The Dirty Streets of Heaven

seventeen

I got up the next morning with a head that felt like the ball from some brutal medieval game, the kind where at least a couple of peasants died every time. But even the horrible throbbing couldn’t make me forget the not-very-bright thing I’d done the night before-basically told Heaven to go fuck itself. So why wasn’t I standing up in front of a celestial firing squad or whatever it was that happened to bad angels?

I toyed with the hope that Alice had tried to save me by not passing my message along, but I couldn’t make myself believe it. Another possibility was that up there in the timelessness of Heaven they just hadn’t yet got around to pressing the “Blow Up Bobby Dollar” button, but as far as I’d seen, Heaven didn’t tend to wait around before meting out corrections and general holy vengeance.

So I was left with the two most likely answers: Heaven didn’t care that much what trouble I got into, so Heaven was going to wait and let me hang myself, or Heaven actually approved of what I was doing and, presumably, whatever I was going to do in the near future. Which would have been pretty funny because I didn’t have even a clue as to what I should do next.

I put on a pair of sunglasses so I could hobble to the motel manager’s office and get myself a couple of cups of cheap coffee to take back to the curtained, comfortable darkness of my room. A few aspirin, a few more aspirin, then I was almost ready to face the day and what it might bring. First, though, I had some self-defense business to take care of. I’d lost my Smith amp; Wesson in Five Page Mill, and this didn’t seem like a good time to be walking around unarmed.

Orban the gunsmith picked up on about the tenth ring. “Speak.” He has an eastern European accent and the rasp of a man with a porcupine lodged in his throat. He told me once he was shot in the neck during the First World War and it’s never been right since. I believed him. You would, too.

“Bobby Dollar here. I need some silver.”

“Hmmm.” A noise like someone dragging a stick along a picket fence. “Bullets or something else?”

“Bullets. But I need to talk to you about it. You around today?”

“Two o’clock,” he said, then hung up.

Orban’s factory was out at the end of Pier 22-one of the Salt Piers. Thirty or forty years ago the southern end of the port of San Judas was owned by the Leslie Salt Company. They harvested salt from the bay water and piled it into mountains to dry, a range of miniature Alps looming over the not-quite-Tyrolean splendors of Belle Haven and Ravenswood. The salt-harvesting people changed to a different technique in the nineties that used less space, so they sold off a bunch of the land at the southernmost end. Most of it became a nature preserve, but some of the piers where they used to load the salt onto container ships were repurposed into shops and apartments. The dingiest of them at one end were sold as live/work spaces. A lot of artists got in with grants from the city, but a few small manufacturers like Orban got in too. He wanted somewhere he could make noise at any hour of the day or night.

He made a lot of it, too. Today I could hear his machinery and the clangs of hammers all the way out at the entrance to the cracked asphalt expanse of the parking lot, which was mostly full this time of the day, but would be nearly as empty as the Gobi desert by midnight. Orban had created quite a thriving little concern here at the end of Pier 22, a collection of long, low buildings full of metal-grinding and bending and riveting machinery and God knew what else, manned largely by black and Hispanic workers. At the near end stood another set of benches set up for handwork, where lots of white guys with beards, who looked like they should be out with the anti-government militia on weekends, sat fiddling with various bits of guns-measuring, filing, polishing. Out of sight at the far end was the room full of sand-filled buckets that Orban used as a firing range. Beyond that, outside, was what the gunsmith called his veranda, a metal platform that stuck out over the water. He kept a couple of chairs out there so he could sit and look across the bay all the way to the Newark Ferry Port, atmosphere permitting.

The master gunmaker himself had a short grizzled beard and hair that grew naturally in a thick monk’s tonsure. Just looking at him you’d guess a fit sixty-five years old, but according to him, he’d been around about five centuries longer than that. Orban got on the wrong side of Heaven back in the fifteenth century because of something that happened at the siege of Constantinople, (or so he’d told me one night over a couple of glasses of strong red wine, while we waited for one of his assistants to finishing customizing some weaponry for me). Since Heaven would never take him back, he said, and he didn’t want to go to Hell, he had simply decided not to die.

Don’t bother to ask-I’m just telling you what he told me.

Orban had his back to me but looked up as I reached the makeshift counter, as though he had actually heard me over the clanging, slamming din. He was wearing some special eyepieces that made him look like a robot crab. He slid them back onto his forehead and stood up, which didn’t take long. He’s not very tall.

“What do you want, Dollar? Make it fast-I have real customers to take care of, you know.”

“Yeah, nice to see you too. I need some help and advice. Oh, and bullets. Silver bullets.” I told him what was after me and everything I knew about it, but he shook his head the whole time I was talking like I was saying it all wrong. “What?” I asked. “Silver no good against one of those?”

