Sleeping Late On Judgement Day (22 page)

I swear, this is the kind of stuff I think about all the time. Because I have to. No wonder people say I don't play well with the other kids.

“Fortune favors the brave,” had become my official motto lately. I was hoping the full version was something like, “Fortune favors the brave, the stupid, and the hopeless-but-at-least-entertaining,” because “brave” isn't my best trick. But if I was going for broke (and that was pretty definitely what I was doing) there was no point holding back at the last moment. I mean, you can say,
“Okay, I'll run out in front of the motorcade and shoot the Pope, but only in the arm.”
They're still going to be picking Swiss Guard machine-gun bullets out of your corpse afterward.

“Give me a ride back to my place,” I told Clarence. “Wendell might as well meet the rest of the gang.”

So that was me—signed up and in for the long haul. Sergeant Dollar and His Howling LGBT Commandos against Heaven itself.

 • • • 

After Clarence had shown Wendell around and they'd both had a chance to catch their breath about the decor, I let Wendell have Caz's computer to see if he could crack the Black Sun's drive encryption. Meanwhile, I filled Clarence in on my last few hours. He was suitably agog.

“Anaita?” He said it almost in a whisper. “You're joking. You went to
her house?
”

“Hey, I just brought my second crooked angel to our safehouse, Junior. I live dangerously.”

“Harrison, remember? And are you calling Wendell crooked? Hang on, are you calling
me
crooked?”

“One way or another, babe. You two are now officially either cheating Heaven or cheating me. Take your pick. Now help me examine these pictures from Anaita's stately pleasure dome.”

It was slow going because we had to do it all on Oxana's phone. She'd taken a couple of hundred pictures, and although the first dozen or so seemed to be pieces of expensive furniture, and Oxana herself could only explain that she'd thought they were interesting, we quickly got to Anaita's visitors' waiting room—not the place I'd been, but something a bit more official in another part of the house. The room was large and tasteful, but the walls were covered in photos, and Oxana, bless her shuriken-loving little heart, had taken close-ups of almost all of them. Unfortunately, the photographs seemed, if not useless, at least not immediately helpful. Most of them were staged publicity shots from various dinners and awards ceremonies or even less formal public situations, rich people's parties and things like that. The number of faces I didn't recognize outnumbered those I did, despite the fact that Anaita/Donya clearly knew a buttload of important and even famous people. She had a picture of herself with Jon Bon Jovi, for God's sake. I mean, isn't that about the weirdest thing you've ever heard? A goddess turned angel thousands of years old at the minimum, and she puts up a picture of herself with Bon Jovi? I supposed it was all part of her desire to create a human persona. Yes, I guess if you were a rich Iranian exile, you might well display pictures of yourself with rock stars and Ronald Reagan.

“What exactly are we looking for?” Clarence asked after a while.

“I don't think she would keep the horn at her house,” I explained. “It just doesn't make sense. The one place everyone would look.”

“But you said she had a private army of guards.”

“She does, but think about it. Who's she hiding this from?”

“Everybody.” Clarence frowned. “I mean, everybody in Heaven.”

“Yeah, of course, which is why she wouldn't keep it in Heaven. But who does she really need to keep it from?” He was still thinking. “Come on, Junior—who did it belong to in the first place?” I looked over at Wendell, but he was at least pretending not to be listening too closely.

Clarence nodded. “Eligor, of course.”

“Yep. And if there's anyone who could get around guards—or
under
them, or even
through
them if he wanted, it's Eligor. Hell, those fucking Black Sun chumps got a bugbear into my car with the windows closed! How hard could it be for one of the most powerful demons in Hell to get access to Anaita's place? At the very least, she'd have to be constantly on guard. Some vacation from the stresses of Heaven that would make! And I got the distinct impression she likes pretending to be a mortal and lady of the manor.”

“So what are you looking for?”

“No, it's what
you're
looking for, Sunny Jim. Remember, you're in this with me, right up to your collar buttons. I need you to figure out where all these pictures were taken, when, and who was there.”

“And what are you going to be doing, Bobby? Strapping on your pearl-handled six-shooters and calling out the Black Sun Brotherhood? High noon in the middle of Centennial Avenue?”

I kind of liked the idea, actually, but I shook my head. “No, I'll deal with them later. I'm going to be making a systematic check on all of Donya Sepanta's holdings. Because if she's got another property, and she's probably got more than a few, then that's where I'm going to start looking for Mr. Eligor's lost noggin-topper.” I thought I might get a little help out of Gustibus on that, since the private lives of Heaven's biggest stars was his vocation, but I didn't want to announce that to everybody here, which would only make them think I wasn't going to be working as hard as they were.

