A silence fell between the boss angels; I had the disturbing sense of things flying past above my head, of conversations I couldn’t hear but which would determine my fate whether I liked it or not. Haraheliel was the real angelic name of rookie advocate (and company spy) Clarence, and trying to make the kid’s report jibe with my invented recollections was one of my major challenges.
“I’m sorry, Master,” I said quickly. “You’re right, of course. When I said ‘attacked,’ I meant the creature’s last movements. I thought it was dead. It lay still for a long time, but then it stunned Angel Haraheliel with its leg and started to get up again. I fired my last bullets into it, and it finally stopped moving.” I was praying—ironic, no?—that I was remembering the details right, or at least the details of the version I’d submitted to Heaven’s auditors. I had been studying my report and Clarence’s for days, like a panicked freshman in finals week. I’ve got a pretty good memory, but being here in the Anaktoron would be enough to make Einstein put his fingers to his lips and go bblbblbblbbl. “Then, when I looked up, Angel Haraheliel was unconscious and Sam—Angel Sammariel—was gone.” I was tempted to prattle on, reemphasizing all the important points, but instead I clamped my mouth shut and waited. Again the awesome, nerve-wracking silence. Moments only, but a moment in Heaven can literally seem like hours.
“Another thing that has been puzzling me, Angel Doloriel,” said Anaita in her sweet, childlike voice. “How was it that you were able to defeat a creature of Old Night with nothing more than silver bullets? It seems strange that such a mighty enemy should be dispatched as easily as one of the Adversary’s foot soldiers.”
Because the silver I put into the monster at the end was more than just any old silver. It was a gift to me from Caz, a tiny silver locket, the only precious object that remained from her life as a human woman. And it was given to me with love, I’m convinced of that. The fact that a monster from the depths of time had died from that fragile little bit of silver but had laughed off all the earlier silver slugs was one of the biggest reasons that I didn’t believe what happened between Caz and me had been mere infernal seduction. But I could no more admit that to the ephors than I could claim that God Himself came down in a fiery chariot and crushed the ghallu beneath its wheels.
“I still don’t know,” I said as humbly as I could. “I put quite a few silver bullets in it during the course of perhaps two hours. At the end . . . it seemed to be laboring.” Which was a lie. Until I used Caz’s locket, the thing had swallowed silver rounds like they were lemon drops. “Perhaps . . . I . . .” If I had been breathing, I would have stopped to take a deep, deep breath, because I had no good answer, and I was just plain scared. “I honestly don’t know.”
“Don’t underestimate an angel of the Lord,” said Karael suddenly. He was talking so I could hear him, but he was clearly saying it for the benefit of his fellow ephors. “Angel Doloriel was trained as a member of Counterstrike Unit Lyrae to resist the enemies of Heaven, and those angels are as brave and tough a group as we have. I have fought many times beside our Counterstrike Units. If anyone could bring down a creature of such ancient, evil lineage, it would be a CU veteran. Isn’t that right, Doloriel?”
I could have kissed him, I swear. I could have wrapped my arms around his fiery, beautiful awesomeness and planted one right on him. “We . . . we do our best, sir. We always do our best.”
“Exactly. Doloriel was a Harp.” The way Karael said it, it seemed to roll and echo through the great council chamber. “One of those courageous souls who defend the walls of Heaven itself—even if the ones they protect do not always remember. That means something.”
So was Karael trying to get me off the hook simply because he didn’t like to see the angelic equivalent of ex-military being run down by the bureaucrats? Or was there something else going on? Shit, who was I kidding? In Heaven there’s always something else going on.
“Of course, noble Karael,” said Terentia, again speaking so I could hear. “But this angel left the Lyrae, did he not?”
I couldn’t figure out what was going on, and that scared me all over again. Why were the top brass arguing in front of me, a mere foot soldier? It didn’t make sense.
“Doloriel left Counterstrike because he was gravely wounded in a battle with Hell’s forces.” Karael almost sounded defensive.