“Only if it’s special.”

“Special how? Blessed by a priest?”

He made a face like he’d bitten a lemon. “Priests no good. This thing chasing you is older than the Jews, let alone the bloody Christians. Come.”

I kept asking him questions as he led me across the fluorescent-lit expanse of the long, extremely noisy room, but he couldn’t define “special”, except that he couldn’t supply it. That gave me a chill, and I hadn’t been particulary warm before: Orban’s place doesn’t have a secondary ceiling beneath the roof, just a fretwork of beams, so it was cold in there most of the year. Maybe that’s why the gunsmith still looked pretty good for five hundred plus.

He stopped to discuss my order with a swarthy guy in an apron. “How much you want?” Orban asked me. “Going to cost ten dollars per piece just for the silver-it’s high now. Give you a hundred at fifteen a round complete-that’s a good price for custom work.”

Man, I thought, saving my life was going to be expensive, and Heaven didn’t pay us much. “Then give me a hundred of ’em, I guess. I don’t know how long this is going to go on.” Orban always treated me fairly, but I still wasn’t thrilled. The new ammunition was going to blow a large wad of my emergency funds, and I was pretty sure my bosses weren’t going to expense me for the extra motels and silver monster-killers.

Once Orban finished going over the technical specs with his assistant he led me out to his rusty veranda. It was mid-afternoon, and the water was full of working vessels, most of them small since we were a good distance south of the working part of the port, and most of what surrounded us was shallow water and estuaries. “Sit,” he said, pointing to one of the rickety chairs and lifting a bottle of wine off the huge wooden wire spool he used for a table. “You want some Bull’s Blood?”

I usually liked the stuff just fine, but not today. In fact, just the thought after the previous night’s binge made something bulge painfully behind my eyeballs. “No, thanks. But don’t let me stop you.”

He shrugged and poured himself a full tumbler. “So you have got yourself in some serious shit,” he said after he’d taken a swallow. “That’s no good, that horned fellow. I knew a man at Adrianople who saw one take a bad priest. Not a pretty sight. The man who saw it, his hair turned white all over.”

“Do you know anything about it that might help me?”

Orban ran his fingers through his beard. “The horns say it is from India or Mesopotamia-they loved their bulls and buffalo, those old river people, and that’s the kind of dark spirits they call up. But I heard the Egyptians knew this ghallu bastard and thought it was their god Set. They couldn’t kill it either.” He frowned. “Tell you truth, Dollar, I don’t think I ever heard about someone killing one.”

“Thanks. You’re really cheering me up,” I said. “Did you bring me back here just for a pep talk, or did you have some other help to offer? You said the silver bullets needed to be special if there’s going to be any chance-special, but not blessed. Special how?”

“Don’t know.” He shrugged again and took a long swallow of the Egri. “Just know what I read in manuals.” I should mention that manuals of the sort Orban referred to are pretty obscure, since as far as I know, things like where to shoot a chimaera and the best ammunition to use on various sorts of undead don’t make it into the standard Smith amp; Wesson user’s guides. “But I’ll do some thinking, and I’ll tell you if I come up with anything.”

“Great. Okay, here’s a weird one. Anything to be done when facing off against a Grand Duke of Hell?”

“Say your prayers.” He snorted. “You sure don’t kill one of those-not with any weapon I work on, anyway. Just make them angry.” Orban took a long drink. “Do you want to wait for your bullets? It will take most of the day.”

Disappointed, I got up. I hadn’t really counted on Orban having anything useful in the way of advice, but I had still hoped. “Nah. Can’t wait. Too many irons in the fire.” I thought about where I was. “Not literally, of course. I mean I’ve got a lot of things to do.”

He wiped his lip with the back of his hand and gave me a dry look. “I understand metaphor, Dollar.”

“Sorry.” Sometimes it’s hard to forget that even the really old ones have been living in the present as long as the rest of us have, it’s just a smaller percentage of their total experience. I shook his hand, which was as rough as his voice. “Do you want me to give you a deposit?”

He made a face. “Normally, I say no. You are good for the money. But with a ghallu after you…?” He nodded. “Yeah, give me check for half when we go back inside.” But he still wore an odd expression, and it took him a moment to speak again. “I thought you were out of this kind of business, Dollar. It’s been a long time since those days. I thought you were advocate now-nice safe job. Why is something like this after you?”

“Somebody said something that wasn’t true to somebody who isn’t nice. That’s basically it.”

“Keep your eyes open, Dollar,” Orban called after me as I left. “You always were the kind of stupid bastard that attracted trouble.” But he said it in a nice way.

