Nosferatu

2

Serrin stayed for three days. By day Julia was away from the apartment, returning later with the books he wanted, having somehow won permission to take them out overnight. At night they drove back into town, wandering mostly around the East Riverside neighborhood, where she took him to the Metropolitan Opera and to restaurants where they dined well and expensively. She always paid her half of the tab, a fact that should have made Serrin wonder, but didn't.

Meanwhile they talked as endlessly as on that" first day in the morning sun outside the library. In the course of their conversations Julia confided that she dabbled in writing and was an aspiring actress. From what she described, he made her as one of those eternal hopefuls hanging round the fringes of the arts, doomed to disappointment like most of the rest.

The only thing that seemed other than wholly harmless about Julia Richards was her collection of books on the

occult. Possessions, hauntings, apparitions, all the standard themes plus a good few more. She'd taken some courses in parapsych, and showed him the working version of a ghost tale she was writing. Surprised to find it so readable and well done, Serrin thought the girl had an old-fashioned knack for creating scenes with the disturbing hint of unseen, unknown, unknowable presences lurking just on the edge of the reader's perception.

"This interest in ghosts amp; You intending to hunt them professionally?" he asked, more jesting than serious.

"Oh, just an old hobby," she said, waving her hand to show how minor was its importance, and left it at that.

But from that time on Serrin felt that everything changed. It wasn't anything in particular that was different. There were no scenes, no major misunderstandings, just a shift in mood, in tone. Even when they made love, he knew her heart wasn't in it. Though he tried to paper over the subtle rift between them with friendly conversation, the mage grew uneasy.

"I think I'd better be heading back home," he said at last, thinking of the Chinese proverb that both guests and fish stink after three days. If he left tonight, he'd avoid that fourth day. "It looks like I'm done with my research, which I couldn't have finished without your help. I won't forget it." He was scrupulously trying not to get too personal.

"Yes, well, it's been fun having you here," Julia replied, sounding as if she genuinely meant it. Serrin was confused, unsure of what deeper emotions might be roiling beneath the surface. He kept the rest of his goodbye short, trying hard to avoid her eyes.

She offered him a ride to the airport, but he declined. A lift to the library, however, he did accept, because he still needed to follow up on one or two final points before returning to Seattle.

"Thanks again," he said, climbing out of the car on a street near the library. "And don't forget. You've got my number. If you ever need anything, don't hesitate. Call any time."

Julia looked away for the merest split-second and he wondered what on earth he had done wrong now. "Sorry,"

was all she said, before jerking the car out of neutral and pulling off. He shook his head, picked up his carrying case, and headed toward the library.

Two hours later he was just finished copying out some of the material he'd come for when he heard the announcement for closing time. After hurriedly checking the flight schedules on one of the library computers, he decided on the midnight shuttle, which would give him time for a decent dinner somewhere downtown. He didn't feel like pressing his luck in Chinatown, so he chose a Thai place off Times Square. Hell, he thought with amusement, maybe I could tap the shoulder of one of those Knight Errant slags who hang around down there and get him to pick up the tab.

Within five minutes of sitting down at his table in Little Home Thai, Serrin suddenly felt like everyone in the place was watching him. Glancing around furtively, he saw two men in suits appear in the doorway, press a wad into the head waiter's hand, and stride across to his table. He almost panicked, but forced himself to reason that these couldn't possibly be a couple of avenging assassins. You don't get iced for preventing someone from being killed, he told himself. Or do you? At least these two didn't look like Arabs amp;

"Mr. Shamandar," one of them said with a heavy dose of fake sincerity as he sat down uninvited at the table. "I'm Dan McEwan of the Times and this is my cameraman, Randy Simmons." Simmons, grinning like an embarrassed hyena with an outdated mustache, nodded a greeting and hefted a camera from around his neck. "We'd really like to take some pictures for a feature on you while I just ask a few questions. We'll try not to interrupt your meal at all."

Serrin was about to growl, "Frag off," then realized he wanted more in the way of explanation. "What's this about anyway?"

"Why, your act of heroism, of course," McEwan said, almost leaving a visible trail of slime on the carpet. "The whole city is still buzzing with it, even after three days. You know, the mystery mage with the haunted eyes?"

The vidcasts didn 't get your face, Julia's voice said at

the back of his mind. In panic he shielded his face with a red napkin and ran for the door. Haunted eyes, my ass, he thought.

"Just get me out of here!" he snarled to the troll driver as he leapt into the back of a yellow cab two minutes later. By now, it seemed like at least a dozen photographers and media reptiles had appeared on the scene. He tried hard not to think about how foolish he must look with the sweaty, ragged remnants of a paper napkin pasted onto various parts of his face. "JFK. Take some detours. Don't worry about the meter."

