by Tad Williams
When he finished, he was going to order another set, but I knew it was only a matter of time until somebody played “Queen of Hearts” on the jukebox (because that had been their song), so I somehow convinced him to come outside with me, I think under the pretense that I needed to buy some smokes and the Barnstorm’s machine was empty. Sam insisted on bringing his last shot out with him. He set it down long enough to bend over and yank a parking meter out of the ground—it took him some work, but it was still pretty fucking impressive—and then he threw it end over end down California Street, scratching up a couple of parked cars. He retrieved his drink, swallowed it, set the glass down, then stretched his arms high into the air like a monster.
“Goodnight, Tokyo!” he bellowed. At the far end of the street a couple walking toward us turned around and headed in another direction. “I will fuck your buildings and shit in your harbor!” It could have been funny, in a different world. He took a couple of staggering steps and just dropped onto the pavement in front of Springtime Dry Cleaners like a puppet with its strings cut.
He was dead before the ambulance got there, or at least his earthly body was. The official verdict was heart attack, but the fact is, Sam Riley took the strongest body Heaven could provide and pretty much systematically drank it to death.
• • •
Barnstorm was gone, but the location was still a bar, something called Mike’s Corner Pocket. Springtime Dry Cleaners, however, was still there, as if all those years hadn’t passed. I was peering in the window when I felt Sam behind me. I pretty much always know. I tell him he’s got a heavy shadow.
“You thinking of going into a new profession, B?”
“Yeah. I figure this angel thing can’t last, but people always need clean clothes.” I turned and got the morning sun in my eyes. That’s another thing I hate about that time of the day. The sun is completely fucked up and jumping out at you unexpectedly all the time. “Too bright—why does anyone go out of doors? I think there’s a coffee shop down the street.”
There was, and we slid ourselves into a corner booth. “Sorry to bring you back here,” I said. “But neither of us can afford to go near downtown, and I couldn’t think of anything else without spelling it out for anyone who might be following me.”
He shrugged, but I wasn’t sure that was really what was going on for him. “No big deal.”
“Everything all right on your end? Did you-know-who show up in you-know-where?”
“No. But she will. And you? Has the shit started raining down from our little museum visit?”
He apparently didn’t even know I’d been picked up, let alone put on trial. “Don’t you get any news there at all?”
“In Kainos? Shit, B, the Third Way is like another planet, remember? Everything we used to get came from Ke . . . you-know-who. Speaking of, why haven’t you been squashed like a grape by the folks Upstairs?”
It wasn’t an idle question, I could tell. Sam isn’t stupid—far from it, although he’ll ride that Andy Griffith, aw-shucks routine as far as it’ll take him. “Oh, trust me, it’s been interesting. I’ll give you the details later. But I want to find out if that invitation you gave me is still open.”
“To our place? The you-know-where place? You finally ready to come and join us?”
“I’m beginning to think I don’t have much choice. I’m in trouble, man.”
“We all are.”
I shook my head. “Thanks for showing up at the museum. That meant a lot.”
“Didn’t do it for you. Did it so you wouldn’t get Clarence killed.”
As was sometimes the case when he was in a bad mood, I couldn’t tell for certain whether Sam was kidding. “Yeah, I notice you two have been close. Anything else you want to tell me?”
“Huh?”
“Now that Clarence has come out. Anything you want to share?”
“What do you mean? Did you just figure that out?”
“And you knew?”
“Since before the kid did himself.” Sam waved impatiently and a grizzled-looking guy in a spotty white shirt came over and took our order, which heavily featured caffeine and grease. “Man, someday they’re going to learn how to deep-fry coffee,” said Sam, “and I’ll never have to look at a menu again.”
“Look, moving past Clarence and his lifestyle choices for a moment, how did you finally figure out about you-know-who?” We’d avoided saying her name so many times now it was beginning to feel like a magical necessity.
He gave me a very dry look. “You mean, how did I finally figure out that you were right?”
“Okay, I’ll take it that way too.”
“Fuck yourself, Dollar. It didn’t just come out of the blue. Some weird shit had been going on. First she told us—well, didn’t know she was a she, then—that we weren’t going to be getting any more souls for a while. That the project was on hold, or in hiatus, or some other bullshitty bureaucrat’s term. Then the Magians started kind of disappearing.”
“The Magians? You mean the others like you?”
“Yeah, the other angels she’d recruited. That she’d tricked.” For a moment I had a glimpse of the anger he’d been hiding, and while I didn’t think it was the only thing that bothered him, it was certainly part of it. “First Nistriel, then Tehab and some others. At first we thought they were on some kind of extended missions, but then one of the others ran into Nistriel on Earth and said she’d been wiped.”
“Wiped?”
“Yeah. Like what you said happened to Walter Sanders. She had no memory of the Third Way or anything. So we began to wonder which way the wind was blowing. Then you gave me your big speech, and it made so much sense that I didn’t want to hear it. But I couldn’t unhear it afterward. I started thinking things over, putting a few questions to some of the other Magians, and it didn’t take very long until I could make sense of a lot of shit that hadn’t been making sense before that. It’s a long boring list.”
