Then it hit me. Donkey. Mule. Archangel Temuel, my supervisor.
Two more pictures were at the bottom of the handbill, a clock out of a child’s picture book and a cartoon of a garden bench. That seemed another long coincidence, since I’d met the archangel on a bench in Beeger Square a few times in the past. And if it wasn’t a coincidence, I was being ordered to a meeting.
I trotted over to the square but saw no sign of the fragrant old man on any of the benches. Could it really have been Temuel? Our archangel liked disguises, especially when he was being secretive, and it was entirely possible he knew that everyone in my department called him “The Mule.” Also, “White House” wasn’t that different from “the Big House” and other things we angelic grunts called Heaven. But did I need a message to tell me people in Heaven were out to get me? Shit, I knew that already. Temuel knew that I knew that already. So either it was what I’d thought in the first place, a slightly coincidental piece of mail from Farthest Crazyland, or my boss had come all the way to Earth to meet me so he could warn me I was in even deeper trouble than I thought I was. And I’d missed the meeting.
I looked at the piece of paper again and this time I noticed that the hands on the clock were pointing to eleven. I checked the time on my phone. Nine-forty. No wonder there was no sign of Temuel—I still had almost an hour and a half to wait. So apparently I was going to the Compasses after all, because I sure as hell wasn’t going to sit in windy Beeger Square for all that time. Besides, I wasn’t going there to drink, just to kill time until I could find out if this was a real communication, so it didn’t really count.
How often have you held a piece of paper in your hand and prayed that it belonged to a real drunk smelling of real, rank sweat and old aftershave instead of being a message from an archangel?
First time for me.
• • •
When I got to the Compasses, the place was all but empty—just a couple of angels I didn’t know too well, French Didi and another guy, sitting in one of the booths emptying a bottle of wine between them like it was ten in the evening instead of ten in the morning. They only looked up long enough to nod, then went back to arguing about Formula One racing. Like I said, I didn’t know them, and Formula One isn’t really my thing, so I almost walked out again. I bellied up to the bar instead and asked bartender Chico to slide me a beer.
Yes, I know I said I was cutting back. See, vodka, that’s drinking. Beer—well, beer is just getting the inside of your mouth wet.
Anyway, as Chico pushed the bottle of Negra Modelo over to me, he said, “Looks like all you special cases are coming home to roost today.”
“Who else beside me?”
“What am I, your secretary? Go look in the back room.”
I figured it must be Sam, who had already made one dangerous (and as far as I could tell, completely pointless) return to the bar, where he’d been treated like a returning war hero by the rest of the Whole Sick Choir, but what he was doing in here at this hour was beyond me. The idea made me very nervous, and it wasn’t because it was so early. Because of his known involvement in the Third Way, Sam was seriously angelica non grata with our bosses in Heaven.
The back room at the Compasses is actually a little alcove on the way to the restrooms—what the Brits call a “snug.” I pushed aside the curtain and found Walter Sanders huddled over a mug of beer.
Yes, that Walter Sanders: the angel who had been stabbed by a crazy dead guy who I’d assumed was trying to stab me, just when Walter was about to tell me something important. (I now felt pretty sure Walter himself had been the target, to shut him up.) Then he had disappeared completely. The last time I’d seen Walter he’d been in Hell wearing a demon-body, working on a slave ship. The last thing he’d done had been to point a finger at Anaita, one of my most powerful angelic superiors, as the person behind the Third Way (Heaven’s currently Most Wanted rebels) and much of the rest of my recent troubles. And Hell was where I’d left Walter Sanders, too, which meant I was more than a wee bit surprised to see him sitting there in an overcoat, nursing a drink like any other Compasses regular.
“Walter!” I threw myself onto the bench across from him. “What the hell—pardon the expression—are you doing here?”
His first response had been a flinch, but when he saw it was me, he smiled. It was a tired sort of smile. “Hey, Bobby. Good to see you. I’m back.”
“Fuck, yeah! I noticed. But how? When? What happened?”
“Still not quite sure. Last I remember, you and I were walking down the street, then . . . nothing. When I got rebodied, I found out I’d been gone for weeks! Pretty strange. A little hard to . . . to get up to speed again.” He laughed unconvincingly and sipped his beer. “But it’s nice to see a familiar face.”
All the questions about to pour out of me suddenly clogged my brain like a dammed-up stream. It took me a couple of seconds to work through what he’d just said. “Hang on. You don’t remember anything? Since you were stabbed?”
He shook his head. “Not a thing. I hardly remember the night it happened, either. I just remember you were there. I hope it wasn’t too tough on you, Bobby. I know you tried to get me help.”
I could only sit, my beer untasted, and stare at him. What was going on? Had Walter been mind-wiped after being sprung from Hell? Or was he just being cagey—too smart to start blabbing in an angel bar about the kind of things that had really happened? I took a deep breath, tried to keep my hands from shaking, and made appropriate small talk while we drank our beers, although I didn’t want mine now at all. When I’d drunk about half, I put it down and announced that I had to go. I asked him if he was walking and if he wanted company, but Walter only shook his head again in that sort of dazed way.
“No,” he said. “No. I’ll be honest, Bobby. It’s my first day back and this is about all the talking I can handle today—I saw a couple of the gang already, earlier. I’m . . . I don’t know . . . tired. Really tired. I’m just going to finish this, then I’ll call a cab.”
I was feeling a little desperate. “Okay. But you’re sure there isn’t anything you want to talk to me about? Doesn’t have to be tonight. Any time is fine. Because you wanted to talk to me that night. You had something to tell me.”
He gave me a strange look. “There is one thing, actually. Does this mean anything?” He pulled out his wallet, fumbled for a moment, then produced a piece of folded paper. It was a leaf from an executive calendar, one of the note pages without a date, and it said, “Talk to D about A -?s”
My pulse sped a bit. “Is this your handwriting?”
“Yeah. But it’s from before the stabbing, and I don’t remember what it’s about. I just realized “D” might be you. Ring any bells?”
“Could be.” Damn straight. Talk to Dollar about Anaita asking questions, that was what it meant. “Appreciate it, Walter. I’ll give it some thought. Feel better.”
When I returned to the bar, Chico looked at the half bottle I put on the counter. “Sick?”
“A little,” I said. “Unsettled” would have been a better word. Because I knew that was all I was going to get from Walter Sanders. Whatever had made him want to talk to me on that fatal night was gone, burned out of him by the machineries of Heaven. But thanks to the note Walter had made to himself before he was taken off the board, I wasn’t going to waste any more time wondering whether I was right about that supreme bitch-angel Anaita. From now on, as far as I was concerned, she absolutely was out to get me.
Which still left me with the unpleasant fact that somebody much more powerful than me wanted me silenced, if not utterly obliterated.
As I came out of the Compasses, wishing I still smoked, something scuttled under a car at the edge of my sight. Normally I wouldn’t have paid any attention, but Walter’s return—or at least, the return of part of Walter, just not the part I needed—had me more than a little on edge, so I looked carefully. After all, if knife-wielding Smyler had come back and decided I was Bobby Bad Angel again, I didn’t want to be caught by surprise. From the split-second view I had before it vanished down a storm drain, whatever it was didn’t look much bigger than a cat, but cats didn’t run like that, legs splayed out, bellies almost on the ground.