by Tad Williams
“Right. Oh, and the word on the street is that not only did your pal Grasswax have a gambling problem, he was in deep and in bad.”
“Why does everybody keep calling that miserable dead demon bastard my pal? Never mind, just go on, explain.”
“Well, you know your other friend…” He had the good grace to pause and start over. “You know that guy Eligor who right now doesn’t like you so much? And you know how he’s a really high muckamuck in Hell? Well, the guy Grasswax owed his gambling debts to? He’s even higher up the ladder than Eligor.”
“Huh?”
“That’s what I’m picking up here and there. Sitri is his name, Prince Sitri. A prince of Hell. Apparently he’s a gambler too, but he doesn’t lose very often, and he really hates it when people welsh on him.”
“Sitri?” I knew the name, of course, but not well. He was big, okay, in more ways than one. My head was swimming. Did this mean there was someone even higher in Hell’s ranks than Eligor who might want my head as well? “I can’t say I remember much about him. What do ‘prince’ and ‘duke’ even mean down there, anyway?” I asked.
“Power, mostly,” Fatback told me. “How much of Hell belongs to them. And they all hate each other.” He chuckled. “They’d probably have beat you guys a long time ago, otherwise.”
“Probably. So the late Grasswax was in hock to this prince? For what? Money? Souls?”
“Don’t know, Mr. D. But the articles I’ve been reading make it look like Sitri isn’t the kind of demon you want to keep waiting too long for his winnings, whatever they are. Eater of the dead, Satan’s foul hunter, scourge of wayward souls, etc.”
“Yeah, like I said, I’ve heard his name. But I don’t know much about him, so dig me up anything that looks useful, will you? Man, this shit just keeps getting deeper.”
I was about to hang up when he said, “Oh, wait, Bobby! One more thing!”
“Yeah?”
“This thing you’re supposed to have? That got stolen from Eligor? Well, I ran across a couple of individuals talking about it. Some bad, weird folk on a private channel in a members-only network you don’t even want to know about, but they’re the real thing, Bobby, trust me. Anyway, they didn’t name it, but one of them called it ‘the Horseman’s little souvenir’ and the other one said, ‘it’s not an ordinary one, remember-it’s a gold one.’ But I’ve never heard even a whisper about it anywhere else, and that comment was between two parties who thought they were having a secure exchange.”
“Let me get this straight. They said, ‘Not an ordinary one-a gold one’?”
“Right.”
“Okay. I’ll think that over too.” But it didn’t exactly make me feel more confident about the phony auction I was facing in twenty-four hours. “Thanks again, George. Take care of yourself.”
“Oh, you know me. Happy as a pig in…well, you know.”
“You and me are both swimming in the same stuff right now, old pal. I’m glad at least one of us is enjoying it.”
I had two advocate clients the next morning, one right after the other, and no sign from Heaven that they were treating me any differently than before I sent them my grumpy little message about how I was quitting. Which just showed me how much I mattered in the halls of Heaven. I suppose the business-as-usual was a good thing since it kept me distracted from the night of open bidding and merriment ahead. I still didn’t have an idea about what I was going to do or how I was going to do it, and I was beginning to wonder if I’d let the Sollyhull Sisters talk me into something I was going to painfully regret. Still, I was getting very, very tired of sleeping in a different room every night like Stalin avoiding assassination, and I was even more tired of looking over my shoulder for the ghallu, which had been quiet so long now I was beginning to wonder whether the stalking was meant to be as much psychological as physical. Was Eligor trying to get me to panic and reveal where his “souvenir” was hidden? Good luck, since I didn’t know myself.
Sam met me for a late, late lunch. He was letting Clarence handle his first solo call.
“I didn’t want to stand over him, B. I let him argue the last one, and the kid did pretty well. This one looked like a no-brainer, slam-dunk, all those cliches. He was a church deacon, and the guardian said he was actually as advertised, an all-around good guy.”
“Who did the Opposition send?”
“That weedy little dude who looks like he’s wearing glasses, what’s his name? Beetlespew?”
“The one that looks like Urkel in a bug suit?”
“That’s the guy.”
As we finished and Sam called for the check, my phone rang.
“Mr. Dollar? Mr. Robert?”
