The Dirty Streets of Heaven: Volume One of Bobby Dollar (29 page)

Orban’s factory was out at the end of Pier 22—one of the Salt Piers. Thirty or forty years ago the southern end of the port of San Judas was owned by the Leslie Salt Company. They harvested salt from the bay water and piled it into mountains to dry, a range of miniature Alps looming over the not-quite-Tyrolean splendors of Belle Haven and Ravenswood. The salt-harvesting people changed to a different technique in the nineties that used less space, so they sold off a bunch of the land at the southernmost end. Most of it became a nature preserve, but some of the piers where they used to load the salt onto container ships were repurposed into shops and apartments. The dingiest of them at one end were sold as live/work spaces. A lot of artists got in with grants from the city, but a few small manufacturers like Orban got in too. He wanted somewhere he could make noise at any hour of the day or night.

He made a lot of it, too. Today I could hear his machinery and the clangs of hammers all the way out at the entrance to the cracked asphalt expanse of the parking lot, which was mostly full this time of the day, but would be nearly as empty as the Gobi desert by midnight. Orban had created quite a thriving little concern here at the end of Pier 22, a collection of long, low buildings full of metal-grinding and bending and riveting machinery and God knew what else, manned largely by black and Hispanic workers. At the near end stood another set of benches set up for handwork, where lots of white guys with beards, who looked like they should be out with the anti-government militia on weekends, sat fiddling with various bits of guns—measuring, filing,
polishing. Out of sight at the far end was the room full of sand-filled buckets that Orban used as a firing range. Beyond that, outside, was what the gunsmith called his veranda, a metal platform that stuck out over the water. He kept a couple of chairs out there so he could sit and look across the bay all the way to the Newark Ferry Port, atmosphere permitting.

The master gunmaker himself had a short grizzled beard and hair that grew naturally in a thick monk’s tonsure. Just looking at him you’d guess a fit sixty-five years old, but according to him, he’d been around about five centuries longer than that. Orban got on the wrong side of Heaven back in the fifteenth century because of something that happened at the siege of Constantinople, (or so he’d told me one night over a couple of glasses of strong red wine, while we waited for one of his assistants to finishing customizing some weaponry for me). Since Heaven would never take him back, he said, and he didn’t want to go to Hell, he had simply decided not to die.

Don’t bother to ask—I’m just telling you what he told me.

Orban had his back to me but looked up as I reached the makeshift counter, as though he had actually heard me over the clanging, slamming din. He was wearing some special eyepieces that made him look like a robot crab. He slid them back onto his forehead and stood up, which didn’t take long. He’s not very tall.

“What do you want, Dollar? Make it fast—I have real customers to take care of, you know.”

“Yeah, nice to see you too. I need some help and advice. Oh, and bullets. Silver bullets.” I told him what was after me and everything I knew about it, but he shook his head the whole time I was talking like I was saying it all wrong. “What?” I asked. “Silver no good against one of those?”

“Only if it’s special.”

“Special how? Blessed by a priest?”

He made a face like he’d bitten a lemon. “Priests no good. This thing chasing you is older than the Jews, let alone the bloody Christians. Come.”

I kept asking him questions as he led me across the fluorescent-lit expanse of the long, extremely noisy room, but he couldn’t define “special”, except that he couldn’t supply it. That gave me a chill, and I hadn’t been particulary warm before: Orban’s place doesn’t have a
secondary ceiling beneath the roof, just a fretwork of beams, so it was cold in there most of the year. Maybe that’s why the gunsmith still looked pretty good for five hundred plus.

He stopped to discuss my order with a swarthy guy in an apron. “How much you want?” Orban asked me. “Going to cost ten dollars per piece just for the silver—it’s high now. Give you a hundred at fifteen a round complete—that’s a good price for custom work.”

Man, I thought, saving my life was going to be expensive, and Heaven didn’t pay us much. “Then give me a hundred of ’em, I guess. I don’t know how long this is going to go on.” Orban always treated me fairly, but I still wasn’t thrilled. The new ammunition was going to blow a large wad of my emergency funds, and I was pretty sure my bosses weren’t going to expense me for the extra motels and silver monster-killers.

