He seemed stunned, although whether it was what I was saying or the fact that I’d actually remembered his name, I couldn’t say. “I don’t know. I have to think.” A moment later he got up, fumbled out some money and dropped it on the table. “I have to go. I’m on call. I’ll . . . I’ll talk to you later.”
“There goes your ride,” I said as he left.
Sam snorted. “Are you kidding? I drove. Don’t you remember?”
“That was your car we came in? How do you have a car, living in a funhouse mirror?”
“Borrowed it from Orban. He sympathizes with people who are kind of stuck between the two sides.”
“Yeah, I guess he would.” I finished off the rest of my pancakes and downed my coffee. “You wanna drop me back at my place? I’ve got to start thinking about what I’m going to do next.”
“Aren’t you worried about the kid?” Sam stood up, jingling his car keys. “That he’s going to go drop a dime on you or something? Go right to your bosses?”
“Clarence? Yeah, right. That’s why he left five bucks on the table for his cup of coffee. He’s such an idealist, and he wants to hang out with us big boys so badly, that I’ll probably have to hold him back when he decides to storm Heaven itself with guns blazing—for Justice!”
“That’s a very scary thought,” said Sam as we walked out to the parking lot, headed back to my place. “You’re not really planning something like that, are you? I mean, even us Third Way folks don’t actually want Heaven to collapse. Shit, we don’t really even want Hell to collapse—there’s a lot of scary motherfuckers locked up there, and I can’t think of a better place for them.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I agree. I think I met most of them. No, I don’t want to tear anything down. I’m just tired of being kicked around, that’s all. I want the truth.”
Sam flicked away the toothpick he’d been using to work the calamari out from between his incisors. “You know that’s exactly what people always say just before the really bad shit starts happening.”
A bit of a wind came in off the bay, fresh but surprisingly cold.
“I want answers, Sam. I just want a fair shake. I don’t want a revolution.”
He spat something onto the asphalt. “From your mouth to the Highest’s ear, B. Hope He’s listening.”
“Amen, buddy,” I said. “Amen.”
Then, believe it or not, I went home and cleaned my apartment. Because you’ve got to start somewhere.
epilogue:
queen of the snows
I WAS THIRSTY. I found a little bottle of bitter lemon in Caz’s refrigerator and brought it back to bed. She was dozing, the sheet pulled up only to her thighs, and I stopped in the bedroom doorway, suddenly unable to breathe. So beautiful. I know I keep saying it, but it’s because I’m not good with words, not about things like that, anyway. She was a small woman, slender, but the curve of her haunch still made weird things happen in the pit of my stomach (and other places). I can’t explain it, but something about that wonderful slope between hip and ribs that you see when a woman’s lying on her side . . . well, it’s a lot like poetry, I guess: If you analyze it too much, you miss the most important part.
And her hair, so long, so straight, so pale, like Caz herself. The longing was already so strong in me that I couldn’t help wondering whether I’d been snared by one of those famous infernal snares. But I hadn’t. It was her, and the things I felt were real. I’d been suckered by Hell more than once. I knew the difference.
She rolled over and peered at me out of one eye. “What are you staring at? Haven’t you ever seen a fallen woman before?”
“Never seen one who fell this far.”
“You mean to San Judas, or to you?”
“Either way.” I sat down on the edge of the bed because I wanted to look at her, and I knew if I got too close I’d get distracted again by all the fascinating novelty of touch and smell and taste.
I know it sounds crazy, but right at the moment I was thinking of a picture I’d once seen of this ’60s actress, Jean Seberg, wearing armor to play Joan of Arc. Unlike Caz, she had her hair cut really short, and, of course, she was wearing a couple of dozen pounds of metal to Caz’s absolutely-nothing-but-half-a-bedsheet. But there was still something compellingly similar—the delicacy of her face, maybe, the fragility of that slender body set against a big, dangerous world. I don’t think that actress had a much better time of things than Joan, so maybe it wasn’t a very healthy comparison.
“You’re still staring.”
Caught, I laughed. “Sorry. You’re . . . I was just thinking about Joan of Arc.”
“Why, are you planning to set me on fire?”
“Only with mah love.”
Caz laughed, which was nice of her. On her back now, she pulled the sheet up to her navel, which didn’t really solve the problem of me staring or being distracted. “I remember when she was executed.”
“Wow. Were you there?”
“Me?” She shook her head. “No, of course not. You’re such an American! I was in what’s now Poland, at least a thousand miles away. But the word of it spread all over Europe. My husband, may his soul never rest, heard about it when he was traveling and couldn’t wait to come home and tell me about it. He thought it was—I don’t know. Fascinating. Exciting.” She was silent again. “When my own time came, I thought of her. Not of her faith, though. I had none of my own left at that point.”
I was about to ask a question, but the look on her face stopped me.
“I thought of her because the horror was not in dying, but in the hatred of the crowd. There must have been at least a few watching in Rouen who thought she was innocent, after all, or at least not worth hating—someone gave her a cross made of sticks, so she wouldn’t have to face the end without God. But I don’t think there was a single person in that crowd in our city square, not even my own children, who didn’t think I deserved to die in agony.”
At that moment, for the first time, I really felt the difference between her and me, or rather, between her memories and mine. I shuddered, imagining the avid, hostile faces of the medieval crowd.
“Don’t,” I said. “It’s over. You’re here—I’m here.”
She turned to me. For a moment I thought she was angry. I’m still not quite sure what the expression on her face meant, but all she said was, “It’s never over, Bobby darling. Hell doesn’t work that way.”
I climbed in next to her and put my arms around her, and she turned until her rear was against my groin. I did my best to ignore the distracting nearness of her, her warmth against me, the feeling of her breasts moving against my forearms as she breathed.
“I can’t get over how pale your hair is,” I said as I kissed the back of her neck. I spent a lot of our night together doing that. “It’s amazing—nearly white. Do you have Vikings in your family history?” I guess it could have been dyed, although it matched the rest of her coloring, but I had learned enough in my years on Earth to know that, “Do you dye your hair?” is only a marginally more acceptable thing to ask a woman than “When are you expecting?”
She shrugged in my arms. “Vikings? Possibly. But my people were a mixture of so many things: Slav, German, Goth, even Mongols.” She slid back against me, pressing firmly, not in a sexual way but like someone seeking comfort. “There’s an old story about where the golden-haired people come from. A Gypsy story.”
“Gypsy? You have Gypsies in your blood, too?”
“No, I don’t think so.” Her voice had slowed a little; I wondered if she was getting sleepy again. “They had only been in the kingdom for a few generations. But we had a Gypsy servant when I was a girl, and she would sometimes tell me stories while she worked.”
I waited. “And the story? About the people with golden hair?”
It took Caz a moment to get started again. “Yes. She said that once upon a time, a tribe of Gypsies had camped at the base of a mountain. They didn’t go up it, because it was always misty and cold, and at night they could hear voices howling in the wind. The only man who was brave enough to climb it at all was a fellow named Korkoro the Lonely, a young man who had no family of his own. But even he wasn’t foolish enough to climb too high, because he would have been trapped there when the sun went down.