The Dirty Streets of Heaven

by Tad Williams

  She laughed. “No, the first ‘him’ in my life. The man who owned me. The man I killed.” I didn’t say a word—I didn’t dare—but she must have sensed something in my silence. Her eyes opened, and she gave me a crooked grin. “You didn’t think I got sent to Hell by mistake, do you? Believe me, Bobby, I earned every single moment of my damnation.”

  “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. But if you do, I’ll listen.”

  “There’s not a lot to say. It was a long time ago. He was an important man, the hrabia—the count, we’d say now. His name was Pawel, and his family owned most of the land around Lublin.”

  “Poland.” Now I finally understood that whisper of middle-European under the British schoolgirl diction. “When was this?”

  “Do you really want to know?” She smiled, but it was a bitter one. “I hope you like older women. Much older. Let’s put it this way—you know about the Renaissance? Well, it was before that.”

  I didn’t say anything. Something was happening here, something as powerful and inevitable as a storm, but I had already decided to hunker down and let it wash over me.

  “They gave me to him,” she said. “That’s how they did things in those days. I was scarcely fifteen years old. Practically an old maid!” She laughed. It hurt to hear it. “And Count Pawel looked every inch the part. He was tall, handsome, a brave soldier, and a firm ruler. He was also twisted inside, twisted and bent and broken.” She shuddered. “He still is. Even in Hell he’s considered dangerous.”

  “You have to…see him?”

  She shook her head. “Any business between us is long over. He’s happier persecuting the dead than he ever was on Earth. But for a while, when we were both alive, I was his favorite plaything.”

  “You don’t have to—”

  She lifted a hand. “I want to. You…you deserve to know the truth. But come and sit next to me. It would be nice to have someone near.”

  I sat beside her and took her hand. I could sense she didn’t want to be looked at, so I leaned back and stared at the ceiling and the draperies as they swayed gently in the breeze of the air-conditioning.

  “He was a monster. Some are discovered, but some are never known except by their victims. He was one of those sort; the subtle, clever kind of monster. Never killed anyone powerful, never tormented anyone who could fight back—although, since he was a high nobleman, he had a wide array of victims to choose from, of course.

  “With me it was different. Yes, he raped me over and over, but that was nothing unusual for the time. I was his wife, and he owned me. A little thing like reluctance bordering on terror only added savor for him, and as my terror grew so did his enjoyment. He went out of his way to find things that would frighten me and hurt me. And he hurt others in front of me, especially women…and girls. The servants were no more than furniture—no, they were no more than animals. Either way, they were possessions, and unlike Elizabeth Báthory or Gilles de Rais, he was just careful enough with his crimes that no one ever felt the need to stop him.

  “And if God had not punished me enough, I also had to live with his mother Justyna, the dowager countess, a harridan who never killed anyone but in her own way was every bit as cold and cruel as her son. Worse, in some ways, because she understood some of the subtler cruelties only other women know how to use. She employed them gleefully, too. My family were only minor nobility, and she never thought I was good enough for her Pawel.

  “I gave that monster and his bitch mother two heirs, both boys, and I lived each day of my life in dread. If any of the servants showed me any sympathy or kindness beyond the strict performance of their duties Pawel or his mother went out of their way to punish them. Justyna all but snatched my own boys away from me and raised them herself to be certain they grew up to be Pawel’s sons and nothing of mine…” She trailed off, then took a deep breath and resumed.

  “And one night it was finally all too much. I won’t trouble you with details, but my husband had recently killed a sweet little servant girl I favored, and only that day I had seen her buried in our churchyard. He came to me that evening and, as he took me, showed me a lock of her hair that he had cut from her head in the coffin, and which he had put into a locket to give me, ‘So that you may keep your little peasant girl with you always,’ he told me. So that I would remember always how he had snatched her from me and killed her, was what he meant. So I would know that he could take from me anything I cared about—and that he would always do so.

