The Dirty Streets of Heaven

by Tad Williams

  The door thumped closed.

  I ran after her, snagging myself on some trailing bedclothes. When I had untangled my legs and got the door open, Caz had already vanished around the corner of the corridor, no doubt heading for the elevator. I could hear other voices in the hall and hesitated, balancing my need to catch her with my desire not to be running around Eligor’s hotel with my dick dangling and no gun. Caution won out, but only barely. I threw on my pants and pulled my jacket on over my bare chest, shoved the automatic into my pocket, and pushed my feet into my shoes without untying them before I hurried down the hall.

  Three minor angels were having a rare old time trying to open the door to their room. They had clearly been tasting the unfamiliar freedoms of mortal bodies, especially the sort that came from fermented grain, but I still didn’t want to make a spectacle of myself chasing down the corridor after a female demon who had probably just passed them—something that might pierce the haze enough to be remembered tomorrow. I manufactured a little you-ought-to-know-better smile as I walked by, sending them into gusts of embarrassed laughter, then I moved briskly toward the elevator.

  Could she be right somehow? Did Eligor, maybe with Caym’s help, have the clout to shut down the conference? And would he really do it just to get a crack at me?

  He thinks I tricked him, I realized. He thinks I tricked him about the feather, not to mention he obviously knows there’s something between me and Caz, whether she told him about us or not. A grand duke of Hell might or might not have ordinary kinds of sexual jealousy, but they all had a very keen sense of possession, and I’m not talking about The Exorcist variety. Yeah, he might just be that unhappy with me.

  But whatever Caz thought, there was no way Eligor could manage to end the summit in the middle of the night as far as I could see. It was past eleven. What was he going to do, call up Karael and suggest sending everybody home and postponing the rest of the joint powers’ little circle jerk? The higher angels hate putting on human form in the first place, hate leaving Heaven; I could just imagine how that proposal would go over with Karael.

  When I reached the elevators I could see that the one Caz must be in had already reached the second floor. I jumped into one of the others, gambling that she was going all the way down, figuring that if she didn’t I could come back up from the lobby and search the lower floors. When the door pinged open, I pushed out past a group of snickering, drunken demons and hurried across the lobby but saw no sign of her anywhere, so I headed for the main entrance. I almost smashed through the nearest glass door when it didn’t open fast enough because I’d spotted her long legs walking away from valet parking along the front of the hotel, toward the parking lot. None of the valets or visitors seemed to be paying much attention, so I sprinted after her.

  I caught her just at the edge of the building where she had stopped as if to wait for someone. I was pretty sure that someone wasn’t me. The smell of the bay was strong, and I could hear seagulls keening. I hadn’t been outside since I’d checked in. I’d almost forgotten we were out at Sand Point.

  When she saw it was me, her whole body slumped like she’d been shot, but she straightened up again and stepped away from me as I approached. My coat was half-buttoned over my shirtless chest, my shoes only barely on my feet. I must have looked like a lovesick hobo.

  “Now what?” There was enough chill in her words to make goose bumps.

  “I don’t believe you’re doing what you want to do,” I said.

  “You don’t know anything about what I want, Bobby. You only think you know. I’m not who you think I am.” She said it with the patience of a weary parent dealing with her spoiled child. “I’m a million times worse than you can imagine. I’ve been in Hell for centuries.” She laughed. It was painful to hear. “They broke me a long time ago. I’m a lifer.”

  “Bullshit. You wouldn’t have—”

  “Wouldn’t have what? Fucked you? Do you think that makes you unique? Grow up, Dollar!” She looked over her shoulder as a big, black car came sliding up from the front of the hotel. “Oh, shit.”

  She grabbed me then and pushed me back into the shadows of the building, but the car just eased up and settled to a stop at the edge of the sidewalk less than ten yards away. I could see a pale-haired silhouette in the front seat that had to be Eligor.

