by Tad Williams
He took a couple of steps and then turned around. “I get it that you’re miserable. I get it that you think the world is hopelessly fucked, both the human world and the world we live in. Shit, I more or less agree. But that doesn’t mean I have to go down and roll in it with you. You may be right about some of it, even, but that doesn’t mean you’re right about all of it. And at the moment, I don’t care about any of it.”
“Sam, I’m sorry . . .”
“Tell me some other time, maybe I’ll listen,” he said, walking away. He was in such a mood that he accidentally dragged his coat across the plates of the two people sitting in the booth next to ours. Sam’s big, though, and when he’s angry only the suicidal would jump up and start something. They didn’t even start talking about what a jerk he was until the glass door had closed behind him.
After he’d gone, I just sat staring at my coffee, watching it get cold. The waitress wandered by a couple of times and offered to freshen it up, but I just waved her away. I didn’t want any more fucking coffee.
fourteen
other people’s problems
I DIDN’T GET much sleep that night, but for once it wasn’t because of bad dreams. I had the distinct feeling that a noose was being drawn tight around my neck, tighter by the day. I had one hope, and that was to find the horn and get it away from Anaita. But meanwhile I was losing friends and allies right and left.
I didn’t think Sam was gone for good—not really. But I wasn’t used to him being that pissed at me, and I still didn’t know all the facts about his arrangement with Kephas. On top of it all, I still had a few trust issues with him. After all, he’d lied to me from the beginning about the Third Way, and that was something I hadn’t believed could ever happen. Shit, maybe he’d known he was working for Anaita all this time. Maybe the bluster was all faked. I didn’t even know how to think about that, it seemed so impossible.
But if I couldn’t call on Sam, who did that leave for Team Bobby? Foxy Foxy had made it clear he wanted nothing to do with any of this—I believe the good old phrase “scared shitless” applied, if you could say that about a Japanese nature spirit. Clarence was a maybe, since he still hadn’t entirely cleared himself after starting out his career as a spy and trying to arrest Sam. (Of course, I’d clocked him on the skull with a gun butt, so it wasn’t like I’d been a great mentor, either.) George the Internet Pig was out in the Central Valley somewhere, the Sollyhull Sisters would have been out of their league completely, and the Broken Boy was more broken than usual after answering my last set of questions. Which left me what? Two Amazons I’d just met and my guns-and-cars supplier, Orban—in other words, two women who didn’t speak great English yet and an immortal Hungarian who never would. Anyone else? Dr. Gustibus, but he was too weird an unknown to count on.
Of course, I’d almost forgotten my old friend G-Man, aka Garcia Windhover, the wannabe-gangsta idiot kid who thought he was one of my operatives. He’d do anything for me, despite his complete and utter lack of qualifications or even rudimentary intelligence. His English wasn’t too good either, even though it was his first language. Sure, I could always bet my immortal soul on G-Man—or just shoot myself now.
I wrestled with some heavy questions that night, things that could affect not just my afterlife, but perhaps even the balance of Heaven and Hell. When at last I gave up on any really solid sleep and made myself some coffee, I had come to at least one major decision, something that scared me badly, but which had to be done.
It was time to sell my car.
• • •
“You are not serious.”
It was always hard to tell with Orban whether he was asking a question, making a statement, or talking to someone else entirely, because he didn’t make a lot of eye contact and was usually surrounded by bearded men who wanted his attention, a bit like Snow White during dwarf mating season, so I waited until the latest group of armament mechanics had eddied away. Orban repeated his earlier remark, which proved he’d been talking to me all along.
“Wish I wasn’t,” I said. “I love that car like an ordinary man loves his mother. More, because that car never gave me liverwurst for lunch or made me wear hand-me-downs to school. But I need the money, and I honestly don’t know if I can ever drive it again without feeling like America’s Most Wanted.”