“And now he serves the will of the Highest as a member of His holy advocates,” said genderless Raziel in a voice like quiet music. “Defending the souls of the worthy from the lies and trickery of Hell.”
“Perhaps,” Anaita replied. “But it was one of those selfsame advocates who conspired with members of the Opposition to create this wretched Third Way, causing all the trouble in the first place. And while there is no doubt that Angel Doloriel has been a brave fighter and an effective advocate, no one could dispute the fact that he seems to . . . attract trouble.”
“It is true,” said Raziel slowly, “that there have been times since I created the Advocacy when I wonder if we are asking too much of the Elect, requiring them to take on earthly bodies again, exposing them to all the temptations and despair that beset the living every day on Earth.”
They fell into silent conversation again, which was just as well because I must have been gaping like someone had broken a bottle over my head. Raziel created the Advocates? I had never heard that. In fact, I had never heard anything to suggest our existence came from anything less than a divine order from the Highest Himself. How important were these five angels? And why were they spending so much time with little Bobby Dollar?
Then an idea came to me, stealing over me like a fog, sending chills up and down my non-corporeal form. Something was going on here far beyond a fact-finding meeting, or even a meeting about something as important to these high angels as the renegades of the Third Way. Sam had told me that he’d been approached by a disguised angel that called itself Kephas, and everything about Kephas had suggested powers beyond that of Heaven’s rank and file, including the God Glove it had given Sam, a device or power or whatever it was that had allowed him to do so many unexpected things. Might Kephas, the revolutionary behind the Third Way, be a high angel like this quintet of ephors? Or, even weirder and more disturbing, was Kephas one of the Furious Five themselves?
The games they play in Heaven are incredibly subtle, but they’re still deadly—no, worse than deadly, because the loser’s lot is an eternity bathing in fire. What was I caught up in? And how was I going to avoid becoming a Bobby-colored smear in the grinding gears of heavenly politics?
“Angel Doloriel,” said Terentia suddenly, breaking into my thoughts so abruptly that I almost squeaked in terror. I’m glad I didn’t, since angels usually don’t squeak.
“Yes, Mistress?”
“We must consider all you have told us. We will speak to you again. Be ready for a summons.”
And just like that it was all gone, the fiery ephors and the gleaming magnificence of the Anaktoron’s council chamber, and I was back in bed in my miserable apartment once more, back in my miserable, shivering human body. It was still dark outside, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be able to get back to sleep.
three
coming back
I CAN ONLY look at four walls so long before I start to get a little crazy. It was worse the morning after my inquisition, because almost everything I owned was still in boxes on the floor of my new apartment, and the paltry number of those boxes made me think about how little I had to show for my existence. I suppose one of God’s chief servants should have been proud of such a sparse, monkish existence (if a crate of jazz and blues CDs and a couple of boxes of hot rod magazines interspersed with the occasional Playboy and Penthouse counts as “monkish”) but it just depressed me. If I’d been a happy little angel doing the work of Heaven it probably wouldn’t have been that way, but I’d always felt that somehow there must be something more to my afterlife. Now that I woke up each day with a Caz-shaped hole in me, I knew what was missing b
ut that didn’t mean I was ever going to have it.
I’d sworn that I was going to get her back, and I’d really meant it. I still did, but the heat of my anger was less now that several weeks had passed, and I had begun to realize just how unlikely it was that I could make it happen. For one thing, Caz was back in Hell, and nobody just waltzes into Hell any more than they walk into Heaven without a reservation. In fact, you’d have a better chance of rolling a shopping cart into Fort Knox and helping yourself to gold ingots. Both Heaven and Hell are way off the grid, by which I mean almost certainly not on our big old round physical Earth. Even if I managed to sneak in, there would be the little matter of me being an angel. Conspicuous? Yeah, a bit. And last but certainly not least would be the fact that Caz was currently the unwilling property of Eligor the Horseman, Grand Duke of Hades, who’d already demonstrated his intent to torture me for at least an eternity or two, as soon as he cleared a few other matters off his desk. I’m not sure even Karael and an entire heavenly legion could manage to get Caz away from him, so you can imagine the odds against me on my own. In fact, the whole project was really just a complicated, painful way of committing soul-suicide.
