Chapter 3
			  Remembering Berlin

	I stood outside the smoked-glass entrance structure that
marked the underground location of the Shattuck Avenue BART station in
Berkeley, smoking a cigarette and trying not to look like I was
nervous.  Why should I be nervous?  In Berkeley, people meet old
friends they haven't seen in years all the time.  They're not
nervous.  It's probably a violation of some city ordinance or another
to be nervous here.  Don't sweat it, man, you're in Berkeley (under
penalty of law).
	I heard him before I saw him - that laugh, thunderous and
ringing, would never change.  I turned to see him coming out of the
station, laughing at something someone had just said, or maybe just
laughing.  He looked different since the last time I'd seen him, but
he was still unmistakable - a big, bearlike man with a coffee
complexion and a mop of dreadlocks, his face deeply seamed with laugh
lines, his eyes twinkling.  He could have been any age from 30 to 70.
	"Hello, Jake," he said softly, clasping my arm below the elbow
and using my mortal name.
	"Hello, Eli," I replied.  This wasn't going at all the way I'd
envisioned it.  In my version, I was angry - rightfully so - with Eli
for disappearing, abandoning his Servitors, pawning some of us off on
other Archangels and forgetting about others, including myself.  I
gave him the cold shoulder when we met, stayed chilly and distant
until he asked what was wrong, then let all my resentment and anger
out in one incandescent flood.  Then he apologized.  That was my
version.
	Instead, I found myself unaccountably glad to see him, unable
to stay angry.  I was filled with an inexplicable feeling that, now
that he'd finally shown up, everything would be all right.  At the
very least, I figured he'd have a good reason for having disappeared,
one that would make Dominic see that he couldn't be a heretic.
	I was just glad to see him, and that was a feeling I hadn't
felt in a long time.
	We walked down Shattuck to the corner with Haste, where the
Barnes & Noble guarded one side of the avenue and a nice secondhand
bookshop the other.  Eli tsked as we prowled the mystery section,
noting that I'd let Frank Hanson's books slip out of print.  I tried
to explain that it was just another one of the million things I hadn't
been able to care about since he ditched the celestial scene, but he
changed the subject, and I went along because I didn't want to destroy
the mood.
	From there, we rambled, making our way across the residential
neighborhoods that lie between Shattuck and Telegraph.  The area is
crawling with college kids, lying as it does so close to the
University of California campus.  (There are other campuses in the UC
system than Berkeley, but UC Berkeley is the only one the students
call "Cal".)  It takes a lot of bookstores, pizza parlors, record
shops, and purveyors of oddities to keep a bunch like that happy, and
most of them are on the northernmost part of Telegraph Avenue, where
it's one-way northbound.
	On the weekend, Telegraph's one-way section is also home to a
totally different, but related, kind of street bazaar.  Vendors with
folding card tables and mutt dogs at their feet sell all manner of odd
wares there, on the weekends.  Walking up one side of Telegraph on a
Saturday afternoon, you'll encounter a black woman in a muumuu selling
braid beads and jewelry made of an interesting opalescent material; a
bearded, grizzled man in a threadbare Army field jacket, his table
covered in political bumper stickers ("US OUT OF <wherever>" is a
favorite theme of his sticker supplier); two young men selling an
herbal blend that smells like, and they claims affects the user like,
but isn't, marijuana; a buxom blonde woman with a spaced-out grin,
offering The New Macrobiotic Cookbook and related items; a big,
tough-looking guy selling beautiful pottery, thrown, glazed and fired
by his own callused hands.  And that's just in the block south of
Durant.
	Eli seemed to know every one of the street vendors personally,
or maybe he just approached them like he did and their own natural
affability kept them from acting like they were wondering who the hell
he was.  He bought a packet of the faux joints and insisted that I
take one, that they were "cosmic".  He passed the time of day with the
bicycle cop who passed by, making sure that the panhandlers weren't
getting pushy with passersby.  He had a quarter or so for every
panhandler who hit him up - two if their approach was creative.
	Over slices of massively thick, delicious pizza at Blondie's,
I finally got the chance to ask him what he was doing on Earth, why he
had dropped out of celestial society.  My tone came off as more
curious than the heated accusation I had planned; his good cheer and
happiness to see... well, -everyone- had muted my anger, made me feel
as though it would be childish to be mad at him.
	He looked at me for a moment, his eyes growing sad.  Then he
said softly, "Marlael, do you remember Berlin?"