  “You’re going away with him, huh?” I was beginning to wonder how much of her visit had been her idea, and how much might have been Eligor setting her on me just to soften me up for the killing blow. At the moment, though, I didn’t care if he shot me through the heart. Wouldn’t have been the first time. Wouldn’t even have been the first time tonight. It never even occurred to me that I was carrying a gun too.

  “Yes, of course I’m going away with him. Don’t you understand? I don’t have any other choice.”

  “Does he have the feather?”

  She shook her head, but she still had me pinned back against the concrete wall. “Wake up, Bobby! This isn’t a detective novel. No, he doesn’t have it. I don’t have it either, and I don’t know where it is. I told you what happened.”

  “Then why did he take you back?”

  She stepped back again so that half of her was bathed in the light from the hotel’s grand front entrance. Behind her I saw Eligor lean forward a little as if he was watching. For just a moment his eyes gleamed red in the darkness of the front seat, as if he was his own anti-theft system.

  Fucking show-off, I thought.

  “He let me come back…because he wanted to know about you. All about you. And I told him everything. There? Are you happy? I sold you out, Bobby, just like any good demon. Just like you should have expected.”

  “But everything else—”

  “Everything else was a lie!” She lowered her head for a moment. When she lifted it she wore an expression of rage and misery like I’d never seen. “I thought we might have something, sure. I like students. I told you that. I thought we might study things together. I thought we might even learn from each other. But I was wrong. You’ve been wearing a body too long, Dollar. You’re just like any other angel or demon who’s gone native. You’re letting your human disguise convince you of things that aren’t so—that can’t be so.” She stepped all the way out into the light. “Goodbye, Bobby.”

  She turned toward the long, black car.

  “But damn it, I love you,” I said, loud enough that even the monster waiting for her behind his tinted windows must have heard. “I don’t care about Heaven or Hell, Caz. I just want you.”

  She hesitated for such a long moment I thought time itself might have ground to a halt. Then she came back toward me and grabbed my lapels as if she wanted to shake me the way I’d wanted to shake her since she first walked into my room. She pulled at my coat so hard I thought she’d rip it, then stood on tiptoes and put her face close to mine so I could feel the chill of her skin, the heat of her breath. She stared at me. I could not have told you for all the glory of Heaven what she was thinking.

  “I love you,” I said again.

  She turned away, empty, hopeless. “Then you’re a fool.”

  She let me go and walked toward the car. The door opened as if by magic and she slid inside, then the black sedan pulled away from the sidewalk and slipped off into the night.

  I must have stood there for several minutes watching the taillights dwindle and then disappear in the fog off the bay, wondering why they spent all that money on an expensive replica lighthouse if they weren’t going to turn on the goddamn light, before I realized that something felt funny on the front of my jacket. Only half paying attention I rubbed my chest, looking for wounds Caz’s fingernails might have left, thinking at least I would have a few days before those last traces were gone, too, but something hard and heavy was making a lump in my kerchief pocket. I took it out and let it slink into my palm, then took a few steps out into the light so I could see what I had.

  It was a heavy, shiny little oval sitting on a snaky pile of chain like the
last little serpent’s egg in the nest waiting to hatch. As I turned it back and forth I finally realized through my haze of blasted thoughts what I was looking at: the locket Caz wore around her neck, the gift her husband the Polish count had given her (if any of her story was true) on the night she’d killed him.

  What did it mean? An apology? A curse? Maybe even—and for a moment I almost let my useless human heart get the better of my sense—a promise of sorts? Or was she just telling me that she was done with all obligations, obligations to the dead and to the living as well?

  I flicked it open. Inside two curls of hair lay twisted together like the DNA of some unknown species, one brown, which must have come from her little maid, the other a gold so pale it almost looked like platinum, which could only have come from the Countess of Cold Hands. I closed it and walked back to the hotel entrance.

