Epistle to the New Age

Angels in Disguise

As Silas and I made our way through that re wed-up crowd, accepting donations with the faraway smile Saint had taught us, I noticed a strange little woman, wearing a black costume that I did not recognize at the time. Since Chet's arrival at my bungalow with the television, I've since learned a lot about the different costumes in the TV part of the world. But in those days everybody just wore his tunic and maybe his cloak or toga on top of that and that was about it for the guys. The gals wore these wrap-arounds.

The lady in the black non-wrap-around was my very first 'angel in disguise'.

She was watching us with an expression that was pretty much beyond rapt. She had, I realize now, just channelled in from the TV world. At this point in Saint's history, he had been in touch with these visitors for some time, although he preferred not to talk about them to us. One of the few times he ever opened up on the subject was when we were in Rome and I was shacked up with a rich widow called Flavia on the Aventine. Saint was in a state of deep depression over a lot of things, including the widow and my having told him that my hyacinthine golden curls and blue forget-me-not eyes were now strictly out of bounds as far as he was concerned, ass-wise.

We were at breakfast. In a loggia. View of cemetery across Tiber. View of Tiber. Lot of barges from Ostia. Stacked with amphorae. Sun like a round hot . . . thing. In the sky. Blue sky. Blue – Saint started in on how blue he was and how unhappy his life had been and how, worst of all, he was a phoney because he'd never bothered to meet Jesus before he died. 'There I was in Tarsus. Practically next door to Jerusalem. Go see Jesus? You kidding? No time. Sorry. Too busy. Well, I was busy putting out a line of ready-made tents but what really kept my nose to the grindstone was my undercover work for Mossad. Yes, darling, I was an agent of the dreaded secret service of the Roman Palestinian-Zionist Lobby. I was one of their numerous hit men, Call me Sol. My code name. I set up Stephen to be hit. And, baby, he was hit. Just like we got Count Bernadotte. Pow! I also had orders to keep an eye on subversive self-hating Jews like Jesus. But did I? No. Too boring, I thought. Too many losers to check out. Then He meets me on the freeway after He died. Oh, I could kick myself. Just about everybody and his brother in Greater Israel had heard Him, seen Him. You know, Timmy, it is my personal educated guess that, so far, to date, in this frame of time, more than one million have personally checked Him out and that's just a fraction of all those outside the frame who'll keep on coming and coming, wanting tickets, cost no object, for the crucifixion scene at Golgotha, the grand finale, in every version – and I wasn't there, ever. To date, that is.'

My head was spinning. 'A million who were where? Not people. There aren't that many people in Greater Jerusalem even if you count the Arabs.'

Saint realized that he had blundered. He batted his eyelids at me, an old trick when he was about to lie or change the subject. But I didn't let up. So finally he said, 'Well, I meant . . . you know, the kibitzers. The monitors like the one we saw that night at Philippi. Remember her?'

So sitting there in the loggia of Flavia's attractive if somewhat bitter better home and garden on the Aventine Hill, I suddenly remembered what had happened back then, which I now record.