Chapter 1
“A Tall Order”
We moved up the avenue of ash and rubble with the sounds of bombs exploding at our backs. Neither of us was frightened, nor were we concerned. We were professionals, keeping a calm demeanor in all situations, and we trusted our coworkers to handle the backlash. Our mission lay close to our feet and it was just a matter of time before we fulfilled it.
Buddy checked his watch.
“It’s just after two,” he said.
“What time are we supposed to intervene?” I asked.
“I think it’s up to our discretion, but the deadline is three.”
I shook my head. The dark cloth around my temples bounced around, and for a moment the earth took on a shadow.
“So glad we got the green light. I’ve been needing a vacation.”
Wafts of smoke passed us as we approached the stone archway leading into the bunker. Piles of rubble crushed under our feet as he ducked to avoid hitting our heads on the door. And then we held our breath as we entered the concrete hallway, staring down a path of amber lights into a stairwell descending into the subterranean realm of this ramshackle city.
“And you’re sure it’s today?” I asked.
Buddy removed a calendar from inside his cloak. He carried everything in that thing; a couple years ago I caught him smuggling a bottle of Coca-Cola back to the operations center, just because he wanted to know what it tasted like. He told me that some people used it to clean rust off the connectors to their car batteries. I thought he was trying to pull a fast one on me. Then he told me it tasted sweet, a bit like ambrosia, but less deadly to humans. Anyway, he checked the calendar.
“Well, his expiration date is set for nineteen sixty-three, but I guess the Boss has had enough of his wicked games, so...” Buddy removed a pencil from his cloak and scratched out the date. He wrote today’s date in its place. “There’s one every generation, eh?”
“And to think we’ll have more of them someday.”
“At least tomorrow we can resume our game of Black Jack. What has it been, forty-five years?”
I started moving down the amber-lit hallway.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” I said. “Gosh, I hope this guy doesn’t give us a fight. I’m tired of dealing with him.”
We reached the stairs. Buddy stopped at the edge.
“Yeah, about that. I think I’m gonna let you be the one to go in there. That dragon smell really gets to me.”
“You’re gonna send me in there alone?” I clenched the inner hem along my cloak. The thought of handling this mark on my own unnerved me. I was never good at negotiations, and I knew this guy would try to enter into one. “But you’re my voice of reason.”
Buddy scuffed his bony foot across the floor.
“I have confidence that you’ll get the job done. Besides, someone needs to stay behind to catch all the stragglers. I think he gave everyone a poison capsule.”
I sighed. “Even among his own people he gives us too much to do. We should’ve dropped his butt in Rome.”
“We were busy then, too. The humans don’t know when to stop.”
“Don’t remind me. I think I still had skin back then.” I took a breath. It smelled like the fires below had already started. “Well, here I go.”
Buddy patted my shoulder as I descended the stairs into the bunker. His touch was cold, and for some reason it wasn’t pleasant. But I shook it from my mind and continued on, continued down into that hall of clients.
Soldiers in dark uniforms and red insignia patches passed through me as I moved down the hall, oblivious even to my own cold touch. They carried on, some in celebration, others with despair wearing lines down their faces. And most of them avoided the room in the back where the majority of the smoke and the silence came from.
As I ventured closer to the back room, passing dining rooms, wine cellars, and unused bathrooms, I found another calendar on the wall—this one full of little red X’s. The final date of the month, the 30th, was the only one left unchecked. And I was sure that no one in the bunker could fully comprehend how none of them would be crossing out that final box.
“Hey,” said Buddy, from a place above the underground chaos, “I just got news that Henry finally completed the Mussolini contract a couple of days ago.”
“Really?” I had to shout because I wasn’t sure if he could hear me above the clatter of “Mein Gott” ringing in my ears. “How did it go?”
“Someone threw his body in a gutter. Kinda sad, actually.”
“Makes you wonder what the Allies are gonna do tomorrow, doesn’t it, with no one left to fight?”
