“Ratting on your pals again, eh?” Nick sneered. “You stay in the burning lake a thousand earth years. You’ll have plenty of time and company for your plotting. Let ’im rip!”
“No! I’ll be forgotten—”
“No one remembers you now except as a dung heap.” Nick turned a thumb downward, and the screeching shade vanished.
“Like a paper towel in a gale,” Belial said as he let the flap clang shut. “How’d that creep get a job where he could snoop?”
“My fault,” Beelzebub admitted. “He’s a smooth talker. I saw him not long after you left, Your Majesty, when I went out to inspect the garbage incinerator. He had shaved off his dinky mustache and changed the color of his eyes, but I recognized him.”
“It’s okay, Beel.” Nick patted the heavy shoulder of his top assistant. “The punk did us a left-handed favor in bringing things to a head.” He told of how Charon had discovered the Red plot, then outlined his general plan.
“Those Commies can’t stand ridicule,” Nick summed up. “While I’m gone I want every Communist son tossed into the burning lake. Alarm all guards and tell them how to identify them—the fragrance of sweet peas with an underlying stink. No one in the USSR has used up a cake of soap in twenty years, and the perfume they add can’t quite cover the BO.”
“Must be a lot of Commies here,” Mulciber commented. “How many guards have we, Azzy?”
Azazel, Statistics Chief, glanced at a roll of incombustible microfilm, and cleared his throat. He liked being called upon, and since he had the history of every shade while on Earth, he was the second most feared devil in Hades.
“After promoting the last batch who qualified for better jobs during the minimum millennium at common labor,” Azazel said, “and adding—”