by Tad Williams
“Electronic. And use my private email address, will you?” I didn’t want it going through Alice, who didn’t even know what the word “private” meant. “Oh, and there’s one other thing. I need to get in touch with someone from the Opposition.”
Fatback turned sour little piggy eyes on me. “Forget it. I’m not doing that for you or anyone else, Mr. D. We’ve always got along well, you and I, but if you want a go-between, find someone else.”
“I’m not asking you to set up a meeting, George, just to tell me where I can find a particular member of the other side. I’ll do the rest.” Now that I was about to say it, the whole thing seemed ludicrous—suicidal, even—but I plunged ahead anyway. “I need to track down a fixer called ‘Countess’, a big shot. I don’t know the rest of her name.” I gave him a quick description of her appearance, at least the time I’d seen her, and told him what little I knew, including that she’d been brought in to clean up after the Walker mess.
“So you are tangled up in the Grasswax thing,” George said cheerfully. “Well, any dead devil is a reason to celebrate as far as I’m concerned. Go tell Javier I’m hungry, and I’ll see what I can find out about her.”
Javier was putting the remains of his own dinner into the kitchen garbage can. When I told him what his boss wanted he lifted out the liner bag and trundled the whole mess out to the pig barn. I decided I didn’t need to watch Fatback getting fed, so I stayed in the kitchen listening idly to Spanish chatter on the television for a while, then when that got boring, I stepped out onto the back porch and was serenaded by the other pigs snorting sleepily in their own barn a short distance down the slope.
Javier finally came back. “He ready for you now, Mr. Dollar.”
“I think I’ve got what you need,” George told me when I approached his pen. He was looking up at the screen on the wall and a whole column of addresses, ears twitching. “I can’t find an address or any hint of home turf for her. The bad guys move around more than you guys do. But I’ve got something that might work just as well. Try a place called The Water Hole on the Camino Real by the university’s north gates.”
“Really? The Water Hole?” I knew of the place and to be honest it seemed a little lightweight for a heavy hitter like the Countess.
“Yeah, really—at least if it’s the Countess of Cold Hands you’re talking about.” He showed me a blurry image that looked like it had been shot from concealment without a sufficient lens, but even so it was impossible to mistake that small, pale, extremely alluring form.
“Yep. That’s her. But The Water Hole? I thought it was a student place.”
“Whatever. It’s the only spot I’ve managed to find a sighting of her that you also might have a chance of getting out of.”
“Don’t you mean ‘into’”?
“Oh, I doubt you’ll have any problems getting in, Bobby.” His snout curled in that sour little smile again.
“Cute.”
“That’s me. I’ll send you the rest of the stuff when it’s ready.”
“Thanks, George. Don’t forget to bill me.”
“No worries there.” He grunted and settled down into the mud. “On your way out will you ask Javier to bring me Meredith? I’m feeling the need of a little company.”
“Meredith?” I didn’t get it. “Who’s Meredith?”
“A very, very nice young lady. Of the four-footed variety.”
I was glad to hear he’d finally found someone. “A were-hog like you?”
He was silent for a moment, but then he laughed. There are few things odder than hearing a pig laugh in the middle of the night. “No, no, just an ordinary American Landrace sow, but she has a sweet disposition—a certain tenderness—and a lovely shape.” His look became stern. “Don’t judge me, sir. Don’t you dare judge me.”
Not judging, I thanked him, and made my way quickly back to my car. I had my windows open all the way down Alpine but didn’t get rid of the smell until I reached the bottom of the hills.
six
waking up in trouble
IT WAS still dark outside when my bladder woke me. That’s pretty much how it works: use a body, become slave to various unpleasant internal systems. By the way, there are no bathrooms in Heaven, although angels eat and drink there, after a fashion. Which, now that I think of it, is pretty weird.
Generally my earthly bodies are in reasonable working order, thirtyish in appearance but a good bit stronger and more durable than your average human of that age. So the fact that I was trying to find my way to the john in the dark meant one of two things: either my kidneys were failing or I’d had far too much to drink the previous night. The way my head felt suggested that it was the latter.
