Now, Father Handy and Tibor needed a power—mekkis, Father Handy thought to himself—to come from Above and aid them… on this, the Servants of Wrath agreed with the Christians: the good power lay Above, Ubrem Sternenzelt, as Schiller had once said: above the band of stars. Yes, beyond the stars; this they were clear on; this was modern German.

But it was strange, depending on a poem whose meaning one did not actually grasp; he wondered, as he unfolded and searched through the old stained gas-station maps once given out free in prewar days, if this was not a stigma of degeneracy. An omen of badness… not just that times were bad but that they themselves had become bad; the quality was lodged withinthem.

His conference now was with the Dominus McComas, his superior in the hierarchy of the Servants of Wrath; the Dominus sat, large and tepid, with strangely cruel teeth, as if he tore things, not necessarily living, in fact much harder—as if he did a job, a profession, teethwise.

“Carl Lufteufel,” the Dominus McComas said, “was a son of a bitch. As a man.” He added that because of course one did not speak of the god part of the god-man, the Deus Irae, like that. “And,” he said, “I’ll give you ten to five that he made martinis with sweet vermouth.”

“Did you ever drink sweet vermouth straight or with ice?” Father Handy asked.

“It’s sweet piss,” McComas grated in his horrid, low voice, and, as he spoke, cut into his spongy gum with the tail of a wooden match. “I am not kidding; it’s nothing but horse piss they’ve bought.”