  I was standing in the elevator watching the lights flick slowly upward toward my floor, feeling empty and cold as an abandoned house, when the bomb went off in the ballroom downstairs.

  thirty-five

  boom boom

  THERE’S AN evil old song by Little Walter called, “Boom Boom, Out Go the Lights,” and that’s pretty much how it happened. The explosion down in the Grand Ballroom rocked the entire building, most definitely including the elevator shaft. The car lurched up and down and even a little bit sideways, knocking me around like a pinball, and then suddenly everything went dark.

  How do I know the explosion was down in the ballroom? Because if you were going to make sure the summit conference didn’t continue, where else would you put a bomb except in the room where it was happening, the only room big enough in the hotel? Eligor’s own hotel.

  He blew up his own fucking hotel! I remember thinking as I stood very still, trying to figure out if there was structural damage to the elevator and shaft or if it had only stopped because the power went out. But I came as close to admiring a murderous bastard of a demon-lord as I can get. Eligor the Horseman had cojones, I had to give him that. There was a lesson in this for me, too; I’d been trying to imagine how he’d get it done and hadn’t even considered that he might just blow the shit out of his own joint and kill a few dozen people at the very least, not to mention seriously inconveniencing hundreds of his closest allies. I’d seen how crowded that lobby was and couldn’t even imagine the scene now. I would never underestimate him again.

  Eventually, I pushed up the emergency hatch on the top of the elevator and climbed out, then reached up in the dark. I seemed to be only a short distance under the next floor, so I braced myself against the walls of the shaft and worked my way upward until I could perch close enough to the door to work on it. It was hard to find leverage, but at last I got my fingers into the crevice and pulled it far enough apart to risk scrambling over and out. The escape was a lot hairier than I would have liked—it was pitch black, and even though the elevator was blocking the shaft, that was only in the spot just beneath me. If I didn’t manage to stay on top of my particular elevator I could have a straight drop to the basement. Anyway, I managed at last to clamber out onto the floor, covered with greasy carbon stains, the muzzle of my gun causing a permanent groin bruise through the inside of the pocket.

  Some emergency lights came on now, casting a dull red—dare I say hellish?—glow over everything, so that even with my better-than-average sight I had to get real close before I could be certain I was on the third floor. Sam’s room was on the next floor up so I headed for the stairs. The stairwell was crowded with overstimulated people, most of them hurrying down toward the lobby before the hotel fell over or something, others in just as much of a hurry to get away from the lower floors where the explosion had happened. I smelled smoke but hadn’t yet seen any sign of fire, though the other guests looked and acted like terrified animals. There’s nothing like sudden disaster to deliver humans back to their original state of being, and even if you’re a demon or an angel vacationing in a human body, it works pretty much the same way.

  I found Sam sitting in the open doorway of his room pulling his loafers on. I dropped down beside him because I wanted to tie my own shoes properly. I had a gun, yes, but no socks, no flashlight, no shirt, and no wallet. It’s hard to be prepared for a major explosion in your hotel, but I’d definitely dropped the ball.

  “So, you don’t need a new body yet?” Sam asked.

  “Not yet, but give me another ten minutes. Eligor’s men are going to be looking for me and I’m sure they’d like to change that.” Actually, I thought they were more likely to want to capture me if Caz had been telling the truth, and their boss still didn’t have the feather, but I didn’t want to waste time explaining everything.

  Sam had the good grace not to ask any difficult questions, just climbed to his feet and slapped the place under his coat to let me know he was armed. “They might get an argument, then.”

  I felt ten times better just knowing he and I were together. Not only wouldn’t I be worrying about what had happened to him, I knew from long, firsthand experience that he was exactly the right kind of guy to get into and out of trouble with—good thinker, good shot, good liar.

  “So I’m guessing we want to go down where the other people are, if someone’s after you,” he said.

