Four, p.24
Four, page 24
“It’s exactly the type of apartment I’d expect for a robot,” she said as she squinted to hunt for a single piece of dirty laundry or a dish in the sink. She was sorely disappointed, however, to see that the only traces of dirt entering the apartment were coming off their grungy shoes.
Ren popped over to the fridge and came back with two blissfully cold, sweating bottles of water. “Here you go. Don’t worry. Once I’ve finished this initial inspection, it can be turned over to a real crew. I just don’t want to have to explain too many bloodstains.”
“I’m surprised that your boss doesn’t just kiss them all and make them forget,” she said after a long drink.
“Well, he could, but it would be just as suspicious to have a whole team come home with amnesia time and time again,” he said. “The simplest solution is usually the best. If you’d like, you can use the shower.”
“And get back into these?” she said, tugging at her once-white tank top.
Ren slipped over to the drawers and pulled out a T-shirt and shorts. “It’s not high fashion, but it should keep you decent until the laundry is done.”
“Music to my ears,” she said. She slipped into the cramped bathroom and nearly banged her knee on the tub that filled most of the space. After a quick blast of blissfully warm water that sprayed from the showerhead with the force of a category one hurricane, a full bottle of water, and a clean change of clothes, Georgia finally began to feel human again.
As she was yanking her fingers through the hacked-off ends of her hair, she noticed a bit of orange plastic tucked behind a jar of cotton balls and a box of tissues that was tucked in one of those porcelain holders that usually only were found in high-end hotels. She inched the container ever so slightly to read the prescription label, but instead of finding some antibiotics or clandestine painkillers, it was simply carbonyl iron for the treatment of anemia. Next to it, however, was a row of all sorts of other vitamins lined up like neat little soldiers, each one with the expiration date inked on a tiny label with disturbingly neat handwriting.
“So, he’s a health nut,” she said.
She finally noticed that her borrowed T-shirt had a faded row of letters on it. She smiled at the peeling edges of the U in UCLA and the slight tear along the lower hem. The bright blue and gold shorts looked a bit crinkly and worse for wear as well. “I’m done,” she shouted.
“Just leave the laundry on the floor. I’ll get it once I’m done.”
She found another bottle of water waiting for her on the desk, complete with a coaster and a plate of all sorts of neatly chopped-up fruit. Ren waited patiently for her to clear the door, then disappeared into the bathroom with his ninja speed and silence.
“How does he do it?” she sighed as she settled at the one little table in the room—a two-seat bar in front of his lone window. Her purse and phone had somehow made their way to the table as well, further reinforcing his ninja aura. Before she could really ponder it all, the serene calm of his room was interrupted by a phone vibrating violently on the desk, followed by a second buzz from another phone stashed next to the TV.
She counted the sheer number of electronic devices tucked neatly around the room. Eventually she found a third phone, a tablet charging on the nightstand, and a pair of computers under the desk linked to three rather large monitors—each flashing with “Hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE to Unlock.”
“This guy has to disconnect,” she sighed.
Before she could poke around too much more, the bathroom door swung open, and a freshly scrubbed Ren came sauntering out in a pressed pair of trousers and a sparkling white T-shirt. His hair was still damp but neatly combed, and his skin positively glowed red from the shower.
“Love the sleeves,” she said.
Every inch of his left arm from his wrist to the edge of the shirt looked as if it had been flayed open to reveal wires and sprockets. She noted the pink dots, particularly farther down, and faint traces of adhesive on his wrist.
“My master said it was too obvious,” Ren said. “But I wanted a change.”
He turned to show off his less-decorated right arm. She tried to make sense of the feathers trailing to his elbow. She peeked back over at the left and saw feathers mixing in with that ink as well.
“My roommate—well, my former roommate—has wings tattooed on her back. Did you do the same?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” he asked as he grabbed phone number one and flicked through messages.
“Well, yeah, I want to know, that’s why I asked,” she said.
“Mysteries are meant to be savored, Georgia,” he said, still only half paying attention. “Kuso!” he snapped, and he darted over to phone number two. “Just give me a minute.”
She watched him burst into a flurry of activity, unlocking each screen while he pressed a phone to his ear. She heard him speak something in Chinese into one phone before grabbing the next and sounding completely different in the following conversation. Finally he finished with something hushed and possibly German before turning back to a screen and sending an e-mail or ten.
“Look, if you’re busy, I can head out. We can have breakfast some other time—” she started.
“No!” he said surprisingly quickly. “I just need to upload a birth certificate for the third time, and I have to cross-check a few references. Then we can go out. We’ve earned it after all the manual labor. Ugh, who would have thought that the Cleveland Hall of Records would have decent security?”
“I have never seen you this stressed,” she said before popping a grape in her mouth. “It’s kind of refreshing.”
“There is this one employee who is impossible to crack. She refuses to open any e-mail attachments, and all her machines are so old I can’t get in there. I have to arrange a physical drop, and that’s just a sink of time and money. I think I’ve finally got it going, but now I’m trying to finalize the details. Now, I just need a few more photos . . .” He trailed off and stared right at her chest.
“Yes?” she said, putting her hands on her hips.
“Do you mind if I take a picture of your jaw through your chest?” he asked.
“My jaw through my chest? What is this, vampire porn?”
“I promise I’ll show you the results. It’s just that you have a similar skin tone, and I think I can use it for a selfie.”
Georgia just grabbed one of his phones, popped it over to the camera mode, and turned it around. She bent over ever so slightly and got a good shot of her chest. She then adjusted the camera and pouted cheesily for the camera. “This one is a bonus just for you,” she said, then snapped another picture.
He reached for the phone. “I could have taken it.”
