“Shut your damned mouth!” I shouted, putting my head down to my hands, trying to breathe in the odor of the circle of bread, so that I would not pass out.
“None can close the throat of Hell,” he smirked. “Shall we now to business?”
“What do you want, Fixer?”
“To fix you. You are broken. Has not the sacrament of confession rejected you, ignited you, tormented you, and cast you away? No healing comes from there. To the dead, that door is shut; the dead are never risen again.”
“I hate riddles. Speak plain. What do you want from me?”
“Nay. Ask instead what it is you want. We shall be generous to grant. Liberty. Freedom. We are the prince of freethinkers.”
Against my better judgment, I was curious what he had to say. “You are babbling, Fixer! Liberty from what?”
“Prison. You cannot depart this world until your unfinished business here is done.”
“What business?”
He nodded, and the streetlamp across the way came back to life, so that his reflection vanished. “She is drawn back to that house of adultery by memory even as you are. Here she first broke her marriage vow. Here she first betrayed you.”
“You’re lying. She was always faithful.”
“Faithful to her womanhood! My snake coupled with Eve beneath the tree of carnal knowledge, and all her daughters are like unto her. It was with your partner’s love warm pulsing inside her loins when she went back to the office to return the bottles of pills she had stolen. You see, she used them each time to remove the memory, and so remove the guilt. Each time she thought it was a first time, and that made the lure of breaking the law all the more delicious.”
“With Sylvester?”
“He resisted at first, because he loves her — because his lust for her burns deeply. But he is a stupid man, and no match for her wiles.”
I wondered what that hesitation had been, that catch in his throat. Could he even make mistakes? Or was everything an act? But no one outwits the devil’s lies. I was out of my depth.
“I want to go,” I said sullenly. “Now.”
“Your will is of no matter,” he smiled, keeping his lips together. “You cannot depart from this world until your business here is done. Twice you have been told that you are broken. Now a third time we say it. Ask of us what we shall give you?”
It took me a moment to puzzle out that last sentence. “You mean you are going to do me a favor?”
He did not even bother to snort at that. He merely turned the dark eye-shapes of the sunglasses toward me with a sardonic tilt of his head.
“A bargain, then,” I said slowly. “A deal with the devil. Those usually turn out badly.”
“Why have you not passed beyond, then? What keeps you in this sad world of suffering and absurdity? You are chained here. Chained to a few spots. What do they all cry out for you to do, that you may rest?”
Which spots? Here in the pawn shop, because I had been called here. The street outside, while Lorelei was there. The place where I was shot, not long after I was shot. The place where I was buried, quite a long time before I was buried. I shook my head. “I don’t see a pattern.”
“Vengeance.”
“But I forgive her.”
“Her?” And he smiled. “Who speaks of her?”
“You mean Sly? He did not shoot me.”
The hooded figure raised a finger (the hand that was not holding the star) and pointed. I looked, and made the wall transparent. There he was. I could see Sly walking down the street in his long coat. The collar was up and his head was down, as if he were hoping no one would notice his face. He was not wearing that ugly, oversized hat he was so proud of.
The Fixer said, “The gas main under the hotel is leaking, and the basement filled with fumes. There is a tiny stone, a bit of flint, which fell long ago from some ill-fitted crate, and there is the broken blade of a knife which snapped off in a man’s ribs and lodged in the wall there. Look. You can see them.”
And I could. I could see through the street and the basement wall to where he pointed.
“You have the power,” he said. “Ask the flint to raise itself up and strike the steel, and there will be a spark. One spark is all that is needed now.”
“I don’t want to kill him…” I said. But it tasted like a lie in my mouth.
“He will be as you are now. Is that so bad? And do you know, ah, do you know why he is here? He forgot his hat. In the room, in the dark, when he clutched her beautiful and sweating hot body in his arms, when they rutted like swine in heat, grunting, and he poured his sperm into her in a vast, hot, stiff explosion, a joy lost now to you forever. He took no pills. He remembers. And with your death, he is free to enjoy her and use her and spew his seed into her as he might spit into a spittoon on the floor, until the amusement of plundering you of yours is weariness to him. Is this not cause enough to kill? It is justice. The scale is unbalanced. Strike! Strike the flint against the steel! And you shall be whole!”
I pointed my finger. The communion wafer fell to the floor, unnoticed. The cold came into me and gave me strength. In the distance, through the cloudy surface of the street, the tangle of underground plumping and buried cables, through the brick and mortar, I could see it as clearly as the room I was in. Or maybe I was there, in two places at once. Or maybe I was nowhere. What did it matter? But I saw the flint lift up, and poise, trembling.
Hesitation stopped me. “What about the other people in the hotel? Asleep?”
The Fixer stood up. He was very tall, I would guess seven feet, ten inches. “Adulterers and panderers! All are guilty. As prince of this world, we give you permission to execute them. They are Sons of Adam, all guilty, and deserve never again to see the hideous light of the terrible day again. We decree it, and we acknowledge none to be superior to us, to gainsay our word, nor say us nay. Strike!”
The flint was still hanging by itself in a dark basement room, and meanwhile Sly had entered the hotel, crossed the lobby where a single bulb burned, and had jostled awake the sleepy night clerk at the front desk.
