The Dirty Streets of Heaven

by Tad Williams

  They broke for lunch but I didn’t feel like eating. I went back to my room to see if it had been searched—it had, of course—and then got a soft drink from the machine before returning to the ballroom. The atmosphere seemed to have become even more tense, frustration setting in as both sides realized nothing was going to be accomplished, and nothing was going to be said that everyone didn’t already know.

  Shortly after the proceedings resumed I got my call to the stage. As I climbed the stairs I thought I was being stared at a little more intently than I had expected, and not just from the Opposition side of the room. I couldn’t help wondering whether the Heavenly bastard or bastards who had set Clarence on me might be watching me even now, in this very room.

  No matter where some handicappers may rank me, I’m not the dumbest guy ever to wear a halo. I did exactly what Karael had told me, answering the questions as truthfully as I could while staying resolutely clear of anything controversial. At least I did until Prince Sitri sideswiped me with a surprise inquiry. His soggy, wheezing voice made me want to clean each of the words thoroughly before I allowed them into my brain.

  “Isn’t it true that you’ve been following up on the case since the disappearance of Edward Walker, Mr. Dollar? That you have been investigating various unusual acquaintances of Mr. Walker’s?”

  Karael, bless him, bristled and half-rose from his chair. “What our people do and what our internal policies are in an unprecedented case like this are none of your business!”

  One of Sitri’s eyebrows rose like a caterpillar climbing a glob of suet. “Pardon me, but aren’t missing souls all of our business? Is that not the reason we are gathered here in this lovely hotel? Surely only someone with something to hide would object to my question?”

  I could see dozens of laptops and phones around the room suddenly being assaulted by ten times that many fingers (in most cases) as heavenly and infernal bureaucrats took note of this interesting little contretemps. The flurry of typing and texting brought home to me the strangeness of the whole conference in a way nothing else had. All these creatures of light and darkness, immortal and immensely powerful, with abilities humans could only guess at, and yet by mutual consent they were meeting here on Earth where they had to make do with the stumbling artifacts of mortal technology to do their jobs. It was like the UN deliberately holding their deliberations by candlelight in Dark Ages France.

  In Caym, Karael had an unexpected ally in trying to cut off this line of inquiry. The bespoke demon suggested that perhaps a Rules Committee meeting should be convened to decide on whether Sitri’s question was permissible under the agreed format. Many in the audience groaned at this time-wasting idea, but a few demanded it be implemented. A couple of spectators cried “cover-up!” from the infernal side of the room. The argument became general and rather shouty.

  Adramelech, perhaps because he was also playing Eligor’s game, or maybe just because he was a million years old and needed to piss, finally slammed his gavel hard against the tabletop and rasped for silence. In the ensuing hush he turned from side to side, stiff as a tortoise who had just woken from hibernation, then said, “We do not have time to do this today. We have only today for all the witnesses. These points can be resolved before the deliberative phase tomorrow, time permitting.” Which effectively closed off Prince Sitri’s question and anything like it. I saw no disappointment in the glittering eyes that peeped out of the prince’s drooping facial flesh, and I wondered if the whole thing had just been Sitri’s way of poking at his rival Eligor, like the little confrontation he had arranged between Caz, me, and the Horseman in the hotel bar the night before.

  I answered a few more procedural questions and was interested to note that nobody on either side seemed willing to bring up the strange coincidence of Grasswax getting snuffed at the same site only a few hours later. In fact, the whole subject of what really happened around the Walker disappearance seemed to be surrounded with an invisible fence like the kind people use to keep wayward dogs in the yard. But how did they get all those demons and angels fitted with shock collars? How could a supposed inquiry work so hard not to inquire? How high did this Third Way thing go—and did it reach that high on both sides?

  After I was released from the stage, a number of other angels were interviewed about the souls who had disappeared after Edward Walker, but none of it gave me anything to work with or pushed the discussion forward much at all. Already any pretense of fact-finding had disappeared into partisan bickering. If you think watching Congress make laws is unappealing, you should see the sausage-factory of the eternal powers at work. Gosh, you would think they didn’t like each other or something.