  “I don’t know what happened to me, except that I simply couldn’t take any more. When he fell asleep I slit his throat with his own knife. As he thrashed in his own blood, I stabbed him over and over in his chest and back and face, and continued to stab him long after he was dead. Then, covered in dripping red like some horrible phantom, I went and dragged the two boys out of their bed—they could scarcely have been six and seven years old—and brought them in to see the wreckage of their father. I was laughing hysterically and could not stop. ‘Here’s a present from me so you’ll remember him always!’ I kept saying, or so I’m told. They ran away in terror, but not before I tried to kill them both as well, wanting now to dam the whole river of Pawel’s cursed blood once and for all.

  “When I was alone again I tried to pray but my hands were numb and my heart was like ice in my chest, as though my crime had stolen all the heat out of my body.

  “The boys brought back their grandmother and the guards. They found me sitting beside Pawel’s body, sunk up to the wrists in his deepest, widest wounds, blood soaking my arms to the elbows. I tried to explain what I was doing but they pulled me away from him, screaming that I had desecrated his body. I wasn’t trying to hurt him any more—I only wanted to warm my hands, because they were so cold.”

  She turned to look at me. I could scarcely stand to see the agony there. “And now, dear Bobby, you finally know where my name comes from.”

  She looked away again. “I was convicted of murder, of course, and after much torture I confessed to witchcraft as well, because why else would a woman kill such a fine husband and then try to destroy his children, too, unless she was possessed by Satan himself?” She was winding down now, her head nodding like an exhausted child in the back seat of a car. “I was not treated leniently by the authorities, either in this world or the next—but that’s no surprise, is it? Count Pawel hadn’t done anything to me that most husbands do not do, in spirit if not in fact. If I’d had a clever advocate like you, perhaps I would have received a lesser sentence than eternity in the pits of fire. But I didn’t.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I realized I had been silent for long moments. “Nothing…there’s nothing….” I stammered. “You didn’t deserve…”

  “Hush.” She sat up a little and laid her finger against my lips. “It’s all over now. What did Marlowe write? ‘But that was in another country. And besides, the wench is dead.’”

  “Caz…”

  “Don’t. I told you, that wench is dead. Come and love this one…while we can still love.”

  And what else was left to me in my horror and my sorrow except to do as she asked?

  twenty-three

  assorted blasphemies

  WE HAD fallen asleep, and again I woke first, or thought I had. I lay with Caz’s head pillowed in the crook of my arm and stared up at the ceiling. The light hadn’t changed but now the swirl of flame-colored draperies and the dim light behind them gave the space above me the feel of sunrise, even though outside, in the real world, it must have been much later in the morning than that.

  I took my phone off the bedside table and tried to call Sam again but couldn’t get a signal. It occurred to me that I might be missing a bunch of incoming calls; that I might be missing actual clients. Even worse, if I was missing calls from my bosses in the Celestial City, coupled with the damage the ghallu had done the night before, they might think my body was dead or critically injured, and only the Highest could guess what kind of crazy snafu might come fr
om that. If I had possessed any sense at all I would have been out of Casimira’s hideaway hours ago and doing my best to reestablish contact with Heaven.

  I was about to put the phone down when Caz stirred. “You can’t use your cell here,” she said sleepily.

  “I figured that out.”

  “If you really need to call someone, use the landline. Just make sure you’re not calling anyone who’d want to trace the call.”

  Landline. I felt like an idiot. I found the slim receiver sitting on its stand on the desk.

  “You look good with no clothes on, Wings,” she said.

  “Thanks. I worked my way through angel college as a go-go dancer.”

  “Liar.”

  “Delivering obscene birthday-grams.” I was only half paying attention—I had got an actual dial tone this time. To my surprise, though, it wasn’t Sam who picked it up on the second ring.

  “Sam Riley’s phone.”

  “Monica? Is that you?”

  “Bobby? You’re alive!” She actually sounded pleased. “Where are you?”