All right, all right, I admit I haven’t been completely honest about everything. I haven’t lied-I’m an angel, remember? — but I have been, in the famous words of a British politician, a bit economical with the truth. Yes, I did have another job before I became a heavenly advocate. That’s where I met Sam. Orban, too. And my old mentor, Leo? That was where he did his mentoring. But to explain I have to go back a bit.

Like most other angels (or at least most of those I’ve talked to) I first woke to the light of the Celestial City. In a way I was born there-not as an infant, knowing nothing, but as something else entirely, an angelic being with the general but non-specific knowledge of a human adult. I wish I could tell you now exactly what I did and didn’t know at first, but those memories have been muddied and confused by all that’s happened since.

Over the course of what seemed like a few years I became more and more aware of what was going on around me in Heaven as well as back on Earth (although I hadn’t yet visited my old home). Somehow, though, I still knew I belonged down there, or had belonged there once. Yeah, like a lot of heavenly stuff, it’s hard to explain. And after a while I became aware that things were expected of me, that I wasn’t merely around to enjoy growing up, like a pampered child, but had a duty to take my foreordained place on the walls of Heaven, defending it against the constant threat of the Opposition. The Highest and His Adversary had been in conflict since the earliest days, since shortly after light and dark were separated, and the only reason there was anything like peace now was because of the protocols they had established. And Earth was neutral territory, open to both sides-an open city, like Casablanca during WWII. But Earth was also the main battlefield.

And as I grew in Heaven and became more and more aware of my duty, I was also being observed and shunted (in the most subtle of ways and by authorities I never knew) toward the role for which they thought I would be best suited, an Angel of the Lord’s Vengeance-a member of a Counterstrike Unit. The Highest’s ambition for me was finally revealed, and I was sent to Earth to begin my long training process.

If, as I assume, I lived my pre-angelic life on Earth, I returned there from Heaven in the early 90s. It was strange beyond belief to leave the Celestial City and inhabit a meat body, to feel the firing of nerves and the pumping of blood, to be covered in a garment of living flesh. On Earth, everything around me seemed so present, the things I saw and felt right on top of me, almost overwhelming my strange, frail human senses. Sunsets and sunrises could make me weak with joy, and the stars suddenly seemed distant and mysterious.

My first waystation in this new life was a walled camp out in the California desert north of Barstow. Camp Zion-now that was an interesting place, but I’ll save most of those stories for another time. I will say, however, that if Earthly sunsets were painfully intense, being sent down from the cool, comforting shimmer of heaven to the baking, shit-colored mud of the Mojave was staggering in a completely different way.

From the moment I walked into Zion my education was in the hands of my staff sergeant (as you’d probably call him-his heavenly title is more like the Greek lochagos, the leader of a small band of warriors, which was why we called him “Leo the Loke”). Leo was African-American, or at least his earthbound body was; he had a flat, knowing stare that could make any of us stammer, and he was nimble as a dancer but strong enough to crush rocks in his fingers that the rest of us could barely lift with both hands. The “us” in question were the unit’s new recruits, half a dozen in all. (Although we hadn’t become friends yet, my buddy Sam was one of the squad’s veterans.) We were now part of Counterstrike Unit (or “CU”) Lyrae, named after a constellation and informally called the Harps.

Don’t get me wrong, the other rookies and I weren’t just being trained like army guys are trained, running obstacle courses and firing guns-or at least that was only a small part of what we were learning. We were Angels of Vengeance, after all, so what we studied more than anything else was the Opposition-their habits, strengths, and weaknesses, how they preyed on the innocents of Earth, and what we were allowed to do about it. As I mentioned, Earth is a very complicated place for the forces of Heaven and Hell: the appearance of neutrality between the two sides has to be preserved at all times, even if underneath we all know it’s complete bullshit.

Anyway, since I’m trying to keep a long story short, I learned my job as part of a twenty-five angel unit, two dozen men and women and our leader. Leo the Loke had two corporals. Sam-or Sammariel as we called him then-was one of them. Sam scared the shit out of us, to be honest. He’s always had big Earth bodies, and he’s built like Jack Dempsey or one of those old boxer guys, big arms, big torso. He talked slow, thought fast, and could make you squirm in shame with only a couple of well-chosen words. Later on I found out he could make you laugh just as easily. I also didn’t find out until later that when I met him he was already rethinking his career choice and (perhaps not coincidentally) busily drinking his earthbound body to death.

After about a year and a half we graduated from training to actual work-counterstrike, which meant we went into situations that had gone wrong and did our best to put them right and also, quietly, to send a very strong message to the other side that such things would not be tolerated. I have no idea what was going on in other CUs, but CU Lyrae was strictly reactive.

