“And they’re sending more soldiers,” Joana said, her scratchy voice breaking tensely at the end.“They want to choke us until they figure out who’s been killing the criminals and who’s been killing the soldiers.They haven’t announced it so that it can be a surprise attack, but when they do, they’ll tell everyone they’re trying to kill a kingpin.”
Tadeo’s blood was cooling rapidly, his hand shaking now.“I’m not,” he said tightly, “a fucking criminal.”
“Well, what else is the world going to call someone who’s killing soldiers, boy?”Joana leaned back into her chair, reached for her glass soda bottle, brought it to her mouth, gulped down the last of it.
“Tadeo,” called the uncle, “relax, son.They don’t know who they’re looking for.You should hide.They’ll leave as soon as they can’t find you, and no one will betray you.The town loves you.”
But Tadeo was frowning, afraid; he hadn’t felt loved in church or on the street.In fact, it’d seemed like everyone would jump at the chance to betray him.‘But I only kill bad people.I’m a good person.This world is crazy, God.They think I’m a monster for trying to save my people.’
“Din-ita,” the grandmother was saying, wiggling to try and stand around the crowded table.“Come, come,” she urged, scooting as close to Dina as she could, then touching his shoulder gingerly with a trembling, wrinkled hand.“You need to get out of those clothes.I’ll tell you where you can wash up and where you can sleep.I’ll find you something clean to wear.”
The angel remained seated for a moment, his eyes wide, listening to the silence, before he nodded, whispering that he would like to be clean again.
CHAPTER9
As the beautiful priest Father Ángel flipped through a binder, he landed on a clipped magazine cover of what appeared to be a woman — blonde, blue-eyed, with long lashes that evoked the rays of a sun, full lips coated ruby red; of her figure, there was the expected fullness of a celebrity and thinness in the right places and long legs, a perfectly coy silhouette.They called her the Harlot — the words were written in lipstick across the bottom half of the page, obscuring her groin.She hadn’t wanted that name, those who despised her and those who loved her both embraced it.In the photo, she was posed with hands framing her face, right hip jutted one way, and her face was sultry, knowing.Father Ángel stared at her.
‘Ángel,’ she said, ‘the people are asking where I am.’Ángel turned the page to look at another section of his binder, the notes on some deals — though he’d written them in a sort of Vigenère cipher — he still heard her.‘You can’t be here long.The stage misses me.And you look so ugly in that cassock.’The priest gathered the information he needed, then he shut the binder, and he slipped it back under the false bottom he’d created in the desk of his rectory room.A window nearby buzzed with the insects fluttering on the opposite side, and he heard distant bird songs.‘Be quick with what you’re here to do.The people want another album.They miss me.Don’t you miss me too?’
As the priest made his way to the wardrobe, he passed beneath a flickering bulb, and in a fraction of a second, his shadow appeared horned with a tail trailing by his feet, but with four wings hanging heavy from his back and three other faces pressed against his copper-red own — one like an ox, another like an eagle, the third like a lion.He lifted a hand to the wooden door of the wardrobe, pulled it open to reveal every clean cassock he owned before reaching to wiggle the board at the back.Another false end, another lie.
He removed the panel and set it aside to reveal his emergency outfits.A dress would do for tonight, wouldn’t it?Should he wear the one that ended on his upper thighs, hardly concealing the perfect intimacies the devil could tempt even the holiest men with?Or, should he wear the tighter dress that fell to his ankles with a long slit that crept up higher on his thigh than the first outfit?Surely, he’d love to sit and ponder, but the beautiful priest had places to be and people to be.The night was young.
Somewhere else in the same town, the young angel Dina was sitting on the roof, legs hanging off the edge with a half-finished pinkpan dulce, sugar bread, in his hands.He wore now a sweater whose hood covered the top of his head and long jean shorts that fell to his knees, as well as a pair of sandals that were too small.He watched the smoke twirl up and away from a grill — made of bricks and iron fixtures above a grave of burning coal — that Tadeo’s uncles and male cousins were crowded around, with one young girl among them who kept trying to help.Large cuts of meat were roasted there, alongside some cactus pads rid of their spikes and both corn and flour tortillas, and there had been onions, tomatoes, peppers there as well, but they’d been moved to a stone mortar that an aunt beat a pestle against, crushing all the darkened vegetables.From a speaker set on a table where the younger children were chattering — upbeat, rhythm-heavy music blasted.Tadeo stood not far from it, as did Joana, as they argued in whispers, or perhaps hisses.
‘I never,’ Dina told Apsinthos the star, ‘saw this in my books.’The angel turned his face and sighed a little, catching some of the street from his periphery.There was a boy who passed by on a bicycle, followed by a group of laughing friends.In the distance, he heard a bang, but it was rather muffled, and another one.Two gunshots, but only two.Nothing to be afraid of.Dina knew gunshots, had heard them as he lay hiding in that house Tadeo found him in; he’d peeked between the boards of the windows and seen men with firearms in their hands.‘I don’t understand,’ he thought then and now.He continued to think of what Uriel had told him in Heaven, that this world shouldn't end, and what Joana had spoken of.
‘There’s so much of humanity that you still have to see for yourself,’ said the star in his head.‘Why don’t you take a walk?’
Dina hesitated.‘They’ll call me down for their food soon.’His gaze flickered to his bread.‘They were excited for me to try it.’
‘You won’t be long.’
And so Dina finished his bread, rose slowly onto his feet and climbed down, heading for the street.If he wouldn’t be long, maybe the humans wouldn’t notice.Only once he was on the road did he wipe at the crumbs on his mouth.
