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?
3
He'd chosen Heidelberg almost randomly. Now, after two days, Serrin was beginning to think the choice had been inspired. The city was quiet, even now, in the tourist season, and looked as though it had barely changed in more than a century. Small white boats still drifted lazily down the Neckar, and people still shopped at the street market where he'd bought a sample of neckarfroschen, one of those hand-made green ceramic frogs, a curious, goblin-like creature with a quizzical expression on its face. The market with its jars of homemade preserves, stalls of feathered hats and drinking steins, fish and fruit and schinken, the ever-present dried ham that was obviously a local specialty was as straight out of the nineteenth century as the rest of the town.
Wandering the streets, Serrin stopped on his way up the narrow one leading to the hilltop castle and gazed idly into the window of a confectionery shop. Some colorful little boxes caught his eye and he bought one, only to find a distressingly heart-shaped chocolate biscuit inside. Accompanying it was a tiny piece of paper, which said that these were "Student's Kisses," sweets sent by one student to a potential sweetheart whose chaperone prevented any more direct expression of ardor.