I’ll gloss over the nearly eight years, Earth-time, that I spent as an Angel of Vengeance. Suffice to say that some of it was exhilarating, much of it terrifying, quite a lot disgusting, and almost all of it dangerous. Our territory, like my advocacy beat these days, was mostly San Judas, although we ranged as far afield as the Pacific Ocean on the other side of the mountains, or occasionally to other parts of Northern California. After all, the Lord’s vengeance has no limits, so what’s a county line or two? That was something Leo used to say. Another favorite of his: “The only thing dumber than angels are the dumb bastards who think you can train ’em.” He was a good man when he wasn’t making you want to disappear from self-loathing over something stupid you’d done. I wish I knew if anything was still left of him, soul-wise. It’d be nice to think we might meet again someday in some higher Heaven.

As to how I came to leave the Harps-well, I couldn’t exactly tell you. That’s because I don’t remember it. One day I woke up in a CU hospital facility. The last thing I remembered was that we had been sent after a particularly nasty gang of drug cowboys that Leo said was Opposition-backed and which had a lot of Belle Haven and Ravenswood under its sway. According to Sam, who was there with me in the hospital when I woke up, I was ambushed, and two of the earthbound angels with me were blown to pieces on the spot, but the bad guys took me back to their warehouse base to question me. By the time Sam and Leo and the rest found me, I had been in their hands for about three days, and the body I was wearing was extremely dead. With some luck they managed to get me back to base and into another body, but I still wasn’t right for a long time-Hell can inflict damage that isn’t just physical. You can see why the thought of Grasswax’s last hours had some impact on me.

Anyway, after that my superiors decided I was in no fit shape to continue in the Harps. Although I begged to stay on in some other capacity, they instead offered me a transfer back to the Celestial City, to heal and be retrained. But I didn’t want to go back. I liked Earth. In some weird way I still can’t fully explain I felt comfortable there in a way I hadn’t exactly felt in Heaven. So I inquired about jobs in San Judas and was told that there were openings for advocates.

I saw Leo in Jude a few times after that-he’d drop by The Compasses and we’d have some laughs, but of course he couldn’t tell me what he was doing since I was no longer cleared. Sam and I stayed friends, too, although we weren’t as close as we later became. Then Leo died.

I don’t know the details very well, and I still don’t like to think about it. As I may have mentioned, it wasn’t him dying that was hard to take, and it sure wasn’t surprising-he had a dangerous job-but the fact that he couldn’t be resurrected, and that some people suggested it was because he’d made enemies upstairs. Which nobody wanted to believe, because…well, where did that leave the rest of us?

Not too long after Leo’s death Sam quit the Harps and came to work for the advocates as well. He told me he’d been thinking about it long before I was invalided out, but losing Leo had been the final straw. He had a lot to say about his reasons, although he shied away from specific details except to say that some of the jobs he’d done had been really, really bad. Worse than anything I’d ever seen.

Okay, so now you can guess the answers to some of those things you’ve probably been wondering, like why I know a gunsmith as weird as Orban, and how I met some of my more obscure friends. And, of course, why I wanted nothing more at this moment than somehow to escape the whole mess I was in as quickly and painlessly as possible.

I was driving west when the phone rang, heading for the Camino Real to shop for a new motel-people pay way less attention to you when you check in during the daytime-and noticing that the Carnival decorations seemed to have spread out of downtown and all across the city. I squinted at the phone. It wasn’t a number I recognized.

“Go,” I said.

“Top flight! Excellent to reach you, Mr. Bobby! And to find you not yet dead!” It was Fox, the albino jitterbug.

“How the hell did you get this number?”

He only giggled. “No time for such, Dollar-man! You wanted meeting? You want big auction? Price is Right? Studio audience? You got it!”

“Are you saying it’s on?”

“Tomorrow night. Midnight.” He hummed a snatch of music to himself, but I couldn’t make it out. “Be there or be square, Mr. Bobby!”

“Be where?”

“Don’t know yet. But I promise-I call as soon as I know.”

“You didn’t tell them I’m bringing…the thing they’re interested in, right? Because that’s not going to happen. I want to agree on a price, then I’ll arrange the delivery.”

“Don’t worry, Dollar-Bob, don’t worry. Everything will be right in the rain.”

Before I could ask him if he meant “right as rain,” he was gone. So now on top of all the other shit I had to deal with, I had twenty-four hours to figure out how to conduct an auction with a bunch of criminals or worse for something I had never seen and couldn’t even name.

We sure know how to have fun in San Judas.