“Yeah, it’s me, Fox.” I had forgotten to ask Fatback if he’d turned up anything on my new albino friend; I reminded myself to take another pass through the material he’d sent me over the last couple of days. My first readings are always hasty, looking for things that jump out immediately. I owed myself a more deliberate study. “Are we still on? You got a location for me?”
“Oh, yes, most truthfully! We are, as you say, completely and totally still on. Do you know the Islanders Hall, Dollar Bob? King Street off of Jefferson?”
“That place has been closed for years.”
“The finest sort of spot for a midnight meeting, then, don’t you think?” He chuckled in a really irritating way. I could almost picture the little merengue he must be doing. “So we shall not be disturbed! Meet me a few minutes ahead of time, and I will guide you to our appointed spot.” And then he was gone.
“Trap,” said Sam when I told him what I was doing. “And a pretty obvious one. You know you’re not going by yourself. Even you aren’t that stupid.”
“Are you volunteering?”
“Somebody’s gotta keep you from getting blown up, chum. I know the place. I’ll meet you there at quarter ’til, out front by the parrot.” He swung his big body out of the booth. “And I’ll be carrying. I suggest you do the same.”
I was profoundly grateful to think that Sam would be there with me, but I wasn’t going to admit that to him-bad for his humility. “I’ll try to remember, Sammy-boy, but I was thinking I might just pick up a stick or a couple of rocks when I got there.”
He slid me the check that had just been dropped on our table by a passing waitress. “You’d better pay. You probably won’t survive to get the next one.”
The rest of the day went pretty quickly. I had another client, a case I lost through no fault of my own-the guy was a total bastard, an unreformed drunken wife-beater who’d died by falling off his own roof after his wife locked him out. (He was trying to get back inside via the skylight so he could “teach her a lesson,” as he thought of it.) Seeing him go down the drain didn’t affect me near as badly as seeing Brady the jock get his sentence, but it still made me wonder who exactly was in charge. Guys like this client, well, that’s exactly who Hell was made for, that seemed clear-but forever? Did people really get sent off to flail screaming in pits of molten lava and blazing feces forever? I was pretty sure that even the drunken wife-beater didn’t deserve to burn for longer than the stars themselves.
I mean, that’s a really long time.
When evening came I left my latest motel room to go get a late dinner. After a leisurely meal and a cup of coffee I headed toward the place where it was all going to go down, feeling all the things you feel when you’re wearing an extremely tense human body. Perhaps I should have had things planned more carefully in terms of the auction itself, but I’d survived this far by trusting my instincts, and I didn’t have time to become a new person overnight. I wasn’t going to produce the object in question anyway, I’d made that pretty clear, so nobody should be planning to rob me. I wasn’t going to say anything stupid and give the game away and neither would Sam. Other than that, I’d just have to see what happened, pay close attention to who showed up and what they said.
I parked on King at the Jefferson end about a block or so from Islanders
Hall and spent a while just watching the street as people came back from social evenings or walked their dogs before bed. Years ago that neighborhood used to be an almost entirely residential section of late nineteenth century brick buildings turned into apartments, but now there are stores and coffee shops on several of the corners and even a local bar; still, by eleven-thirty the sidewalks were all but deserted. I left Orban’s battle-wagon unlocked, wagering the odds of getting ripped off were smaller than the likelihood I might need to make a fast getaway, then headed for the dark bulk of Islanders Hall.
The Independent Order of Islanders was one of those fraternal organizations like the Masons and the Elks that thrived during the beginning and middle of the last century, but unlike the Elks and the rest, the Islanders as a group sort of died out, and their hall closed about a decade or so back. It gets rented out for occasional functions but not generally the sort that begin at midnight. Most of the property is surrounded by an old iron picket fence meant to keep people away from the building but there’s a little porch in front that’s open to the street, with benches and hedges and a long-dry Benny Bufano fountain in the shape of a very plump parrot. That’s where I expected to find Sam, since it was about quarter ’til, but he wasn’t there.
I waited nearly fifteen minutes, checking my phone intermittently for messages, but there was no sign of him, nor did he answer his own phone. I was just about to take a short walk down to the streetlight to see if he might be coming when the gate creaked open behind me and my pale friend Fox was there, shimmying like the ghost of a nautch dancer. The weird thing was that the gate had been chained and locked, and I’d never heard a clink.