“The whole thing sucks. And it still doesn’t make any sense. What did she want if she didn’t believe in the Third Way?”
For a moment he looked angry again, then the expression settled into something sadder and more resigned. “Maybe she did, at least to begin with. Fuck, who knows, B—I can’t spend any more time on the whys and why-nots.” He shook his head as the food arrived. “So what next?”
“You mean what are we going to do to protect ourselves?” I paused with a whole sausage impaled on my fork like a harpooned pilot whale. “I wish I knew. I mean, I have a couple of ideas I wanted to bounce off you.”
“Oh, yeah, you are definitely the idea man.” The remark sounded a bit strained. “Go ahead.”
So I told him what was in my head, or at least part of it, as well as some of the ideas I was considering. He listened, asking questions from time to time, and made a few suggestions that made me look at some of the problems from different angles. It was pretty much what I hoped for, and it’s one of the things about Sam that I’ve always valued: he didn’t take things for granted. If you said, “I’ve got a plan that will make us rich,” he’d probably ask you, “Do we really want to be rich?” And he’d be right to ask—that was something you needed to know before you started.
After about half an hour and three or four cups of coffee each, we had a few preliminary ideas scraped together into something that, while not yet deserving the name “plan” or even “desperate stopgap measure,” at least gave me a starting point and a foundation for more thinking. I paid the bill while Sam used the restroom, then we walked outside. The wind had stiffened a bit and the skies were cloudy. Christmas decorations swung on the wires overhead like hardy winter blossoms.
“How do I get to Kainos?” I asked.
“Depends,” he said. “How much notice can you give me?”
“Who knows? Maybe none. I may have Heaven and Hell both on my backside when the moment c
omes. I sure don’t want to have to leave a note and arrange a rendezvous like this time.”
“Well, I could just stand there for days and days, waiting for you to be ready.”
That had been more than just grumpy. “What’s up with you?”
“Nothing. Bad week.” He scowled. “Look, I’ll get back to you on how you can cross over. I have a few things to do while I’m on this side. I’ll call you before I go.”
“Every phone I have is tapped, Sam.”
“Then I’ll be sure to keep it top-secret and hush-hush. I’ll think of something, don’t worry.” He turned and started in the opposite direction from Mike’s Corner Pocket, which was a relief. From his weird mood, I’d been afraid he might have been falling off the wagon, or thinking about it. “Oh, and thanks for breakfast,” he called back over his shoulder.
• • •
The landline rang a little before two in the morning. I’d fallen asleep on the couch, so it took me a minute to get myself oriented. Oxana was watching some movie on television, her suitcase packed and sitting on the carpet beside her, as it had been for hours. She was still pissed at me and had hardly said a word all evening. She was obviously not going to answer the phone.
I crawled toward the desk and picked it up. At first all I could hear was a lot of dull roaring, like I was holding a big seashell to my ear. Then I heard someone’s voice, although it wasn’t talking to me.
“Sam?” I asked.
“Yeah?”
“What’s up? Where are you?”
Something was definitely weird, but it took me a moment to figure out it wasn’t the connection. “Just been thinkin’,” he said.
“I can hardly hear you. Did you say ‘thinking’?”
“And I wanted to say something.” There was a long pause. “Tell you something.”
My heart was icing up. I knew this Sam. I hadn’t spoken to him in a long time, but I definitely recognized him. “Are you okay?”
“Fine. Fine, fine. With some friends. Say hello, friends.” Somebody laughed in the background, and somebody else shouted something I couldn’t hear. Country-western music was playing far back there somewhere.
Oh, shit, not now, was my primary thought. It was pretty clear that Sam had fallen off the wagon, and fallen hard.
“Do you want me to come pick you up?” I asked. “You need a ride?”
“Fuck no! A ride? I got wings, man. Magical angel wings, remember? No, I just called to tell you something, man. Because, you know, I was thinking today that I needed to tell you. About some shit, some important shit. And I wanted to, I really wanted to. But then I kept thinking, why should I tell that motherfucker anything when he sold me out?”
Ice. Ice in my chest so cold it burned. “Sam, I didn’t—”
“Get fucked, Bobby. Do you think I don’t know anything? You don’t think I have any friends expect . . . no, except you? No friends except you? So I wouldn’t know you totally sold me out?”
“I didn’t intend to actually do it, Sam. You have to believe that. I had to offer them something so they’d let me go. Shit, they were just about to pass judgement on me!”
“Yeah, oh, yeah. I get it. Completely. You weren’t really going to do it. That’s why you didn’t even tell me.” For a moment his voice threatened to break. “Didn’t even tell me . . .”
“Sam, I would have, but we got talking about all that other stuff—”
“And you know, I said I’d get back to you about how to get to my place? When they come for your lying ass? And so I’m getting back at you.” He laughed like something badly broken. “No, getting back to you, sorry. Sorry. So when you need to come along to my place, when you really need to . . . you just take a flying fuck at the moon, okay? Okay? That’ll do it, baby, that’ll . . . do it.”
