The Dirty Streets of Heaven

questions I ask I don’t even get answers. Not even, ‘Shut up, I’m not going to tell you’! Maybe you could ask him to talk to me a little more, Bobby.”

I laughed, but now I wasn’t feeling quite so protective toward the kid. “Look, if he answers even half your questions you must keep him talking twenty-four seven. He’s trying to train you, and he’s going to do it his way. If you wind up as even half the advocate Sammariel is, you can be very, very proud of yourself.”

Clarence looked at me carefully. He was very present now, as if the discussion had helped him shake off some of the free-floating joy of Heaven. “He always sticks up for you, too. That Elvis guy said something about you once, nothing too bad even, and I thought Sam was going to hit him in the face.”

Now I did laugh. “Yeah, well, Young Elvis can be a bit of a bitch. And Sam and I go back a long way. Has he told you…?”

“That you guys were in the Counterstrike Force together? Yeah. You were Harpers or something.”

“Harps, youngster. CU Lyrae. That’s not the kind of connection you forget, and those aren’t the kind of friends you turn your back on. I’ll tell you a quick story.” We were approaching the street of shining, cloud-piercing buildings in which the Records Hall was to be found. “I was on point once on a SALT mission in Spanishtown-”

“SALT?”

“Yeah-Secure And Level Target. Which means burn it to the foundations and purify the ground with silver nitrate. We were going into a desanctified church that a group of Deniables had made their base of operations-”

“Deniables?”

“Are you going to let me tell the story, kid? Deniables are demons who’ve supposedly gone rogue. The Opposition is still running them, of course, but they can claim they’re out of control, acting on their own. And these bastards were doing some bad, bad shit in that part of Spanishtown. Three possessions among children in the neighborhood, a rash of suicides, and a big increase in drunken fights, stabbings, family violence, you name it. They were peddling despair, and they were building their clientele by the hour.

“Anyway, I was point and Sam was our top-kick that night when we broke into San Juan Soldado. It was a bad fight, and I don’t really want to talk about it here-doesn’t quite seem right. We had pretty much wrapped it up, though, until we broke into the final chamber, the old sacristy…but they had a Deathwatch hiding there. You probably want to interrupt again. Or do you know what those are?”

Clarence shook his head.

“It’s a demon who looks like a man, but who’s made up of…well, bugs, or things that look like bugs. Beetles usually, which is where the name comes from. We already had the area enclosed with wards, so the Deathwatch wasn’t going anywhere, but he wasn’t going to surrender, either. All the pieces of him flew apart and swarmed me.” I paused for a moment. I hadn’t talked about it in a while, and it still made my stomach clench. “Oh, one thing I forgot to tell you about those bugs-they’re poison. Every single one of them sinks its little jaws into you and the pain is…well, there’s no describing it, really. Time just stops. The pain is everything. All you can do is scream and thrash, if you can even hold it together enough to do that.

“Anyway, do you know what Sam did when the Deathwatch got me? He grabbed me and wrapped his arms around me like a drunken frat boy hug. A bunch of them jumped off me and onto him, and he staggered away, carrying them with him. Then he shouted at the guy with the flamethrower to hose him down.”

“What?” Clarence looked like he was going to be sick. It raised an interesting question-did anyone ever throw up in Heaven? “What do you mean…?”

“You heard me. He told the guy to hose him down with the flamethrower.”

“But how could Sam survive that? How could his body survive it, I mean?”

“It couldn’t, of course. But he was showing me what to do. So when the guy turned the flames on him I jumped into it too, just like it was a warm shower.” I sounded glib, but it all came back as I said it, that endless, shrieking, agonizing moment that in some ways, especially during sleepless nights, had never ended. Time does not always move forward, no matter what they tell you. That kind of agony equals eternity, and that’s how long the memory would be with me. They also say that you never really remember pain. That’s bullshit too.

“You…you burned up?”

It took me a moment to push it away. “Yeah. It was the only way to stop it, the only way to kill those fucking beetles. But it was fairly quick, believe it or not-a few bad seconds, then it was all over.”

Clarence was looking around as though hoping to find evidence somewhere nearby that I was making it all up. “So, w-why didn’t Sam just use the flamethrower on you? Why did he let himself…?”

“Because he was our leader. Nothing like this had happened to us before, and he wanted us to see that Heaven was behind us. Also that he wouldn’t ask anything of us he wouldn’t do to himself. Believe me, everybody remembered. Wherever they are now, they still remember, I promise. I did, too-when I woke up in a new body, that is. Sam and I spent a while in Rebirth-see, it takes some time to get used to the new body when you go out violently like that. And while we were there…well, that’s when we got to be friends.” It was also the time Sam started doggedly drinking his new body to death, but I didn’t tell the kid that. None of his business.

Something about the stark horror on Clarence’s face almost made me sorry to have told him the Deathwatch story. He looked like a whipped puppy. I glanced up and saw the first of the Halls of Records looming in front of us, a literal ivory tower covered with gold and silver scrollwork, a massive needle without a haystack. It was quite interesting on the inside, too, but I wasn’t going to be seeing it, at least not today. If I even stepped inside I might as well have set off an alarm throughout the Celestial City announcing “Bobby Dollar’s back in town.”

“Here’s what I want,” I told him, and recited the list of half a dozen names, beginning with the Rev. Dr. Moses Habari. “Get me whatever you can find on all of them. Everything of interest.”

“But I can’t bring the records out!” he said, horrified. “I’m not even supposed to go back there after being transferred!”

“You still have friends there, I’m sure,” I said. “Sam must have taught you at least a little by now, Junior. Schmooze them up. If you can’t bring me copies just memorize them-remember, you’re an angel. I’ll meet you when you’re done. Go on, get to it, or I’ll have to report you for loitering.”

He stared at me as I turned away. When I looked back he was slouching toward the door of the Records Hall like he’d been called to the principal’s office.

I headed off to the building where the fixers hang out to explain what exactly had made The Compasses fall down go boom.

The Mule looked up from his work, if that was what the ball of cold fire in front of him represented. The face inside the angelic glow changed expression, but it was hard to tell from what to what. Archangels aren’t anywhere near as inhuman as Principalities, but they’re still hard to read. “Angel Doloriel!” His tone was guardedly friendly. “God loves you! What a surprise. Are you well?”

Well, not actually. I’m in love with one of Satan’s little helpers, and one of his poker buddies is trying to kill me-and that’s if I’m lucky. But even in Heaven, that’s a question I seldom answer honestly. “Yes, I am, Archangel Temuel, thank you for asking.”

“The Ministry of Inquiry wants to talk to you. Have you communicated with them?

“Just finished up with them before I came here. But I also wanted to check in with you. Do you have a moment to spare?”

He hesitated an almost undetectable instant, but I was looking for it. “Of course. Let’s go out. Do you like Contemplation Park?”

“Lovely spot.” Does he know how deep I’m in? I wondered. Has he somehow heard about Caz? Why else would he want to take me somewhere beyond the reach of eavesdroppers?

My next thought was even creepier. Does such a place even exist in Heaven?

We made that strange Heavenly transition between inside and outside, the one where you kind of just melt your way through everything in a matter of moments, then walked in a more normal fashion through the crowds to Contemplation Park. (The folks in the City are busier and more focused than the folks in the Fields. They’re also off in their own worlds, but their worlds seem to be part of now. If you stop them and ask them something they’ll even directly answer your question, if they can. In some ways they’re almost like people in an ordinary city, but there’s still that