The Merciful Angel of Death (A Matthew Scudder Story Book 5) Read online

  “Then why not leave her alone?”

  “There’s a hospice administrator who’s afraid she’s murdering people. He called me in rather than start an official police inquiry. But if I don’t get anywhere—”

  “He calls the cops.” He found his address book, copied out a number for me. “Please don’t make trouble for her,” he said. “I might need her myself.”

  I called her that evening, met her the following afternoon at a cocktail lounge just off Washington Square. She was as described, even to the gray cape over a long gray dress. Her scarf today was canary yellow. She was drinking Perrier, and I ordered the same.

  She said, “Tell me about your friend. You say he’s very ill.”

  “He wants to die. He’s been begging me to kill him but I can’t do it.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “I was hoping you might be able to visit him.”

  “If you think it might help. Tell me something about him, why don’t you.”

  I don’t suppose she was more than forty-five, if that, but there was something ancient about her face. You didn’t need much of a commitment to reincarnation to believe she had lived before. Her facial features were pronounced, her eyes a graying blue. Her voice was pitched low, and along with her height it raised doubts about her sexuality. She might have been a sex change, or a drag queen. But I didn’t think so. There was an Eternal Female quality to her that didn’t feel like parody.

  I said, “I can’t.”

  “Because there’s no such person.”

  “I’m afraid there are plenty of them, but I don’t have one in mind.” I told her in a couple of sentences why I was there. When I’d finished she let the silence stretch, then asked me if I thought she could kill anyone. I told her it was hard to know what anyone could do.

  She said, “I think you should see for yourself what it is that I do.”

  She stood up. I put some money on the table and followed her out to the street.

  We took a cab to a four-story brick building on Twenty-second Street west of Ninth. We climbed two flights of stairs, and the door opened when she knocked on it. I could smell the disease before I was across the threshold. The young black man who opened the door was glad to see her and unsurprised by my presence. He didn’t ask my name or tell me his.

  “Kevin’s so tired,” he told us both. “It breaks my heart.”

  We walked through a neat, sparsely furnished living room and down a short hallway to a bedroom, where the smell was stronger. Kevin lay in a bed with its head cranked up. He looked like a famine victim, or someone liberated from Dachau. Terror filled his eyes.

  She pulled a chair up to the side of his bed and sat in it. She took his hand in hers and used her free hand to stroke his forehead. “You’re safe now,” she told him. “You’re safe, you don’t have to hurt anymore, you did all the things you had to do. You can relax now, you can let go now, you can go to the light.

  “You can do it,” she told him. “Close your eyes, Kevin, and go inside yourself and find the part that’s holding on. Somewhere within you there’s a part of you that’s like a clenched fist, and I want you to find that part and be with that part. And let go. Let the fist open its fingers. It’s as if the fist is holding a little bird, and if you open up the hand the bird can fly free. Just let it happen, Kevin. Just let go.”

  He was straining to talk, but the best he could do was make a sort of cawing sound. She turned to the black man, who was standing in the doorway. “David,” she said, “his parents aren’t living, are they?”

  “I believe they’re both gone.”

  “Which one was he closest to?”

  “I don’t know. I believe they’re both gone a long time now.”

  “Did he have a lover? Before you, I mean.”

  “Kevin and I were never lovers. I don’t even know him that well. I’m here ’cause he hasn’t got anybody else. He had a lover.”

  “Did his lover die? What was his name?”

  “Martin.”

  “Kevin,” she said, “you’re going to be all right now. All you have to do is go to the light. Do you see the light? Your mother’s there, Kevin, and your father, and Martin—”

  “Mark!” David cried. "Oh, God, I’m sorry, I’m so stupid, it wasn’t Martin, it was Mark, Mark, that was his name.”

  “That’s all right, David.”

  “I’m so damn stupid—”

  “Look into the light, Kevin,” she said. “Mark is there, and your parents, and everyone who ever loved you. Matthew, take his other hand. Kevin, you don’t have to stay here anymore, darling. You did everything you came here to do. You don’t have to stay. You don’t have to hold on. You can let go, Kevin. You can go to the light. Let go and reach out to the light—”

  I don’t know how long she talked to him. Fifteen, twenty minutes, I suppose. Several times he made the cawing sound, but for the most part he was silent. Nothing seemed to be happening, and then I realized that his terror was no longer a presence. She seemed to have talked it away. She went on talking to him, stroking his brow and holding his hand, and I held his other hand. I was no longer listening to what she was saying, just letting the words wash over me while my mind played with some tangled thought like a kitten with yarn.

  Then something happened. The energy in the room shifted and I looked up, knowing that he was gone.

