The Dirty Streets of Heaven

thirty-one

I hadn’t even made it back across the lobby to the guest elevators when a hand full of steely fingers closed on my arm. Startled, I clawed in my pocket for my concealed automatic even as I turned. Reflexes aside, I knew nobody was likely to attack me in the middle of the biggest summit for decades, but I was still relieved (slightly) to see that the person who’d stopped me was from my side. At least as far as I knew.

The angel holding my arm had the tanned, fit look of a mid-career military aviator. In fact, everything about him looked military, the creases in his expensive charcoal gray suit so sharp that it might as well have been a dress uniform.

“Slow down, son,” he said, and the iron grasp of his fingers made certain I did what he suggested.

I had never seen him wearing flesh and, in fact, had only seen him once in any form, but I hazarded a guess. “Karael?”

He didn’t bother to acknowledge it. “I saw your report. You’re testifying tomorrow, but I want a chat with you ahead of time.” The way he said “chat” made me think of rubber truncheons and other painful methods of ensuring team play, but I think that was just his style. “Now you’ve seen how hard these bastards will work to cover their tracks, to make it look like the breakdown is on our side.”

I looked around, worried about eavesdroppers, but if Karael wasn’t worried I decided I shouldn’t be either. This guy had been fighting the Opposition since before the Seventh Day; he must know what he was doing. In fact, that was what was worrying me more than any demons listening in. Still, I lowered my voice. “Hold on. You’re saying that this whole Third Way thing is a front? That the other side have been pilfering the souls, and that’s their cover?”

He frowned like I was a school kid who’d just spelled C-A-T-T. “I’m saying that we give them nothing for free, and that includes this conference. Tell the truth about what you saw when the first soul went missing, but don’t go overboard. Don’t give them anything else. Unless you have to.”

Nothing like directions from the top so vague that no matter what happened, it was still going to be my fault. I’m not an idiot, though, at least not most of the time, and I wasn’t going to argue with him about it in the middle of the Ralston lobby. In fact, I wasn’t going to argue with him at all. That’s one of the more pointless ways to spend your time with a higher angel. “Of course,” was what I said. “Can we go over it before I have to stand up in front of everybody?”

He nodded. “Excellent. Breakfast at 0800 local time. In that restaurant there. Are you paying attention, son?”

I had to tear my eyes away from his shoes, which were so shiny and deep black I thought I could actually see gravity bending inward around them. “0800.” I checked the sign. “Cafe Belmont.”

He looked my civilian clothes up and down. After the week I’d had, there might have been a few stains. “You’re not going to wear that, are you? We represent Heaven, son. The Highest.”

“I have a suit.”

“Good.” He paused as if considering what to say next. After the sniper-like efficiency and speed of his previous conversation it almost seemed out of character. “I’ve been checking up on you, Angel Doloriel.”

How many ways could I dislike that? Several, just off the top of my head. “Oh?”

“I hear that you were trained by Archangel Leo Lochagos. Out at Camp Zion. If you’re one of Leo’s boys, that’s a heck of a pedigree.”

“Uh…yes.” This paragon, this uber-leader of the angelic hosts, had known Leo? My Leo?

“He was a good one.” Significant pause. “I worked with him more than once.” Karael made work, which in his case almost certainly meant war, sound like the most glorious thing an angel could do-which, I suppose for him, it was. “We should never have lost him that way.” He finally let go of my arm. “See you at 0800. Remember, you’re not just an angel, you were a Harp. That means something. Don’t let me see you wearing that piece of shit.”

I stared after him as he walked away, measured and straight as an architect’s tools. He was by no means one of the biggest bodies in the room, and certainly there were quite a few who were way uglier, but I wouldn’t have wanted him angry with me for any money. But what the hell had that been about Leo, long dead now and beyond resurrection? A hint? A warning? In either case, my arm still tingled where Karael, Master of Demons, had no doubt crushed several thousand capillaries beneath his righteous fingers.

Although Karael’s mortal body had looked pretty much like I’d have guessed it would, it was still a strange sensation to see him and so many other important angels wearing flesh. They don’t show up down here very often-almost never. The lords of Hell love to spend time on Earth, of course. If your home decor prominently featured rivers of lava, pits of molten human feces, and the constant shrieks of the tormented, you’d probably spend most of your time at the office, too. But the big angels were usually, excuse the pun, above such things. You saw them on the other side of the Zippers, of course, but they didn’t have to embody themselves there.