Orban walked with me to the garage, and pulled the tarp off my muscle car, my beloved AMC Matador Machine. The coppery paint job and the black and white checkerboard upholstery were so beautiful I almost cried.
“It is certainly an ugly fucker,” he said, “but the engine runs like a dream. Nice, new four-oh-one.”
“Don’t remind me.” Why did everyone have to talk shit about how my car looked? Didn’t anyone in this town have any art in their souls? “I still owe you ten. How much you think you can get for it?”
“If I can find a blind man who likes to drive fast, maybe twenty-five total.” He squinted at me and frowned, which made him look like an Eastern-European Popeye the Sailor. “How bad are things? If you really want to sell, I can give you another ten now if that will help.”
“It would. It really would.” I was already beginning to think strange, un-Bobbylike thoughts about holing up in the woods with a bunch of guns and growing a beard. (Or maybe getting a job with Orban, since that’s how everybody he employed already looked.) But I definitely wanted liquid assets, and fast.
Because of his business, or more specifically his brand of customers, Orban was always handling cash, which was well known among the drug dealers and smash-and-grab robbers who tended to patronize him, both for guns and well-armored vehicles. But even so, nobody had ever tried to rob him. This probably says almost as much about Orban himself as about the dozens of well-armed guys who worked there and were pretty much on the premises all night and all day. Orban claimed he’d been the designer for the cannons at the siege of Constantinople. Don’t bother to Google, I’ll tell you—AD 1453. He might be nothing more than a formidable liar, but considering that my own girlfriend had been around that long, I was more willing than most to accept that as possible. He also claimed he had simply decided not to die, and that was why he hadn’t. If you spent a half hour with him, especially if he was giving you one of those looks of his, you’d probably take his word for it like I did. He isn’t a big man, but he has presence like a porcupine has sharp stuff.
In his office he counted me out a hundred Benjamins and I signed off on the pink slip. Then he broke out a bottle of wine, and we had a drink. Here’s another Orban tip: never tell him the Hungarian stuff he drinks tastes like cow piss. He claims it’s called Bull’s Blood, but I think that’s a translation error.
I promptly gave him a couple hundred back for his guys to paint the ancient Datsun I’d been driving for a while, another Orban special. I would have liked a fresh start and a new, never-seen car in case I had to disappear, but I settled for having the old car sprayed an unexciting black. I’d throw some dust on it when it dried.
While they were taking care of that, I wandered down the Salt Piers to a little burger joint and had a late breakfast. While I waited for my hash browns, sausage, and eggs, I went through Fatback’s Persian stuff again, then emailed him with directions on narrowing the search. Seagulls fought loudly on the railing outside the window. It was hard not to imagine that the crows who came to pick my bones when Anaita was done with me might sound a little like that.
• • •
As I drove back across town, Sam’s words were still stinging. Was he right? Was this all happening just because I was a stubborn asshole? I mean, nobody was arguing that I wasn’t a stubborn asshole—I lost that debate a long time ago—but had I really brought this all on myself? After all, it was Sam who had first stuck the feather in my pocket (more or less—inside the pocket had actually been inside a different part of time) and got me into this mess. Not that I was holding it against him, since it had led to Caz. Of cours
e it had also led to the giant Sumerian monster trying to kill me, and Eligor having a personal grudge against me, and me going to Hell. Actually, I was holding it against him. Bastard.
Even after an hour or more under the hot lights, the car’s new paint job wouldn’t really cure for a month or so, but it was already dried shiny, so I turned off on the way back and drove along a couple of sandy dirt roads I knew that ran near the bay. Yes, I was pitting the new paint, but “new” wasn’t the point. “Different” was the point, along with “unremarkable.” I had several important things to do and I wanted to avoid attention.
I had decided that no matter what Heaven thought about it, I had to get out of the Tierra Green Apartments. Too many bad things had found me there. I had already packed a suitcase earlier with all my most crucial stuff. I wasn’t taking much with me, because I didn’t want it obvious to either my enemies or my bosses that I had moved out, so I was leaving most of my crap in the old apartment. My new place? Well, let’s just say I’d had an idea.