“They can do what they want. I want to finish that game of Black Jack.”
A secretary ran through my cloak and distracted me. By the time she was gone, I had already forgotten to respond to Buddy. And judging by his silence, it seemed he didn’t care.
A few minutes later, I found the mark’s office, and the mark sitting in a chair staring at a pistol in his hand. His skinny little mustache was quivering and a woman with dark, curly hair was leaning over his shoulder whispering something in his ear. It sounded like “Ich bin mit Ihnen zum Ende,” which meant “I am with you to the end.” For a moment it surprised me.
I checked my watch. It was after two-thirty.
When he looked up, his eyes bulged with terror. Then he aimed the weapon at me. The conviction in his face caused me to shake my head in despair. Judging by the frantic words coming from his mouth, it seemed he actually thought he could shoot me with his manmade weapon.
“I will die when I command it,” he said, in his native tongue. “Ich werde sterben, wenn ich ihm befehle.”
I raised my palms and backed away a few inches. I didn’t usually carry the scythe with me unless I was clearing a battlefield or some other catastrophe, so I didn’t worry about dropping it when I made my subtle retreat.
“Take your time,” I said. “You’ve got about twenty minutes before I have to rush you.”
The mark pounded his empty fist against his desk. Documents regarding his will skipped along the surface. The woman had tears in her eyes. She looked toward the door, but couldn’t see me.
“There’s no one there,” she said, under her sobbing breath.
“He’s there,” said the mark. “The Angel of Death coming to take me away. But you will not rush me.” He pointed his pistol at me again. I sighed.
“I’m not rushing you. Not yet. Just—” I reached in my cloak and removed a sheet of paper covered in blood. It was still wet and I dripped a little onto the floor. “Here, take a look. It says you have until three o’clock.”
I tiptoed toward the desk, doing my best not to set the man off. In his state of mind it seemed he would try to shoot me anyway. And with my luck, he’d do it just as one of his lieutenants passed by the doorway, and that guy would get shot in the head, and then I’d have to call Buddy down into the bunker to take care of it because I was too busy waiting to deal with the little jittery dictator. So I kept my open palm raised as I approached and breathed a sigh of relief when I reached the desk and he didn’t pull the trigger. I set the contract onto the desk and pointed to the April 30, 1945, before 3:00pm deadline. The year 1963 was crossed out just above it.
“See? You still have a few minutes. Relax. What’s your girlfriend’s name?”
The mark pounded his fist again and shot me anyway. The bullet passed right through my cloak and out the door. I quickly craned my neck to see if anyone else was hit. Then I wiped my brow in relief when I discovered the bullet had only hit a wall. I looked back at him.
“So, what is it? Gloria? Jenny? Guys today seem to be into those girls named Betty, right? Your girlfriend named Betty?”
“Wie Sie herausordern, mich zu beleidigen? Ich bin der Führer.”
“Who’s insulting you, you little mongrel?” I asked. “I know who you are. I don’t know who she is.”
I looked over to the woman, who was now sobbing against the mar
k’s cheek. She kept shaking her head, wiping her nose across his ear. It seemed she was upset over his sudden burst of insanity, or so she called it. I knew it was because she couldn’t see me.
“Why should I tell you?” he asked. “You’re supposed to know everyone, like that, what’s his name, Santa Klaus?”
“Claus, like the thing that cats have. Yeah, I know him, and he doesn’t know everyone, either. Don’t worry about Santa Claus. He’s off duty right now.”
“I shall not tell you her name.”
I slid the contract up to his fingers and highlighted the section about known cohorts and victims caught in the collateral damage.
“She on this list?” I asked.
The mark, while foolishly keeping his pistol trained on me—I couldn’t believe he was still doing that; he’d already shot me and it didn’t do him any good—glanced at the document. When he reached the end, he looked up.
“Nein.”
I reached out with my bony fingers and nudged the sheet of paper back my way. Once it was out of his hands, I clutched it for myself. And it was still bloody.
