The Railroad Eccentric — Thursday, 17 January 1991, 4:35 PM

Clark/Division / Pedway / Succubus Club / Tremere Chantry

Chicago, Illinois

The bookkeeper from Ravenswood had been alone at a bar called Sterch’s with three bourbons past his credit limit and a wedding ring he kept turning with his thumb. Tomas took him in the alley behind the kitchen. Two points. Clean puncture, licked and sealed, the man back on his stool before the ice in his fourth drink settled. The blood sat in Tomas like ballast — warm weight distributed evenly through the chassis, hunger pushed to a distance where it became data instead of imperative.

He walked south on Clark. The recruiting office on the corner had flags in every window and a handwritten sign someone had already corrected: SHIELD crossed out, STORM written over it in marker. The correction was a day old. Down on Division the bars all had their televisions angled toward the glass — green night-vision footage of tracers over Baghdad, the same four seconds of video repeating on every screen like a test pattern for the new American century.

The Predatory Aura registered at Clark and Elm. Not the full-spectrum pressure of meeting another vampire in a closed room — a draft. A door that shouldn’t be open.

The old man was sitting on the bench at the bus stop. Herringbone overcoat, expensive in 1971. Flat cap pulled to his eyebrows. A folded Tribune on his lap, open to the crossword, filled in with a fountain pen at eleven at night in twenty-degree wind. Brown eyes, deep-set. A face calibrated for forgetting.

“Seven across. Eight letters. ‘Rail baron’s folly.’” The pen tapped the paper. “Samuel Insull. Built the North Shore Line, the South Shore, half the interurbans in the Midwest. Controlled the electricity for the whole city. They loved him until he went bankrupt. Then they deported him to Greece.” The old man shook his head. “Imagine building the machine that lights Chicago and dying in a Paris Metro station with eight cents in your pocket.”

The paper folded. The pen vanished.

“You’re the new one at Nicolai’s house. The analyst.”

Tomas said: “Who are you?”

The old man looked at him the way a teacher looks at a student who answered correctly for the wrong reasons. “Someone who reads crosswords at bus stops.” He adjusted the cap. “You walked past three people on this block who could tell you more about the war than CNN. The woman with the grocery cart has a son in the 1st Marine Division. The man in the doorway of the shoe repair lost his lease because his landlord is selling to a developer who doesn’t exist yet. The kid at the payphone is calling a girl in Cicero who won’t pick up.” He paused. “You didn’t look at any of them. You looked at me. That’s training, not instinct.”

The old man knew about Nicolai’s labeled vials. He knew about Tomas’s two visits to the Succubus Club. He knew about the second visit — the one where Tomas went looking for a Toreador who’d already left.

“That’s not operational,” the old man said. “That’s personal. Personal is where the mistakes live.”

Tomas said something about the Pyramid. About the Power that stood behind and beside him. The old man made a sound like a radiator settling and said he’d watched the Tremere sign at Thorns. Five hundred years ago. English field. Wet wool and old blood. He said the other clans didn’t trust mages who’d stolen the Blood but they needed what the Pyramid could do. He said the Pyramid’s blind spot was the size of Lake Michigan: it believed its own filing system.

The pen came out again. Uncap. Cap.

“Sit down. I have a question about blood.”

The room was forty feet below Scott Street. Ten by twelve, poured concrete, a wooden table and a chair and a cot with a wool blanket folded on it. A bare bulb on a pull-chain. Someone had left a glass of water on the table that hadn’t gathered dust.

Tomas broke the black wax seal with his thumbnail. The smell was cold vitae with something heavy underneath — sediment, the old man had said. The deeper the generation, the heavier the weight.

He touched the blood to his tongue and the room disappeared.

Three hours. The lineage confirmed: Balthazar, eighth generation, Brujah. Sired by Alexis Blanc, seventh generation, French Brujah out of Paris. The shadows behind them receded into the kind of distance that stops being history and starts being geology.

