The Boo Angel

Chapter One

Interventions

God himself could not alter the course of nature.
Goethe, 1820

He always stayed at the Marriott just off the Gänsemarkt, a modern hotel near the old city center, deep in the reconstructed downtown area of Hamburg, Germany. Staying here was habit now, nothing more or less than that, because as far as chain hotels went this Marriott was better than most and, when he thought about the matter he thought the staff always treated him well, and what more could one ask of a hotel? Besides, he thought, The Four Seasons over by the lake was simply too pretentious, and it was too far away from all the action.

Because Hamburg was, after all was said and done, all about the action.

The man's name was William Taylor, though few ever dared call him Bill these days. He was a big man full of big ideas for making big money, and for the past twenty five years he had been doing just that. Growing up on a ranch northwest of Billings, Montana, he'd never once considered staying out there on the windswept prairie with his family, and he had never felt any familial obligation to continue ranching. He instead went to the University of Southern California on a full-ride football scholarship, yet he -- somewhat uncharacteristically for a jock on an athletic scholarship -- took his studies seriously. He majored in economics and did well, though he carried a minor in film production -- for reasons that will soon become clear. Still, his future was taking shape nicely, though he needn't have worried, not really.

He'd been an outstanding talent in high school, and became a fearsome middle linebacker respected by every team USC faced, and while he had a reputation of being a little too mean every now and then, he was also considered a "fair" player -- whatever that meant. USC went to the Rose Bowl twice while Taylor was on the team, and he won the defensive MVP his senior year when SC won another national championship, and Taylor almost singlehandedly shut down Notre Dame's final drive, preventing their 'go ahead' score and insuring that USC took home yet another national title. He was drafted by the San Francisco Forty Niners and played there seven years, and he was instrumental in San Francisco's two Super Bowl wins during that time. His football career was, however, cut short by a cheap shot in what turned out to be his last playoff game, in a heartbreaking loss against the Dallas Cowboys. He flew home weeks later with his shattered left femur and knee still in a cast, with a host of metal rods and plates in his leg. While effectively ending his professional football career, this injury had lasting effects: he used a cane to walk, and the pain was usually so bad that walking more than a quarter mile left him in tears.

But after this career ended, and not yet having turned thirty years old, he realized that he still had friends all over California, and none of them seemed too put off by his limp and his growing collection of eccentric canes. Friends in The City, and even closer friends down in LA, were more than helpful, and in no time at all Taylor went to work for a film production company working out of the Twentieth Century Fox studios adjacent to Century City. His first real assignment was to join one of the location scouting teams working on the second trilogy of a popular science fiction film series, the first film he was involved with concerned the early childhood years of a kid named Skywalker. The rest is, as the saying goes, History.

Because he did well on this first project, and because he did he took on a more active, participatory role on the two sequels that followed, moving into production for the third installment, learning the ropes from masters of their craft all along the way as he progressed. Smaller independent projects followed, but he was credited as an Associate Producer on an Oscar winner and that was pretty much that. He'd made it into the big leagues once again and soon bought a house on Foothill Road in Beverly Hills, then he picked up a nice sailboat which he berthed down at Marina del Rey. Life seemed good. Better than good, really, yet people talked. Perhaps because through all his meteoric rise William Taylor had remained resolutely unattached...and so he was by the time he first limped into his house on Foothill Road considered a confirmed bachelor. Except...there was a history he refused to talk about.

Because, in point of fact, he wasn't a bachelor, at least not in his mind, or should we say heart? No, he wasn't...not really. At least, he didn't want to be, yet while being single certainly wasn't the result of a conscientious decision on his part, by the time Taylor made it to Hamburg he really didn't seem to care anymore whether he was in a relationship or not. And perhaps because he was in his mid-forties, though in his mind he was fast approaching fifty-years-old, and this despite the fact that most of his business associates considered him a decent enough looking fella. No, maybe it was because, despite his good looks and all his newfound money he'd never really grown all that comfortable about his leg. He was, in fact, still something of a jock, too -- at heart, anyway. He'd soon grown comfortable with the fact he'd never run again, yet even so he almost religiously went to a gym over on Sunset at least four evenings a week. He kept in shape that way, yet because his left leg had begun to wither and atrophy, he became increasingly insecure about it.

