Chapter 2: Reconciliation
"This one," says the King of Hell, "is a pirate."
He sets it on your desk with ceremony. It is, in fact, a pirate: tricorn hat, eye patch, a tiny cutlass molded into one wing, and a parrot on its shoulder that is itself a much smaller rubber duck.
"There's a duck on the duck," you say.
"There's a duck on the duck," he agrees, beaming.
"Is the little duck a pirate too?"
He looks at you as if you've said something unbearably wise. "I hadn't decided," he says slowly. "But now I think he's the captain. The big one's his first mate. The big one does all the work, the little one gets all the credit." He picks it back up. "Oh, that's good. That's very good. I have to go fix the hat."
He doesn't go fix the hat. He sits down in the folding chair he started bringing on day four, the one that has LUCIFER written on the back in gold paint like a director's chair, and props his feet on your trash can, and asks what you're working on.
It's been three weeks.
He comes most days. Sometimes he's hiding from Charlie's latest bonding exercise, and he says so, flatly, as he slips through the door. Sometimes he's hiding from Alastor, which he also says, though less flatly. Sometimes, lately, he doesn't say anything at all. He just knocks, two quick taps, and comes in with a duck, and sits.
You've started keeping a log. It's a habit; you can't help it. In the back of your own notebook, under a heading you've labeled DUCKS (RECEIVED), there's a neat column of entries:
Accountant (visor, glasses). Bathrobe w/ coffee. Firefighter. Ballerina, with notes on her pointe technique. One with tiny devil horns, which he claimed was "a self-portrait, but cuter." One that was just a regular yellow duck, no costume, that he slid across the desk with an odd shyness and said was "the original model, from way back," and wouldn't explain.
And now: pirate, plus captain.
"Reconciling the bar tab," you say. "Husk has been writing everything down as 'loss.'"
"Everything?"
"Every drink. Every bottle. He wrote down a bar stool once. Just 'Stool, loss.' I asked him about it and he said, 'Angel.'"
Lucifer laughs, a quick bright bark of a laugh that he seems to be surprised by every time. Then he leans over your shoulder to look at the spreadsheet, close enough that you can smell him, which is something like warm apples and candle smoke and the inside of a very old library. He reads the numbers with real attention. You've noticed this about him. People assume he's frivolous, because of the ducks and the hat and the way he talks with his hands. But he reads every line.
"Your columns are very straight," he says.
"Thank you."
"Like, aggressively straight. It's a little intimidating." He points at a cell. "That number's beautiful. Look at it. You made that."
"I added it up."
"Same thing." He sits back. He's quiet for a moment. "I used to make things like that. Systems. Up there." He tips his head at the ceiling. It takes you a second to realize he doesn't mean the second floor. "I designed half the animals, did you know? The fun ones. The platypus. The octopus. That one little bird that does the dance. I had all these ideas about how things could be better, more interesting, more free." He turns his cane over in his hands. "Turned out nobody up there wanted interesting. They wanted obedient. And when I kept making things anyway, well." A small, sour smile. "You know the rest. There was a whole book."
You don't know what to say to that. So you say, "The platypus is very good."
He looks at you for a long moment, and then his face does the thing you've started waiting for, the thing where all the performance drains out of it and he just looks like a person who's tired and pleased.
"It's my best work," he says quietly. "Don't tell the duck."
Alastor finds you on a Thursday.
You hear him before you see him: the low static under the door, like a radio between stations, and then a voice, warm and terrible, saying, "Knock knock!" He doesn't knock. He simply leans in through the doorway, the whole long red length of him, grinning his permanent grin, and his eyes go to your desk, and your notebook, and the row of eleven rubber ducks lined up along the top of your monitor like a tiny jury.
"Well, well," he says. "I wondered where our little king had been disappearing to. I assumed a support group. Or a crawlspace."
Lucifer, from the folding chair, does not look up from the duck he's sanding. "Hello, Strawberry Pimp."
"Your Majesty." Alastor bows, so deeply it's an insult. "I had no idea the throne had relocated to the broom closet. Should I inform the court? Or is this a private audience?" His eyes slide to you. "With the help?"