  “Nevermind, how’s Sam? How are you, for that matter?”

  “Sam’s not good, but he’ll pull through. We’re here with him at Sequoia emergency—me and Jimmy and Annie. He got broken up pretty badly…”

  A pang of guilt and sorrow stabbed my gut. “I’ll come right over.”

  “No!” I could imagine all the other people in the waiting room turning at her loud exclamation. When Monica spoke again it was in a near-whisper. “Unless you killed the thing with the horns, somehow. Which I doubt.”

  “No such luck. It was all I could do just to get away.”

  “Then don’t come near here. The last thing anyone needs is to have that two-ton monstrosity come smashing through the hospital looking for you.”

  Which meant I was being ordered to stay away from my best friend’s bedside—my best friend who had been smashed up trying to help me. “Okay. I see the logic even if I don’t like it. Is Sam awake? Can I talk to him?”

  “He’s way, way under, Bobby. His brain was swelling so they induced a coma. I don’t know how the fixers from upstairs are going to explain this one—The Compasses looks like someone drove a train through it. On the fourth floor. Chico’s over there now, wrapped up in bandages like Claude Rains, swearing at the water damage. I was pretty proud of the hose, actually.”

  “As you should be—that was a nifty idea. Don’t worry about the cover story too much. They can say a single-engine plane crashed into it—probably already have. I’ve seen them use that one before. The Clean-Up Squad keeps smashed-up plane and car parts and all kinds of useful shit like that in a warehouse in Millbrae.”

  “Like they say, my Father’s house has many mansions.”

  “And you’re really okay, Monica? Really? Not too badly hurt?”

  “I’m a bit bruised, but I’ll live. How did you get away?”

  “I’ll tell you another time. At the moment I’ve got stuff to do. Like in the movies—‘Now it’s personal!’ Or something like that.”

  “Just don’t do anything stupid. I…we were all worried about you, Bobby. I thought…”

  I didn’t want her to say anything she’d regret later, especially not with the Countess lying naked in bed behind me, listening. Not that Caz would hear what Monica said, but it just seemed wrong somehow. “Thanks, but I’m okay.” I changed the subject. “How about Clarence? Has he been in? Does he know about Sam?”

  “How could he not know, Bobby? The Compasses has a hole in it, and the whole block is knotted up in crime-scene tape.”

  “Okay. If you see the kid before I reach him, tell him I want to talk to him. Give everybody my best—and my apologies for getting them into this shit. I’ll stay in touch. And take care of yourself.”

  “You too, Bobby.”

  I made one more quick call, this one to Alice at the office. Other than what happened to poor Sam, my luck had been very good: I hadn’t missed a client while I’d been offline, although I did have a message from my superiors telling me that I needed to speak to a minister (the official name for a fixer, as you may remember) about the events in downtown the previous night. I said I would (and I was telling the truth—you don’t dodge one of those) then I asked her to steer any clients to one of the other advocates for the next twenty-four hours while I recuperated. I got off the line before anything else came up.

  It looked like Caz had fallen asleep again, but as I climbed in next to her she said, “You have to go, don’t you?”

  “Before too long, yeah—I probably do.” I stared at the gleaming oval on its chain around her neck, then reached out and touched it gently. “Is that it? Is that the locket your husband gave you?”

  She opened her eyes. “Yes. It’s all I have left of little Anna, my maid. She was only eleven when that bastard killed her.”

  “It looks like it’s made out of silver.”

  “It is.”

  “But doesn’t it burn you? I thought silver…”

  She reached up and pushed the locket to the side. Where it had rested, an angry red mark disfigured Caz’s white skin. Even as I watched it began to fade.

  “Does it burn?” she asked. “Every moment of every day. That helps me remember.” And the way she said it gave me chills all over again. Her voice turned softer. “Do you have to leave right now, Bobby? Or do we have a little more time…?”

  I wanted to—God, how I wanted to—but first things first: I had made a decision while I was on the phone. It scared me, but I was determined. “Listen, I have a couple of questions to ask you.”

