd? He’d talked to the other parents without a qualm.

  It had damned well better not be, he told himself, because she was black. The day he let race shit get in the way of his job was the day to pack it in. All right. She’s been to the preacher so much, she’ll be in church on Sunday. I’ll put on my best suit, tune up my hymn singing, and meet her there.

  Chapter Five

  “IF YOU THINK THE Russians are crazy enough to blow up the world over a maniac like Qaddafi, you have a lower opinion of them than I do.”

  Trotter kept himself from smiling—it wouldn’t have been appropriate. This was a serious discussion, and he knew Petra Hudson was watching.

  It was amusing. The tone and editorial policies of the Hudson Group were very similar to the positions Trotter was taking, so Regina’s mother should be on his side. On the other hand, the opposition was James Hudson, Jr., home from college and showing off a previously unsuspected fiancée.

  The fiancée’s name was Hannah Stein, and Trotter liked her already. She was small, not especially pretty, but with shiny dark eyes that said she wasn’t the mouse she seemed to act like. He managed to talk to her long enough to find out she was a sociology major (as Jimmy was) and that her father was the manager of the butcher department of a Food Emporium Supermarket in Queens before Jimmy got wound up on the topic of American intransigence. She looked tenderly at her fiancée, but, Trotter could tell, without illusion. It was the attitude most intelligent women had about men, if they didn’t scorn them entirely—“He’s really quite wonderful, he just needs a little management.”