Of Love and Evil - By Anne Rice Page 0,54

felt an overwhelming desire to say them, a certainty that I was meant to say them, but I did not know what to do now.

Finally, I resolved to leave the house.

Only Pico was on guard at the front door. I gave him most of the gold in my pockets. He didn’t want it, but I insisted.

I saved only what I thought I might need to find a warm place in a tavern where I might listen to the music and wait in the hopes that Malchiah would soon come for me, and I felt strongly that he would.

Soon, I was walking, very far away from the part of town I knew, through ink black streets where seldom a dog barked or a hooded figure hurried by. My thoughts were heavy. My failure to save Lodovico weighed on me no matter how many times I reminded myself that the Maker knew the hearts and minds of all of us, and He and He alone could judge the misery or confusion, or poison, that had led Lodovico to his dark path. More than ever I realized that what we know of another soul’s salvation is essentially nothing. We are always thinking and talking about our own souls, and of our own souls we don’t know what the Maker knows.

Nevertheless I marveled that I had not foreseen his suicide. I thought of myself when I was younger, and how many times I’d been tempted to take my own life. There were months, even years, when I was obsessed with the possibility of suicide, times even when I’d planned my own death down to the disposal of my remains. Indeed, every time I’d completed an assassination for The Right Man, skillfully dispatching another soul into the unknown, I’d been so tempted to take my own life that it was a marvel I’d survived. What would my life have amounted to, had I taken that step? I was almost weeping with gratitude suddenly that I’d been given the opportunity to do something, anything, that might be good. Anything, I whispered to myself as I walked along, anything at all that might be good. Vitale and Niccolò were alive and well. And the soul of Giovanni had apparently found rest. If I’d played the smallest part in any of it, I was too grateful for words. So why was I weeping? Why was I so sad? Why did I keep seeing Lodovico, dying with the poison in his mouth? No, this was no perfect victory, far from it.

And then there was Ankanoc, the real dybbuk of this adventure, and his words still echoing in my mind. When and how would I have to deal with Ankanoc from now on? Of course it had been foolish for me to think that I might see angels and not demons, that the one would not presuppose the other, and that some sinister personage would not manage to be more than a negative voice in my head. Yet I hadn’t expected it. No, I hadn’t. And still didn’t know what to make of it. Fact was, I believed in God and always had, but I don’t know if I have ever really believed in the Devil.

I couldn’t get Ankanoc’s face out of my mind, that bittersweet, charming expression. Surely before his fall, he had been an angel as beautiful as Malchiah, or so it seemed. Shocking to think of it, the vast airy firmament with its angels and demons, the world to which I belonged now more surely than any world I’d ever known.

I was growing tired. Why hadn’t Malchiah taken me away? Perhaps because I had my heart set upon one more small experience here, and that was to find a cheery tavern, filled with laughter and light, where there was no lutenist playing at the moment.

At last I came to just such a bright and cheerful place with its door wide open to the night. A fire blazed in a crude cavern of a fireplace, and the rude tables and benches were thronged with men young and old, rich and poor, many with shining oily faces, some with heads bowed, dozing in the shadows, and indeed there were children there asleep on the laps of their fathers, or on bundles of rags on the dusty floor.

When I appeared with my lute, a lusty cry rose from the crowd. Cups were raised in greeting. I bowed, and I made my way towards a corner table where at once two