  “Yes,” she murmured. “Yes, Kevin. God bless you, God give you rest. Yes.”

  “Sometimes they’re stuck,” she said. “They want to go but they can’t. They’ve been hanging on so long, you see, that they don’t know how to stop.”

  “So you help them.”

  “If I can.”

  “What if you can’t? Suppose you talk and talk and they still hold on?”

  “Then they’re not ready. They’ll be ready another time. Sooner or later everybody lets go, everybody dies. With or without my help.”

  “And when they’re not ready—”

  “Sometimes I come back another time. And sometimes they’re ready then.”

  “What about the ones who beg for help? The ones like Arthur Fineberg, who plead for death but aren’t physically close enough to it to let go?”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “The thing you want to say. The thing that’s stuck in your throat, the way his own unwanted life was stuck in Kevin’s throat. You’re holding on to it.”

  “Just let it go, eh?”

  “If you want.”

  We were walking somewhere in Chelsea, and we walked a full block now without either of us saying a word. Then she said, “I think there’s a world of difference between assisting someone verbally and doing anything physical to hasten death.”

  “So do I.”

  “And that’s where I draw the line. But sometimes, having drawn that line—”

  “You step over it.”

  “Yes. The first time I swear I acted without conscious intent. I used a pillow, I held it over his face and—” She breathed deeply. “I swore it would never happen again. But then there was someone else, and he just needed help, you know, and—”

  “And you helped him.”

  “Yes. Was I wrong?”

  “I don’t know what’s right or wrong.”

  “Suffering is wrong,” she said, “unless it’s part of His plan, and how can I presume to decide if it is or not? Maybe people can’t let go because there’s one more lesson they have to learn before they move on. Who the hell am I to decide it’s time for somebody’s life to end? How dare I interfere?”

  “And yet you do.”

  “Just once in a while, when I just don’t see a way around it. Then I do what I have to do. I’m sure I must have a choice in the matter, but I swear it doesn’t feel that way. It doesn’t feel as though I have any choice at all.” She stopped walking, turned to look at me. She said, “Now what happens?”

  “Well, she’s the Merciful Angel of Death,” I told Carl Orcott. “She visits the sick an
d dying, almost always at somebody’s invitation. A friend contacts her, or a relative.”

  “Do they pay her?”

  “Sometimes they try to. She won’t take any money. She even pays for the flowers herself.” She’d taken Dutch iris to Kevin’s apartment on Twenty-second Street. Blue, with yellow centers that matched her scarf.

  “She does it pro bono,” he said.

  “And she talks to them. You heard what Bobby said. I got to see her in action. She talked the poor son of a bitch straight out of this world and into the next one. I suppose you could argue that what she does comes perilously close to hypnosis, that she hypnotizes people and convinces them to kill themselves psychically, but I can’t imagine anybody trying to sell that to a jury.”

  “She just talks to them.”

  “Uh-huh. ‘Let go, go to the light.’”

  “ ‘And have a nice day.’”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “She’s not killing people?”

  “Nope. Just letting them die.”

  He picked up a pipe. “Well, hell,” he said, “that’s what we do. Maybe I ought to put her on staff.” He sniffed the pipe bowl. “You have my thanks, Matthew. Are you sure you don’t want some of our money to go with it? Just because Mercy works pro bono doesn’t mean you should have to.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “You’re certain?”

  I said, “You asked me the first day if I knew what AIDS smelled like.”

  “And you said you’d smelled it before. Oh.”

  I nodded. “I’ve lost friends to it. I’ll lose more before it’s over. In the meantime I’m grateful when I get the chance to do you a favor. Because I’m glad this place is here, so people have a place to come to.”

  Even I was glad she was around, the woman in gray, the Merciful Angel of Death. To hold the door for them, and show them the light on the other side. And, if they really needed it, to give them the least little push through it.

  About the Author

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  Lawrence Block published his first novel in 1958. He has been designated a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, and has received Lifetime Achievement awards from the Crime Writers’ Association (UK), the Private Eye Writers of America, and the Short Mystery Fiction Society. He has won the Nero, Philip Marlowe, Societe 813, and Anthony awards, and is a multiple recipient of the Edgar, the Shamus, and the Japanese Maltese Falcon awards. He and his wife, Lynne, are devout New Yorkers and relentless world travelers.

  Email: [email protected]

  Twitter: @LawrenceBlock

  Blog: LB’s Blog

  Facebook: lawrence.block

  Website: lawrenceblock.com

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  The Matthew Scudder Stories

  Available on Amazon

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  For a list of all my available fiction, with my series novels listed in chronological order, go to About LB’s Fiction.

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  Thanks!

  Lawrence Block

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