Sleeping Late on Judgement Day

forty-nine: the station

I SPOTTED HIM from about a block away, on the corner of Broadway and Spring, last-minute Christmas shoppers flowing around him like a tall, sharp rock in the middle of a stream. Of course, in that long coat and Dickensian top hat he was hard to miss. My pale friend was doing a funny little two-step, of course, scarf fluttering in the brisk wind. Everything seemed back to normal.

“Mister Dollar Bob!” he said when he spotted me. He tipped his hat. “Such a pleasant thing to see! So happy to notice you are all attached, body-parts and such.”

“Yeah, Foxy, same to you, I guess.” My body parts were intact and connected, all right, but my knees were still wobbly from the previous day’s interview Upstairs. “How’s business?”

He performed a little samba-move, one hand pressed against his belly—step, step, spin, stop. “Very good now. Was a little worried. Foxy Foxy is not in the munitions field. He does not make bang-bang guns like your other friend Mister Orban. War is bad for business.” He smiled, his teeth impressively white considering they had to compete with his albino complexion. “But now—no war! All happiness, all good things. So now Mister Fox is happy, happy!”

“War? You talking about Heaven?”

“Of course! When the folks Upstairs or Downstairs have a really big fight, all of us mousies hide in the grass.” He laughed. He really did sound relaxed.

I wished I felt the same, but the cold, gray day really fitted my mood. I’d survived my face-to-face with Karael, but that, I felt sure, had been only because I was no threat to him whatsoever. In fact, I was totally irrelevant. I’d been through Hell, literally, lost everything I cared about, all to get some answers, but the only real answer seemed to be, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” And I wasn’t even going to receive that last consolation of the stubborn idealist, a hero’s death. I was walking around alive only because I didn’t really know how to do anything else. And because I needed to leave the apartment occasionally to buy more booze.

“Yeah, well, I’m happy for you,” I said. “Enjoy the holidays.”

“Hold on, Mr. Dollar B. I have a message for you.”

“Message?”

“A friend is waiting in the square. You might want to drop by.”

I could think of a couple of possibilities, none of which I liked much. “I’m relieved to hear my enemies are now willing to wait politely to kill me, instead of pushing and shoving to get to the front of the line.” Just thinking about it made me feel sour. It was one thing living in a self-induced alcoholic coma, another getting taken down like a punk in the middle of the Pioneer District, in front of God and everyone. I took a quick look around to make sure Pumbaa the Nazi wasn’t crouching somewhere nearby, waiting to avenge his beloved Timon.

“You have a very unique humor, Bobby Money Man,” said my dancing friend. “Everyone knows. It’s fun! I wait breathlessly for the chance to do business with you again someday.”

“I hope not too breathlessly,” I said, but when I turned around again he was nowhere to be seen, gone like a white fox into snow.

I walked into Beeger Square carefully, eyes open and a hand in my pocket. The bench looked so cold and windblown that I almost felt sorry for the figure sitting there, but I’d seen that small, hunched shape before.

I walked slowly across the square toward her. Yes, “her.” Temuel was wearing his little-old-Latina-lady body again. A battered shopping bag sat beside him, threatening to tip over and blow away any moment. I stared, not quite willing to sit.

“Well,” I said. “Merry Christmas. Or close enough. What’s a couple of days to an immortal?”

“You’re still angry.”

“Wow, good guess.”

“Please, won’t you sit down?”

I wasn’t clutching my gun any more, but I wasn’t feeling particularly friendly, either. “No, thanks. So you’re working for Karael now?”

Temuel shook his head. Because of the body he wore, Fellini Peasant Lady Type A, I half-expected him to make the sign against the evil eye. “I can’t talk about it—any of it. I told you it was complicated. Well, it is complicated.”

“You know, hearing that isn’t as enjoyable as it was the first two dozen times.”

He pulled a thermos out of the shopping bag, unscrewed the top. “I’m sure it isn’t. But what would you say if someone asked you the same questions?”

“What do you mean?”

He didn’t answer right away but poured the cup full of something that wafted steam. “Coffee?”

I took it, sniffed, then sipped. It was strangely sweet. “What’s in this?”