Even so, a bunch of stuntmen types worked out at the gym he used, a couple of B-listed actors he knew as well, and he did in fact make a few new friends there from time to time, too, but then again he always did. And even though lots of actresses worked out there, he'd never bumped into anyone special. Nothing ever developed, these girls were more than willing to go out for drinks.

Because William Taylor just wasn't that kind of guy. He was a guy's guy, true enough, and he had an easy way around beautiful women that most found completely disarming, but you might consider that it was all a ruse. People liked him, and probably because they found him genuinely easy to talk to, and he was, predictably enough, a popular guest at parties all around the West Side. He had that Super Bowl ring, too, and in a status driven town like Los Angeles a little chunk of metal like his opened all kinds of doors, doors that might otherwise remained firmly closed, especially to a cowboy from the Middle of Nowhere, Montana. And yet even in the rarified places he soon frequented, his easy going smile and kind eyes always carried the day, and he easily made new friends wherever he ventured -- even in locales as varied Tunisia and Tibet, or yes, even in cities known for more reserved citizenry, places like Hamburg, Germany.

Taylor's production company had just begun work on a small production in Stockholm and he had decided to come down to Hamburg to decompress before heading back to LA, and he'd reserved his usual top floor suite for the night. After he arrived he showered and changed into the same clothes he always wore, before he made his way down to the taxi stand off the lobby, yet right away he did a double take -- because there were, literally, dozens of priests walking around everywhere he looked. Even members of his own security detail stopped and gawked, because the sight was almost comical...like herds of penguins out walking the streets of Hamburg as a light snow began falling.

These days his security team was never really far away. Like the famous, big name actors the studios used for their biggest productions, Taylor was now considered a 'high-profile target' and when he was abroad the studio regularly kept a large detail on him. If the threat level was considered high enough, a team regularly followed him around Los Angeles.

And then there was the matter of his clothing, which vexed these security contractors to no end. Taylor always wore a black suit and a white shirt -- topped with a bright red bow tie. Everywhere. No exceptions. And the same heavy black wingtips. The closet in his suite at the Marriott had four freshly laundered suits and four freshly shined pairs of identical shoes, everything custom made in London; even his socks and briefs were identical, and when members of his detail swept the rooms for listening devices they came away making up jokes about the clothes in Taylor's closet.

But these priests out here on the street were, however, another matter entirely. They were everywhere. Standing in clusters noisily chatting away. Gaggles of them walking along like penguins playing on Antarctic shores -- all of them noisily chatting away. Taylor had never seen anything quite like it, not even in Rome, and he laughed a little as he stepped outside, because the sight of so much ecclesiastical garb out on the sidewalks of Hamburg was faintly preposterous. Still, he wondered what was going on and why they all seemed so excited. In the end, he bunched his lips and shrugged, then hopped into the next taxi that pulled up to the stand, asking the driver to take him down to the Reeperbahn.

+++++

Yes. The Reeperbahn. That Reeperbahn. Ground Zero for fun in Germany.

After the Beatles played Hamburg -- once upon a time -- the city became a stop where every semi-serious musicians of every stripe called from time to time. Yet Hamburg was also famous for semi-naked chics sitting in overstuffed chairs, their recumbent forms lounging in open windows -- even in the middle of winter! -- selling their bodies and, just maybe, little slices of their souls -- one cheap little fuck at a time. Cheap dance halls, too, all usually overflowing with sailors just off freighters fresh in from faraway ports, and these fetid establishments lined many of the side streets just off the Reeperbahn, with all kinds of garish strobes pulsing to deeply unsettled music and with steaming, testosterone-fueled lust running headlong into the cool, calculating economies of hard-eyed girls from eastern Europe -- their darting eyes like double-edged stilettos, looking to settle a few quick scores in the night just ahead.