Meanwhile, the priest opted for the shorter dress, taking and folding it elegantly into his duffel bag before heading out into the night.He had a driver waiting — a simple bribe — to the nearest airport, where the bribe had been more difficult, had involved a call to the governor from the right person.Nonetheless, the private jet arrived safe, and, if all went well, there’d be no need to do this, this trip, again.Picking at his nails, the priest wondered how he’d explain the lack of acrylics, and he ignored the buzzes of his phone in his pocket for now.It could be Toño, who might’ve watched the beautiful, young, new priest sneak away, or it could have been the governor.It could be anyone.Father Ángel would ignore them all the same.
Leaning his head against the car window, he watched the quiet streets, and he thought of all he’d heard about how there was nothing but war here.Shootouts, mass graves, burning cars, hanging bodies, decapitated journalists.The people, however, were largely silent of what was happening, what had already happened.A quiet war — but Father Ángel knew that quiet wars were as horrific as the rattling, screeching, booming ones — they were simply longer, happened over generations — and sometimes they exploded too, in a final act, like the universe beginning again.
Not thinking of the danger of doing so, Dina walked in the center of the street, following flickering streetlights.He wondered where the glow in them came from, if man had captured the small stars in the sky and trapped them in jars.Some wind rustled nearby leaves, and he tilted his head to look at a home on the opposite side of the road — graffitied, overgrown with ferns and a tree, all behind a simple fence.Dina approached, peeking in between two thin bars to see a shrine within arms-length.It was of a woman with her hands together in prayer, wearing a red gown and a robe of green with yellow stars speckled on it, her feet supported by a little angel.
“Mary,” Dina recognized, but then frowned.“You’re all alone.”The paint was faded everywhere, scraped off in sections, and her shrine itself was weathered at the corners.
Slow, Dina’s gaze trailed down, and he saw, right by the angels holding Mary’s feet, a small, faux-leather square.It was thick, though its length wasn’t much longer than that of his hand, and when he reached between the bars, grasped it, it fit perfectly in his palm.He pulled the small book out, fingers brushing scratchy, torn pages and a curved binding that was frayed at both ends.Over the front, there was the title of the book, its version, as well as an embossed golden crucifix.
On board the private jet, the priest changed into his dress, let down his naturally golden hair, and he changed the contacts in his eyes from browns to blues.He, then, began with makeup.But as he stared into his small vanity mirror, he imagined a hand over his own, and he thought — momentarily — that there was someone standing behind him with eyes a shade much brighter than the ones the beautiful priest had slipped on — something more like sapphire, more like sky.His last memory of Azazel said nothing, simply lingered, and he did so for the majority of the many-hour flight.
Angel Dina, on the other hand, flipped idly through the Bible, looked back to the Mother of God for a moment, then he turned to begin walking again with the book in hand.As he left, he listened to all the distant noise of houses full of life and those deathly silent.He passed by piles of garbage, and he passed by some bowls of water that must’ve been left out for strays, and he saw, in the distance, a pillar with a great, glowing sign attached to the top.He could read it to say something, but it wasn’t a word he recognized.Though he was tempted to step inside, Apsinthos warned him — ‘You have no manner of paying.’Dina wanted to say he did.He had a soul; he had a body, too; he had a body to pay with.Maybe Apsinthos heard him; he said, ‘You have no money.’Dina had encountered that concept before in his books, but he hadn’t understood it there, and he didn’t understand it here, now.
Nonetheless, he turned slowly and walked away from the convenience store, though he saw some young people talking inside happily, then laughing.For a moment, he imagined being among them.He thought of how he’d once sit in between Azazel and Armoni.He thought of them, and he thought of Uriel once more, who’d wanted the world saved.‘Dina,’ said Apsinthos, ‘go to the river.’
Father Ángel arrived in a city of fluorescent light, skyscrapers, and fortune, and at the airport, as expected, was a chauffeur.After this, it was a half hour to the casino, each minute of which he spent with his eyes shut firmly, trying to make up for all the sleep he should’ve had on the jet.It wasn’t enough; it was never enough.As the driver pulled up to a seven-floor, wide building, the beautiful priest opened one eye in a squint.Though the arrangement had been to close the casino for a private event, there were more people than planned moving in and out of it, many older folk.Oh well.
Long ago, the beautiful priest had learned to accept collateral damage.All humans died eventually, and almost all of them died miserable deaths.And he didn’t often torture them, he was often quick, and there was something so comfortingly impersonal about a devil responsible for your death; there was nothing you could have done differently, it wasn’t someone you loved, it wasn’t the world that you hated.It was something so much larger than you could ever know.
Tapping, his stilettos climbed up a line of steps toward the entrance into the casino, and he licked the gloss on his lips for a taste of its cherry flavor.The double doors were guarded: security stood at either side, asking for identification from the priest, informing him that this event was closed.Without a word, Ángel retrieved a wallet from his purse, offered an I.D., and then smiled pleasantly as he was allowed in with another few taps of his heels.Soon, he was crossing them over carpet, which was colored red-orange and decorated with yellow geometric shapes in a vague floral aesthetic.Tassels of blonde hair bounced against his shoulders, curling toward the jeweled, designer necklace he wore, whose style matched his bracelets and dangling earrings.As for his dress — it was a seven thousand dollar piece of pale lace beneath crystal embroidery, with some black bows on his shoulders, though one was, tastefully, on the verge of slipping off.Coyly over his bottom, he held a clutch purse as he moved through a hundred people.
The slot machines were singing, whirring, but the priest headed toward the circular bar at the center of the enormous room first, where there was what appeared to be a young woman standing before the bartender, sipping from a tall glass with a salted rim.Her nails were acrylic and half pink, half white, and her hair was a tender, soft pink in loose curls.“Gemory,” the priest called, watching the woman jolt, then turn on her heels to reveal her short white dress with a low, V-shaped collar.