	"Of course I remember Berlin."  How could I forget?  Berlin,
1935, was the last time we'd talked.  The Nazis were in power, the
city was starting to feel the prewar gloom as Europe hurtled toward
war with Hitler at the wheel, and Berlin, long a haven of
intellectuals and artists, was starting to feel downright dangerous.

	I was then been much the same as I am now, though my mortal
vessel had gone by the name of Mark Sullivan in those days - an American
private eye, living in the San Francisco Bay Area.  A case took me to
Berlin, and I ran into Eli at a sidewalk cafe while wandering the city,
killing the downtime between wrapping up the case and my ship leaving
for New York.  He was different then, too - his mortal vessel back then
was a Jewish artist named Saul Steinberg.  Saul didn't look anything
like Eli's current vessel, but he had the same laugh, even though Jews
and artists in Berlin didn't have much to laugh about in 1935. 
	We sat and drank coffee long into the night, talking about the
saddening state of the world and speculating about the positioning of
various celestial forces in the arrangeent of the conflict everyone
could feel coming.  Finally, at the end of the evening, he stood up,
stubbed out his cigarette, and grabbed his hat, saying,
	"The whole thing stinks, Mark," he said.  "The whole thing
stinks and I've got to find out who's behind it."
	"What?  What are you talking about?" I asked.
	"Just promise me you'll watch your back until we meet again,
OK?  I'll probably need your help when the time comes."
	We met every month or so back in those days.  I didn't think
it was any big thing to reply, "Sure.  No problem."
	"See you around, Mark," said Saul.  He put on his hat and
walked out into the rainy night, and that was the last I'd seen of him
until today... sixty-two years later.

	"Of course I remember Berlin," I repeated.  "You confused the
hell out of me and then disappeared on me.  I'm not likely to forget
that."
	Eli nodded, gazing down at the steaming surface of his coffee.
"I'm sorry about that, Marlael.  I really am.  But you have to look at
it from my perspective."
	"A difficult task," I observed, "considering you didn't see
fit to let me in on your perspective."
	"I thought it was the right decision at the time," Eli
replied.  "I was going to be digging into some pretty heavy stuff,
stuff other celestials wouldn't want to get out, and I didn't want to
take anybody down with me.  It was better to let everyone believe that
I'd dropped out, gone walkabout.  That way if it backfired, I wouldn't
take friends down with me."
	"Some of us would be happier to go down with you than be left
in the dark," I growled, lighting a cigarette.
	"I know that now," Eli replied.  He looked truly sorry - so
much so that I relented, and instead of nagging about it any more, I
asked,
	"So what's the deal?  What was this heavy stuff?"
	"I'm not finished with it yet," Eli replied.  "I'm getting
close, damned close, but I don't have enough proof yet."
	"Enough proof to do what?"
	Eli sat back and rubbed the bridge of his nose, then opened
his eyes, looked me in the eye, and said softly, "Marlael, I'm going
to topple the Inquisition."
	I blinked.
	"You're what?"
	"I'm going to topple the Inquisition," he repeated calmly.
	I tried to keep my voice low as I replied, "Eli, do you
realize how much Dominic wants your hide?  He suspects you've been
consorting with evil this whole time you've been gone."
	"He's not far off," Eli replied.  "Diabolicals often know
things that our own people don't - or aren't willing to talk about."
Eli shrugged.  "Once I have the proof I need, Dominic won't be the
worry."
	I was so stunned and absorbed by what Eli was laying on me
that I wasn't paying enough attention to my surroundings - always a
potentially fatal mistake for someone in my line of work.  I hadn't
noticed the wiry, middling-height guy in jeans and a dark warmup suit
slide into the next booth over, behind Eli.  The first time I realized
anything was wrong was when I heard a popping noise, like the sound a
piece of bubble wrap makes when you squeeze it, and saw Eli's face
take on a look of infinite surprise.
	"Marlael," he said, his voice as steady and calm as ever.
"You'll have to finish it for me."
	Then he fell face-first into his pizza, his corporeal vessel
just as dead as any human I'd ever seen shot in the back.
	Over Eli's dead shoulders, the Malakite I'd met the day before
grinned and leveled his derringer at me.  It was no ordinary derringer -
not if it had just killed the corporeal vessel of an Archangel with a
single shot - and I had no illusions about my ability to survive a hit
from it.
	So I did what any self-respecting private eye would do.  I
threw myself sideways, bellowed "CALL THE COPS!!" and ran like hell as
the Malakite's second shot took out a framed copy of a Time Magazine
article about Tupac Shakur on the wall behind me.