  “Be my guest.” She reached down and began to play with my wedding kit, as Leo used to call it. Very distracting.

  “Not when you’re doing that. I can’t concentrate. Come on, stop tha—ouch!” She had wickedly sharp fingernails. “Bad girl!”

  “Well, duh.”

  “Look, I’m going to do something first that’s probably really, really stupid. I’m going to tell you the truth.”

  Suddenly she became very still. “Really?”

  “Yes, really. Here it comes. I have never, from the beginning, known what you took from Eligor. I told you that before. That was true. What’s also true is that I still don’t know. I found out it was a golden feather—how I found out doesn’t matter—but I have no idea what that means. I can’t imagine one of Hell’s major players gets worked up over any mere piece of jewelry. He must be able to get his hands on all the gold he wants. It has to be something more.”

  She was lying on her side facing me. Her hand slid up to her own throat as if for protection. “Go on.”

  “So what is this thing? I’m tired of bluffing, Caz. You’ve been straight with me as far as I can tell. I’ve been wandering in the wilderness for a long time. What’s this about? Why all the fuss over a feather?”

  She raised herself higher on the pillows. The blankets slid away from the upper half of her slim torso like waves retreating from a beach. Even if it was an illusion, she was so beautiful that it was all I could do not to reach out and pull her to me.

  “You’re right, Bobby,” she said slowly, her hand still at her throat. “Gold and jewels don’t have much meaning to…to people like us. In some rare cases, the value could be sentimental.” She lifted her hand away, revealing the locket. “Like this has meaning to me. A few dollars worth of silver but I’ve worn it for five hundred years. Would I raise a ghallu to get it back? I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m strong enough—but I’d consider it, I swear I would.”

  “Eligor doesn’t strike me as the sentimental type.”

  “I’m just saying that there can be other reasons to covet something.”

  “So the feather has some special meaning to Eligor?”

  “To anyone who knows what it is—really, to anyone who sees it. It’s hard not to recognize it when it’s in front of you.”

  “I’m not following, Caz.”

  “Then you’re being a bit slow, Bobby. Where does a
feather come from?”

  “A bird.”

  “Now you’re overthinking. Simpler. Where does a feather come from?”

  I gave it a moment, then took a breath as it came to me. “A wing,” I said at last.

  “And what has wings? Birds and bees and…?”

  I shook my head. “No. Not here on Earth. Not in the real world. Look, Caz, I should know, I’m an angel myself. We don’t have wings here.”

  “You don’t, Bobby. Because you’re Earthbound. You’re minor-league, if you’ll pardon me for saying—a foot soldier. But when the higher angels manifest here…well, they keep their heavenly attributes. If they’re important enough, that is. If they’re high enough up the ladder.”

  I felt like she’d punched me in the face again. “So you’re saying that what Eligor had was a feather from an important angel? You really believe that?”

  “Believe it? I held it, Bobby. I stole it out of Eligor’s safe and smuggled it out of the building—with a little look-the-other-way help from some bribed security guards. And if you’d seen the feather, you’d know I was right about it.”

  “Yeah, but I haven’t seen it—and that’s the problem. Everybody thinks I have it but me. And eventually that’s going to get me killed.”

  Her face changed then, blue eyes widening in such a convincing display of guilt and sorrow that for the first time in a while I wondered again whether I had been a fool to trust her at all. “I honestly didn’t mean this to happen to you, Bobby. It was my play, but it went wrong. I trusted Grasswax—not very far, but far enough for him to betray me, as it turned out.”

  “Explain.”

  “I had to get rid of it—I told you, I was being watched. And followed. As soon as Eligor knew his prize was gone, he knew what I’d done. He knew that I had it, and that I wouldn’t be afraid to use it against him.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Look, you don’t just pluck a feather out of one of the Powers or Principalities,” she said. “And they don’t molt, either. Eligor had that feather for a reason.”