“Right on time, D-Man! Right on the money! Come in-many are waiting!”
I didn’t like the sound of that. “How many? And how did they get in? I’ve been here all the time.”
“Dollar Bob, you don’t think clever Foxy picks a burrow with only one entrance, do you?” He laughed and did a quick shuffle, then led me through the gate, up the front steps and inside.
Islanders Hall is a genuinely unsettling place, especially after dark. The organization had a South Seas theme, and the downstairs lobby played that up big, with tapestries of pounded bark stretched along the walls and carved masks leering from the shadows (many of which could pass for Infernal prosecutors I’d met in the flesh) as well as other more exotic displays like clutches of poison arrows and poisonous darts, feathered costumes, shrunken heads, and even a Fiji mermaid in a glass case. The Fiji mermaid was an infamous kind of sailor’s souvenir, usually the mummified corpse of a monkey sewed onto the body of a fish, but the face on the one in the Islanders Hall case looked more like a dessicated child than an ape. I didn’t look at it very long, though. To be honest, the filmy, fishskin eyes gave me the creeps.
At the back of the lobby, beneath a full-sized Hawaiian battle canoe that dangled on chains from the ceiling, complete with a paddling group of ancient mannequins in feathered warrior drag, stood the door to the main hall. I followed Foxy inside as if he were a will-of-the-wisp. As we entered the large, shadowy room everybody turned to look at me; perhaps two dozen folk in all, most standing at silent attention. Since many of the attendees wore dark colors the first impression I had was a sea of bodiless faces. I recognized a few of them as Fox led me past, but only a few. He whispered the names of some of the others. Three shaven-headed white guys in dark pajamas were from the European branch of a Japanese Aleister Crowley cult. While I puzzled that one out he pointed out two fellows in ostentatious Catholic clerical garb who were apparently members of Opus Dei. There was also a man Foxy named “Mr. Green,” who looked absolutely normal except for the antique smoked glass box he held in his hands, which was just about the size of a bowling ball, and which he kept lifting to shoulder height as though he was helping it to look at things.
More than a dozen others were waiting with them, including those I recognized, like the fifteen-year-old girl with a Bluetooth headset who looked as if she had just stopped in on her way home from junior high school. That was Edie Parmenter, one of the most trusted sensitives in Northern California; she had an almost infallible knack for identifying psychic phenomena. I couldn’t help wondering who’d hired her. Also, what her parents thought about her being out this late. Besides a few other usual suspects, known dealers in objets d’occultes whom I’d guessed would be here, Fox pointed out Coptic priests, some representatives of the Russian Mystery Circus, and a trio of women so tall that for a moment I thought they might be wearing some kind of Carnival costumes with false heads. Fox whispered that they were Scythian priestesses-“truly real Amazons, dear Bobby!” as he put it. It was quite a stunning array of weirdness, but it still didn’t tell me anything about what it was I was supposed to be selling.
Fox clapped once. “Gentlemen. Ladies. Before the bidding commences, a word from the sponsor of proceedings, Mr. Dollar.”
Something north of forty eyes watched me as I took a step forward. I slipped my hand into my coat out of habit and touched my revolver just to assure myself it was still there, still full of silver. I really, really wished Sam was with me, but I was also a bit worried about him. He’d never let me down before.
“I won’t waste much of your time.” My voice echoed and quickly died. I noticed for the first time that there were life-size wooden frigate birds hanging from the high ceiling like frozen phantoms. “You know what I’ve got. I’m here to answer questions, and then I’ll take bids. I’ll make arrangements for transfer with the winner.”
“But why can we not examine the object?” demanded one of the Copts. “How can we be expected to bid on something that we cannot see?”
I took a breath. I had pretty much expected that as the first question, but I was glad to hear the word “object,” which I would use from now on. “You’ll have a chance to examine the object before any payment is made, trust me, but I’m not going to set up inspections for every Tom, Dick, and Youlios who wants one. Please remember, my possession of the object in question is still slightly…controversial.” I smiled. Nobody laughed.
Edie Parmenter, who’d been talking into her Bluetooth, looked up and said, “One hundred thousand.” She had a slight lisp.