I looked back at the Fixer. “What do you get out of this, Fixer?”
“Your prey will escape you, if you hesitate. Strike now!”
The Fixer was right. The night clerk had the hat with other little items in a box labeled “Lost And Found” right there in the cloakroom next to the front desk. Sly, now with his oversized foolish-looking hat on his head, was coming out of the hotel. He was not quite out of blast range. There was only one other figure on the street, a dumpy, slow-moving shape, ambling slowly in the other direction.
“Answer me, Fixer,” I said sharply.
The slow-moving shape must have been a woman, for Sly tipped his hat as she shuffled past. It was dark, and way after midnight, and so she crossed the street to avoid him, coming toward me. Maybe she was outside the blast radius. Maybe not. I had no way to know, but now, right now, was my last opportunity.
It was a little thing. Such a little thing. But I knew him. I knew his every gesture.
They say that not everyone who goes to services gets into heaven. I am pretty sure most don’t. But some do. Some change.
Sly had come across the dead body of a man who had — let’s be frank with this now — I rode him pretty hard some times. Okay, all the time. And maybe he put more money into the till than I did, and maybe I should not have been so skinflinted about spending it. Half was his, wasn’t it?
But he deserved to die, sure. Sort of. Because Rory was mine. Wasn’t she?
We had known each other since altar boys, when he saved me from the Adolfo brothers. Two against one, bigger kids from the bigger school found me in the park and had me pinned against the wall, and all the other kids stood around, watching. Without asking, Sly Steel just jumped in. He evened up the odds.
We grew up together. We fought together, and also fought against foes together. Then he saw me dead, and it finally sunk into his thick skull that he was mortal, too. And mayb
e he listened to Father Pat and blind Father Donovan, or went into the bell tower where Sister Oona’s voice still lingered, and listened to her sing.
I knew him.
He always tipped his hat at the pretty young ladies. Never at the old ones.
“It is supposed to be a bargain, right, Fixer?” I shouted the words.
I could clearly see the flint, hanging in the air, underground, across the street, more than fifty yards away. The whole underground area there was filled up with flammable gas. The hotel would go up like a blockbuster bomb. I wanted to see it, wanted to see the flames. That was the part of the war I missed. I wanted to see it. But something was stopping me. It was as if a bird had pecked up that little wormy thought telling me to hurry. I wanted to hurry — but —
Damn it. I was a gumshoe, even after I had bought the damned farm. I wanted answers. I wanted to live in a world that made sense.
“Talk!” I shouted louder. “So what is your cut?”
“A mote of food for our endless famine,” came the voice like a raft of violins.
“What the hell does that mean? What do you gain if I kill him?”
“The increase of our kingdom! If he dies now, Hell eats one more soul.”
You know, if the Fixer had just said it to me straight, one right guy to another, if you kill him now you go to eternal torture, but then again so does he, and he never touches your girl again, had he said that, I would have said some unprintable four-letter Anglo-Saxon word, and struck with the flint, and let that have been the last thing I ever said, before screaming and screaming for eternity.
I would have done it. I would have. I was that close.
Because it seemed worth it to me, see? It was all worth the price.
But no, the Fixer had to play it like a smart-aleck. His kind always does. He wanted me to shed my partner’s blood so that I would break one of those Commandments (I forget which one. The Fifth? Or is that the one against self-incrimination?) and ruin my conscience and give away my soul for free, and get nothing in return but pain. Some bargain.
One more soul into Hell meant me, not Sly. Not two souls. Sly had changed.
It was clear. Now he was the kind of guy who tipped his ugly hat to ugly old broads, even the kind who crossed the street to avoid him. Maybe he would be a regular churchgoing, prayer-saying old stiff, rotary club, all that jazz. Maybe he would be a force for good. Maybe that is what the Fixer did not want.
And maybe, if he played by the Marquis of Queensbury rules and not like an old back alley brawler like me, a dimwitted but goodhearted psychic private eye like Sly would get more help from stronger powers than I could call. There was a part of the twilight world loyal to the coming dawn, after all. Twilight works both ways.
And maybe — now I was getting a glimpse of the future — maybe Old Sly was sly enough to fix the Fixer.
Not fix him for good and all. No human could do that. But get him out of a few lives? Drive him out of a neighborhood? Stranger things had happened.
I stopped pointing at the flint, and instead put my hand on the only thing in the room I knew I could pick up, the only thing that might hurt him&mdashthe plate of communion wafers. I threw the whole plateful in a spray of white bread right at him.
It did nothing. I could feel the bread go cold as it all flew fluttering through the air. That was not something he was doing. I had done it. You cannot toss the precious body of Christ at someone like it was a grenade. I had desecrated the host. The little pure white disks of bread, like a handful of spinning coins, bounced off the Fixer’s brown robe, and fell to the newspaper and butcher paper on the dirty floor.
“You think you can escape?” He drew off his sunglasses and smiled.
It was the most horrible sight, that empty smile, what he had instead of eyes, that face. It was pure misery, superhuman hate and emptiness and loathing. I would have eaten a whole bottle of those damned elf pills to get that sight out of my eyes, out of my brain, out of my soul.