Once I got near downtown I called the cellphone number Halyna (the Red Amazon) had given me. I hadn’t talked to them since the Night of the Swastikid, so I was surprised and pleased when she actually picked up. I told her I needed her and Oxana to meet me, told them where and what to bring, said I’d see them in an hour, then hung up.
Once again I was back in the middle of town with some time to kill, but I wasn’t going anywhere near the Compasses, especially in the Datsun. If the place was being watched, as it probably was, I might as well just share pictures on the internet: “Here’s my car’s new paint job! LOL!” Instead I parked in a municipal lot and went into a bar I’d never visited. The tavern was called The Bung, and it was about as classy as you’d guess from the name; the kind of dark, depressingly quiet place where you could get completely shitfaced in the middle of the day and nobody would look twice. But all I wanted was a beer and some quiet to study the Persian stuff again, and even the beer was just a hair of the dog for my vodka-aching head.
I still had some shit to straighten out with young Clarence, Mister Hey-Guess-What-I’m-Gay, Mister Hey-Just-Dropped-By-Without-Calling, but that would have to wait for another day. And of course there was still the matter of those Black Sun charmers, especially the bald one with the big, bony fists who’d had so much fun with my face and ribs. Normally I would have already found those bastards and set their families on fire, but these were busy days.
As I looked through Fatback’s files again, I became more and more certain that there were four or five names in the Persian material that were real possibilities as a San Judas identity for Anaita, so I emailed George to focus on those. Then I just sat back in my booth and sipped my beer while some guy at the bar complained about his ex-wife. It was strangely soothing, listening to other people’s problems.
• • •
Evening was creeping over the city as I walked into Hoover Park. The lights of the tall towers downtown had mostly come on, so I was surrounded by bright windows that hung in the sky like square stars. I made my way to a bench on the southern side of the park, which I’d picked because the Amazons could walk there from our apartment house without too much trouble.
Ten minutes later I saw them, carrying duffel bags and looking pretty much like any number of other semi-homeless young people. I waved them over.
“Let’s take a walk,” I said.
We made our way to a more isolated part of the park, out by one of the children’s play structures. At this time of the day the only people in sight were a young mother with a couple of cranky, runny-nosed kids, but they were already packing up to head home. As I watched them walk off down the path I asked Halyna, “Now tell me again what you two want. Exactly. And why you helped me.”
She looked a little surprised by the question. She looked even more surprised when I pulled out my pistol. “What is going on?”
“It’s nothing. The technical term is ‘due diligence.’ Oxana, you sit down too.”
Their eyes were wide, but to their credit neither of them looked anywhere near close to panic. I wondered how many bad situations they’d already seen in their short twenty or so years on Earth. “Why is this?” Oxana asked, pointing at the gun.
“Because I need answers, and this time I need real, truthful ones. First your people, you Scythian Amazon whatevers, wanted the feather, and now you’re trying to keep the horn away from the Black Sun. How do you even know the Black Sun? How do you know any of this and why do you care?”
“We know because the bitch Anahita has been our enemy for hundreds of years,” Halyna said. “She made her Persian servants steal our sisters and put them in slavery.”
“When?”
“When? When all the Persians obeyed her. Worshipped her.”
“You do realize you’re talking about more than two thousand years ago.”
“We not forget,” said Oxana.
“We were raised for not forgetting,” added Halyna.
“And how do you know about the Black Sun and their hairy pets?”
Halyna nodded. “Because after the feather and the auction, Black Sun got interested in you. But we know them already because they are in Russia too, and Russian Black Sun hate us Scythians. They call us race-traitors and whores.” She smiled. “Oh, and lesbians of course, but some of us are not so bothered by that. They try to get into our camp, we kill one of them. After that, it is war between us.”