  Five o’clock was approaching. I was hungry and depressed, two things that don’t usually go together for me, and I was just contemplating sneaking out as soon as Karael looked away for a moment, when Adramelech abruptly gaveled the whole thing to a close.

  “We will resume tomorrow morning,” he said, his words like wind over dry hills. “I suggest that all participants consider ways to make our next session more productive. I am not impressed with our progress today, nor does it make me hopeful of any real joint solution to our problem.”

  He walked from the stage as slowly as a tin toy overdue for a winding. Caym followed him while Sitri waited patiently for the hydraulic lifter that would move him into his cushioned golf cart. The prince’s pudgy fingers were tented on his chest, and to my untrained eye he looked rather pleased with his day’s work, which as far as I could tell seemed to have consisted of nothing more useful than taunting Eligor with hints about the Magian Society. Should I try to question Sitri again? I wasn’t kidding myself he would do me any favors, but I wondered how deep his rivalry with Eligor went. Enough that he might throw me a bone, if only to help bury the Grand Duke? But he was rolling toward the freight elevator, and I didn’t have the strength of will to chase him just now.

  I checked in with Sam but the ache of my buddy’s injuries hadn’t been improved by a long day in a ballroom chair. He was going to take a nap but promised to catch up with me later, so I went upstairs and called in a room service strike on my position, then took my coat and tie and shoes off. I’m not a suit person by nature, as you’ve probably guessed. When forced to wear one, I always have to fight the urge to find a jagged rock and rub it off me like an itchy old snakeskin.

  I’ve always found hanging out for long stretches in a hotel room a strangely mixed experience. The sense of otherness never goes away, the knowledge that you’re not in your own place, although the anonymity of the situation is appealing. It’s like being the last undiscovered guy in a game of hide and seek. You just settle into being on your own, and if it lasts long enough you even stop thinking about anyone looking for you. That is, until someone finds you.

  I had been mindlessly flipping channels for so long that the sky beyond the room’s flimsy muslin curtains had gone from pale blue to black, and the baseball games and prime-time dramas were winding down. In fact, I was winding down too after my long night and early start, my eyes starting to droop, when someone knocked on the door.

  I’d called Sam an hour earlier and he’d said he was taking Advil and staying in bed, so the chances were good my late visitor was someone I didn’t want to see. In this situation, that meant “someone I might have to shoot.” My dwindling supplies of adrenaline were enough to get me off the bed quickly and over to my coat and shoulder holster. I still had the extended magazine on the Five-Seven automatic. I wanted it loose and in my hand from the start so it wouldn’t snag on anything, so I hid it behind my back as I cracked the door, stepping back in case somebody strong was planning to kick it hard enough to break the chain. My heart was beating fast, and I was ready for anything Hell might send through the door.

  Well, almost anything.

  “Let me in,” Caz said in a cold, flat voice. “This hotel is crawling with busybodies and spies. You can call me a whore when I’m inside and the door’s locked.”

 
; She came in with her head up, looking defiant, ready to be slapped or cursed. I closed and locked the door and put the chain on, wondering just for a moment if I might have dozed off, if this could all be some kind of dream. She stared at me, waiting for me to do whatever I was going to do next, and to be honest, at that exact moment I didn’t really know. The less angelic parts of me ended that confusion by grabbing her shoulders and pulling her toward me, then I used my mouth to silence the question she started to ask and dragged her down onto the bed. At first she seemed to be struggling, but it was only to get her clothes off. I didn’t even bother with most of mine. We rolled, grabbed, scratched at each other. She was weeping and cursing as I entered her. I might have been doing the same.

  thirty-four

  breathing together

  IT WASN’T love, and it wasn’t just lust—it was hunger. I don’t know what I wanted at that moment, but I wanted it so badly I couldn’t think. I finished quickly and collapsed gasping on top of her, and only then felt the sweat that was gluing our bodies together and dripping from my forehead into her hair. I couldn’t speak. Words were the last thing on my mind. She lay panting, her face turned away from me, her clothes half-on, half-off except for what was scattered around us on the bed and the floor. For long moments we just lay there, breathing into each other’s ears as if everything else didn’t exist. Did you know that was the real meaning of the word “conspire”? To breathe together. But what kind of conspiracy was this?