“Horchata. It’s South American, I think. You’re supposed to drink it cold but I like it in my coffee.”

Normally I’d have run like hell to get away from sweetened, milky coffee, but the dank, sobering chill of the season had sunk through my clothes and skin, into my bones. I took another sip. “It’s okay.”

“You didn’t answer me, Bobby. What would you say if I ask you the same sort of questions?”

“What questions?”

“The obvious ones. Why did you risk your life and soul for your friend Sam? Why did you travel to Hell? Why did you make a deal with one of the most powerful demons in existence and try to bring down a high angel by yourself?”

“I don’t know. Because I couldn’t see any easier ways to do it. Because the deck was stacked against me and I didn’t have much choice. It wasn’t an organized plan, that’s just how it turned out.”

“Or, in other words, it’s complicated.” Temuel held out his hand for the cup, which I discovered to my surprise I’d emptied. He screwed it back onto the top of the thermos. Then something clicked for me.

“You were working for Karael all along, weren’t you?”

“Nothing is simple, Bobby.”

“That’s your excuse? Just like me, you did the best you could. Is that what you’re saying?”

“I’m not saying anything.” He stood up. “I’m giving you something.” This time it was an envelope he pulled out of his tattered bag and placed in my hand. “But I can tell you one other thing before I go. You’ve probably noticed that I went out of my way a couple of times to keep information about you from my superiors.” He gave me a tired smile, exactly the kind I’d expect to see on the face of an older lady who’d worked too hard all day for too little thanks. “But it wasn’t to protect you, Bobby. That’s beyond my capabilities.”

I stood up too. “What’s that mean?”

“I can’t protect you from the major players. I don’t have the power. If they want to hurt you, they can hurt you. No, I was just trying to protect your privacy. Sometimes we all need a little privacy.” He nodded, then turned and walked away, shoulders bowed as if the tattered paper shopping bag weighed a hundred pounds.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I shouted, but Temuel only raised a small hand and waved as he disappeared into the Friday afternoon crowd of workers heading for their cars, their homes, their lives. Real lives—the kind I didn’t have.

What the fuck was he talking about? How had he protected my privacy? He’d handed me over to our employers easy as selling a puppy to a medical lab. Yeah, he gave me a car—a fucking ugly car, to boot—but private? Everyone knew about it. Hell, half of Heaven had been following me around as long as I’d been driving it. So what did he keep from them?

It was only then I realized I was still clutching the slightly soiled envelope he’d handed me. It wasn’t that easy to get it open because my fingers were cold, but when I did, all I found was a single piece of paper. The words were printed and the note was unsigned, but I knew who it was from.

• • •

Your first assignment. San Judas main railway station at 6:15 pm. Track Eleven.

• • •

So my new boss—who I now felt pretty sure was also Temuel’s old boss—had a job for me already. I should have been pissed off at being ordered around like a hired driver, and I was, a little bit, but I was also deep into a stretch of several long days of not giving a shit about anything. All I’d been planning to do tonight was get hammered and watch television with the sound off, anyway. Maybe Karael needed someone picked up. Maybe that’s why Heaven let me keep the taxi.

Hurray—my new job! I wondered if I’d have to report my tips.

I was going to do it, of course. If it turned out to be too depressing, I could always throw myself under the San Francisco commuter express, which would at least liven up my weekend.

• • •

It was weird that the note hadn’t told me what to look out for, but I was guessing it was going to be Karael himself, come down to earth for one of his infrequent visits. Maybe he was going to give me a personal briefing on whatever dirty work he wanted me to do. Well, I’d play along, but Karael was going to learn that he didn’t have as much of a hold on me as he thought he did. See, I’d lost pretty much everything, so what did I have left to be scared about? Destruction? Don’t make me laugh. At this point, an eternity of darkness and silence seemed like the nicest, most soothing thing I could imagine. I suppose Hell was the real implied threat, but even that didn’t have the terror for me it once had. Torture no longer seemed like that big a deal. It was only pain, whether for a moment or an eternity. I’ve learned how to do pain.