“Mr. Dollar?”

I never really have got used to being called “Mister.” If I knew my father, I'd probably be one of those guys who says, “No, Mr. Dollar's my dad.” But of course, I don't. “Yeah, Wendell?”

“I got it open—the neo-Nazi group's files. It wasn't that difficult, honestly, I mean, these guys aren't pros or anything.”

“Hallelujah.” I picked up my beer and went over, Clarence following. The Amazons were still looking through the pictures on Oxana's phone, oohing and aahing over the security arrangements as much as the expensive furnishings.

“I actually unlocked the drive a few minutes ago,” Wendell said, “but right away I saw this video file labeled
Die Beschwörung
that had its own encryption, and I just got that open. I really think you want to see this.”

“Why? Oh, please, it's not Uruk the Aryan Beast doing the Pants-Off Dance-Off, is it?”

“I wish,” said Wendell. Even based on our short acquaintance, he seemed strangely grim. “Just look.” He clicked. The video started.

It was a dark room, that was all I could see at first. I was prepared for it to be another cult-murder, or maybe even the one I'd already seen. But something else was going on. “Oh, my sweet Lord,” I said as I began to understand. “These Black Sun people really
are
nuts.”

The Amazons and Clarence crowded in behind me to look over Wendell's shoulder. “What do they do?” asked Halyna.

“Well, I might be mistaken,” I said as I watched the tiny, poorly-lit figures setting out their implements and readying their books. “But I'm pretty darn sure those crazy Nazi kids are trying to open a doorway to Hell.”

The last thing they placed on the floor of the dark room—it looked like the same warehouse floor where Bald Thug had met his untimely but probably richly deserved end—was not much bigger than a corgi dog. It wasn't a dog, though, it was a human baby. We could hear its thin cries, the hoarse, hitching sobs of a child who'd been crying a long time.

“I cannot watch,” said Halyna and turned away.

I wish I'd done the same, but instead, I watched it all. One of the robed figures lit a fire in a trash can lid. None of us made a comment now, except for sharp intakes of breath when the knife came out, and helpless noises of disgust and horror when one of the masked men slit the child's throat and drizzled the dying infant's blood into the flames.

I wanted to kill the Nazi bastards
so bad
now, I wished I'd gone into their place with C4 strapped to my chest and taken the whole floor out in a blast of cleansing fire, even if it meant I went with them. But I hadn't. I'd played with them like they were just punks. I hadn't thought them worth my attention beyond that. My bad.

So I kept watching their miserable, badly shot little video.

It only got worse after that.

I
T WAS
so bizarre, watching it happen in that tiny little window on a laptop computer screen. It almost felt if we were spying, as if this were happening right now and we were kids staring through a keyhole, trying to find out what grown-ups really do.

“Is horrible,” said Oxana. The child had stopped moving, and was tossed to one side like an empty bag.

“Who are these people?” Wendell asked.

“Neofascist crazies,” I said, “but they clearly have bigger ambitions than just making the trains run on time. They've been spying on me for weeks. They think I know where Eligor's horn is hidden.”

“Is this really
the
Eligor we're talking about?” Wendell asked. “Grand Duke of Hell?”

“You know him?” Clarence was surprised. I guess he thought only crazy angels like me dabbled in this kind of stuff.

“I know about him, just like any American GI used to know who Himmler or Goering were. He's one of the worst there is.” Wendell looked at me. “What do they want his horn for?”

“No idea,” I said. “I suppose they could be working for Eligor, but I can't imagine him hiring a bunch of clowns like that. He's too smart.”

“And do you have this horn of his, or know where it is?” Wendell watched me, daring me to explain what an angel might be doing with such a thing.

“No. But I want it for reasons of my own. Good reasons,” I told him, stung by his doubtful look.

Clarence leaned over to Wendell and said, in a loud, theatrical whisper,
“Girl problems.”

“It's nowhere near that simple, damn it! But I promise you that it's connected to everything else going on here, that my reasons are honorable, and I want these murdering fascist fucks
not
to have it almost as much as I want to have it myself.”

“What happening now?” asked Oxana, who had barely been listening to us. “Is all dark.”

I turned back to the laptop. The little rectangular window had indeed gone black, as though Uruk's little snuff film had ended. But it only stayed that way for a moment. Then something began to grow in the darkness.