  “Caz.” I said. “Just…I don’t understand any…”

  Her hand shot up, pushing my chin back, forcing me up and away from her. For half a moment I thought she might go for my unprotected throat. Then, as she wriggled out from beneath me, skin sliding on damp skin, I was terrified that she was going to leave me. She got a knee into my gut and pushed me farther up and to the side until I had to roll off her, my naked belly and groin exposed, helpless as an animal ready for slaughter. But instead of killing me she clambered on top of me and reached down to yank and squeeze me until I was hard again, then she gripped my ribs with her knees and sank down on my cock, a look of such obsessive concentration on her face that for a moment I wondered if I was in her mind at all.

  She rode me like a Valkyrie swooping down through the lightning to the last battle, late for the Twilight of the Gods. When I reached up for her pale breasts bobbing and shuddering just above me she clamped my wrists with her hands instead and forced my arms back down, pinning me with the fierceness of her need, rubbing and grinding on me until we both came together in a moment that seemed more heart attack than heart’s desire. But that wasn’t enough for Caz. She stayed on me, squeezing me inside her, and continued to ride me, until I felt another shudder build up inside her, a tremor that seemed to run up and down her spine until she quivered and then went rigid, then shook again for some seconds before sliding off to lie beside me, arms above her head, still twitching like the victim of an electrical shock.

  “Oh, God,” she said in a ragged whisper.

  “…But how can the Robo-Chop do all these things?” somebody squealed on the television, which was still on. “Don’t the blades get dull?”

  “If they do,” answered some shouting Australian, “then we’ll replace ’em! Absolutely free!”

  A great gust of cheers and applause greeted this announcement. I rolled onto my side and reached for Caz, who was facing away from me, slender back and buttocks as vulnerable as a child’s, but when I touched her she pushed my hand away.

  “Don’t.”

  “Just…Caz, talk to me.”

  She shuddered a little. “Don’t. I’m serious. You know you’re going to wind up telling me what a whore I am and how I broke your little heart. Let’s just skip the preliminaries.”

  This time I grabbed her arm hard enough that she couldn’t throw me off, and before she could really start struggling, I pulled her around to face me. For a moment she still kept her face turned away, the face that had haunted me for days, but then she gave up. Drops of sweat clung to her forehead and cheeks but her eyes were dry as they met mine.

  “Don’t ask the questions because there are no answers,” she said. “You and I, we had a moment, okay, but we can never be together in a million years. Just forget about it. I only came here to tell you something.”

  “The hell with that.” I sat up. She stayed on her back, delicate and damaged, putting me even farther in the wrong. She was lying right there in front of me, telling me I couldn’t have her. I fought against a cloud of red fury that could deliver nothing but disaster. “No! I don’t believe this is nothing. I know nothing, and this isn’t it.”

  “Okay, so call it lust.” She slid farther up the bed so she could lay her damp, white-gold head against a pillow. The ivory length of her from navel to feet stretched beside me, distracting me, especially the abbreviated triangle between her thighs that gleamed like straw spun into gold. “We have that on my side, too. It’s nothing unusual.”

  “Damn it, Caz, what do you want from me? If you’re going to dump me, what are you doing here?”

  “Dump you?” She pushed herself back against the bumpy headboard but didn’t seem to notice how uncomfortable it was. “You have an inflated sense of yourself as a lover if you think a one-night stand means happily ever after, Dollar. Especially between you and me.”