	One problem with the sidewalk bazaar on Telegraph Avenue: it
makes it hard to run away from somebody who wants to kill you.  On the
other hand, if that somebody -only- wants to kill -you-, it also makes
it hard for them to shoot you as you try to get away.  Either that or
the Malakite was out of ammo.  No shots rang out, no enchanted bullets
whizzed past me, as I shouldered my way with many apologies through
the crowded sidewalk, heading south.
	He was chasing me, though.  Far be it from a Malakite to give
up the chase just because his heaviest weapon was out of play.  I
could hear the sounds of the crowd, already agitated by my impolite
passing, raising more protest at being barrelled through by my
pursuer.
	I'll be the first one to admit that I have no shortage of
faults.  I'm a Mercurian, a member of the lowest Choir of angels.  We
were made to be closer to Man than God.  Of all the faults I've picked
up in all my time among humans, though, there's one that's gotten me
into trouble time and time again, more often than not, over the years,
and that's this: Sometimes, I get angry.
	Which is why, instead of running away and finding a place to
hide, like I should have done, I got ahead of my pursuer, ran around
the corner onto Channing Way, and ducked into a doorway.  I fished
around in my pocket for my trusty punch reinforcer and waited,
listening as the sounds of my pursuer's shoes got closer and closer.
Malakites aren't known for their subtlety and this guy was living up
to the cliche; from the sound of his footsteps he was running
flat-out, probably thinking I'd gotten far enough ahead of him to turn
another corner.
	I waited, then sprang out of the doorway, unloading a straight
left with a fistful of rolled quarters into the side of his face.  It
struck with all of my strength, the added rigidity of the quarters, and
the force of my weight hurtling out of the doorway.  The impact made a
satisfying thwack and he dropped like a sack of potatoes, not out, but
stunned and startled off his feet.  I hauled him up by the lapels,
yanked his jacket down to foul his arms, and spun him around.  Then I
pushed him in a kind of drunken frog-march into the alley and shoved him
by the back of the neck against the wall of the building and put the
muzzle of my .45 behind his ear.  Corporeal vessels might be tougher
than the humans they resembled, but if I blew Laughing Boy's skull all
over the wall, he was just as finished - in that body, at least.
	"You son of a bitch," the Malakite grunted as he regained his
senses.  "You'll fry for this."  He spat out a couple of bloody
teeth.
	"Will I?  I'm not the one who just offed an Archangel, buddy.
Now why did you have to go and do that?"
	"It's none of your damned business," he snarled.  I pulled him
back a little and bounced his face off the wall.  He glanced around,
trying to see if we were drawing a crowd, but from his vantage point
he couldn't see much but wall, and anyway, we weren't.  Nobody looks
down alleys in the city, and our little dance on the sidewalk had been
so quick nobody had noticed it.
	"Bad choice of words, friend," I observed.  "You just killed
my Superior and you're talking about damnation?"
	"It's my job," he replied.  "Eli wouldn't return to Heaven to
face his trial... so I forced him."
	It dawned on me what he meant.  When an angel's corporeal
vessel is killed, the angel doesn't die; we're made of sterner stuff
than that, more firmly attached to the Symphony than mortal men.  We
just lose our connection to the corporeal plane.  An angel who is
killed on Earth finds himself in Heaven, next to his celestial Heart -
his anchor to all that which makes him celestial - dazed, perhaps even
in shock, but celestially unharmed.
        So -that- was their game.  Simple, elegant, but oh, so cunning.
Want to arrest an angel?  Station an arrest squad near his Heart, then
have somebody kill his corporeal vessel.  A plan that could only have
been thought up by a Malakite.
        Damn.
        As I was thinking about that, the Malakite got an arm free and
drove his elbow back into my sternum.  I moved with the impact and kept
him from caving in my chest, but to do it, I had to let him go.  Once
he'd regained his wits, he was stronger than me.
        As I stumbled back, I wrenched at his jacket; he yanked his
other arm out of it and ran.  I considered shooting him as he ran off,
but shooting was out of the question with the area as crowded as it
was, and I could hear sirens approaching.  The crew at Blondie's might
look out of it, but they know enough to call the cops when people start
shooting.
        "We'll be back for you, Marlael," called the Malakite as he
reached the other end of the alley.  Then he disappeared around the
corner, leaving me with a jacket, a sore chest, and a whole lot of
questions. 

			   TO BE CONTINUED