Once Orban finished going over the technical specs with his assistant he led me out to his rusty veranda. It was mid-afternoon, and the water was full of working vessels, most of them small since we were a good distance south of the working part of the port, and most of what surrounded us was shallow water and estuaries. “Sit,” he said, pointing to one of the rickety chairs and lifting a bottle of wine off the huge wooden wire spool he used for a table. “You want some Bull’s Blood?”

I usually liked the stuff just fine, but not today. In fact, just the thought after the previous night’s binge made something bulge painfully behind my eyeballs. “No, thanks. But don’t let me stop you.”

He shrugged and poured himself a full tumbler. “So you have got yourself in some serious shit,” he said after he’d taken a swallow. “That’s no good, that horned fellow. I knew a man at Adrianople who saw one take a bad priest. Not a pretty sight. The man who saw it, his hair turned white all over.”

“Do you know anything about it that might help me?”

Orban ran his fingers through his beard. “The horns say it is from India or Mesopotamia—they loved their bulls and buffalo, those old river people, and that’s the kind of dark spirits they call up. But I heard the Egyptians knew this
ghallu
bastard and thought it was their god Set. They couldn’t kill it either.” He frowned. “Tell you truth, Dollar, I don’t think I ever heard about someone killing one.”

“Thanks. You’re really cheering me up,” I said. “Did you bring me back here just for a pep talk, or did you have some other help to offer?
You said the silver bullets needed to be special if there’s going to be any chance—special, but not blessed. Special how?”

“Don’t know.” He shrugged again and took a long swallow of the Egri. “Just know what I read in manuals.” I should mention that manuals of the sort Orban referred to are pretty obscure, since as far as I know, things like where to shoot a chimaera and the best ammunition to use on various sorts of undead don’t make it into the standard Smith & Wesson user’s guides. “But I’ll do some thinking, and I’ll tell you if I come up with anything.”

“Great. Okay, here’s a weird one. Anything to be done when facing off against a Grand Duke of Hell?”

“Say your prayers.” He snorted. “You sure don’t kill one of those—not with any weapon
I
work on, anyway. Just make them angry.” Orban took a long drink. “Do you want to wait for your bullets? It will take most of the day.”

Disappointed, I got up. I hadn’t really counted on Orban having anything useful in the way of advice, but I had still hoped. “Nah. Can’t wait. Too many irons in the fire.” I thought about where I was. “Not literally, of course. I mean I’ve got a lot of things to do.”

He wiped his lip with the back of his hand and gave me a dry look. “I understand metaphor, Dollar.”

“Sorry.” Sometimes it’s hard to forget that even the really old ones have been living in the present as long as the rest of us have, it’s just a smaller percentage of their total experience. I shook his hand, which was as rough as his voice. “Do you want me to give you a deposit?”

He made a face. “Normally, I say no. You are good for the money. But with a
ghallu
after you…?” He nodded. “Yeah, give me check for half when we go back inside.” But he still wore an odd expression, and it took him a moment to speak again. “I thought you were out of this kind of business, Dollar. It’s been a long time since those days. I thought you were advocate now—nice safe job. Why is something like this after you?”

“Somebody said something that wasn’t true to somebody who isn’t nice. That’s basically it.”

“Keep your eyes open, Dollar,” Orban called after me as I left. “You always were the kind of stupid bastard that attracted trouble.” But he said it in a nice way.

All right, all right, I admit I haven’t been completely honest about everything. I haven’t lied—I’m an angel, remember?—but I have been, in the famous words of a British politician, a bit economical with the truth. Yes, I did have another job before I became a heavenly advocate. That’s where I met Sam. Orban, too. And my old mentor, Leo? That was where he did his mentoring. But to explain I have to go back a bit.

