One hand clawed through his matted hair. “Am I screaming?” he screamed. “Do I sound a little frantic?”

The chair withdrew into prolonged silence. He turned away, tears running freely.

When he turned around again, a beautiful woman was sitting in the chair. He recognized the moon-gold hair, though in the better light of the standing lamp, it was closer to burnished copper, and her eyes were long slants of green. The tailoring of her blazer was superb. This was definitely his angel.

“Good evening, Andrew,” said the angel, in a soft, silken voice. It was nearly music.

“Good evening.” And now he wished he had paid more attention to the nuns’ instructions on the order of cherubim, seraphim, and assorted supernatural messengers.

“I understand you’ve been praying for a sign.” She perused the labels of a small store of wine on the side table and found a bottle of red that she approved of. “Andrew, I really worry about you, up here all by yourself.” One long red fingernail split the skin of the seal around the cork. “Anyone can get at you…Anyone.”

She held a small silver device, which she now opened to expose a cruel screw of metal. She smiled. Andrew tucked in a breath and held it. She drove the point of the screw into the heart of the bottle cork and began to work it deeper and deeper.

Her blazer opened as she leaned forward to pour the wine into a silver goblet which had suddenly appeared on the low table. He saw the gun in her shoulder holster. Well, that was intriguing.

Now he was afraid.

So this was not his guardian angel at all. She was an avenging angel. He supposed that was only fair. So be it. “I see you carry a gun.”

A vertical line appeared between her eyebrows, only a faint line to show her annoyance. Andrew lowered his foolish eyes to look down at her feet, which were inexplicably encased in rather expensive running shoes. “It’s just surprising to see a gun. I suppose I expected a sword, a great shining sword.”

“Well, the world changed, Andrew.” She replaced the bottle’s cork. “We use revolvers now.”

“I suppose vengeance is vengeance, sword or gun.”

“You got that right.” She brought a handful of communion wafers from her pocket.

“How shall I address you?”

“Mallory-just Mallory is fine.” She set the wafers on the low table near the wine goblet and her cellular telephone.

“Mallory? Is that from the order of Malakim, the Virtues?”

If so, that would be good news. The Virtues liked everybody, and never slew anyone as far as he knew.

“Just Mallory.”

“I don’t know that one. No disrespect intended, but what rank is that?”

“Don’t piss me off, Andrew.”

“Oh no, I wouldn’t dream of it. I’m sure it’s a very high rank. I’ll just assume it’s right up there with the archangels.”

“Right. I’m a damn angel.” She picked up one of the wafers and held it out to him. As he took it from her hand, she said, “This is the body. Take this body and eat.” And then she picked up the wine goblet and offered it to him, saying, “This is the blood. Take it and drink.”

He looked down at the wafer and the wine goblet and then looked up at her with a mixture of fear and sadness. “But I can’t take communion. You see, I haven’t made confession for my sins. I can’t even remember the last time I made confession.”

“Yeah, right. That is a problem.”

“Will you hear my confession, Mallory?”

“Oh, sure.”

His speech was slow and slurred as he began to describe his sins. Far into his confession, which she could make nothing of, he fell asleep, and the only sound on the roof was the steady rhythm of his snoring.

The angel brought her fist down on the arm of the chair with enough force to make a loud crack in the wooden frame.

The penitent slept on.

He awoke to a pair of staring eyes, tiny and red.

The angel was gone, the rat was not. The beast was only a foot away from his face. He waved his hand lethargically, but the rat did not move. Andrew felt weaker today than yesterday. Would he be able to fend off the rat when it came for him in earnest?

A loaf of bread lay a few inches from his hand. The angel must have left it for him. He was reaching out for it when he heard a beeping noise. He looked up to see the cellular phone on the table by the chair. She must have left that for him, too. But why?

He picked up the phone and extended the antenna. “Hello?”

“Is Mallory there?” asked the brisk voice of a man in a hurry.

“The Archangel Mallory?”

“The what?”

Now the man recited a telephone number, and Andrew confirmed that this was the same number printed on the phone. “But she’s not here now. Can I take a message?”

“Yeah, my name is Coffey. Tell the little angel to get lost for a few days. Tell her our negotiations have hit a snag. The chief is sending uniforms to pick her up. He wants her now.”

Father Brenner was not wearing his priest’s collar. He had spent the morning working in his garden, and he was still dressed for a day in the soil and the sunlight, wearing a flannel work shirt and a pair of old trousers. He passed through the cordon guard of nurses and receptionists without the protection of a priest’s vestments to elicit their best behavior. Today, he felt very much a man like any other, and perversely, he believed that he was getting away with something. For one guilty moment, he wondered if he hadn’t left his proper dress at home for the sheer pleasure of getting a rise out of Sister Ursula.

The old woman was one of perhaps forty people seated in the lounge area, yet he picked her out of the crowd immediately. He fixed on her dark, angry eyes before there was time to register the white wimple which hid all but her face from the eyes of fellow earth people, most of whom she doomed to the low-rent echelons of hell. She was dressed all in white, as she was on the day she had been wedded in the church. She looked very much the elderly bride of Christ in her flowing robe and slippers.

Robe and slippers?

Perhaps he had gotten his days mixed up. He was getting to that age. But he could have sworn that today was the day they had agreed upon to pick her up at the hospital and drive her back to the rectory in Manhattan for a proper dinner and a long visit with her only tie to the world, himself.

“You’re not dressed,” said the priest as he sat down beside her.

“And neither are you.” Her appraising gaze wandered over his person and found him wanting. In most respects she was solidly entrenched in the old ways, but she had never kept to the custody of the eyes. She looked at him squarely, all disapproval.

“You came early this time,” she said. “You’ve never done that before.” And there was an implication that he should not do that again. Ursula was death on punctuality. “We have to wait until the proper time before some young puppy will give me my clothes.”

Only a few minutes into a polite conversation about weather, flower gardens and hell, said young puppy in nurse’s garb arrived by Ursula’s chair and led the old woman off to change her clothes. He supposed this was a reasonable precaution in such an institution. It wouldn’t do to have the inmates wandering out the door, unescorted and dressed for the unsuspecting world.

A few minutes later, Ursula was back, striding down the hall, moving very fast for a nun in full regalia. She was no modern woman of the church, no short skirt and lipstick fashion sister, but a dress-code nun, a great black warship at full sail. Her heavy crucifix swayed from side to side as she closed in on him.

Father Brenner tried to see her from the point of view of a small child. He closed his eyes against that vision.

When they were in the car and heading toward the city skyline, Ursula broke her stoic silence. “Tell me more about Kathy’s extraordinary new habit of stealing candles from the church. What do you suppose she’s up to this time?”