I glanced around the lobby as I hurried to the elevator, anxious to avoid any more meetings, but I didn’t recognize any of the faces around me. This did not break my heart.

My room was reasonably nice, although someone seemed to have gone out of their way to push the walls closer together than in a normal hotel room. It was hard to squeeze between the end of the bed and the cabinet that the television sat on without turning sideways, but I was so happy I was going to be in the same place for two nights in a row that it didn’t bother me. The Ralston’s decor was Gilded Age: molded ceilings, ornate, overstuffed furniture, and a headboard on the bed so lumpy with carved roses that I had to pile all the pillows against it just so I could sit up comfortably.

I wanted to go back down to that lobby about as much as Dante probably wanted to go back to the Inferno, but it was almost dinner time and I was beginning to get hungry. I ordered some nachos from room service, then turned on the television and watched the news. Sometimes it’s oddly relaxing to watch shit happening to other people, not to mention that when you know there’s life after death, you don’t feel like such a jerk about doing it.

About the time the nachos should have arrived somebody knocked on the door. Your friend Bobby Dollar is no fool. I put it on the chain before I opened. It was Sam. I was actually a bit surprised to see him.

“I was hoping to come in and get out of the decor,” he said, “but I see you’ve got it in here, too.”

“How did you find my room? I would have thought the security would be pretty fierce around here, considering what’s going on this weekend.”

He gave me a look. “Suspicious much? Don’t moisten your pants. Alice told me.”

“Great. She’d probably do the same if Hell’s Horned Avenger asked, too.” But I was at least a little relieved. Obviously if I was in Eligor’s hotel I wasn’t going to be able to hide from him, but I was hoping any casual acquaintances with a grudge might have to work a little to find out where exactly I was. “I should have hung a soap on a rope over the doorway to keep creatures like you at bay.” I was joking, of course, but I also couldn’t help noticing that Sam looked a little rough. His suit was badly wrinkled, his bruises and scars were still painfully apparent, and his shoulders had a slumped angle I wasn’t used to seeing.

He made his way in and rifled the minibar, coming away with a can of ginger ale. He took the room’s one chair and put his feet up on the desk. “So what’s the good word, B? Did you clock all the horns down in the lobby? It’s like a metal band’s wet dream down there.”

My nachos came and Sam helped me eat some of them, but without his usual gusto. We talked about my conversation with Sitri and the unwelcome news that the hotel belonged to Eligor the Horseman, Grand Duke of Hell, a name not exactly synonymous with hospitality.

“The big guys have to know that the hotel belongs to him,” Sam said, sucking the guacamole off a chip before putting it in his mouth. “Maybe they rotate-this conference at Eligor’s place, next one at the Vatican or Dollywood.”

I wasn’t going to be distracted by jokes. “No offense, Sam, but you look like shit. I’m worried about you.” I almost asked him if he’d fallen off the wagon, ginger ale notwithstanding, but that’s not the kind of thing I’d feel comfortable asking even Sam. Still, he had an air of defeat about him that I hadn’t seen lately, maybe ever, and at a time like this it really worried me. “Anything you want to talk about? Seriously?”

I could see him halfway to brushing me off, but then he stopped and gave me a long look. “What do you mean, worried about me?”

“You haven’t been your old self since they saddled you with Clarence. Like something’s bugging you.” It was hard to confront him. I was basically accusing my best friend of lying to me. “We’re deep into some scary shit, Sam-worse than in the old days. If you know something that I don’t, it’s time to tell me.”

Sam sighed. That was odd. I don’t think I’d ever heard him do that before. “Yeah. Yeah, there is something bugging me, Bobby. And you’re right-I haven’t been all the way square with you.”

If you’ve ever demanded to know whether your significant other was sleeping with someone else, you’ll understand the ambivalence I was feeling now. I had really hoped Sam would deny it and make me believe it. I didn’t say anything, just looked at him, waiting, my stomach heavy as a rock.

“You were right about the kid,” he said at last. “I don’t know the details-what I said about asking around in Records is true-but he’s definitely working for somebody on the sly. And he’s interested in you.”

“In me? Why?” I let it filter for a moment. “Hold on. You mean the kid was sent to spy on me…and you went along with it? You were the one who asked me to take him off your hands!”

