Page 42 of Angel of Vengeance
Sprawls at the window-sill and gapes;
The waiter brings in oranges
Bananas figs and hothouse grapes
“Livia,” he said in a somewhat louder voice, “would you be an angel and peel me a grape?”
For a moment, all was still. Then one of the caryatids lowered her hands from their mock position in support of the ceiling, stepped down off her plinth, and walked toward him. Unlike the room’s other ornaments, she was flesh and blood; dressed from the waist down in billowy white silk, but also covered from face to navel to toes in fine baker’s sugar, of a golden color.
“Of course, my lord,” she said, approaching him with a sly smile.
She took a seat on the couch beside him, lifted a paring knife from the plate, and began expertly preparing a grape. Diogenes watched, appreciating her artless poise, the lissome manner in which she moved. It was a gift that only nature could confer: dancers might practice for decades and never achieve it.
Diogenes liked Livia very much indeed. She reminded him of another woman with a similar name he had been very close to: Flavia. The women were also similar in their self-assurance, their lusts, and their willingness to experiment. But while Flavia had been obsessed by the art of causing pain, Livia—who had been born into a family of destitute academics—was much more interested in things intellectual. As such, she and Diogenes were twin adventurers in the realms of the mind and senses. Flavia, alas, had died a few years back in the Florida Keys, assisted into the next world by Constance Greene, among others. So many of those in his brother Aloysius’s orbit seemed to suffer a premature demise.
Livia delicately placed first one grape on his tongue, then another. And then—eager to draw off the sugar from her limbs by slow strokes of his tongue—he smiled and beckoned her to lie beside him.
Soon, the sweet taste was flooding his senses even as his mind continued to roam. He reminded himself: Flavia was not dead; she hadn’t yet been born. Neither had he, for that matter. How strange it was, this parallel universe. Diogenes, agent and abettor of chaos, found himself fascinated by it. With his entropic turn of mind, he couldn’t accept that such a precise duplicate of his world should exist. As he’d moved through this mirrored New York of the nineteenth century, he’d been alert for discrepancies. What if Thomas Edison championed AC current, rather than DC? Or John Keats had avoided tuberculosis and gone on to write another dozen famous odes? Yet wherever he looked, he’d detected no departure from history, however minute—aside from the changes he and his compatriots from the twenty-first century had wrought in their arrival.
And that bloody tower. There was no such tower in his New York, and he had never heard of such a one previously existing. This lone discrepancy from his own timeline vexed him.
Meanwhile, the tip of his tongue had traced a line up Livia’s left arm and was now moving in semicircles toward her breast, taking away arcs of golden sugar with each stroke. But as the Egyptian Revival clock struck the hour, he realized he had dallied too long—the workhouse required his presence.
“Livia, my pulchritudinous poppet,” he said, lifting a fingertip to trace one of her eyebrows, then drifting it along the center part of her brunette hair, “would you mind terribly if we pause for just a while?”
“Of course not,” she said. “As long as you promise to finish.”
“I swear to make it a climactic event of the first order.”
“Should I regild—?” She paused, looking down at the streaks on her smooth flesh where the gold was now gone.
“Oh, please don’t bother. I have some additional adornments in mind for tonight.”
“How delicious!” Livia knew better than to spoil things by asking what these might be. “I’ll order up some caviar and read Justine while I wait.”
Of course she meant the novel by the Marquis de Sade, rather than the other, yet unwritten, one by Lawrence Durrell. He kissed her, whispered something in her ear that made her gasp, then rose and left the salon.
In his private dressing chamber, which nobody—including Livia and his manservant—ever entered, he changed clothes and washed, transforming himself into the Right Reverend Considine, the stiff-necked, narrow-minded bane of Leng’s existence. He left the dressing chamber through a hidden panel and passed down a narrow, blind staircase that ended at a door beneath the level of the street.
Beyond was a narrow, low-ceilinged passageway that had once been intended as a crypt for a church, demolished fifty years before. A new, larger church had been built in its place, and its entrance—at the end of this passageway—was as carefully hidden as the one within his own town house. He had no idea which prior owner built the secret staircase to his dressing room, or why; he only knew it had sat unused and forgotten for half a century.
Reaching the far end, he slipped into an unused basement room of the rebuilt church, closed a hidden door behind him, then threaded a circuitous path up into the active area of the building. Although he saw nobody, he had already devised a backstory for his clerical presence in the church at any time of the day or night.
Diogenes went out the front door of the church onto Thirtieth Street and walked in the direction of Broadway, where he planned to hail a cab to the Five Points. According to Royds, Leng was still attempting to gain access to the Mission and the House of Industry. Diogenes was determined to deal definitively with Leng—the only man capable of seriously threatening his own existence in this strange old snow globe of New York.
He soon became aware he’d been observed leaving the church and was now being tailed. It was one of Leng’s Milk Drinker gang, of course. No avoiding that: he realized he cut a conspicuous figure in the getup of Considine.
Diogenes caught a glimpse of the tail as he passed a mirror in a barbershop window. A gangly, unkempt fellow—he felt offended the man hadn’t done him the courtesy of a decent disguise, remaining clad in the unofficial Milk Drinkers uniform. Diogenes slowed a little, smiling as he saw the thug quicken his own walk. Now it became clear: the man wasn’t just following him, but planned to kill him.
How delicious.
Bringing himself into acute awareness of everything going on around him—on the street, the sidewalk, the buildings above—Diogenes waited for the right opportunity. Two coaches were clip-clopping down the cobbled street, and here, in midblock, the pedestrians had thinned out.
He dipped three fingers into the hem of his cassock, withdrew them, and then suddenly turned to face the man, a beatific smile on his face, hands cupped together before him as if preparing to administer the Eucharist.
“Would you care to confess your sins, my son?” he asked.
The man’s grimy face screwed up in confusion—just long enough for Diogenes to sink the short-handled icepick he’d palmed into the man’s solar plexus, the movement hidden by his billowing cassock. As the would-be assailant wheezed in surprise and pain, Diogenes leaned in familiarly, patting the man’s shoulder with one hand while the other—as with Miss Crean—probed the point for the sweet spot.