You put down your pen.
"I'm not the help," you say. "I'm the person who's going to find out how you're paying for that radio tower. Because it's on the hotel's electric bill, Alastor. All of it. You've been running the whole thing off our meter for six months."
The static hitches. It's the smallest sound, a crackle out of rhythm, but in the silence after it, you hear Lucifer, very quietly, start to laugh.
Alastor's smile does not change at all. It simply grows a little more fixed, like a picture nailed to a wall. "Fascinating," he says. "We must discuss it sometime." And he's gone, the static receding down the hall like a tide.
Lucifer is staring at you. His eyes have gone bright gold all the way through, no red at all. His cheeks are pinker than usual.
"Is that true? About the meter?"
"Completely true."
"Oh, I love you," says the King of Hell, apparently without thinking about it, and then hears what he said, and turns the exact color of the apple on his cane.
You both look very hard at the pirate duck for a while.
Here is the thing you have not told him.
You know what a ledger is for. You know it all the way down, the way some people know prayers. A ledger is a promise. It says: this is what happened. This much came in, this much went out, and here is where it went. When the numbers are honest, a ledger is the most beautiful thing in the world: a clean, true record of a life.
For six years, you were the person they called when the ledger was lying. You found the shell companies and the ghost employees and the money that went out a back door at three in the morning. You were good at it. And then a man named Gerald Pruitt, who owned half the apartment buildings in your city and let them rot, made you an offer to come and work for him instead, and the offer had a lot of zeros on it, and you said yes.
You made his books lie for eighteen months. Beautifully. No one ever caught it.
Then you found out where the money was really coming from. Rent increases on tenants who couldn't afford them. Repairs that were billed and never made. A boiler in a building on Delancey that had been "replaced" four times on paper and had never been replaced at all, and the winter it finally failed.
You took it all. Every cent he'd hidden. You knew exactly where it was, because you'd hidden it. You moved it out through twelve countries in a weekend and into a fund for the tenants, and then you went to the police with a copy of the real books, and Gerald Pruitt's lawyers buried you in court for a year, and you died in a car on the way to a hearing, and here you are.
You stole. You lied for money and then you stole. It's a reasonable thing to go to Hell for.
But you promised yourself, on your first night here, staring up at the red sky: never again. You'll never make a ledger lie again. Not for anyone.
You haven't told Lucifer this. But you think about it every Friday at midnight, when the deposit comes in from L.M. Holdings (Ducks & Misc.), and you write it down, honestly, in your perfectly straight column, under a name that his daughter doesn't know is his.
On a Monday he comes in without knocking, which he has never done, and puts a duck in your hands without saying anything.
It's smaller than the others. More detailed. You turn it over, and then you stop breathing for a second.
It's you. Unmistakably. The same hair, rendered in carefully sculpted rubber. The same glasses, tiny gold wire. A pencil tucked behind one ear. It's holding a ledger in one wing, and its expression is somehow, impossibly, the exact one you wear when Angel hands in a receipt that just says "for fun." Unimpressed. Fond despite itself.
On the bottom, in gold, it says: AUDIT.
"I've been working on it for a week," he says to the floor. "I kept getting the eyebrows wrong. You do this thing with your eyebrows when you think somebody's being an idiot. It's very specific. It took me nine tries."
You don't trust your voice. You hold the duck in both hands.
"Lucifer," you start.
The door bangs open. It's Charlie, glowing with excitement, a clipboard pressed to her chest.
"There you are! Oh, Dad, you're here too, perfect!" She doesn't even question it. She's too happy. "Okay, so I had the best idea last night. Total financial transparency! Everyone in the hotel deserves to know how we're funded, right? It's part of the healing journey! So on Friday, we're having a big meeting, everyone's coming, the whole staff and all the guests and even some of the overlords who've been thinking about donating, and you," she points at you, radiant, "are going to walk us through the books. Every line! Every single deposit! Isn't that great?"
Behind her, in the folding chair, the King of Hell has gone white, which for him is saying something.
"Friday," he says faintly.
"Friday!" says Charlie. "Midnight! It'll be perfect!"