“All right. The rendezvous is at eight tomorrow night. I’ll come by your hotel at six thirty. Be ready.”

“We’ll be armored to the mouth.”

“Teeth. Armed to the teeth,” said Salzman.

“Spasibo.”

“Until tomorrow.”

Salzman poured himself a drink and wondered which one he should murder first. Eventually, he concluded that it should be the Russian. Coop was a nuisance, but that goddamn accent, he thought. If he wasn’t dead already, he might have to kill himself rather than ever hear Zavulon again.

Qaphsiel slept, despondent, on the top of the Griffith Park Observatory, his keen ears hearing the voices of people passing in the city below and hobos having sex in the bushes. Another perfect night, he thought. How many had there been in four thousand years? He started to add them up, but all the zeroes just made him even more depressed.

The box had seemed so close earlier, but Coop didn’t have it and wouldn’t look for it. Worse even than that, the map had stopped working again. And here he was, with nowhere to go and nothing to do but wander the city like all the lost screenwriters, failed directors, and stoned guitarists who’d come to L.A. with high hopes, only to be crushed under its giant, Technicolor, open-toe boots.

To cheer himself up, Qaphsiel tried to remember even worse times. There was that incident during the Inquisition when a Spanish priest tried burning him at the stake. Of course, angels don’t burn and neither do angelic maps. Unfortunately, his mortal clothes did, and it was quite embarrassing at a church in the thirteenth century. Qaphsiel had to wrap himself in the map like a sarong until he could find suitable attire again.

And there was that time on the Titanic. He had felt he was very close to the box then. In fact, he was certain that one of the well-heeled families on board had it. Then there was the iceberg and he wasn’t able to make it into any of the lifeboats. Qaphsiel sank to the bottom of the Atlantic with fifteen hundred other people. The difference between him and the others was that he didn’t drown. However, by the time he hit bottom, he was so waterlogged he wouldn’t float. He was forced to walk across the bottom of the ocean to land, trying not to think bad thoughts about you-know-who, God’s show-off son. That guy could have roller-skated the whole way to England. But no, Qaphsiel had to trudge through the silt the whole way, fighting off giant squid, confused sharks, and amorous merpeople. It took him weeks, and when he made it back to land and checked the map, he found that he’d been wrong the whole time. The box was back in America. For a fleeting moment, Qaphsiel considered walking back across the ocean bottom, but he’d had quite enough of that.