“Hold on, B, hold on-I didn’t know it then. I thought he was sent to keep tabs on me. I asked you to take him because I wanted to find out what he’d do when I wasn’t around, what kind of questions he’d ask. I only found out later that you were the one he was after.”

I couldn’t make any sense out of it. In fact, the whole conversation seemed a bit like a dream, full of twists and turns and non-logic. “Why should the kid be watching me? And what do you mean, you found out?”

Sam looked embarrassed. “Well, actually, Temuel told me. Apparently he made some inquiries of his own and then got told to lay off, that it was you the higher-ups were interested in and the Mule shouldn’t interfere. As to why they’re interested in you…hell, I don’t know.”

I sat back in my chair. I felt like I had been punched. “So our bosses sent Clarence to get the dirt on me?” I wanted to go find the kid and give his Dockers-clad ass a good kicking. “Shit! What did I do?”

“You’re a nice man, Dollar, but a lousy angel.” Sam stood up. “Think about it. You said yourself, this is a conspiracy, so maybe this little inquiry isn’t official. Maybe whoever put the kid onto you is trying to cover his own angelic ass for something. It could even be Temuel pulling a fast one on both of us.”

“Or maybe whoever engineered this missing-souls thing is looking for a fall-guy, and I’ve been elected,” I said. “After all, it wouldn’t take much to make Karael and the rest believe I’d gone rogue.” I had a sudden urge to hole up somewhere, maybe not even in San Judas, and just stay that way until Judgement Day-maybe longer. I was that sick of all this spy-caper bullshit.

“Nah, you’ll be okay.” Sam downed the rest of his ginger ale. “I’m pretty sure this crap is going on all the time in Heaven, Bobby, whether you and I know about it or not. You try to figure out what’s going on over our heads, you’ll go crazy.”

I couldn’t process it all yet. I’d need time to figure out how this new information fit in, but time was the one thing I didn’t have much of. “And you’re sure you want to stick around while I’m being fitted for a frame-up, not to mention that I’m Eligor’s target of choice? Are you even up to it? Because I wasn’t joking earlier-you look terrible, Sam.”

He waved his hand as he got up. “Hey, I’m fine, fit, and sober. Okay, not fit. The thrashing from that red-hot bruiser of yours makes me feel like I’m about two hundred years old. I think after the Inquisition-oops, the summit conference-is over I’m going to take a couple of weeks off and get better before I go back to the grind.”

Sam was one of those guys who’d respond to losing a finger in a chainsaw accident with, “Well, at least I can hock one of my rings,” so I knew he must really be hurting. “Look,” I told him, “I’m not going downstairs tonight, and I know you don’t like to hang out in bars anyway, so why don’t you just stick around? We’ll watch some porn and charge it to the office.”

He smiled, the first time he’d looked like his regular ugly self in a while. “Nice idea, but I’ve got a room of my own and I get dirty movies there too. Phone me if you need me. I’m going to crash.” He paused in the doorway. “Breast In Show looked good. I think it’s even in 3D. Don’t get your eye poked out.”

After Sam had gone I put the chain back on the door and prepared for a night in. Unlike my best friend, I have no wagon upon which I have to remain, so I found a couple of little bottles of vodka in the minibar and some orange juice and retired to my bed and its bumpy headboard. My brain was too full of weirdness to watch anything in a serious way. I channel surfed, drank iceless Screwdrivers, and tried to figure out how I’d landed myself in so much trouble.

Latest information piled now on top of earlier unanswered questions, I did my best to find the disinterested, calm state where thinking happened without me trying to make it so. I sort of got there, but things swirled in my head like one of those money-tube game shows, every idea a dollar bill, and for all my grabbing, I felt sure I was still going home broke.

The Clarence stuff made no sense at all: the kid had been dropped on us before the souls even started vanishing. Before I met Caz, too. But if Edward Walker and the rest of the MIAs wasn’t the issue, and Clarence’s arrival predated my relationship with the Countess, why had anyone Upstairs suddenly become interested in me? It wasn’t like I had just started slacking, complaining, and taking the Lord’s name in vain last week. No, I just wasn’t ready to make any guesses about that stuff yet.