At first it was only a bloom of yellow light, pulsing slowly on the floor around the smoky fire.
Blood smoke
, I reminded myself.
Blood of an innocent.
But then it began to rise, more like fog than light, and as it gradually grew into a column of shifting, sickly yellow, I could see that something crouched at the center of it, where the fire had been. That something was barely touched by the surrounding glow, its shape distorted and wavering as if this were being filmed beneath the ocean, or on another planet where the pressure was a thousand times greater than here. The light rose in a circular yellow smear until it became a single, unbroken column, a pillar of poisonous-looking vapors.

The thing that crouched inside the light was huge, and blanketed in shadow. I could see no obvious shape to it except that at the top of the mound of darkness two narrow slits blinked, gleamed. Eyes. Then the mouth sagged open. “Who summons me?” it said, in a voice like a cement mixer full of stones and offal.

I knew that voice.

Halyna had come back, drawn by our shocked faces as much as by the terrible, rumbling voice.

“So it's you, you fat bastard,” I said.

Baldur von R. now came back into frame, kneeling beside the column of light, dwarfed by the thing he had conjured. “Sitri, great prince! You who are called Bitru, Master of Secrets! We summon thee! We bind thee! While you remain in our circle you will do no man harm!”

“Excuse me while I swear,” I said to Wendell and Clarence. “Fuck me sideways! I can't believe even the Black Sun are stupid enough to make deals with Sitri. He's as bad as they get.”

The figure in the column of light suddenly shifted, stretching in some places, shrinking in others, still a shadow-puppet but a little easier to see. It had the shape of a man, now, but with great hawklike wings and the face of some kind of cat.

“And what do you wish of me?” The deep voice sounded amused.

“Your help to throw down the mongrels and unbelievers! Your help to bring an age of purity back to the Earth, an age of power for those who truly deserve it!” I could hear the hitch in von Reinmann's voice—he was terrified by his own success. I might have hated his slimy guts, but I didn't blame him for being shocked. Performing a demonic invocation and having Sitri show up is like setting a mousetrap and finding you've caught a grizzly bear.

“And in return, will you perform a certain task for me?” The voice stayed the same, but the silhouette in the oceanic currents of light and wavering shadow stretched into something else—a tree with human fingers, but still with eyes of fire. Before von Reinmann could respond it shifted again, becoming the shadow of a crude, crooked chair.

The neo-Nazi leader was mesmerized by the changing shapes. “Of course, Master,” he quavered. “Of course, great Sitri! We will do anything you ask. You honor us with your trust.”

Sitri became a pillar of standing stone. “I honor you with my
restraint
,” the grating voice said. “One word from me and your souls would be strung like ribbons on the doors to outer darkness. Remember that.” This time the shift was more convulsive, and when it ended the shadow was swimming in the pillar of light, a thing of tentacles and beaks and trailing strands, part squid, part jellyfish. “You will find that which I desire, and you will bring it to me. To aid you in this, I will give you power over three servants, the Nightmare Children, the Boneless Ones, and most fearsome of all—”

The shape stopped speaking. For a long moment, nothing moved in the yellow light except a few strands tugged by some impossible current. Then the figure shifted again, suddenly and violently, stretching into a shape that seemed too long, too many-jointed and angular to fit into the slender column. It might have been a man made of broomsticks; it might have been a scarecrow built of long, thin bones.

“What is that?”
it asked, and the harsh voice took on a colder, even more threatening sound. “What does that creature do?”

Von Reinmann looked over in the direction of the camera. “He . . . records this historic meeting, great Prince Sitri! For the glory of the Black Sun!”

“No.” A moment later a great blackness leaped out of the light, straight toward the camera. Every single one of us flinched. Halyna, who had been leaning on my shoulder, damn near got knocked on her ass. The monitor went black. The video was over.

For a long moment we all stared from the blank screen to each other. Then Clarence said, “I think I might have to be sick,” and staggered off toward the bathroom.

“And this is who you're up against?” Wendell had lost much of his healthy color. He looked like I felt.

“Every fucking day. But not just him.” I turned to check on Halyna, but she and Oxana had retreated to the couch across the room and were whispering anxiously. “In fact, to be completely aboveboard, I don't think Prince Sitri gives a damn about me at all. It's Grand Duke Eligor he wants to damage. They hate each other. If that horn goes public, Eligor is in serious trouble with the rest of the nobles of Hell, so Sitri wants to find it.”

“But why?” Wendell closed the black video window. “What's the struggle over the horn all about? Why is it even in circulation?”

“You'd better get yourself some coffee,” I said. “Even Harrison doesn't know all of this. And when you know the whole truth, you may want to re-think getting involved. Like I said, these are some serious bad folks.”