"I love people who say that kinda stuff, chummer," the troll grinned, then shot off like a devil rat chipped up on BTL.

There didn't seem to be anyone waiting for Serrin at the airport when they arrived, but he guessed that somewhere there had to be a hungry stringer roaming around looking for him, just in case. A quick check of the flight board told him there wouldn't be another domestic flight going out for another thirty-five minutes. And nothing to Seattle for two hours.

"What's the first plane out of town?" he snapped at the woman behind the British Airways desk.

She gave him a startled look and said, "What? Anywhere!"

"You scan it, lady," he said, looking around.

"You in some kind of trouble?"

"I'm not going to hurt you," Serrin said wearily, his eyes tracking her hand as it ducked under the desk, probably reaching for the security button. Then he noticed the tabloid sitting there.

"I'm just trying to escape the reporters," he said, pointing to his face plastered all over the cover. She looked at the picture, then back at him, her eyes widening and her jaw dropping open.

"Frankfurt or Cape Town. Ten minutes," she said as he swiped her Newsday up for a better look. Julia had somehow managed to take some photographs of him seated on her little balcony, relaxed and almost smiling. One of the pics had suffered the attentions of a talented image transformer; the sleazy tabloid apparently had no scruples

about polishing up the drek it published. Serrin Shaman-dar might not be looking too good, but the picture was still recognizable.

All his shadowrunner's instincts were screaming that it was time to get out of town and stay out until the whole thing died down some. He just wished he'd brought along his phony ID so that he could have reserved a ticket for Cape Town as himself and then actually made for Germany under the false name.

"Frankfurt, I think." From there maybe he'd make another hop on to Heathrow, where he'd be able to look up some of his Brit friends; it was certainly a more inviting prospect than a visit to the Azanian city. "Can you get me out of here in time?" he pleaded.

"If you run like crazy, you might just make it. The last call just went out; gate seventeen."

"Lady, I can run like crazy when I need to, trust me." He flung her the City Hall credstick and dumped his suitcase on the conveyor belt. Then he was off, head down, sprinting for the departure gate. Halfway there, he almost tripped over a light metal briefcase, which went spinning away. He glanced up at its owner, an iron-faced man with short hair as gray as his own and a triangular scar on the left side of his chin. Shades concealed cybereyes. Serrin mumbled an apology and something about a terrible hurry, but left the task of retrieving the case to its owner as he continued his dash for the boarding gate. Reaching the gate, fumbling for his passport, the elf had no way of knowing that the man's cybereyes were equipped with a state-of-the-art cyberoptic portacam, which had already shot thirty frames of him.

Serrin just made it to the last boarding bus. As it crossed the tarmac he gazed out over the gray and distant skyline; the coming rain promised to cool New York's hellish humidity to within tolerable limits long enough for the city's denizens to sleep. He stepped into the plane, found his seat, and sank back against the plush upholstery, unrolling the tabloid as furtively as if it was pornography.

Julia of the dark eyes and lovely smile had used just about everything he'd ever said to her, and she'd done her

homework too. No wonder she'd become uneasy toward the end. The scoop had almost everything: his murdered parents, the leg shattered during his stint with Renraku, the Atlantean scam, even the story of how he and Geraint and Francesca had helped solve the gruesome murders in London last year. It was seamlessly stitched together, and what must have gotten her a really fat bonus was the personal poop. No wonder everyone had been staring at him in that restaurant. The media had given the attempted assassination of Mayor Small a barrage of coverage, but Serrin hadn't been watching much trid and so hadn't a clue what else anybody might have said about him by now. But certainly not this intimate, private stuff. Maybe he should be grateful to the tabloid's editors for giving their hungry readers a feast to last them at least until the next three-day wonder showed up. Who knew what they'd do if deprived for too long?

Reading on, he was also grateful she'd spared the revelation of any bedroom secrets amp; then, oh drekWrong again. He just hadn't read far enough. Serrin felt a desperate and wretched sadness, not because the story was savage or brutal, a hatchet job or full of complete lies but because it wasn't. Maybe he'd have found some consolation in cursing her as a lying slitch. But even that she'd stolen from him.

In his impotence Serrin wanted to tear the pages into a million tiny pieces and throw them out the window of the plane. Instead he stuffed the tabloid roughly into his jacket pocket, then wearily sank back against the seat to try and get some sleep.

He hit Frankfurt at ten in the morning, local time, jet-lagged as always after a continental hop, even a short one. Copies of Newsday seemed to be everywhere in the terminal, endless racks of red-edged portraits mocking his attempts at escape. In his over-excited state, the elf decided to keep on moving.