The bond map was clean. Lodin: three steps, full, decades old. The bond tasted like iron law. It matched.

The second bond did not match.

Toreador. Female. Step 2.

Not Step 1. The sample in Nicolai’s basement had read Step 1 a week ago. This sample — independent provenance, collected differently, from the same source — read Step 2. The delta was one step in seven days. Someone had been feeding blood to a staked vampire who could not swallow, could not spit, could not turn his head. Gravity and patience. The oldest technology in the world.

Tomas wrote the bond map in his notebook. He stared at it. The pen didn’t move again until he wrote the word at the bottom of the page: programming.

The old man was still in the chair by the door. He hadn’t moved. He produced a photograph — black and white, telephoto, 1951 date stamp. A woman descending brownstone steps. Dark hair pinned back. A face that read mid-thirties under the grain but had the bone structure of something that stopped aging before the camera was invented.

“Her name is Portia.” He took the photograph back. “She presents as an ancilla. Unaligned Toreador. Minimal political footprint. She is none of those things.” He buttoned his overcoat. “I watched her do the same thing to a Gangrel Primogen in Detroit forty years ago. Step by step. Patient. By the time the Gangrel woke up, he didn’t remember who he’d been loyal to before. She let him die in a fire eleven years later and never mentioned his name again.”

He moved to the door. “What I’ve given you is worth more than what I asked for. The real currency tonight is this: you now have a piece of intelligence your regent doesn’t have. What you do with that gap is between you and your conscience.”

He left. The corridor was dark in both directions.

The Succubus Club was wrong when Tomas arrived. Different doorman. Tighter screen. He posted up across Dearborn and extended his hearing through the wall. The music was low. The crowd thin. Fragments came through like intercepts on a dirty frequency:

“— gone before midnight, both of them —”

“— Ballard’s people were here an hour ago asking —”

“— Brennon shut the back room —”

The Gary emissaries had evacuated before the retaliation cycle started. Cole and the Toreador woman delivered their bomb and left before it detonated. Nobody at the Club knew where they’d gone. Ballard’s people didn’t know either. Brennon had locked down.

Tomas lowered the sense. Filed it.

He walked back to the chantry. Twenty minutes through empty streets. A police cruiser on State, the officer’s face blue from the dash computer. A diner with its lights on and nobody inside except a cook scraping the grill. The smell of burned grease and coffee. He remembered what coffee tasted like and then stopped remembering.

Nicolai was in the second-floor study. Door open. Nothing on the desk except a fountain pen and a sheet of paper with writing Tomas couldn’t read from the doorway.

“You’ve been out.”

Tomas sat in the straight-backed chair and delivered the report. The clean report. Drummond, Ballard, the ledger, the Primogen session, the emissaries vanishing, Ballard’s counter-search, Brennon’s lockdown. Every sentence load-bearing. Every fact sourced. The notebook stayed in his jacket pocket with the gun oil and the Guadalupe santo and the name he didn’t say.

Nicolai listened without interrupting. He said Ballard had been summoned. He said the emissaries were now a priority collection target. He said Cole’s generation claim needed independent verification.

“You’ve done well tonight. Get some rest.”

Tomas walked down the hall to his room. Closed the door. Sat on the cot in the dark.

Three secrets now. The Toreador woman he couldn’t stop looking for. The blood ritual he performed for a stranger in a room under the street. The stranger himself — whoever he was, whatever he wanted, sitting in a chair with a newspaper on his lap and five hundred years of memory behind his eyes.

The notebook was under his pillow. The bond map was on one page. Portia’s name was on another. The gap between what he’d told Nicolai and what he knew was the shape of the thing he was becoming, and the thing he was becoming wasn’t an analyst anymore.

Mickey Contreras had called him El Buho. The Owl. Sits in the dark, sees everything, speaks only to deliver the verdict. Mickey meant it as a warning. Tomas had taken it as a compliment. He was starting to understand which one Mickey was right about.

He closed his eyes and waited for dawn to make the decision for him.