The suspicion was strengthened when I couldn’t recognize the bathroom floor under my bare feet. My apartment had cheap tiles, but this was carpeted. Misadventure was confirmed when I got back and realized someone else was in the bed.
“You done crashing around like a fucking rhinoceros?” asked Monica, mush-mouthed with sleep. “Shut up already.”
I wanted to ask her what I was doing at her place but I was beginning to remember just enough to guess. I’d got back to The Compasses about half an hour before closing time and had done my best to drink away the smell of pig shit and the memory of Fatback’s eyes, both the sad ones in his pig face and the mindless, nasty ones in his human face. At some point Monica had been sitting in a booth drinking with me, and we had been breathing tipsily in each other’s faces as we talked. Q.E.D.
That was as much thinking as I could do with a head that felt like a used sweat sock stuffed with wet cement. I crawled in beside Monica, spent a minute getting used to the unfamiliar feeling of a bed with relatively clean sheets, then tumbled back into sleep.
“Wake up, Laughing Boy.” Monica was standing at the bedroom window, sipping from a glass of water and looking through the slats of the blinds. She was pretty much naked. I could see just enough of Cedar Street outside to know it was morning, the gray kind, the stay-in-bed kind, but it was more interesting looking at Monica. If only she wasn’t so damn cute, I thought: “cute” is one of my many, many weaknesses. “The refrigerator’s empty, and the only coffee’s instant, B.” She turned to survey me. “I think you’re going to buy me breakfast.”
Wasn’t much I could say to that except, “Yes, Ma’am.” Besides, I really needed the coffee. I swear, you don’t understand what slaves humans are to these meat sacks until you’ve spent some time not wearing one. And like I said, it was nice to look at Monica standing there, her graceful long back and wide hips. She wasn’t skinny like the woman on Friends, and her curves always looked good on her. Of course, the fact that she was showing me all this after the way our previous relationship had ended meant I needed to be careful. A drunken slip was one thing, but I was very far away from wanting to start all over with her.
“Your phone’s been ringing and ringing for over an hour,” she said. “Anything going on?”
Research coming in from Fatback, I guessed, but something about her interest didn’t feel entirely natural. I wondered if that was jealousy making its way back into the Bobby-and-Monica equation or something else—paranoia on my part? Or was I being too hard on myself, when a certain amount of paranoia was sensible? After all, it had been a pretty interesting week.
“Nothing too interesting,” I said as casually as I could, then groaned as I sat up and began hunting around on the floor for some pants. “My skull hurts. Hell, even my hair hurts. How much did we drink?”
She looked at me over one shoulder as she pulled on a clingy sweater. She didn’t seem as badly off as I was. In fact, she seemed to be enjoying herself. “Enough to make Chico cry. Where do you want to go? That pancake place still open?”
She said it lightly but my alarms went off. Monica and I used to go to the pancake place on Sunday mornings in the midst of our most domestic phase, when one of us was sleeping at the other one’s place most nights of the week. “Nah. This time of the day we
’d have to wait half an hour for a table. Let’s go to Oyster Bill’s.”
“Oyster Bill’s? Their French toast tastes like cardboard.” She frowned. “You’re not freaking out on me already, are you, Dollar? One drunken fuck, and you’re getting ready to run for the hills again? I just wanted some decent pancakes.”
“No, no, that’s fine,” I said, although not entirely truthfully, “but at Bill’s they serve alcohol in the morning, and there’s a Pay and Save on the way there.” At that moment I needed a handful of aspirin and then a Bloody Mary more than anyone who hadn’t recently seen the flensed and unpleasantly disarticulated corpse of one of Hell’s prosecutors could possibly understand.
