As she got closer she only got more gorgeous, although now it was plain that the irises of her eyes were the color of…well, of something really red. (I was going to say “blood” but that’s a bit of a cliche already, isn’t it? But that’s certainly what color they were-like big shiny drops of the stuff.)
“What piece of shit are you handing me this time, Grasswax?” she asked as she reached us. She might have had the trace of an older accent, but mostly she sounded like Hayley Mills, one of those sweet, super-plummy upper class English voices-“Oh, Mummy, I’ve lost my pony and I’m ever so weepy about it!” But Grasswax positively flinched when he saw her. Oh, my goodness yes, she was cute, but she was also the scariest thing I’d run into lately, that was for sure. This she-thing was one of the nobility of Hell, after all, so she had to be quite a few notches above me on even the most generous comparative organization chart.
The fixer from our side gave her a little nod of respect. “Countess.”
She barely glanced back at him. “Minister.”
She walked past me as if I wasn’t there and pulled Grasswax aside. From the look on his face I guessed she wasn’t going to be asking him the whereabouts of a good coffee bar. I was still staring as she led him away, so much so that the fixer had to make a throat-clearing noise.
“Angel Doloriel?”
It was hard to turn away from her, even when the competition was an impatient, high-ranking angel. The other side’s fixer was a small, slender woman, but something about the way she walked was mesmerizing. You know the chesty way some small dogs have that shows they think they’re really big dogs? The Countess, whoever and whatever she was, might dress like a schoolgirl but she walked like a very confident stripper.
No, classier. Like a prima ballerina. Yeah, a ballerina from Hell.
“Sorry, Minister. I was…thinking.”
“I Hope I’m Not Taking Too Much Of Your Valuable Time, Doloriel.” Now that I could see him closer up it became clear that the minister wasn’t exactly normal himself. For one thing, unlike most higher angels, the fixer had eyes, but they were almost entirely white except for a pinprick of black at the center, which, with the mask, made it a little hard to tell where he was looking. The other thing was that he had at least six or seven fingers on each white-gloved hand. I couldn’t help wondering what that was about.
“Not at all. Sorry.” I turned my back on the prosecutor and his boss so I could concentrate on my superior. The beautiful little Countess was a demon, I reminded myself-a powerful one. Infernal nobility can appear in any form they choose to, but what was inside that yummy exterior was certain to be extremely ugly. More important, personal experience told me that each and every one of Hell’s residents would tear me into little pieces if I let my guard down. No matter what they looked like, they were all monsters of corruption. “What can I tell you, Minister?”
“Repeat Once More All That Happened From The Moment You Received The Call,” he demanded.
Under his strangely unemotional gaze I went back over everything I could remember. I didn’t say anything about Sam and his trainee, but I did mention I had seen Grasswax just the day before on another case.
“And You Are Certain You Arrived Here Before The Prosecutor Did?” The beak of his mask swung toward me as if sniffing for truthfulness. “Quite Certain?”
“You don’t think Grasswax would actually do something that crazy, do you?” I wondered whether I should mention again how angry the prosecutor had seemed to be about the missing soul. Did Grasswax have a guilty conscience? “How? How would he even have pulled it off?”
“We Couldn’t Say.” The minister made a sniffing, offended noise. “But If You Are Saying He Couldn’t Possibly Have Managed It, Then Your Role In The Matter Becomes Even More Significant.”
Oh, no. No way I was going to get rolled up for something I didn’t do. “I’m not saying any such thing, Minister. I had nothing to do with any of it. I was as surprised as you are.”
“Really? Then You Might Be Aware We Are Not Particularly Surprised.” He shook his snouted head, looking more than ever like a very creepy child’s imaginary friend. “We Feared It Might Come To This.”
I had no idea what he meant and told him so.
“We Have Heard Enough From You To Make Our Report, Angel Doloriel,” was all he said. “You May Go. God Loves You.”
Most of the regulars had drifted into The Compasses by the time I made it back, although there was still no sign of Sam or his sidekick. I had stopped at Morton’s Cafe to eat an early dinner and watch the shadows lengthen across downtown as the sun stopped trying to light the darker bits of San Judas and eventually gave up and went to bed. Now the lights of downtown and the big black empty of the harbor filled the windows.
“Are you all right?” Monica asked when she saw me. “I was worried about you.” She had sobered up a bit, so maybe she was telling the truth. “Was that guy’s soul really missing?”
“You heard about it already?”
“Of course we did. Somebody called in a minister and that never stays secret long. Alice at the office said everybody in the city’s talking about it!” Which meant everybody in the city with wings and horns, anyway, although the Walker suicide was probably going to draw quite a bit of earthly attention as well. “What was it like?”
I shrugged. “What was it like? Like nothing. They pulled out the corpse but the important part of the guy just wasn’t there.”
“Oooh.” Monica made a face of sympathetic worry. “How freaky!”
Jimmy the Table and Sweetheart and some of the others made their way over. The one good side of the whole nasty mess was that for at least one night I didn’t have to pay for my own drinks.
“Do you think the Other Side did it?” Monica asked. “Are they trying to provoke something?”
“Jeez, how should I know? They sent in one of their own fixers quick enough. Female, called the Countess?”
Jimmy the Table let out a shrill laugh. “I heard about that bitch! They said she wore a necklace of human balls to the company Christmas party!”
“I don’t think the Opposition celebrates Christmas, darling,” Sweetheart gently told him.
“Some party, then-don’t matter.” Jimmy was very pleased to be the one with information. “Anyway, if they put her in charge, that’s some serious shit. You ask anyone who knows-the Countess is a definite bad ass. You remember Zippy? Zippoo-whatever?”
“Zepuriel,” said Sweetheart. “The one with the cute bottom?”
“Whatever,” said Jimmy, refusing for once to be baited. “Why do you think he transferred out of the advocates back to Painting Rainbows Division or wherever he wound up? He met up with her on a job, and she ripped him up so bad he never got over it.”
“You are entirely full of shit,” said Walter Sanders from behind his beer in the corner. “Never happened.”
“Screw you, I was there!” said Jimmy, and half a minute later they had forgotten all about the rest of us and were happily insulting each other in a way that an outsider would think was deadly serious. Some combination of the Table, Walter Sanders, and young Elvis were always arguing about some stupid thing, but I didn’t mind. You spend a lot of time passing time when you’ve got Eternity on the clock.
“I’ve heard of her,” Monica told me when the rest of the Whole Sick Choir had finally eddied away. “Jimmy’s right about one thing-everything I’ve heard about that bitch is bad news.”
“Doesn’t matter to me,” I said. Actually, I couldn’t stop thinking about Hell’s fixer and her slender pale legs and fairy-tale face. Even for the most confirmed Hell-haters among us heavenly sorts, it’s hard to remember sometimes what’s underneath the exterior if the bodywork is good enough. Of course, I wasn’t stupid enough to admit that to Monica. “I’m done with it. Filed my report with the minister and another one with the Mule. And if this missing-soul thing is real, it’s way out of our league, anyway. I doubt any of us will ever hear about it again.”