He was intercepted by a fireman.
“Are you the owner of this establishment?” asked the fireman.
“Don't be stupid! Do I look like I run a bookshop?”
“I really wouldn't know about that, sir. Appearances can be very deceptive. For example, I am a fireman. However, upon meeting me socially, people unaware of my occupation often suppose that I am, in fact, a chartered accountant or company director. Imagine me out of uniform, sir, and what kind of man would you see before you? Honestly?”
“A prat,” said Crowley, and he ran into the bookshop.
This sounds easier than it actually was, since in order to manage it Crowley needed to avoid half a dozen firemen, two policemen, and a number of interesting Soho night people, [In any other place than Soho it is quite possible that spectators at a fire might have been interested.] out early, and arguing heatedly amongst themselves about which particular section of society had brightened up the afternoon, and why.
Crowley pushed straight through them. They scarcely spared him a glance.
Then he pushed open the door, and stepped into an inferno.
The whole bookshop was ablaze. “Aziraphale!” he called.
“Aziraphale, you.. you stupid Aziraphale? Are you here?”
No answer. Just the crackle of burning paper, the splintering of glass as the fire reached the upstairs rooms, the crash of collapsing timbers.
He scanned the shop urgently, desperately, looking for the angel, looking for help.
In the far corner a bookshelf toppled over, cascading flaming books across the floor. The fire was all around him, and Crowley ignored it. His left trouser leg began to smolder; he stopped it with a glance.
“Hello? Aziraphale! For Go.. , for Sa.. , for somebody's sake! Aziraphale!”
The shop window was smashed from outside. Crowley turned, startled, and an unexpected jet of water struck him full in the chest, knocking him to the ground.
His shades flew to a far corner of the room, and became a puddle of burning plastic. Yellow eyes with slitted vertical pupils were revealed. Wet and steaming, face ash.. blackened, as far from cool as it was possible for him to be, on all fours in the blazing bookshop, Crowley cursed Aziraphale, and the ineffable plan, and Above, and Below.
Then he looked down, and saw it. The book. The book that the girl had left in the car in Tadfield, on Wednesday night. It was slightly scorched around the cover, but miraculously unharmed. He picked it up, stuffed it into his jacket pocket, stood up, unsteadily, and brushed himself off.
The floor above him collapsed. With a roar and gargantuan shrug the building fell in on itself, in a rain of brick and timber and flaming debris.
Outside, the passersby were being herded back by the police, and a fireman was explaining to anyone who would listen, "I couldn't stop him. He must have been mad. Or drunk. Just ran in. I couldn't stop him. Mad. Ran straight in. Horrible way to die. Horrible, horrible. Just ran straight in ...
Then Crowley came out of the flames.
The police and the firemen looked at him, saw the expression on his face, and stayed exactly where they were.
He climbed into the Bentley and reversed back into the road, swung around a fire truck, into Wardour Street, and into the darkened afternoon.
They stared at the car as it sped away. Finally one policeman spoke. “Weather like this, he ought to of put his lights on,” he said, numbly.
“Especially driving like that. Could be dangerous,” agreed another, in flat, dead tones, and they all stood there in the light and the heat of the burning bookshop, wondering what was happening to a world they had thought they understood.
There was a flash of lightning, blue.. white, strobing across the cloud.. black sky, a crack of thunder so loud it hurt, and a hard rain began to fall.
* * * * *
he rode a red motorbike. Not a friendly Honda red; a deep, bloody red, rich and dark and hateful. The bike was apparently, in every other respect, ordinary except for the sword, resting in its scabbard, set onto the side of the bike.
Her helmet was crimson, and her leather jacket was the color of old wine. In ruby studs on the back were picked out the words HELL'S ANGELS.
It was ten past one in the afternoon and it was dark and humid and wet. The motorway was almost deserted, and the woman in red roared down the road on her red motorbike, smiling lazily.
It had been a good day so far. There was something about the sight of a beautiful woman on a powerful motorbike with a sword stuck on the back that had a powerful effect on a certain type of man. So far four traveling salesmen had tried to race her, and bits of Ford Sierra now decorated the crash barriers and bridge supports along forty miles of motorway.
She pulled up at a service area, and went into the Happy Porker Cafe. It was almost empty. A bored waitress was darning a sock behind the counter, and a knot of black.. leathered bikers, hard, hairy, filthy, and huge, were clustered around an even taller individual in a black coat. He was resolutely playing something that in bygone years would have been a fruit machine, but now had a video screen, and advertised itself as TRIVIA SCRABBLE.
The audience were saying things like:
“It's 'D'! Press 'D'.. The Godfather must'vegot more Oscars than Gone With the Wind!”
“Puppet on a String! Sandie Shaw! Honest. I'm bleeding positive!”
“1666!”
“No, you great pillock! That was the fire! The Plague was 1665!”
“It's 'B'.. the Great Wall of China wasn't one of the Seven Wonders of the world!”
There were four options: Pop Music, Sport, Current Events, and General Knowledge. The tall biker, who had kept his helmet on, was pressing the buttons, to all intents and purposes oblivious of his supporters. At any rate, he was consistently winning.
The red rider went over to the counter.
“A cup of tea, please. And a cheese sandwich,” she said.
“You on your own, then, dear?” asked the waitress, passing the tea, and something white and dry and hard, across the counter.
“Waiting for friends.”
“Ah,” she said, biting through some wool. “Well, you're better off waiting in here. It's hell out there.”
“No,” she told her. “Not yet.”
She picked a window table, with a good view of the parking lot, and she waited.
She could hear the Trivia Scrabblers in the background.
“Thass a new one, 'How many times has England been officially at war with France since 1066?”'
“Twenty? Nah, s'never twenty ... Oh. It was. Well, I never.”
“American war with Mexico? I know that. It's June 1845. 'D'.. see! I tol' you!”