He took a cab to the rail station, which was alive with travelers, all of whom seemed to be either eating or else thinking about it. He saw people ordering croissants stuffed with every filling imaginable, gulping down soykaf and ordering rolls oozing with schinken, pickles, pink beef sizzling fetidly in pools of fat, and salads bathed in mayonnaise thicker than a troll's arm. Such a diet didn't seem to produce many thin Germans, and Serrin worried that his tall elf slenderness would make him too conspicuous. About the best he could do was pull his collar up around his neck and duck his head down into it while he stood waiting in the ticket queue. So preoccupied was he with trying to hide his face that it wasn't until he was almost to the front of the line that Serrin realized he had no idea what would be his destination. Frantically, he looked up at the huge, ever-changing indicator beneath the concourse clock, an enormous thing of iron and brass.

The first train showing was for Karlsruhe. Studying the string of destinations along the way, Serrin settled, for no particular reason, on Heidelberg. He asked the clerk for a one-way ticket first class again, for the isolation and anonymity and headed for the indicated platform.

Crusher 495 was one of the most popular bars in the Barrens, the poorest, most godforsaken district in the

whole urban sprawl that was Seattle. The troll finished his soda water and chuckled over the magazine again, flicking it to and fro in his huge hands. The bar stool beside him creaked as a grizzled, gray-haired ork, weary from another day working the roads, parked his butt down next to him.

"Hey, Ganzer. How ya doin'?" the troll said. "Not too bad, Tom. Same as always. Janus chummer, get me a beer, will ya? Whatcha got there?" The ork turned Tom's magazine over to take in the cover.

"Slot me if that isn't Serrin," he said, looking up with an expression of puzzlement. "Looks like he got some facial work done since we last saw 'im."

"Not likely," Tom said slowly. "Serrin never wanted any metal in the meat. Wouldn't go anywhere near a scalpel. Why would he change now?"

The ork drained half his glass and said nothing. It wasn't tactful to talk much about metal in the meat to Tom. It might only get the troll sermonizing again.

"He saved the mayor of the Rotten Apple from getting shot," Tom said. He knew Ganzer couldn't read.

"That so? Well, as the tortoise said to the army helmet, guess we all make mistakes amp; But, frag, we haven't seen Serrin in what? Five years?"

"Five years and two months," the troll said slowly. "I don't forget."

Ganzer wasn't in the mood for tales of Tom's old shadowrunning days right now. The stories always seemed to end up with the interminable saga of how the troll quit boozing for good, and the ork didn't want to hear about temperance. He wanted a bellyful of beer. Ganzer decided it was a better idea to change the subject. "Say, I hear you're a real hero over in the Jungles these days."

Tom shrugged, but couldn't help a smile to think that the lot of some of the squatters down there might actually improve. "Yeah, well, getting the mayor to throw some grant money their way made him look good too. Now that the detox has gotten the soil up to growing crops acceptable for animal feed, some of those squatters can start earning enough money to buy themselves somethin' to eat."

Tom gazed reflectively around the dingy bar, with its boarded-up windows, scarred furniture, and murky atmosphere. The ceiling might once have been white, but smoke from an untold number of cigarettes had long ago turned it a brown only a millennium of sunshine could have achieved if sunlight had ever found its way in here. The Crusher was still enough of a meeting-place for orks and trolls to get hit by Humanis policlubbers now and then, though it had been six months since the last firebomb attack by the anti-metahumans. Tom knew about every one of the attacks, since he always got called in to help out afterward. A Bear shaman was often the best many folks too poor for medical insurance could hope for.

A heavy hand slapped him on the back, and he turned to see another ork, Denzer, smiling down at him. The joke that went around the Crusher was that Denzer was a troll stitched into an ork's skin, and he was almost big enough for it to be true. He flicked the greasy black hair out of his eyes, and Tom gave him a friendly growl.

"Buy you a soda water, Tom? Hey, the mayor's running around like he just won the next election. Nice work, chummer."

The troll smiled again and let himself feel good about it all. No matter how wretched were the Redmond Barrens, it was his home and he was doing what he could to put something back into it after all those years of being on the take.

He looked around once more at the hard-worked and care-worn faces. Seven years ago, he'd have killed anyone in here for a few hundred nuyen. Now, what was left of him loved these people. From the Plastic Jungles, with their legacy of chemical pollutants all the way down to the street markets of the Bargain Basement. And, down in the Jungles, the seed money grant his group had been able to extract from Redmond's mayor, Jeffrey Gasston, was going to make a real difference to thousands of them. I owe you for all that, chummer, he said silently to the face on the magazine cover. Whatever did happen to you?