  It took me a second to answer. “Yeah, sort of. Follow me to the stairs…”

  Flashlight beams were now sweeping the wall at the far end of the corridor. The hallway had cleared in the half a minute since I’d gotten there, so whoever was coming with all those lights had deliberately forced their way upstream against the fleeing guests. In other words, they were almost certainly bad news.

  Even as I yanked at Sam’s sleeve they appeared around the corner at the end of the hall; big, hunched figures wearing heavy gear and some kind of night-vision goggles that protruded from their faces like the eyestalks on a snail. Sam and I legged it the opposite direction, back to the stairwell I had used to get there. We opened the door as quietly as we could, but Eligor’s men must have been using amplification devices, or else they just had extra-good hearing. Muzzles flashed in our direction and we heard the stuttering, ripsaw noise of automatic fire as we dove through the door and slammed it behind us.

  “Hold on a second,” I said.

  “Not a good idea,” Sam replied.

  “Just let me…” I finally got the extended magazine out of my gun and thumbed the silver slugs out of it, back into my pocket. Then I leaned out into the stairwell and tossed the empty magazine onto one of the steps above us “They’ve got infrared goggles—they’ll spot it. Maybe they’ll think we went that way.” And they would also take note that I had a large hand gun, which couldn’t do anything worse for us than make our pursuers a bit more cautious.

  As we sprinted down the stairs past the third floor and heading for the second, I said, “We need to get out of this building fast. The next floor down’s the mezzanine, right over the ballroom, and if it’s even still standing it’ll be full of firemen, and who knows what else.”

  “So why do you want to go that way?”

  “Because we’re going to sneak out the back.” I fought to get my breath. “Out to the marina.” The hotel had its own little harbor, because more than a few of the Ralston’s guests liked to arrive in expensive watercraft.

  “Why?” Sam was panting, too. Our conversation sounded a bit like we were both being strenuously massaged. “We going to steal a yacht?”

  “Better. Now shut up. I’m trying to read my phone.”

  We dashed out onto the second floor, which was empty but full of hanging dust and the smell of burning. I hoped it was all from downstairs and that we wouldn’t suddenly find ourselves caught between Eligor’s security goons and a wall of fire. The only good thing was that the group chasing us had been comparatively small, no more than half a dozen men. Twice that number had probably gone to my floor but they would find out pretty quickly I wasn’t there. If the Grand Duke hadn’t been so busy making a point, watching Caz tell me off without even b
othering to intervene, he might have called his men and told them I was out in front of the hotel. At least, that was the only reason I could see that he’d let me walk away when I was right there for the taking.

  We sprinted through the second floor’s wide hallways past various meeting rooms and got to the end and the other fire stairs just as someone kicked open the stairwell door we’d exited. A spray of gunfire spattered the wall just to our right and petered out across the ceiling.

  “Stop!” someone shouted. “This is the police! You can’t escape! Drop your weapons and lie down.”

  “If that’s the police,” Sam grunted as we wrestled open the door to the stairs, “then I’m the Little Drummer Boy.”

  I plunged down the stairs with my big buddy right behind me. “We have to find a way out to the marina without going near the lobby, ‘cause everything there’s blown to shit.”

  “There’s an escalator on this floor that leads to the pool,” Sam said. “We can get to the boats without having to go near the lobby end.”

  I heard the stairwell door open above us, a spatter of gunfire, then curses. The shots must have been accidental. One of the bullets actually pinged down the walls past us, kicking up gouts of plaster, shredding the wall hangings.

  The first floor wasn’t damaged at this end, but the smoke and dust were even thicker, and the far end at the front of the hotel was clearly on fire, flames gleaming through the gray haze. I could hear screams now, and not just the agitated voices of rescue crews, but honest to God screams of pain and terror. I did my best to pretend that it wasn’t my fault—all this destruction and carnage just so Eligor could catch me.

  But had Eligor really set off a bomb just so he could catch me off guard? Surely there were easier ways he could have done it—waited until tomorrow then thrown a cordon around the hotel being one obvious way. Why blow up the place?