  “Are you telling me you don’t feel the same way?” I wanted to hit something. I wanted to rip the covers off the bed, spilling her and everything we’d done like a magician’s tablecloth trick gone embarrassingly wrong. “Go ahead, then. Tell me. Let me hear you say it.”

  She looked at me then, really looked at me for the first time since she’d come through the door, eyes somber and serious. “I don’t feel the same way you do, Bobby.”

  It was like being knifed in the gut. I’ve had that happen, so I know. The air pushed out of the belly, the cold, hard ache of something that shouldn’t be there, shouldn’t ever be there—it was almost exactly the same. “You’re lying.”

  “Lying is what I do,” she said quietly. “It’s my job. But I’m trying to do you a favor and tell the truth for once.”

  I got up and walked to the minibar, but taking a drink, especially out of one of those puny little bottles seemed like such a weak thing to do, such a human thing, that I turned around again and walked back to the bed. My entire life, the Highest’s grand plan for Doloriel, had shrunk to the dimensions of this little hotel room…or even smaller. To the size of a mattress covered with damp sheets. I have never wanted so badly to hit someone, to hurt someone the way I was hurting but I have also never wanted so badly to grab that same person and carry her away, to flee the wicked, wearisome world and spend the rest of whatever life I had trying to make her happy. “Torn” is not the word. “Confused” is not the word. I don’t think there is a word. “So, why did you come here?” I managed at last. “Why, Caz?”

  “To warn you,” she said. “To try to save your life.”

  I laughed, I’m sure rather bitterly. The life in question didn’t seem like an important commodity at that moment. “Some demon you are.”

  “I didn’t say I don’t care about you at all.” For a moment she had to look away, and I had a stupid hope that I had broken through somehow, that she was going to tell me that all the rest of what she’d said had been another lie. But when she turned back to me her face was horribly, horribly composed again. “Of course I do, in my own way. And I don’t want anything to happen to you—at least, not because of me.” She sat up and gathered her clothes, then slid off the bed and began to pick up her shoes and the rest of what had fallen, rewinding the spool of our sex, making it as though it had never happened. She was still half-naked, and despite my guts roiling and my head pounding, the sight of her bending over to get her coat was too much for me. I tried to put my arms around her but she violently yanked herself away from me.

  “No! Don’t! I can’t! I can’t do that again.” She backed away, then after staring me down for a moment, s
tepped into her panties and began slowly putting herself back together. Every glimpse of flesh made my chest ache, especially when she buttoned up her shirt and the main expanse of her pale skin disappeared like the sun going behind clouds.

  “Now,” she said when she was dressed, “we can argue some more or you can listen to me.” She looked at her watch. “We don’t have much time before I have to go.”

  “With him?”

  “Argue or listen?”

  I closed my mouth.

  “Eligor’s ending the conference early,” she said. “I heard him talking to one of his subordinates. Tonight, at midnight.”

  “What are you talking about? He doesn’t have the power to do that even if it is his hotel This is a goddamn summit conference! He’s outranked by a bunch of guys on his own side, let alone what my side would think about it. You’re wrong, Caz. It’s not going to happen.”

  “I heard what I heard,” she said, cool as a marble fountain. “And if he’s doing it, it’s probably to catch you by surprise, Bobby. He told me he wouldn’t…he said he wasn’t interested in you anymore, but we all know what his word’s worth.”

  “Hold on. He told you he wouldn’t go after me anymore? Is that what you were going to say? Why would he say that? What did you tell him? Or what did you give him…?”

  “Now you’re arguing,” she said.

  “Fuck it, that’s not fair…” I began.

  “But there’s more!” shouted the audience along with the Australian television huckster. He continued on, whipping them into a frenzy. “That’s right! For this one low price you can get two Robo-Chops, plus two shredder blades, two deli slicers, and this beautiful serving plate!” The informercial audience sounded like they were nearing the climax of a particularly noisy orgy, or else, perhaps, watching the Christians being delivered to the arena sand to meet the maneaters. I stalked to the television to turn it off, then began looking around on the floor next to the bed for the remote.