Like most other angels (or at least most of those I’ve talked to) I first woke to the light of the Celestial City. In a way I was born there—not as an infant, knowing nothing, but as something else entirely, an angelic being with the general but non-specific knowledge of a human adult. I wish I could tell you now exactly what I did and didn’t know at first, but those memories have been muddied and confused by all that’s happened since.

Over the course of what seemed like a few years I became more and more aware of what was going on around me in Heaven as well as back on Earth (although I hadn’t yet visited my old home). Somehow, though, I still knew I belonged down there, or had belonged there once. Yeah, like a lot of heavenly stuff, it’s hard to explain. And after a while I became aware that things were expected of me, that I wasn’t merely around to enjoy growing up, like a pampered child, but had a duty to take my foreordained place on the walls of Heaven, defending it against the constant threat of the Opposition. The Highest and His Adversary had been in conflict since the earliest days, since shortly after light and dark were separated, and the only reason there was anything like peace now was because of the protocols they had established. And Earth was neutral territory, open to both sides—an open city, like Casablanca during WWII. But Earth was also the main battlefield.

And as I grew in Heaven and became more and more aware of my duty, I was also being observed and shunted (in the most subtle of ways and by authorities I never knew) toward the role for which they thought I would be best suited, an Angel of the Lord’s Vengeance—a member of a Counterstrike Unit. The Highest’s ambition for me was finally revealed, and I was sent to Earth to begin my long training process.

If, as I assume, I lived my pre-angelic life on Earth, I returned there from Heaven in the early 90s. It was strange beyond belief to leave the Celestial City and inhabit a meat body, to feel the firing of nerves and
the pumping of blood, to be covered in a garment of living flesh. On Earth, everything around me seemed so
present
, the things I saw and felt right on top of me, almost overwhelming my strange, frail human senses. Sunsets and sunrises could make me weak with joy, and the stars suddenly seemed distant and mysterious.

My first waystation in this new life was a walled camp out in the California desert north of Barstow. Camp Zion—now
that
was an interesting place, but I’ll save most of those stories for another time. I will say, however, that if Earthly sunsets were painfully intense, being sent down from the cool, comforting shimmer of heaven to the baking, shit-colored mud of the Mojave was staggering in a completely different way.

From the moment I walked into Zion my education was in the hands of my staff sergeant (as you’d probably call him—his heavenly title is more like the Greek
lochagos
, the leader of a small band of warriors, which was why we called him “Leo the Loke”). Leo was African-American, or at least his earthbound body was; he had a flat, knowing stare that could make any of us stammer, and he was nimble as a dancer but strong enough to crush rocks in his fingers that the rest of us could barely lift with both hands. The “us” in question were the unit’s new recruits, half a dozen in all. (Although we hadn’t become friends yet, my buddy Sam was one of the squad’s veterans.) We were now part of Counterstrike Unit (or “CU”)
Lyrae
, named after a constellation and informally called the Harps.

Don’t get me wrong, the other rookies and I weren’t just being trained like army guys are trained, running obstacle courses and firing guns—or at least that was only a small part of what we were learning. We were Angels of Vengeance, after all, so what we studied more than anything else was the Opposition—their habits, strengths, and weaknesses, how they preyed on the innocents of Earth, and what we were allowed to do about it. As I mentioned, Earth is a very complicated place for the forces of Heaven and Hell: the appearance of neutrality between the two sides has to be preserved at all times, even if underneath we all know it’s complete bullshit.

Anyway, since I’m trying to keep a long story short, I learned my job as part of a twenty-five angel unit, two dozen men and women and our leader. Leo the Loke had two corporals. Sam—or Sammariel as we called him then—was one of them. Sam scared the shit out of us, to be
honest. He’s always had big Earth bodies, and he’s built like Jack Dempsey or one of those old boxer guys, big arms, big torso. He talked slow, thought fast, and could make you squirm in shame with only a couple of well-chosen words. Later on I found out he could make you laugh just as easily. I also didn’t find out until later that when I met him he was already rethinking his career choice and (perhaps not coincidentally) busily drinking his earthbound body to death.