In fact, I have a soft spot for the arcade in general, and not just because of the coffee joint or the spectacular glass and iron fretwork roof that runs from the station all the way to Broadway. Walking along one of the upper levels beneath the high atrium ceiling, looking down on all the busy shoppers, reminds me in a weird way of Heaven. Of course, unlike the Happy Place, retailers at the Station Arcade have splashed corporate logos on everything, undercutting the Edwardian grace of the building just a teensy bit, but I still enjoyed it. I like people, see, I really do. I just don’t like them much close up.
The coffee shop is called Java Programmers, which I assume is a tech joke of some sort, but I forgive them because of the background music. I ordered regular coffee, a chicken salad sandwich, and some kind of non-potato chips (a mistake I will not make again because they tasted like baked sawdust). The sound system was playing something modern, a saxophone duet. As I chewed and sipped and listened, I tried to get my head around what I was going to do next.
Don’t get me wrong, it was nice to be back to work and living the old, familiar angelic life, something I’d doubted I’d ever see again when I was slogging through Hell. On the other hand, I was only having this brief vacation in normality because I’d managed to avoid being ripped to bits, shot, or stabbed several dozen times by folks who, as far as I knew, still wanted to do all those things to me. Several loose ends from that Hell trip were still dangling, the two most important being Caz, the woman I loved, who remained a prisoner in Hell, and Anaita, the powerful angel who kept trying to off me for no reason I could discover or even guess. You’d have thought I’d stolen her designated space in Heaven’s executive parking lot.
The whole mess seemed to revolve around a bargain that important angel, Anaita (masquerading as angel Kephas) had made with Grand Duke Eligor, the big-name demon who was holding Caz prisoner. Eligor had received an angel feather from Anaita as a symbol of their bargain. Actually, the feather was meant as blackmail fodder, to keep her quiet if their deal to create a home for the Third Way experiment fell apart. The feather had eventually come into my possession (don’t ask unless you’ve got a free week or so) and after I got back from Hell, I’d tried to trade it for Caz’s freedom. Eligor tricked me: he got the feather, but he also hung onto Caz.
But just when I had begun seriously wondering whether angels could commit suicide, my junior angel friend Clarence had asked me what Eligor contributed to the deal as his marker—in other words, what had the demon swapped for the feather? This had never occurred to me, and with this realization I found a reason to go on. See, if I could get my hands on Eligor’s marker—which I was pretty certain had to be one of his horns, since I’d seen that he was growing one back when Eligor accidentally showed me his real (and really scary) face—it would be worth just as much to him as the feather, and I could trade it for Caz and get the swap right this time.
But here was the problem: I didn’t have Eligor’s horn, and I didn’t have the slightest idea where it might be. I was going to have to figure out where Anaita had stashed it, then steal it from her. Oh, and get away with it, without either Anaita or any of my other bosses finding out or, in fact, learning any of the stuff I’d been up to lately.
Easy, right?
As I finished my sandwich and sawdust chips, I watched a bunch of teenagers dicking around in front of a video game shop across the way. Something about the way one of them was spinning around, smacking his friend with a wool scarf, reminded me of Mr. Fox, the dancing maniac I’d met near the beginning of the whole wretched Third Way mess. Foxy had helped me by setting up an auction to sell the feather. I never intended to sell it (at that time I didn’t know I actually had it) but I wanted to find out what it was that everyone thought I had, so I decided to get a bunch of crazy people in to bid on it.
Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
As with so many of your hero’s thrilling adventures, the auction ended with a bunch of nasty folks trying to blow me to pieces with dangerous weapons, and then a giant Babylonian Demon Whatsit—a ghallu—shredding my car into metal scrap with me and Sam inside it. But thinking of Mr. Foxy-Foxy reminded me that he knew the kind of people who were interested in things like a genuine angel’s feather. Which made him a logical candidate to know things about a Grand Duke of Hell’s horn, too. It wasn’t a perfect fit—Fox had only known about the feather because word leaked out that it had been stolen from Eligor—but he might be able to point me to someone who could give me a few leads. I certainly needed somebody’s help, because right now, I was as empty as the giant cardboard bucket whose contents I’d just downed—what passed for a coffee cup these days.
So: not a plan, maybe, but at least I had a caffeine buzz going now, and a next step: ask Foxy.
I was so close to downtown I decided to leave my car in the station lot and just walk. The weather was pretty nice—November in Northern California is like September most other places—and I didn’t mind stretching my legs.
I passed several of the city’s cherry-picker trucks: the public Christmas decorations go up in Jude right after Thanksgiving. You know, in case someone didn’t know it was the holiday shopping season, despite every store in the city draping itself in tinsel and pumping in canned versions of “The Little Drummer Boy” and “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen.”
Downtown Jude has really grown a lot in the last ten years. I admit to being just enough of an old-timer now to find some of it a bit irritating. They were pretty careful not to muck up the historical buildings at the heart of things, but everything else seemed to be painted these toy-town colors that really didn’t work for me—big swathes of yellow and purple and blue, bright colored awnings, lime-green lamp posts. Sometimes it looks like the whole downtown has been turned into a daycare center for overgrown children. I guess that’s progress of a sort. I’m told that in the 70s and 80s it got pretty grim in the old part of town, nothing but bums and liquor stores and strip joints, but I’ve lived downtown since I got out of the Harps, and I’m enough of a romantic to say I might have preferred the old version to living on Sesame Street. And now I hear Jude’s chamber of commerce wants to rename the old part of downtown “the Pioneer District.” Shudder.
As I slowed down near the entrance to Beeger Square, to let a large family cross the intersection in front of me, I noticed that a couple of guys I’d seen earlier were still walking behind me and that they’d stopped too; they were now having a discussion in front of the showroom window of a baby needs store called Small Wonders, pointing at things and animatedly discussing them. The pair looked a bit like Mormon missionaries, young, clean-cut white guys wearing boring suits. I suppose they could have been a couple of young fathers-to-be, but the act seemed a little forced, and something about their suits and black shoes didn’t look quite right. Cops? The po-po did seem younger every year, at least to me. Or were these guys something more sinister?
I was tempted to lure them into an alley and scare the shit out of them, but for all I knew they really were just a couple of kids looking for people who needed the word of Jesus. It would have been bad enough terrorizing innocent Mormons, but if they were undercover cops, things could get complicated. Besides, I had something to do and didn’t want to be observed, so I strolled into Beeger Square, doubled back behind one of the food trucks that swarmed to the square at lunch and dinner times, then slipped into one of the public restroom kiosks. I stayed there, savoring the smells of human failure for several charming minutes, then stepped back outside. No sign of the missionaries, so I headed out to the street corner where I had first successfully summoned Foxy Foxy, everybody’s favorite dancing dealer in stolen supernatural goods.