Sam’s revelations about the kid hadn’t answered any of my other questions, either, and I still had a ton. Where had Eligor’s feather gone? How was I going to stay ahead of the ghallu? And did my new chum Prince Sitri fit into this mess somewhere? Clearly the fat bastard didn’t mind talking, but as with any demon, believing anything he said was like wearing an “I’m With Stupid” t-shirt with the arrow pointing straight up at your own stupid face. Still, the one thing about demon lords is they hate each other almost as much as they hate us-more, sometimes-and Sitri didn’t seem to have much of a problem about getting into Eligor’s shit. I was sure he was telling the truth about the ownership of the hotel-why lie? — but everything else had to be checked, or at least carefully considered.

So, where did that leave me on the big questions? What did I know for certain?

According to Caz, Eligor had made a deal with someone in Heaven, with the marker of that deal being a golden feather. That deal hadn’t necessarily been about the missing souls and the Third Way, but it was an awfully big coincidence timewise if it wasn’t.

Caz’s story (which I wanted to believe, of course, but not being a suicidal idiot had to take with a few grains of salt) was that she had stolen the feather from Eligor as protection and then passed it on to Grasswax when things got hot. Howlingfell said Eligor had sent him to be Grasswax’s bodyguard, which must have alarmed Grasswax quite a bit; Eligor was as much as telling him, “I know you’ve got it.” The deal with Edward Walker’s soul or lack thereof then went down, and by later that same day Grasswax was dead in a very ugly manner that suggested he’d pissed someone off pretty thoroughly or else that they’d wanted information badly, which supported Caz’s story. A short time later, I was entertaining visits from the ghallu, which Caz and Howlingfell had both confirmed was Eligor’s fetch, and that suggested that Grasswax really had told the Grand Duke-probably while vomiting blood-that he gave the feather to me.

Why me? Sure, Grasswax hadn’t seemed to like me much, but pinning it on me still seemed pretty extreme when he must have known he wasn’t going to survive being questioned by Eligor and his minions. I didn’t have the feather, so who had he been protecting? Caz? Didn’t seem in character from a nasty piece of work like Prosecutor Grasswax.

And now I had to fit our young friend Clarence into all this, too. My bosses were spying on me for some reason. Why? Had one of them known that Walker’s soul wasn’t going to turn up, and also knew I’d be on the case? That still didn’t explain much.

A sudden thought from earlier reoccurred to me: what if Eligor wasn’t the only player? What if someone like Sitri wanted the feather too, to blackmail Eligor or whoever the feather belonged to? Could the fat prince have been the one who actually tortured Grasswax, trying to get in on the Great Plumage Hunt? If so, Caz was mistaken…or was lying to me, and so was Howlingfell. But it still didn’t explain where the golden feather was now, or the weird thing my albino buddy Fox had told me about Eligor’s prize: “I smelled it on you.”

You can go crazy with this stuff-wheels within wheels, as Sam put it. Is it any wonder every now and then I have to stop thinking and just do something?

And just to round it all out, I had found a connection between Eligor and Reverend Doctor Habari, the front man for the Magian Society. So what if this whole Third Way mess was some kind of massive, deep-cover fraud Hell was putting over on us to disguise the fact that they’d found a way to shanghai souls before they ever reached judgement? Or a private play for infernal power by Eligor (or Sitri, for that matter)? Either way, the stakes were clearly high, because if Eligor was willing to let his hired demon smash up The Compasses he was obviously more worried about finding the feather than being discreet.

And of course I had to deal with the possibility that the answer was None of the above and that the Magians really did represent some fifth column in Heaven, maybe even the first stages of an attempted coup. We hadn’t had one of those get even close to success since the Lightbringer first tried to snatch the car keys and Daddy took the T-Bird away. Another such revolution from within would be way out of my league, and yet I was right in the middle of it and getting very little support or information from my bosses. As you can imagine, the word “scapegoat” kept coming back to me. It wasn’t a word I liked.

Caz drifted through all these thoughts like a trail of smoke or a hint of some exotic perfume. Had she been using me to get herself off the hook or to push some agenda I couldn’t yet see? That was certainly within the character of her calling. But asking me to believe she had fooled me so completely was asking me to believe that I had learned nothing in all the eventful years of my angelic life, that I was as gullible as the newest halo fresh off the heavenly bus and had fallen in love with an unrepentant hell creature after we spent one night together.