But oh my dear Lord, every morning that I woke up, and Caz wasn’t with me, I ached. And every night I lay down by myself in that punky little room on Beech Street, and I thought about ways to get her back. But the one thing I could never imagine was an outcome where we were together, happy, and sane.
If I knew Heaven, I wasn’t going to hear anything from my inquisitors for a few days: one thing they’ve got plenty of up there is time. I wouldn’t have been surprised to discover they were all still floating around that conference chamber one-upping each other and hadn’t even started deliberating my fate. Just about the worst thing to do would have been to sit around my little studio apartment waiting for Heaven to call, even if I wasn’t already prone to maudlin Caz-thoughts, so I invented a few pressing errands to give me a reason to get dressed.
I took a cab over to see Orban, the gunsmith. He’s the one who built cannons for the Sultan to use at the siege of Constantinople a few hundred years back. Here’s how that worked out: Sultan wins, Constantinople falls, Christendom is seriously hacked off with Orban. Because he knows he’s never getting into Heaven, he refuses to die and still hasn’t done it. That’s how he tells it, anyway, and I’m not inclined to argue with him, especially since the stuff he supplies has saved my skin and soul many times.
Anyway, Orban also armors cars, and he still had my custom Matador in storage in his garage. And although I had enough money now to get it out of pawn, I was beginning to think that a gleaming, topaz-colored muscle car might not be the best ride for a man developing such a large collection of enemies. What good was it changing apartments and then parking the Amber Amigo out in front of it? Not that I was going to give that car up—I’d put too much money and sweat and spare time into it—but I was going to have to find something else for day-to-day use. In my business as an advocate angel I drive a lot and at all hours. No way I was going to be sitting at bus stops at three in the morning hoping the Number Eleven crosstown would get me to somebody’s bedside in time to be there when they died.
Orban wasn’t in the shop when I arrived, but one of his assistants, a bearded guy who looked like he would have felt comfortable with a parrot on his shoulder and his keel being hauled or something, recognized me and opened up the garage, a long building on the next pier over from Orban’s gun factory. Most of the vehicles inside had been brought in for some kind of modification, usually shielding, but the owners had either gone broke or had really needed the shielding earlier, and Orban had been stuck with the rides they left behind. He sold a few, especially if the security work had been finished, and kept the rest to cannibalize for spare parts.
The guy with the pirate beard wandered back to whatever instrument of destruction he had been working on, leaving me to walk along the row of grills, footsteps echoing from the stained concrete below my feet to the rounded aluminum roof. Most of the cars were huge, limos and old American luxury sedans, the ones Orban had more trouble selling than the Hummers and pimped-out SUVs today’s drug dealers preferred. One of Orban’s old classics, a Pontiac Bonneville, had been ripped up like tinfoil by the ghallu, so I was in need of a new ride. I spent a few agonizing minutes yearning over a scratched-up but sound 1958 Biscayne that, with a little sanding and a new coat of paint, would have made me a very happy man, but it was just too damn interesting for my purposes. If I wanted interesting, I’d keep driving around in my Matador. Inconspicuous was what I needed, though it went against everything in my character.
Down at the end, looking like the runt of the litter because of its size and pushed-in snout, was a 1969 Nova Super Sport. The paint that remained was a faded coat of candy-apple red, but I could cover that with a less conspicuous color. It was probably a hot little number in its day—the SS’s had a standard 350 inch V-8. The frame was basically okay, but it looked like it would be quite at home rusting away on blocks in the front yard of somebody’s mobile home. Not bad for my purposes.
I left a note for Orban asking what he wanted for the Super Sport, then walked back from the Salt Piers by way of the freeway overpass, so that I’d worked up a pretty good appetite (and killed an hour or so) by the time I arrived at Oyster Bill’s. It was a little weird to think I might never eat there with Sam again, since we’d spent a lot of time there, but I also felt like I was honoring his memory.