“I don't care if it's the Adversary himself,” Wendell said. “They have to be stopped.”

“The Black Sun? Yeah, I'd be happy to take them out if the chance arises. But they're not what matters here.”

Because though I could never make anyone else understand it, the only thing that truly mattered was getting Caz back. Demonic rivalries, Nazi child-murderers, angelic vendettas, none of it meant anything if I couldn't save her.

“
I feel it too,”
she'd admitted to me.
“I have since the first.”
That was what mattered.

 • • • 

Once I'd laid it all out for them, Wendell and Clarence seemed so overwhelmed that I sent them home, sending two of the new untraceable phones with them. They looked like they'd been in a firefight, which wasn't that surprising. I mean, it's one thing to find out that things are different behind the scenes than you thought they were, another to find out that not only are things different, but that the truth is batshit crazy. We all, angels included, spend most of our time acting like reality is pretty safe, that the world is more or less familiar, and most difficulties can be dealt with simply by determination, hard work, and (if we're sentimentalists) good intentions. But it just isn't so, and sometimes it's painful to be reminded.

The Amazons retreated to the bedroom after the angels left. When I heard the noises begin I thought they were taking comfort in each other's bodies, but after a little while I realized that, while that was true, it wasn't in the way I thought: They were sparring. At some point they must have changed to bladed weapons, because the
tank
,
tank
,
tank
noise of steel on steel filled the apartment. Our neighbors had no idea how lucky they were that Caz had insisted on thick concrete walls.

It was nearing midnight, and I was exhausted after one of the longest days I'd ever had outside of Hell, but I still had a few things to do. I didn't want to wait for Fatback to be human-brained, but I did want to get him going on some of the new information I wanted, now that I'd confirmed that Donya Sepanta was Anaita. I especially wanted to know more about bugbears, or at least more about how to kill them. Also, I now had the ominous words of Prince Sitri to consider.
“I will give you three servants,”
he'd told the Black Sun crew. I already knew the Nightmare Children better than I'd like, but the bugbears, or as he'd called them, the Boneless Ones, were a lot more powerful than the swastikids. I didn't even want to guess at what the third servant might be, but it was likely to be another escalation and I wanted to be prepared.

To my pleasant surprise, old Javier answered the phone at Fatback's house. George was back in town, he told me, and was feeling much better for his stay in the valley. Yes, he'd let me ring through to voicemail, although if I just called back in half an hour, he said, I could talk to the boss in person.

I was simply too tired. I left a message for George, then, on an impulse, called Gustibus. One of the Russian nuns picked up the phone and informed me Gustibus had retired, which I hoped meant only that he'd gone to bed for the night. I asked her to have him contact me and gave her the number off one of the new phones.

I could scarcely keep my eyes open at this point, but I also felt a kind of jerky, wired restlessness that made me want to drink. That's one of the things about booze that keeps bringing me back, like a man who can't give up a woman who keeps breaking his heart: It shut my brain up sometimes when nothing else would. It sucked the jangle out of my nerves enough to let me sleep on some bad nights when sleep was the only thing that might help me.

That's not an excuse, or rather it
is
an excuse. Yes, I drink more than I should, and if I didn't have a very fit angel's body which could heal a deep wound in twenty-four hours or less, I'm sure my liver would be in a jar somewhere in a medical museum, next to Rasputin's famous kielbasa and Einstein's deli-sliced brain.

 • • • 

I had just stretched out on the couch, hoping to watch some sports news or something that would shut off the parts of my brain the vodka hadn't reached. Halyna came padding out of the bedroom in her socks, pulled on a hoodie, and went outside to smoke a cigarette. I had just decided that college football must be the second most over-discussed sport in the world—after golf, of course, which has no serious competitors—when Halyna came back through the door with a very weird look on her face.

“Do you know bats?” she asked.

It took me a moment to shift gears, but the baseball season was long over. “Bats? Like flying rodents?”

“Yes. Bats. Do you know them?”

“I know a little bit about them. Why? Did you see one outside?” I thought maybe she'd found an injured or sick one and was about to warn her about rabies, but the expression on her face was weirder than that. “What's going on?”

“There is . . . bat on the fence. I think. And it is talking.”

For a full two seconds I literally couldn't figure out what she was saying, what bizarre wrong-turn in her mental Ukrainian-English dictionary had taken her so far down the road to impossibility—then I suddenly realized what was going on. I leaped up and rushed to the door, pushing past her in my hurry. She followed me out into the apartment courtyard.