Then there was nothing on the other end of the phone at all. No people talking and laughing, no country-western music, and no Sam.
thirty-nine
narwhals and empanadas
I COULDN’T GET back to sleep, of course. I lay on top of the blankets on the couch for about three hours, feeling like a couple of unpleasant animals were fighting to the death inside my stomach. At some point Oxana had given up on television and sloped off to the bedroom, but I hadn’t even noticed.
Finally I couldn’t stand it any longer. I got up, poured myself a drink (with full awareness of the irony) and called the only number I had for Sam. His message was the same: Sam, growling in his best Robert Mitchum voice: “Go ahead. Arouse my interest.”
“Look, man, I’m not even sure you’re going to hear this,” I said to his voicemail. “I hope you’re in a motel somewhere, and that you made some sleeping arrangements before you started your evening’s adventure.
“First off, don’t be a fucking idiot. Whatever you think of me, it’s not worth what you just did to yourself. But it’s done, so now you have to start over, that’s all. You fell off the wagon before. Remember that thing with the kids who died in a fire? Man, I thought you were going to drink another body to death in a single week that time. Didn’t help them, though, and it didn’t help you. And you puked all over my only suit. Three different times.
“And here’s another thing. Don’t bullshit yourself. You’re angry at me because I wasn’t a very good friend, and you’re right, but not because you really believe I was going to turn you over to the Big Happiness Machine. Because if you think I was going to hand over the guy who let himself burn to death to show me not to be afraid—you still remember that, don’t you? Even with a nasty-ass hangover and a gut full of angry feelings, you remember that, right? If you think that I was really going to do that to you, that’s some kind of weird self-hatred trip. And okay, yes, a lot of this was my fault. I was scared to say anything because it does look bad and it made me shitty even pretending. It does look like I was going to sell you out. I was embarrassed. But I never thought you’d actually believe it. I didn’t say anything because it felt to me like I hadn’t stuck up for you in front of our bosses. Ex-bosses, I guess.
“Okay, maybe it was also because I didn’t know how you’d take it. I don’t really know how to deal with a world where I’m not sure what my friend Sam is thinking. You spooked me bad by not telling me about the whole Third Way thing, and I’ve never quite got over it. It wasn’t because you kept it from me—I can understand that, we have freaky jobs, and you have to be careful, and other people were counting on you. But it spooked me because I never thought you’d get so serious about anything that didn’t automatically include you and me staying friends. Yeah, I know, I sound like a wife or something. Live with it. You were knee-deep in your future happiness while I was still home doing the dishes. Fuck, I don’t know, make your own metaphor. I haven’t slept all night.”
Jesus, I thought, is this thing even recording all this shit? What if it cut off five minutes ago?
“Anyway, that’s really all I wanted to say. When you hear this, I hope you’re already sobered up. And if you still hate my guts, well, that’s just something I’ll have to deal with. But don’t ever try to convince yourself that I was really going to sell you down the river, ‘cause that wasn’t going to happen. Couldn’t happen. I was a prisoner of war, and I said and did what I had to to survive, and that’s all. You’re my best friend. I love you, man, even when you call me in the middle of the night to tell me I’m a traitor, and I should fuck off and die. Because that’s how it works.”
I put the phone down then. I finally managed to get a couple of hours of sleep.
• • •
San Judas International was built south of the city on reclaimed tidelands in what was, at the time, a largely unused portion of southern Sunnyvale (before Sunnyvale joined up with Jude, one of those hive-of-scum-and-villainy backroom deals that people still swear about). It’s on the edge of the bay, and only about twenty-five or thirty miles south of San Francisco’s a
irport. I’ve always thought it was a bit strange to have three major airports in such a small area as the SF Bay, but if we had more bridges and tunnels and stuff, we probably wouldn’t. As it is, the bay keeps everyone separate and each of the major metroplexes wants their own landing strips.
Hey, I wouldn’t mind my own airport either, but you don’t hear me whining about it.
Because of the Celtic knot of freeways around the airport itself and the edge of the bay down there, what we could have probably managed in about an hour on bicycles took just as long on a weekday morning in a car. However, I discovered one cool thing about my otherwise stone-ugly ride—I could use the cab lanes. I mean legally, unlike the way I usually did.
I’d never had the slightest dealings with LOT, the Polish airline, so I decided to do the advised three-hours-early thing for international flights. But when we got there it looked like they weren’t exactly fitting customers onto the plane with a shoehorn, so instead of Oxana hurrying through security, we found a coffee shop and had a second breakfast. I wasn’t that hungry myself, but even in mourning, Oxana was a very healthy young woman. She plowed through pancakes and bacon and toast and jam and a couple of coffees while I nursed a tomato juice and said a silent prayer that the Bloody Mary Fairy would appear from nowhere and dump bitters and vodka into it.
I could have just ordered one, sure. That’s the great thing about airports, nobody knows what time zone you’re in, so nobody bats an eye when you order booze at nine in the morning. But for a zillion reasons I felt like I shouldn’t. Magical fairy intervention, however, would have meant it wasn’t my fault, see?
