“Is it true?” Satan asked.
“Which part?” replied Death. “That Jacob’s mother was a whore? I’m surprised you ask. I thought she was the reason you became involved in this saga. She was the harlot of all harlots. She was the whore of Babylon, a prostitute with a good heart.”
Jacob’s cat jumped out of the closet, landed on the hardwood floor with a sizable thump, big boy. His favorite napping place was on the T-shirts on a shelf behind hanging jackets. He glanced at Death for a moment, found him unworthy, ever so dramatically sauntered over to Satan’s hand draped over the armrest, and arched his back. Satan scratched beneath the lush black hair with long fingernails. The cat rolled onto his back, paws in the air, and spread himself for belly ministrations. His loud purring included a strange nasal hiccup.
“He calls this boy Behemoth,” Satan said, smiling.
“Of course he does,” Death said, “and that’s why the cat likes you so.” His tapered fingers reached toward his newly grown mustache, curled and black and blatantly waxed. With his hand raised, the sleeve dropped once more. Death chuckled, noticing that Satan seemed enraptured with the tattoo. “What were we talking about? Wait, I remember. We were talking about the boy’s mother, but you weren’t asking about her, were you?”
“No,” Satan said, shaking his head, still smiling. “I loved her. She was so good, so adept, she could make Denis blush, and you’d think nothing could embarrass that preening pervert of a saint. I meant the funerals, so many of them, his memories. Wasn’t he too young to remember all that?”
“Probably,” Death said. “I don’t know. There were many funerals, but I can’t tell what he remembers. Yemen is one of my favorite places, it’s an octopus with each of its tentacles dipped in a different century.”
“In one of his poems,” Satan said, “he compared Yemen to a poor African nation without Bono or Nicholas Kristof.”
“Funny guy, our Jacob,” Death said. “One of the reasons he has survived for so long is that his mother took him out of that ill-starred country.”
“In Yemen,” Satan said, “you could get killed for having a dust mote in your eye and blinking at an inopportune moment. I frequently played with sandstorms just for the hell of it.”
“That nation has refreshed and rejuvenated me for centuries,” Death said.
He produced a tan leather pouch out of his sleeve. With thumb and forefinger he extracted a pinch of tobacco and began to roll a cigarette. “Yet, that Egyptian hellion Badeea happened to come to Yemen and she took the whore and her son back to Cairo. Things have a habit of working out, as the cliché goes, especially if you had a hand in those things. Badeea was your doing, right?”
From his other sleeve Death produced a match, flicked it lit with his manicured fingernail. The smell of Tartarean sulfur floated in the air between them.
“Are you going to interview the others?” Death asked. “Denis and Pantaleon? Maybe Eustace? You must do Catherine too. She probably knew him best, screwed him up the most—well, after you.”
He took a long drag, the tip of his flimsy cigarette growing and glowing, almost afire, yellow flame, red ember, gray ash.
“Jacob doesn’t like anyone smoking in his apartment,” Satan said.
“Fuck him,” Death said.