All these possibilities jostled around in my brain like cranky kids kept up too late. At last I gave up trying to figure it all out in one night and called the office to check my conference schedule for Saturday and Sunday: I did not want to be asking Karael rookie questions over our shared breakfast. The very thought of his handsome mouth curling in a little Clint Eastwood smirk of contempt at my helplessness made my scrotum climb to higher ground. Once Alice finished complaining about me (which took several minutes) I got what I needed, plus some information that surprised me a bit and which I put aside to chew over later. Then I called Fatback and left a message on his answering machine (since at this time of day he would still be on the Last Train To Porksville) asking for whatever he could find about the Ralston Hotel, emphasis on escape routes, and also for some info about a few other things that had been troubling me. Since I’d finished the vodka and didn’t want to wait for room service, I took two tiny bottles of Bacardi out of the minibar and began working on them. I still had some orange juice, after all, and any sailor knows that when the weather ahead looks foul, it’s time to break out the rum.

I had been brooding and flipping channels for hours, letting bits of images and sound wash over me-half an inning of a baseball game, some incomprehensible cop drama featuring corpses and forensic labs staffed by improbably good-looking scientists, a local weatherman doing his best to seem responsibly worried as he reported a tiny bit of incoming rain that might force a few folks to roll up their car windows, plus old movies, infomercials, children’s cartoons that seemed to consist mainly of primary colors and loud shrieking-anything that would hold my attention for a few seconds. I finally found a program about soldier ants and even settled into it a little. I confess I might have dozed, or been about to; either way, the knock on the door startled me badly.

One of Prince Sitri’s Easter Island statues blocked the space beyond the chain. For an instant I could only wonder if the modest metal links would keep him out during the second or two it would take me to get to my coat where it hung over the chair and the automatic full of silver bullets in the pocket, but he only made a grunting noise and pushed something through the space between door and jamb-an envelope. When I took it, he turned and walked away, surprisingly quietly for a man (or at least a male human body) big enough to have his own zip code.

The envelope contained a note written on impossibly dainty, almost transparent paper in a finicky little hand that it was hard to feature as the product of Sitri’s immense, pudgy paws.

“If you come down to the lobby bar at midnight you will learn something to your advantage,” it read. At the bottom was a single florid letter “S”.

I wondered why he hadn’t just invited me to the Roosevelt Suite. It didn’t seem likely that Prince Jabba the Hutt and I would be able to have a surreptitious meeting in the crowded lobby, even after midnight, but on the other hand there’d be enough people around that it didn’t seem likely he was going to bump me off, either. I was already in the game and had pretty much bet my house, so I couldn’t afford to ignore the summons. I pulled on my coat, but not before putting on my shoulder holster and making sure that I had a round chambered in my new FN automatic. Nobody wants to be the guy they say, “He forgot to load his gun,” about while shaking their heads grimly.

I didn’t encounter anything in the halls, but I heard enough weird sounds from behind doors to make me hope some local channel was showing slasher movies. The elevator was empty too, although I swear somebody had cranked up the air conditioning way beyond what was reasonable, and I had to suffer what felt like cold breath on the back of my neck all the way down to “L.” Signs and portents. Unfortunately, when you live in my world they’re as ubiquitous as advertising and even harder to sort through for truth.

The lobby was still a busy place, with all kinds of folks from my side and not-my-side going in and out, grouped in chatty little bunches. Looking at a troop of obvious Hellspawn laughing and smoking outside the front door, I wondered how many crimes under investigation by Interpol could have been solved merely by listening in on their cheerful conversation.

The bar was full but not crazy full. I stood for a moment in the doorway looking around for either Sitri or his bodyguards, but even with all the weird looking people in the room I didn’t see any as weird as the prince. Then, at the corner of my eye, something bright caught my attention.

She was sitting at the bar by herself with her back to me, but even without the fall of pale gold hair down her shoulders and back, I would have known that slender shape anywhere, anytime. She wore a black skirt that showed her fine, pale legs and a red cashmere sweater that clung to her like a second skin, displaying the delicate bumps of her spine like a topo map in scarlet. Before I could get a chance to tell myself it might be someone else, fruitlessly denying the knowledge that was throbbing in every nerve of my Earthly body, she turned to the bartender, and I saw her face in silhouette. It was indeed the Countess of Cold Hands, her very own self, just as I had known from the first moment I spotted her. It was Caz, and she was all alone as if waiting for someone. As if waiting for me.