We stretched out our breakfast ’til close to noon. Several hairs-of-the-dog-that-bit-me stabilized my head, and we mostly just read the papers, but the whole thing was beginning to feel kind of creepily comfortable. See, I actually like Monica a lot, but…well, nothing more than that. She always seemed to see things in our relationship that were invisible to me. Also, the mathematics of our time together seemed to work out that for every week we had fun together we spent a week later on making each other miserable. I really didn’t want to set myself up for that kind of karmic payback. Things were complicated enough.
“So what’s going on with you, Bobby?” she asked at one point. “You hardly talked at all last night.”
“Is that why you brought me home? To talk?”
She scowled, half in jest. “Don’t be that way. It was nice and you thought so too. I’m just worried about you. You seemed…I don’t know, kind of freaky. About Grasswax and that Walker guy and everything.”
The last thing I wanted to do was talk about any of that. At best it meant she was feeling protective of me again, and at worst…well, I didn’t know what that might mean, but it bothered me that she was so interested in my recent work history. Paranoia can be caution by another name, especially when you live in the world of the unlikely full-time, the way I do.
Feeling this twitch of old habits returning was actually beginning to worry me a bit—I didn’t want to become that guy again. “It’s just the same old shit with some new twists,” I told her as I called for the check. “I gotta book, I’ve got some stuff to do. Take your time. Finish your coffee.”
“You’re going?” She gave me a wistful smile. “Okay. It was fun. Like old times.”
“Definitely.” I didn’t know what else to do so I bent and kissed her—on the mouth but promising nothing. “I’ll probably see you tonight. At The Compasses, I mean.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “At The Compasses.” I could feel her watching my back as I went out. On a hunch I waited half a minute, then doubled back past the front window at a different angle. She had her phone out and was talking, her face serious. Didn’t prove anything, of course, but it didn’t make me feel any better, either. And now I was definitely starting to feel like that guy again, the trust-nobody guy. It’s not a nice way to feel, which is one major reason I gave it up.
It was a warm day for so early in the year and the waterfront was covered with downtown workers brown-bagging or just enjoying the bay breezes and watching the boats. With the return of brain-cell function I remembered that I’d promised Sam I’d take the kid off his hands the next day, which meant that, advocate work permitting, this afternoon was going to be my only chance to do some reconnaissance—I wanted to head over toward the university to check out The Water Hole and the surrounding neighborhood before the evening.
I also wanted a little time on my own to think. Some people can manage that while they’re making slightly awkward conversation with an ex-lover with whom they might or might not have just started up again. I’m not one of those people.
Even if you don’t know San Judas all that well you may know something about Stanford University, the Harvard of the West, alma mater of several US presidents and (although they don’t talk about this quite as much) nursery of uncounted numbers of extremely unpleasant tactical weapons, including the hydrogen bomb.
Back in the middle of the nineteenth century there was only one real city in Northern California—San Francisco, which started its boom with the Gold Rush and never looked back, selling prospectors’ gear to all those suckers on their way to the gold fields, then taking more money from them when they came back in exchange for all manner of services, a few of them actually legal. Across the mouth of San Francisco Bay, Oakland became the jumping-off point for those on their way to the golden hills.
Two other large towns also began to grow beside the bay, one centered around Mission San Jose at the bay’s southeastern end, the other around a secondary mission named “San Judas Tadeo” beside what later became the Redwood River. See, contrary to what a lot of idiots thought then (and still do), the name San Judas has nothing to do with Judas Iscariot, betrayer of Jesus (although later on it came to fit amusingly with the growing image of the place). The city’s named for St. Jude, patron saint of the hopeless, the unloved, and other lost causes—in other words, an even better fit than being named after Christ’s ex-pal.
As more and more people began to need wood for boats and houses, sawmills sprung up all over the hills west of San Judas and settlers dredged the Redwood River so the logs could be brought by water to the new harbor there. Then, just when the town was really starting to grow, somebody found oil up in the Santa Cruz Range and a lot of it got shipped out down the river to San Judas and its new harbor. The boom only lasted about a decade or so, but that was enough to leave Mission San Jose and any other pretenders to the title of the Bay Area’s second city in the dust.