A murmur ran through the others. “Do you know for a fact it’s real?” called out one of the Euro-Japanese Crowleyites.
I took a small risk. “It is. Not all that glitters is gold, if you get what I mean, but this absolutely, definitely is.”
The Crowleyites nodded. “One hundred fifty thousand,” one of them said.
Fox stepped in then and began to orchestrate the bidding as if it were an ordinary auction (except very few of those are usually run by tap-dancing albinos) and the bidding quickly climbed beyond six hundred thousand. Box-man, Edie Parmenter on behalf of her absent principal, and the Opus Dei guys took the lead, with occasional brave stabs from the Crowleyites and one or two of the occult object dealers. I was guessing things would slow down for good and settle near a million, which was pretty amazing for something nobody had actually been able to examine, and possession of which, as my own experience attested, could easily get you killed. And I still didn’t have an idea what I was selling. What was I going to do when someone was actually ready to hand over the money?
I didn’t have long to worry about that. As little Foxy Foxy wheedled a new bid out of the Catholics for three-quarters of a million dollars I heard something bang against the door behind me. For half an instant I had the horrible, funny idea that it would be Sam showing up late, guns drawn and blazing even though I didn’t need saving, but a moment later the entire door splintered around the latch and swung inward and a couple of objects not much bigger than tennis balls bounced through into the hall. I covered my eyes, and a half-second later they exploded loudly, blinding anyone who hadn’t looked away and not doing my ears much good either, thank you. Smoke was filling the hall as a group of armed men rushed in. I threw myself onto the ground, and the hall’s single overhead light abruptly went o
ut. People were shouting in anger or fear or both, then the shouts turned to screams as guns began firing, muzzle-flare strobing the room as the walls echoed with the ratcheting of automatic weapons.
nineteen
one night only
As the guns started blazing in the darkened hall it occurred to me that if anyone was the likely target of this raid, it was me; even if these men weren’t Eligor’s, they almost certainly belonged to someone who wanted what I was supposed to have. I needed to get out of there. Sure, I felt bad about the other auction participants getting shot at, but I was even more worried about what was going to happen to Heaven’s least favorite angel.
I fired back at the armed shock troops, then rolled to another spot so they couldn’t get me by aiming at my flashes. More shots crackled out. I reloaded, then returned fire again, cursing all the time that I had to use silver bullets at ten dollars a round on what were probably cheapjack, low-level mercenaries. I’d already wasted something like a hundred bucks just firing into the darkness, and it pissed me off.
“I turn off the lights, Dollar Bob!” a voice whispered in my ear during a brief lull in the gunfire. I admit I squeaked like a startled puppy. It was Fox, who had proved many times over how easily he could sneak up on me. “But they find the switch soon, I think, so maybe you better vamoose, podner.”
“Yeah, this whole auction thing kind of went to hell, didn’t it?”
My crypto-Asian friend laughed quietly. “Hee! Don’t worry, we finish our business another time, Mr. D-Bob. Go now-crawl to the back of the hall, behind the totem poles.”
He was referring to a forest of New Guinea carvings I had noticed earlier, each pole so extravagantly decorated and carefully burnished that they looked like melting psychedelic candles. In the intermittent flashes of muzzle fire I could make out the poles standing a few yards away across no-man’s-land, pale as a copse of birch trees, so I began my commando-crawl, belly against the parquet and extremely grateful that I was wearing dark clothing. Once a line of automatic rifle slugs stitched their way along the floor just in front of me, missing my face by mere inches and showering me with stinging slivers. I also had to crawl over two bodies that were in my way, one of them in stiff clerical robes, but I finally made it into the totem forest without taking a bullet. A couple of seconds later I found the heavy fire curtain at the back of the room and the exit door hidden behind it. It was locked, but I rose to a crouch, waited for another loud burst of gunfire before kicking the door open, then dove through, hitting and rolling on the far side and fetching myself a nasty thump on the head against the iron railings of the hall’s covered back porch. I dragged myself upright in the dim light, swaying and woozy, and realized I was now on the opposite side of the building from my car. I was just about to jump down and try to lose myself in one of the neighboring buildings when I heard voices both behind me from inside the hall and also coming toward me from the front, getting louder.