Yet the real heart of the Reeperbahn remained steadfast in everlasting, blazing, neon-hued agony: because if sailors didn't get lucky in the dance halls there were always the dozens of adult video arcades waiting with open mouths everywhere they turned, ready and willing to take whatever bodily fluids came their way. Less reputable girls -- and boys -- worked in all those dark shadows, poor souls lost in the depths of a bottomless food chain.

For William Taylor, however, music mattered most of all -- because music was the real beating heart of the city. And not just any music. Taylor was pulled like a moth to the flame by the city's jazz clubs. Little out of the way hole-in-the-wall places with a good piano on a tiny stage, a decent bar and maybe a kitchen. Taylor loved jazz and he always had, but to him Hamburg was special. His veins pulsed with the piano infused, gin fueled music of minor keys, and the soft musical wanderings he found in Hamburg really, really tripped his trigger. Who knows...maybe it was all the debauchery going on just outside the walls, around the Reeperbahn? Maybe the dualities of life...like the other people just outside, out there walking along neon-bathed sidewalks, tripping and falling their way to the other side of their lives, while he sat inside listening to music most would never understand. Maybe he enjoyed his little island in the middle of an ocean littered with the falling, and the fallen.

He was, you see, still that middle linebacker who'd played for 'SC and the Forty Niners, still at heart a rather mean human being, and still blessed with a very cold heart. He knew that, deep down at least, the easy smiles and free-flowing conversations he devised were simply a ruse, they always had been, and when he'd had a few drinks he was willing to admit -- if only to himself -- that he was filled with a deep hatred for people. His fellow man. Not ambivalence, mind you. A deep, abiding hatred. And he'd felt that way all his life -- because, as it is with most people who feel this way, he'd learned this way of approaching life from his father.

The drive from the hotel took less than five minutes, even in the dense, early evening traffic and, because it was almost Christmas, the sun had been down for some time, the temperature, too. As a matter of fact he felt it was almost too cold for this kind of nonsense, but when the taxi stopped William Taylor paid his driver and stepped out into the cold; he began walking the last few steps to his favorite old jazz club just off the Gerhardstrasse -- a funky little building that looked like a purple and black house stuck inside an inconvenient alcove off an alley of ill-repute more than anything else. The dive was conveniently just out of sight, too, which was probably a good thing. Hookers and trannies stood in deep shadows while middle-aged worshippers got down on their knees and prayed at their alters, and everywhere William Taylor looked he saw desperate eyes quietly in search of flagging weakness...predators on the prowl for fresh blood, for the next kill. Oh, how he hated what he saw.

He made it into the club and through that press of besotted humanity gathered near the door and he found a table not far from the tiny stage, his back up against a brick wall, a wall that had probably last been painted a deep, glossy black sometime in the early 50s. An old Steinway sat on the stage in funky purple shadows, along with a gleaming upright bass and a decent sized drum kit, and he looked at his watch while he tried to stifle a deep, jet-lagged yawn as he sized-up the crowd -- such as it was. A handful of officers from ships, a couple of bespectacled, middle-aged businessmen with their too interested mistresses -- their current playmates of the mouth -- and even a couple of hookers at a table near the bar, surrounded by a half dozen kids fresh off the boat from Liverpool, or someplace like that. A cocktail waitress dropped by a minute later and asked what he needed -- not wanted, mind you, but needed -- and he grinned his order for a gin and tonic to her bored eyes then watched her walk away with a brief shake of his head. When she dropped off his gin he tipped her fifty euros and she instantly grew more solicitous and cheerful, and that made William Taylor a very happy fella, indeed. He looked at discovering and rediscovering again and again that his fellow man was nothing if not a craven, hollowed out creature -- with no morals at all beyond an unquenchable hunger for money -- and this was an event to be cherished, as something that justified his outlook on life.

But when a bunch of penguin-walking priests toddled into his old cave few patrons bothered to look up from their whiskeys or biers -- which Taylor also found more than a little amusing. Hiding, were they? Of course they were, especially the beer bellied men with their mistresses. Most of the priests went to two big adjoining tables, but a couple of stragglers came in late and walked around in states of holy confusion, looking for one last vacant table -- only now there weren't any. One of the singletons found a table with sailors in a far corner, and when these drunkards didn't object the poor priest sat with them. Taylor could just imagine their inner conflict as he watched them, and he grinned at their misery.

