I could think of a couple of possibilities, none of which I liked much. “I’m relieved to hear my enemies are now willing to wait politely to kill me, instead of pushing and shoving to get to the front of the line.” Just thinking about it made me feel sour. It was one thing living in a self-induced alcoholic coma, another getting taken down like a punk in the middle of the Pioneer District, in front of God and everyone. I took a quick look around to make sure Pumbaa the Nazi wasn’t crouching somewhere nearby, waiting to avenge his beloved Timon.
“You have a very unique humor, Bobby Money Man,” said my dancing friend. “Everyone knows. It’s fun! I wait breathlessly for the chance to do business with you again someday.”
“I hope not too breathlessly,” I said, but when I turned around again he was nowhere to be seen, gone like a white fox into snow.
I walked into Beeger Square carefully, eyes open and a hand in my pocket. The bench looked so cold and windblown that I almost felt sorry for the figure sitting there, but I’d seen that small, hunched shape before.
I walked slowly across the square toward her. Yes, “her.” Temuel was wearing his little-old-Latina-lady body again. A battered shopping bag sat beside him, threatening to tip over and blow away any moment. I stared, not quite willing to sit.
“Well,” I said. “Merry Christmas. Or close enough. What’s a couple of days to an immortal?”
“You’re still angry.”
“Wow, good guess.”
“Please, won’t you sit down?”
I wasn’t clutching my gun any more, but I wasn’t feeling particularly friendly, either. “No, thanks. So you’re working for Karael now?”
Temuel shook his head. Because of the body he wore, Fellini Peasant Lady Type A, I half-expected him to make the sign against the evil eye. “I can’t talk about it—any of it. I told you it was complicated. Well, it is complicated.”
“You know, hearing that isn’t as enjoyable as it was the first two dozen times.”
He pulled a thermos out of the shopping bag, unscrewed the top. “I’m sure it isn’t. But what would you say if someone asked you the same questions?”
“What do you mean?”
He didn’t answer right away but poured the cup full of something that wafted steam. “Coffee?”
I took it, sniffed, then sipped. It was strangely sweet. “What’s in this?”
“Horchata. It’s South American, I think. You’re supposed to drink it cold but I like it in my coffee.”
Normally I’d have run like hell to get away from sweetened, milky coffee, but the dank, sobering chill of the season had sunk through my clothes and skin, into my bones. I took another sip. “It’s okay.”
“You didn’t answer me, Bobby. What would you say if I ask you the same sort of questions?”
“What questions?”
“The obvious ones. Why did you risk your life and soul for your friend Sam? Why did you travel to Hell? Why did you make a deal with one of the most powerful demons in existence and try to bring down a high angel by yourself?”
“I don’t know. Because I couldn’t see any easier ways to do it. Because the deck was stacked against me and I didn’t have much choice. It wasn’t an organized plan, that’s just how it turned out.”
“Or, in other words, it’s complicated.” Temuel held out his hand for the cup, which I discovered to my surprise I’d emptied. He screwed it back onto the top of the thermos. Then something clicked for me.
“You were working for Karael all along, weren’t you?”
“Nothing is simple, Bobby.”
“That’s your excuse? Just like me, you did the best you could. Is that what you’re saying?”
“I’m not saying anything.” He stood up. “I’m giving you something.” This time it was an envelope he pulled out of his tattered bag and placed in my hand. “But I can tell you one other thing before I go. You’ve probably noticed that I went out of my way a couple of times to keep information about you from my superiors.” He gave me a tired smile, exactly the kind I’d expect to see on the face of an older lady who’d worked too hard all day for too little thanks. “But it wasn’t to protect you, Bobby. That’s beyond my capabilities.”
I stood up too. “What’s that mean?”
“I can’t protect you from the major players. I don’t have the power. If they want to hurt you, they can hurt you. No, I was just trying to protect your privacy. Sometimes we all need a little privacy.” He nodded, then turned and walked away, shoulders bowed as if the tattered paper shopping bag weighed a hundred pounds.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I shouted, but Temuel only raised a small hand and waved as he disappeared into the Friday afternoon crowd of workers heading for their cars, their homes, their lives. Real lives—the kind I didn’t have.
What the fuck was he talking about? How had he protected my privacy? He’d handed me over to our employers easy as selling a puppy to a medical lab. Yeah, he gave me a car—a fucking ugly car, to boot—but private? Everyone knew about it. Hell, half of Heaven had been following me around as long as I’d been driving it. So what did he keep from them?
It was only then I realized I was still clutching the slightly soiled envelope he’d handed me. It wasn’t that easy to get it open because my fingers were cold, but when I did, all I found was a single piece of paper. The words were printed and the note was unsigned, but I knew who it was from.
• • •
Your first assignment. San Judas main railway station at 6:15 pm. Track Eleven.
• • •
So my new boss—who I now felt pretty sure was also Temuel’s old boss—had a job for me already. I should have been pissed off at being ordered around like a hired driver, and I was, a little bit, but I was also deep into a stretch of several long days of not giving a shit about anything. All I’d been planning to do tonight was get hammered and watch television with the sound off, anyway. Maybe Karael needed someone picked up. Maybe that’s why Heaven let me keep the taxi.
Hurray—my new job! I wondered if I’d have to report my tips.
I was going to do it, of course. If it turned out to be too depressing, I could always throw myself under the San Francisco commuter express, which would at least liven up my weekend.
• • •
It was weird that the note hadn’t told me what to look out for, but I was guessing it was going to be Karael himself, come down to earth for one of his infrequent visits. Maybe he was going to give me a personal briefing on whatever dirty work he wanted me to do. Well, I’d play along, but Karael was going to learn that he didn’t have as much of a hold on me as he thought he did. See, I’d lost pretty much everything, so what did I have left to be scared about? Destruction? Don’t make me laugh. At this point, an eternity of darkness and silence seemed like the nicest, most soothing thing I could imagine. I suppose Hell was the real implied threat, but even that didn’t have the terror for me it once had. Torture no longer seemed like that big a deal. It was only pain, whether for a moment or an eternity. I’ve learned how to do pain.
Because I was looking for a tall, soldierly figure, the type Karael seemed to choose on Earth, I didn’t notice the much smaller passenger at first, even though most of the other arrivals had already swept by me, bumping their luggage along and talking urgently into their phones. Then the announcer’s voice, which had been reading a list of destinations over the public address system, suddenly turned into echoing nonsense in my head as the small, slender woman pulled off her wool hat and her straight, white-gold hair fell down onto her shoulders like a flash of sunlight on snow.
I should have run to her that instant, grabbed her before she disappeared again forever, but it felt too much like a dream—the weird kind where you can’t make your body do what you want. In fact, I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. There she really, truly was, wearing some ridiculously gorgeous skirt and coat combination, looking like a young Ivy League co-ed just arrived for the first time in 1930s Paris, and I could only stare, my heart somersaulting inside my chest.