“You think you can reform?” he said gently. “Go, then! For a year, for a hundred years, for a thousand! Your craving to kill him, he who has taken everything from you, will not diminish. You are no longer trapped in time. Let a million years of your time pass, and come back here, to this moment, now. We will preserve this moment for your use. We will place a charmed circle around it. The fire will be waiting. Look.”
A freak gust of wind snatched Sylvester’s hat off his head. With a curse, he trotted after it, then ran, then sprinted, as the hat jumped and hopped and soared just out of his reach. The hat landed just on the doorstep of the hotel. Sylvester trotted up the stairs….
He was right over the buried gasoline tank the hotel used for a small diesel generator in the basement. That tank would also go up like a bomb if the basement full of flammable fumes went up.
I stepped into the timelessness. The scene grew misty, like a pane of rippling glass were now in the way. The voice of the Fixer, more beautiful than the voice of any woman, was dim, but clear.
“No ghost can depart to his judgment when undone tasks, unsated passions, unfulfilled desires, chain him to the world where we are prince and primate. Flee as far as you can. The light will not receive you. There is no place, no time, no where to go but back to this place, now.”
I shouted back at him, “You are damned wrong, Fixer! And damned! I can turn over a new leaf—”
“Mortal men can do that. For you, it is too late. Too late to confess, too late to repent, too late to start a new life. You have no life in you.”
I dove straight down to get away from him.
His voice followed me, silvery, fair words, like music. And that face. I could still see it inside my head, growing larger and clearing in my imagination. Soon I would lose the ability to envision or see any other thing, and my face would look like that face, too. The pain of having all your skin burned away was nothing compared to that face. Those eyes.
He took so much simple, idiotic, empty and innocent joy at my misery, such childlike joy, I had to feel joy at my misery too, and so I hungered for misery and despair to eat me into an ever smaller burnt-out nub, a shadow that shrank and shrank, encountering ever more pain as it crushed itself into ever smaller volumes, smaller than a speck, smaller than a microbe, smaller than an atom. And still I would consume myself and dwindle in misery — but never find an end, never enter the peace of oblivion.
As I swam, I could feel the tugging, towing, hauling, heaving, wrenching sensation trying ever to pull me back, back to the moment where Sly waited for me to kill him. Back toward that face.
That was just once glance in a dim light, from across the room, while his features were overshadowed by a hood. What if I saw him clearly, brightly, in his throne room of fire?
I fled.
The moaning and sobbing I heard was my own voice.
That scared me all the more. Because it sounded like something from a cheap horror movie, or even a comedy, one where Abbott and Costello meet a ghost. All those moans you hear about, which the straight man thinks is the wind, and the clown thinks is the dead walking the earth? I now knew what caused those moans.
And I could not make myself stop. I could not remember or imagine what silence would sound like.
The first thing I did was look for that tunnel of light I had turned my back on during the moment I was shot. If only I had not looked back, looked down at where Lorelei was hugging my corpse, crying out with grief and regret at what she had done—If I had not looked back, surely I would have just soared up.
But that was the funny thing. No direction here in this sea was up. If I went what I thought was upward, the images of the mortal time grew strong and clear, and I was at the surface again. Where was that light? How had I lost it?
Next I tried to find Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. If I could get back into the confessional booth, even if the angel burned me, I could confess, and get clean, and somehow the priest would show me the tunnel of light…
There! An image
of the Cathedral when she was young, in a city before the electric light cracked the night, and her spires reached to the stars. I raced for the vision.
And bounced off, thrown back by some unseen force. I tried again and again. It was like trying to push the south ends of two bar magnets together, if the magnets just got stronger the more you pushed. I was a bird battering myself against a soft and sticky windowpane. It was like wrestling in quicksand. It was like trying to break a bad habit: you think that maybe this time you can resist, and then…nope. It was like trying to cure sin.
Over and over again, I dove down, sometimes really deep, and came up in another place. I tried to find some childhood memory that could carry me back into the past, or some vision of the future. I tried to find my honeymoon, the first man I killed in combat, my graduation, my confirmation, my first paycheck for delivering papers when I was a kid, and my brother Al clapped me on the back and called me a man. There are some days you just don’t forget.
But somehow, I had forgotten them. I tried to see the faces of people I knew, someone else to whom to say a fare-thee-well, someone else I hated and wanted to haunt. Anything. Any excuse. Any face.
The only face I saw was the face of misery. His face.
I could not break the surface. The Fixer had fixed it. There was no entry into the world of living, except where and when he wanted me.
In desperation, I turned and dove as deep as I could, to the point where I was past the prophets and the madness, past the eternal visions of myth.
I do not know how long I was there, moaning, and seeing a face inside my mind. I said a prayer. I could only mouth and gasp the words, because the moaning was controlling my lips and lungs.
No, not the Paternoster. Not the Memorare. It was impromptu, and it went like this: Jeezus! Jesus, save me! Save my damned soul, damn it! Fer chrissake, get me out of this, Christ!
Surely the worst prayer ever. But I meant every word.
I saw a glint of light and swam toward it.