But now one last priest was roaming the room, and when he spotted Taylor's table he ambled over, a hopeful gleam in his eye.

"Sorry," the old priest began. "I hate to intrude, but would you mind if I sat here?"

Taylor smiled genially. "Not at all. Please, make yourself comfortable."

"Ah. You're American. I can't tell you how good it is to hear your voice."

"Oh? Why's that, Father?"

"I've been over here a week and hardly anyone speaks English these days. They can, mind you, but we're so passé these days. Like a venerial disease running rampant through a convent, I should think. Anyway, I can't wait to get back home."

"Really? Where's home?"

"I'm teaching these days, in South Bend."

"Ah. Notre Dame," Taylor sighed, remembering his Rose Bowl victory over that school while wanting to smash this fucking priest against the brick wall -- as he rubbed his left knee in thoughtless ambivalence.

"Don't tell me. You're a football fan."

Taylor grinned. "I played for USC, once upon a time. Against Notre Dame in the Rose Bowl, as a matter of fact."

"Oh, really?"

"Yup. Then for the Forty Niners."

"The NFL? Splendid! Now all I'll need to make my night complete will be to contract HIV."

Taylor chuckled. "Not a fan of the sport, I take it?"

"A mild understatement, my good friend and savior."

"Sorry, Father, but I'm nobody's savior."

"I see. You aren't Catholic, I take it?"

"Montana, so yes indeed, I certainly am. But perhaps lapsed would be a better word..."

"Ah," the priest sighed, nodding. "Most of the early settlers there ran right into the open arms of the missions we'd established for the indigenous."

"My great-grandparents first among them, Father, you'll be so happy to know."

Again, the priest chuckled...a very good natured, easy-going smile on his face. Taylor found him easy to talk to, and he started to relax a little. "So," the priest asked, grinning smartly now, "do you come here often?"

Taylor laughed. "Not the most original pick-up line out there, is it, Father?"

"No, I suppose not, yet I couldn't resist..."

"Why are there so many priests in town right now?"

"An academic conference on the Vatican and the Holocaust, and, dear boy, there's not a mackerel left in the city, not from what I've heard, anyway. What about you? Fishing for Lost Souls, perhaps?"

"Hah! No, I was wrapping up a project in Sweden and I try to come here every time I'm in the area."

"A project? Mind if I ask what?"

"Motion picture. I work in Hollywood, if that's still an accurate descriptive. What do you teach?"

"History, of course. That's about all us Jesuits are really good at these days, or so they tell me? We had a front row seat to the whole shooting match, after all."

"A seat? I heard you were the guys behind the curtains pulling all the levers."

The old man shrugged. "Wishful thinking, I'd say, or so sayeth the Wizard. Did you study history at USC?"

"No, not really, at least not beyond the requisite survey courses. I majored in Econ, was thinking about law school if football didn't pan-out."

"Pan-out...oh-ho, Forty Niners. That's a good one...I like it. I'll have to remember that."

The lights dimmed and three people walked out onto the stage. The pianist was an old white guy who walked with a limp, the bassist was black and appeared to Taylor to be about twelve years old, while the drummer appeared to be only vaguely human, though he was of course carrying his sticks like they were knives. The pianist once had a reputation as a bad boy and was still kind of famous, at least among the jazz set, and everyone in the room seemed happy to find him still at the keys and actively touring again.

Taylor leaned back and took a long pull on his gin and when the first set ended -- about an hour and a half later -- he found he'd been barely breathing the entire time. The pianist then announced they'd be taking a short break, and as the lights came up the room seemed to collectively exhale and visibly relax -- if only just a little.

"Incredible," the priest sighed.

Taylor nodded. "Saw him up in The City first time, oh, I think it was back in the early 90s. He's mellowed since then, I think."

The priest seemed to struggle for a moment. "Ah. You met him before the bad times."

"Really? What was that all about? Drugs?"

"I'm not sure, really. Just rumors, probably nothing of consequence, but he disappeared for years. Still, he's always been something of a lost soul, something of an enigma."