And that’s kind of been the nature of San Judas ever since—boom and bust, feast then famine. It’s been an oil town, a port town, and eventually a factory town because of all the defense industries that set up here around the time of the Second World War. And a main lure for that kind of technology were all those science and engineering graduates from Stanford and the other local universities, which is why Jude, along with Berkeley and San Francisco itself, wound up at the center of the information revolution.
Leland Stanford was a Victorian-era entrepreneur—a “robber baron” to many—who became the governor of California. When his only child died of typhoid, he and Mrs. Stanford built the university in their son’s honor, and for the first few years it was a remarkably forward-looking institution. Then Stanford’s wife died in a fire, with the ex-Governor himself unable to save her because of a locked door. The governor heard her last terrible moments and was never the same man after that, nor was his university the same kind of open and open-hearted place it had been: No more modern, sandstone buildings, no more sweeping vistas to the beautiful western hills. Instead the university grew upward as much as out, spiking the skyline with dark, Gothic towers. The governor’s gift to the state also grew more inward as well, surrounding itself with turreted walls that made it look more like the castle of an occupying army than a modern seat of learning.
Once the Camino Real, the great north-south highway that stretches from San Francisco all the way down to the far end of the bay, ran right through the university itself, but sometime in the 1920s the Stanford board of regents decided they didn’t like the hoi polloi motoring freely through their expensive and exclusive university so they lowered the road and turned it into a long tunnel that passes under the narrowest part of the university property. If you decline to use the tunnel your choice is either line up to be examined for admittance at one of the two forbidding university gates or just turn the hell around and go back.
Perhaps because the deadly fire that killed Mrs. Stanford was rumored to have been started by a drunken servant, or perhaps because he was just a mean old bugger, Governor Stanford was also very, very down on alcohol—not a drop to be had on campus, and for years not a drop to be had anywhere near the campus. That’s eased over the decades. Although the university itself is still famously dry, a number of drinking establishments sprang up in the shadow of the walls to serve Stanford students.
Preparing to rule the world can be thirsty work, I’m told.
The Water Hole was one of these student hang-outs, nestled between the Camino Real and the university turnoff, only yards away from huge and forbidding Branner Gate, a monstrosity of black granite whose polished sheen made it look perpetually wet. At least, I had always thought of The Water Hole as a student hang-out, which was one of the reasons I’d never been inside. I once had a client who got run over in the parking lot by a drunken university professor, and helping him off to Heaven afterward was the closest to the property I’d ever been.
If Fatback’s information was correct, though, there was a bit more to the place than that. In fact, if one of Hell’s big hitters hung out here, that automatically made it pretty damn dangerous and the last place someone in my position should be, but here I was casing the joint like a private dick setting up a motel sting for an unhappy spouse.
I was doing it because a lot of things still didn’t make sense with this whole Walker/Grasswax affair. For one thing, I wondered why my own team had so quickly and casually offered me up to the Opposition for questioning. Didn’t make me feel very protected if you know what I mean, which was why I wanted a different perspective on the matter. The fact that the perspective in question belonged to a devastatingly attractive woman-creature was simply how things had worked out. That was what I was doing my best to believe, anyway, but I had to admit that despite our only momentary acquaintance, I’d had trouble keeping the glamorous Countess out of my thoughts.
Because she’s made that way, I reminded myself. On purpose, just like the wiggly little fake worm growing on one of those toothy deep-water fish.
I’d seen the outside of the bar a zillion times, with its famously broken sign reading “The Wate Hole.” The rest of the place was about what you’d expect of a mid-century student dive, a long, low wooden building with tiny windows that had been almost completely plastered over with old band flyers and Happy Hour two-for-the-price-of-one ads. My first surprise when I stepped through the scratched and many-times-repainted door was how big the place really was. The main room stretched back into what I had thought must be the building behind it, and though the ceiling was low and the lights were lower, it was possible to see that it was pretty crowded, especially for a weekday afternoon.
