The Dirty Streets of Heaven

like the alleyways and hidden courtyards and whitewashed churches of Old Spanishtown. I like the bars at the waterfront and the stories you hear in them. Jude is like one of those favorite books where you find something new every time you open it.

You can’t get much in the way of radio up on Skyline unless you have satellite. The Pontiac wasn’t finished with its conversion yet so it had nothing but a cassette player, of all things. Still, I wanted music badly, and I’m not much of a singer so I pulled over at a vista point and fumbled around in the box of ancient tapes on the floor of the shotgun side until I found a collection of Gregorian Chants, which made better thinking-music than the impossible alternatives (which ran to the likes of Loggins and Messina and Chicago VI). The tape actually played, which surprised me-it must have been in the car for decades. I wondered if someone had died in this four-wheeled sleigh back in the mid-seventies and just lay there mummifying along with his stupid tapes until Orban cleaned out the interior.

Accompanied now by melodiously moaning monks I reached misty Santa Cruz and turned around, still waiting for everything to fall into place, for the secret design to be revealed at last, or at least for the universe to give me a hint about what to do next, but the universe was keeping its mouth shut. I came back the slow way through the redwoods via Highway 9. By the time I got back to the top of the Woodside Highway I was so deeply tangled in my own thoughts that the sudden ring of my phone almost startled me into driving that big old car off the road. I was hoping it wasn’t a client, and this time I got lucky: it was Fatback, which meant it must be after midnight. I was surprised at how quickly the time had slipped away.

“Mr. D, that you?”

“I’m here, George.” I started down the hill. “Not too many miles away from you, actually.”

“You want to drop by? I think Javier’s got a few beers in the refrigerator.”

I’d had a nice hot shower before I came out and the thought of getting my clothes full of that smell didn’t really appeal. Also, I still needed to think. “I’ve got a client I have to go see, George-sorry. I’ll see you again before too long.”

“Yeah.” He sounded wistful. “It’s always nice to have visitors.” He seemed to hear himself because he quickly became businesslike. “Hey, D, you sure are piling up the work for me here. That Walker guy, Grasswax, Habari, what else? Oh, yeah, the albino, Eligor, your ghallu-thing, your Magian Society, and now you want to know about all these new dead guys?”

I was guessing by “new dead guys” he meant the owners of the latest missing souls. “Well, if you had someone working for you during the daylight hours you wouldn’t find all this crap waiting for you when you come back from Pigtown.” I immediately wished I hadn’t said it-it sounded mean-spirited-but if it bothered George he didn’t give any sign.

“Yeah, right. Like I’m going to hire another full-time employee on the piddly amounts you pay me, Bobby. This is the first work you’ve given me in at least a couple of months. Just because people are trying to kill you, suddenly everything’s rush, rush, rush.”

“Very funny. Look, all those new guys are…” I paused. “I’m having trouble remembering, George-did I tell you what’s going on?”

“What, you mean with more missing souls? Yeah, creepy. And these are them?”

“These are some of them,” I said. Monica had sent me a list that now had five names on it. “Just the locals.”

“Wow.” He seemed genuinely impressed. “So it’s happening other places?”

“As far as I know. But they must be hushing it up-in fact, if you haven’t heard about it, both sides must be hushing it up like crazy.”

“Heard lots of rumors, but the psy-ops boys from both sides are smart, Bobby. They don’t try to deny or undermine a story like that, they just put out even more rumors, more and more until the original signal disappears almost entirely in the noise.”

“Well, I need whatever I can get on the new guys.” I had decided that since it was no longer just Edward Walker’s soul that was missing it might be useful to know what he had in common with the newest cases, if anything. “And did you find any more about the Magians or, what was it, Kephas?”

“Nothing you couldn’t have found out yourself, except that I finally turned up a few obscure references to the Magian Society, mostly in backchat on various religious discussion sites. All I can tell is that they seem to be some kind of charitable organization or something, and they have links to some other groups-Der Dritte Weg out of Berlin and something called the Shaw Philosophical Trust in London and Dublin. But what their connections are and what any of them actually do-boy, that’s a lot harder to tell.”

I sighed. To think I had been face to face with that guy Habari and his hastily-loaded car full of Magian Society memorabilia. “Okay, thanks. Obviously, let me know if you get anything else.”

“Right. Oh, and the word on the street is that not only did your pal Grasswax have a gambling problem, he was in deep and in bad.”

“Why does everybody keep calling that miserable dead demon bastard my pal? Never mind, just go on, explain.”

“Well, you know your other friend…” He had the good grace to pause and start over. “You know that guy Eligor who right now doesn’t like you so much? And you know how he’s a really high muckamuck in Hell? Well, the guy Grasswax owed his gambling debts to? He’s even higher up the ladder than Eligor.”

“Huh?”

“That’s what I’m picking up here and there. Sitri is his name, Prince Sitri. A prince of Hell. Apparently he’s a gambler too, but he doesn’t lose very often, and he really hates it when people welsh on him.”

“Sitri?” I knew the name, of course, but not well. He was big, okay, in more ways than one. My head was swimming. Did this mean there was someone even higher in Hell’s ranks than Eligor who might want my head as well? “I can’t say I remember much about him. What do ‘prince’ and ‘duke’ even mean down there, anyway?” I asked.

“Power, mostly,” Fatback told me. “How much of Hell belongs to them. And they all hate each other.” He chuckled. “They’d probably have beat you guys a long time ago, otherwise.”

“Probably. So the late Grasswax was in hock to this prince? For what? Money? Souls?”

“Don’t know, Mr. D. But the articles I’ve been reading make it look like Sitri isn’t the kind of demon you want to keep waiting too long for his winnings, whatever they are. Eater of the dead, Satan’s foul hunter, scourge of wayward souls, etc.”

“Yeah, like I said, I’ve heard his name. But I don’t know much about him, so dig me up anything that looks useful, will you? Man, this shit just keeps getting deeper.”

I was about to hang up when he said, “Oh, wait, Bobby! One more thing!”

“Yeah?”

“This thing you’re supposed to have? That got stolen from Eligor? Well, I ran across a couple of individuals talking about it. Some bad, weird folk on a private channel in a members-only network you don’t even want to know about, but they’re the real thing, Bobby, trust me. Anyway, they didn’t name it, but one of them called it ‘the Horseman’s little souvenir’ and the other one said, ‘it’s not an ordinary one, remember-it’s a gold one.’ But I’ve never heard even a whisper about it anywhere else, and that comment was between two parties who thought they were having a secure exchange.”

“Let me get this straight. They said, ‘Not an ordinary one-a gold one’?”

“Right.”

“Okay. I’ll think that over too.” But it didn’t exactly make me feel more confident about the phony auction I was facing in twenty-four hours. “Thanks again, George. Take care of yourself.”

“Oh, you know me. Happy as a pig in…well, you know.”

“You and me are both swimming in the same stuff right now, old pal. I’m glad at least one of us is enjoying it.”

I had two advocate clients the next morning, one right after the other, and no sign from Heaven that they were treating me any differently than before I sent them my grumpy little message about how I was quitting. Which just showed me how much I mattered in the halls of Heaven. I suppose the business-as-usual was a good thing since it kept me distracted from the night of open bidding and merriment ahead. I still didn’t have an idea about what I was going to do or how I was going to do it, and I was beginning to wonder if I’d let the Sollyhull Sisters talk