“Good, so tell me her name.”
The mark shook his head and smiled.
“I will never betray that information to you.”
And then he did something I wasn’t ready for. He flicked his wrist around like a star pitcher and pulled the trigger on his pistol. The barrel was aimed at his temple. And then his other temple disappeared as it blew open. Then he fell face first onto the desktop, smashing his nose into the surface. And the woman, who just seconds before had stepped away from his cheek to catch her breath, began to wail. And then she did something I really didn’t expect.
She removed a capsule from her pocket and ate it. And then she choked. And then, if my ears didn’t deceive me, I listened to her heartbeat stop. Less than a second after that, she fell to the floor.
I cried out as she landed onto the concrete surface. Her name wasn’t on the contract. Only his and a few lieutenants. I dropped the contract to the floor and raced to her side. And I pressed my ear to her chest to see if what she had done was true. And then I cried out to Buddy when I realized the truth.
“Wake up,” I said, smacking her across the cheeks. “I don’t know who you are, but it’s not your time. Wake up.”
I stared at the mark. His lifeless body stared back. A puddle of blood dripped off the desk and ran toward my feet. And to think I still had to transport him to the other side. I looked at the woman again. She didn’t wake up. And for a moment I couldn’t figure out why it upset me.
“I’ll take you to see Fred later if you need to,” said Buddy, after we searched the streets of Berlin for dying soldiers, checking off names from the master list. “He specializes in suicides.”
“I don’t get it,” I said, shaking my head. “What advantage does it give her? She had time, I’m sure of it.”
“Not my area of judgment. Look, don’t let it get to you. People jump the line, for whatever reason, all the time. Talk to Fred about it. He’s the one who usually deals with that.”
“Fine. Doesn’t make sense, though.”
“I doubt it makes sense to Fred, either. But still, he’s the experienced one.”
***
The next day, I encountered Fred in his office. He was one of those reapers who didn’t wear the cloak unless he had to, gravitating instead toward Hawaiian shirts because they were more comfortable. He donned the cloak only when he was traveling to colder climates.
I spent several minutes in his chair trying to sort out the nature of suicide. In the thousands of years I’ve been doing this, I had to deal with only wars and catastrophes. I never bothered with gangs, shipwrecks, or anything of that nature. And I certainly didn’t touch the suicides. If not for my witness to one yesterday, I would’ve forgotten that it existed.
“It sounds to me like a warped sense of devotion,” said Fred. “Like she would be nothing without him.”
“How could someone be nothing without another?” I asked. “That’s crazy.”
“Human psychologists would call it ‘love,’ but yeah, it’s really just plain old insanity. It happens a lot, unfortunately. It’s the worst kind of application for the eternal bus ticket. I hate dealing with it, to tell you the truth. The first time I was commissioned to handle one, I wanted to puke. It was a beautiful Egyptian girl who willingly ate a plateful of scorpions because she the king passed on her when he handpicked his harem. I couldn’t believe she’d do such a thing, but then the Boss reminded me that evil will cause even the wise to do stupid things. My job was to clean up the mess. Not to understand it.”
I folded my fingers over my lap. His words weren’t all that comforting. But then, guys in my business had a reputation for that, so I had to suck it up. More jobs were coming and I had to be emotionally stable to take them. That meant chucking any sense of feeling out the door. And who was I to start feeling anyway? I’d taken millions across the Great Divide during my thousands of years at this job, and not one of them bothered me. At least, not so much. I mean, it was a shame they had to die at all. But I was a professional. I didn’t let my sense of compassion get in the way of my sense of duty. Even if I wanted to lament the loss of some, I had to keep it to myself. It was the Boss’s job to decide what happened next. Not mine. I just had to bring them to the gate, and then go back for the next in line. I was the equivalent of a taxicab driver. And I didn’t know of any cab driver that cried over taking his passengers to the next hotel. I was probably just stressed over all the work that the war had given me.
I left Fred’s metallic office in a better mood.
###
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