Because I was looking for a tall, soldierly figure, the type Karael seemed to choose on Earth, I didn’t notice the much smaller passenger at first, even though most of the other arrivals had already swept by me, bumping their luggage along and talking urgently into their phones. Then the announcer’s voice, which had been reading a list of destinations over the public address system, suddenly turned into echoing nonsense in my head as the small, slender woman pulled off her wool hat and her straight, white-gold hair fell down onto her shoulders like a flash of sunlight on snow.

I should have run to her that instant, grabbed her before she disappeared again forever, but it felt too much like a dream—the weird kind where you can’t make your body do what you want. In fact, I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. There she really, truly was, wearing some ridiculously gorgeous skirt and coat combination, looking like a young Ivy League co-ed just arrived for the first time in 1930s Paris, and I could only stare, my heart somersaulting inside my chest.

Then at last my brain found the levers, and I could move again. I ran to her, grabbed her arm and spun her around. Her eyes flared open, a moment of fear before the gasp of recognition. Then we were holding each other so hard that it hurt. We kissed and kissed and kissed.

If you’ve ever had this kind of reunion, you know the frustration and the glory. You can’t say what you’re thinking, because the words wouldn’t make sense. You can’t do what you really want to do, because there are laws and things, and the police would come, and also you’d wind up in a dozen people’s internet videos. So all the energy and surprise and sudden need went into our kiss. We had our mouths pressed so tightly we were breathing through each other. Caz was crying, ordinary tears of water and salt, not the icy flakes that had dotted her eyes the last time I saw her. I might have cried a little, too. I’m not usually the weeping kind, but it is a human body I’m wearing, you have to remember. I’m not a stone.

At last I loosened my hold on her; then, holding her lip with my teeth until the last gentle second, I ended the kiss. I looked hard, but I already knew. Even Hell couldn’t make an imitation this good, this real. “It’s really you, isn’t it? Really you this time.”

Her eyes were shiny. “I could hit you, if that would make things feel more ordinary.”

I might have been laughing, then. Might have been crying again. “I don’t have the words, baby,” I said when I could talk. “But let’s . . .”

“Oh, God, yes!” she said. “Take me somewhere. I don’t care how squalid. It can even be your apartment. Just take me somewhere and fuck me until I faint.”

Sexual need shook me like a terrier shakes a rat. I struggled for a second before I could string words together. “I have the perfect place, actually.”

“Then let’s go. Now! I only have the weekend, then I have to go back.”

“Back?”

“To Kainos. The angel told me I have to go back Sunday night. Don’t let’s waste time talking about it, Bobby!”

I steered her across the station and toward the parking lot, our steps echoing up in the high ceiling with hundreds of others. For the moment we were just two people—two people who could do what they wanted, at least for a short while. “Sunday, huh?”

I was drowning in happiness even as I realized what a perfect trap I had fallen into. I should have known Karael was too smart to make the kind of mistakes Anaita had. He had me in a way that fear could never accomplish. He was going to use Caz to keep me on a leash.

At that moment, though, I didn’t particularly care. Did. Not. Care. If I was Heaven’s dog, I was now officially the happiest dog on Earth, at least for the next forty-eight hours. I threw my arm around Caz’s shoulder and pulled her to me, smelled the back of her neck and kissed her there, smooching and sniffing and biting until she squirmed.

“This perfect place,” I said. “You’ll like it.”

“I’m sure . . . I will.” She forced herself to concentrate on walking.

“A friend helped me hang onto it, through all the shit.” I realized I could actually say it and mean it. “There was a lot of shit, as it turned out, but just enough friends.”

She wasn’t really listening. “Where’s your car? That one? Oh, Bobby, not really!”

“No remarks,” I said with what I hoped was a quiet dignity. “It runs. It will get us where we’re going.”

She turned, sweetly hiding the grin that had spread across her face. “No, really, it’s lovely, Bobby—so yellow! But where are we going?”

“I told you, it’s perfect. My friend helped me hang onto it and keep it secret, and I only just figured out why—so I’d have a place to be with you, with neither Heaven nor Hell to bother us.” I grinned. “Don’t worry, you’ll approve of the furnishings. In fact, it’s your own apartment.”