The truth was, I didn’t know how to think about Sam and what had happened to him. When you know somebody as long as I’ve known Sam Riley, aka Advocate Angel Sammariel; when you’ve gotten drunk together, been in firefights together, and watched a few dozen human beings die in each other’s company, you kind of figure you’ve seen everything that other person has to show. So when I found out he’d been working for mystery-angel Kephas and the secret Third Way operation, essentially running a side game right on Heaven’s own turf, under my nose and everyone else’s . . . well, I still wasn’t sure how it all jibed. The last time the two of us had talked, just before he stepped through a shimmering door to somewhere I’d never seen before, he seemed pretty much like the Sam I’d shared all those breakfasts with in this very restaurant, watching the tourists get their money lifted by waterfront locals both legit and otherwise. But all that time, or at least the last couple of years, he’d been hiding the whole Third Way thing from me. It made a guy think, and to be honest, I really wasn’t too fond of thinking right at the moment. Still, I missed Sam and his big old country face. I couldn’t help wondering if we were going to see each other again and what that would be like.
After lunch I manufactured a few more errands, dropping off a hamper full of laundry at Lavanderia Michoacan and picking up some connectors from Radio Shack so I could finally get my television hooked back up. Then I sloped on home, grabbing a couple of burritos I could microwave when I got hungry. The television thing took longer than it should have—the way the wall jack was laid out I would have had to put my television right in the middle of my bed—so I had to go back to the Shack for another reel of cable. When I got back, again, I fixed myself a drink. Okay, maybe two. By the time I finished them the sun had gone down and the television was the only light in the room. I heated a burrito and watched the Giants game (they were playing the Pirates in Pittsburgh) until enough of the vodka buzz wore off that I began to look around at the walls, which seemed closer than they should have. I’d had that feeling a lot, and I don’t think it was just because my new apartment was even smaller than the last one. After a while I wanted another drink, but instead of fixing one I got up, put my shoes and coat on, and headed out to the Compasses where at least I’d be drinking with other people—a time-tested excuse for not being an alcoholic. I didn’t really want to go there, since I knew all my advocate angel buddies were going to ask me about my hearing with the Ephorate, but the idea of going to some other bar, where I didn’t know anyone, was even more depressing. And
I was pretty sure that if I didn’t get out of the apartment I’d wind up fully dressed and painfully hung over the next morning, lying in front of the television, exposed to horrible people chatting away on some breakfast show, which I’m convinced is one of the torments of Hell. There’d been a few too many mornings like that since I let Eligor take Caz away. So I went to the Compasses.
It’s an angel bar—the angel bar in downtown San Judas. It’s in the old Alhambra Theater building near Beeger Square, a former Masonic meeting hall. The Masons’ insignia, the Square and Compasses, still hangs over the door. A lot of the place was recently torn up by a Sumerian demon (it was chasing me, as it happens) but although there were still signs of ongoing construction, the bar was more or less back to normal.
The Compasses was predictably loud, with the usual suspects in residence—the Whole Sick Choir as we sometimes called ourselves. (We’d even put it on softball shirts once, but dropped out of the local league when we found out we were actually expected to show up and play softball.) Chico was behind the bar, looking his usual combination of Mexican biker and aloof Confucian scholar, fiddling with his mustache while deciding which of the guys singing off-key at the bar he was going to cut off first. The serenaders were led by Jimmy the Table, a portly fellow who liked to wear old-fashioned gangster suits and looked like he should be out helping Nathan Detroit find a place to hold his famous floating craps game. He waved to me when I went past, but he didn’t stop singing, being well into the middle verses of “Roll Me Over,” a song that’s always more fun to sing than to listen to. I didn’t intend to do either. I had Chico get me a Stoli, and then I crept off to one of the back booths. For about ten minutes nobody noticed me, and I just sat and watched God’s warriors at rest and play. Pretty horrifying sight, if I do say so myself, but good for some laughs.