“So they don’t work with Anaita?”
“No. I don’t know why they care about the horn, except that it is a powerful thing.” Halyna shrugged. “We don’t care about horn, except to hurt Anaita.”
“So you’re out to overthrow a goddess. An angel. You do realize that’s not going to happen, right?”
Oxana was still looking worriedly at the gun, but Halyna seemed to have forgotten it. I made sure both of them had their hands in view, and that neither of them could reach me easily. I have pretty fast reflexes, especially compared to a normal human, but I had seen the sharp things these ladies practiced with, and there were two of them. Also, I was reasonably sure neither of them had drunk between seven and many alcoholic beverages the night before.
“We fight a long fight,” Halyna said, a curl of red hair lying across her forehead like a bloody weal. “We keep her from winning. That is our victory. Our leaders tell us that because we don’t have the feather, we cannot hurt her, but if we get the horn we will hurt her in a different way. She will lose power.”
Well, Anaita would lose power over Eligor, that was certain. And if Eligor went down, he’d try to take Anaita with him—the grand duke was thoughtful that way. I hoped he had the clout to at least raise some very serious questions among her angelic comrades in Heaven if it came to that.
“So it was nothing to do with me? Why were you living in my building?”
“To watch you,” Oxana said. “Not hurt you.”
“Because lots of people know you are the man with the feather,” explained her comrade. “Now they hear you may have the horn. Very big news with some people, especially some bad people. We think Black Sun may come, so we watch for them. They must not get the horn.” Halyna shrugged. “That is all. We do our job. We work for our people.”
“And all your people want is the horn—but here’s the problem. I can’t let you have it. Do you understand? I need it more than anyone else does. But I can promise you this, if I do get it, your Anahita won’t like what happens. And we can all agree that we don’t want those goose-stepping Black Sun bastards to get it either.”
Halyna turned to Oxana and they had a quick conversation in Ukrainian. I kept the gun up, but I didn’t point it straight at their faces anymore. Sometimes courtesy is as important as actual trust.
“Okay,” said Halyna at last. “Is okay. You promise, we believe. Not give the horn to Anaita, everything okay. We can work together.”
“Not
just work together,” I said. “Go to war. Are you ready for that?”
Oxana nodded eagerly. “We have been in war all our lives. This war. Same war. Against the Persian bitch.”
“Okay,” I said. “One last thing.” I turned my gun around and handed it butt-first to Halyna, who took it with a look of surprise.
“Why?” she said, eyebrow lifting. “Not loaded?”
“Oh, definitely loaded. Go on, look.” I waited while she examined it and saw that it was jammed with shells. “Silver, too. I’ve had to give up lead almost completely.”
Halyna handled it for a moment, then pointed it at me. She looked quite capable of pulling the trigger if she chose. “Why do you give this gun to me?”
“Because I’m tired of not trusting people. Honestly, from here on in I don’t think I’m going to have time to do a lot of background checks. So if it’s really me you want, just shoot me now. I’m too tired for all the usual skullduggery.”
Halyna looked at the gun, then at me. “What is . . . ‘skullduggery’?”
“Never mind—let me rephrase it. I’m too tired for the same old shit. Are we on the same side? If we’re not, then just put two in my skull, and I’ll see what comes next.”
Halyna stared at me for a few seconds, looked briefly to Oxana, who also seemed quite prepared for anything, then handed me back the gun. “Same side, Bobby Dollar.”
“Good. Bring your stuff. We’re going to take a ride.”
• • •
See, Caz’s message-via-demon-crudlump hadn’t just reminded me about Caz and how I felt about her, because to be honest I never really stopped thinking about that part. It had also reminded me that she and I had both flirted with disaster even before we met—the Countess more than me, considering she had stolen Eligor’s most prized possession. So why hadn’t the grand duke just grabbed her and taken her back? Because for part of the time he didn’t know where she was. That was the important part.
