SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL 

And so it came to be that God and the Devil sat down for a peace-ridden Sunday brunch. The noon meal between the two had been habit for a millennium or so, give or take a hundred years, no one being absolutely sure since time was something deities rarely gave thought, for it had little meaning without death to count the moments. Satan himself had only recently begun to wear a wristwatch, a hot Rolex most certainly gold-plated, and only after considerable urging from his underagents in the business world, for whom the clock was a suffocating pressure and a more ruthless master than the Evil One. If pressed, in fact, Satan would wistfully recollect the world’s pastoral days when sin was measured in blood and human lust, not crimson marks on a computerized ledger. The Internet had ballooned the market for souls as much as anything else, that could not be denied, but Satan missed the very human sensation of the old days, the feeling of conquering possession he experienced when a man signed away his life on a golden parchment the Devil held out to him. Satan cherished the needful look in their eyes, a mark of his momentary victory, for he had given them what they most desired and what they could find nowhere else, and certainly not from Him. Now souls came in bulk, across the vast distances of the information super-highway, accompanied by credit card numbers and PINs and personal browsing habits. Satan was an icon that would appear ghostly on Windows 98; you could double-click on him and hyperlink directly to www.satanstuff.com. Everything was numbers and the numbers said that he was winning, but there was no salesmanship, anymore, there was no style. There were no country poets composing ballads of Ole’ Scratch. There was no humanity in this business anymore, and the Devil, he was most human.  
     Such were Satan’s thoughts as he waited for the Lord at a private table for two in Alchemist & Barrister in Princeton, New Jersey, on a gloriously clean and cold Sunday morning in the month of February. The Devil sat just inside the realm of shadows, dodging the brilliant light that filtered through the high window behind the table, and flipped though the Arts & Leisure section of the Sunday Times. A black leather briefcase with a predictable three-digit combination leaned on his chair.  
     To pass the time until God finally arrived, the Devil began to work on the soul of the waitress that had just placed a cup of coffee, deep black, on the table in front of him. She was an attractive enough young woman with frizzy, almost blond hair that threatened to choke her face. He took a well-mannered sip from the pure bone china cup, and smiled at her, right into her, the smile he’d honed for millennia. He nodded in her direction and took in her full figure with a smooth and unceasing sweep of his eyes.  
     "Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name."  

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