“Then it wouldn’t be a selfie, would it?” she teased. “Look, after everything Mr. Lambley has asked me to do, a boob shot is really nothing of note.”
She watched him upload the pic and mix it with a few others on some sort of social media page. In a manner of minutes, he changed the background and shaded her jaw ever so slightly to tweak the shape. He then mixed it with pictures of the French Quarter and some dude doing a kegstand.
“She’s supposed to have gotten back from spring break recently. It would look odd to not have pictures,” he muttered.
“Who?”
“Hanna Broadbeck, well, Hanna Broadbeck von Jaeger now. She needs a new identity here in the states.”
“A vampire from Cleveland?” she asked with a raised brow.
“Born in Cleveland to German immigrant parents. She’s just settling into Cincinnati and needs a full identity—birth certificate, driver’s license, passport, the works. She’s been to school at UCLA, which is easy enough for me to fake, and is a bit of a party girl. I have a couple of tickets to Cancun and New Orleans, as well as a record of a brief stay in rehab on Daddy’s dime. It’s the perfect setup for someone destined to live fast and die young,” Ren said as he continued to type away.
“So, this is what you do?” she asked. “Wow, you have dental records and everything. Is that a copy of a library card? Who goes to the library anymore now that we have the Internet?”
Ren eased back in his chair as a new e-mail popped on-screen. He burst into a huge smile. “Yes!” he cheered. “I finally got the fax in there and filed. Hanna was born in 1995, and her original birth certificate was lost in a small recordkeeping glitch last month. The new copy was just sent over from the archive to put her in the system after it was discovered. It was all terribly awkward, but you know civil servants, they’d hate to be accused of incompetence after nearly a decade of service. One of the clerks I bought off just sent me the confirmation. Little does she know that she’s done this two times before.”
“Oh my god, you bribe government employees and then have your vampire boss cover it up? That’s so terrible it’s kinda awesome.”
“I only use it as a last resort. Once she had to forget seeing a corpse get up, and the other time I needed a marriage certificate refiled for an Azarola. My master buys her dinner and everything. It’s all very discreet and civilized.”
“How many people do you do this to?”
“A few dozen, and that’s only when we have to establish a new identity in the United States. Hanna was our first job in a while, and she’s easy since she’s on her first modern life. Some of the older ones are a nightmare to process.”
“You do so much,” she said appreciatively as she eyed the number of screens dedicated to social media.
“You just have to plant the seeds, and the Internet takes care of the rest. If you send out enough friend requests, someone always bites. After all, most people feel bad saying no when you want them to like you. Everyone wants lots of friends even if they don’t know them—especially if there are pictures of boobs and booze. It’s like when you go to a party and someone says hi and starts talking as if they know you. Even if you have no clue who they are, you’ll play along to avoid looking like an ass.”
“I don’t,” she said.
“I think we’ve already established that you are a unique little snowflake now, Georgia,” he said. He pulled up a few more screens to send out invitations to play little games or join alumni groups. “You see? I use the same principle when I create an identity. Any criminal with a decent printer and the right tools can make a fake ID; the art is getting that ID into the system once. At that point it feeds on the mountain of documents and paperwork you need to survive in society. Once you have a social security number, it snowballs. I even have Hanna’s credit report going. She’s been late on a car payment—that’s going to sting.”
“You make your clients deadbeats? Wouldn’t all vampires want to be rich and powerful?” she asked.
“The world is too transparent for that anymore. If you look like you have too much, you become a target, and if you look too perfect on paper, you come into question. I’ve found that parking tickets work really well to help establish an identity. You don’t want anything criminal, but a few annoying charges help you look human. Hanna requested a few years of fun, so I’m setting her up to look like Daddy’s little estranged princess. That should give her the tools to lure a few accomplices and some easy food.”
“Also known as people,” she chimed in.
It was Ren’s turn to roll his eyes. “You can’t have it both ways, Georgia. You do serve a vampire.”
“A vampire who eats rats and chickens,” she corrected. “I guess I haven’t gotten a taste of the criminal life like you. I mean, damn, you must have been popular at college if you can make such great IDs.”
“My family takes pride in our service,” he said, returning more to his subdued robotic voice. “I am very good at what I do. Our motto is that it takes a human nine months to create a life. We can do it in only four.”
“Four months?”
“That’s our promise. We can have a new identity established and any old ones removed in four months or less.”
“Or the next one is free?” she asked.
Ren’s eyes clouded over for a second. “In the old days if we failed, it was expected for the responsible family member to take his or her life. What can I say? We are terribly Japanese.”
“Oh my god—”
Ren relaxed a little and locked the screens. “Luckily we don’t fail. I can perform miracles in four months—life and death so to speak. It’s gotten easier and harder at the same time with the amount of crap I have to produce online, but on the flip side, I can use one identity to generate another even more rapidly than ever, and I simply love the advances in photo-manipulating software. You should see what I was able to do with some splicing and filters.” He pulled open a drawer and plopped a Texas license on the desk with a shockingly familiar face with big brown eyes and floppy brown hair.
“That’s . . . how did you get a picture of—?” she stammered.
“It’s a mix of a few photos of a young aspiring actor who is a distant grandnephew of my master. He went to a makeup test—supposedly for a razor commercial—but never got a callback,” Ren said with a sly smile. “I think it’s almost impossible to tell the difference and certainly not at a quick glance.”
“Stefano goes by Steven Drake?” she asked as she read the license. “And according to this, he’s pushing forty now.”
“It’s an older ID. He was lucky that I had such a close match. Getting doubles for others can be a nightmare.”
“And you do this for any vampire that asks?” she asked. “Wow, Steve is a Republican and an organ donor according to this.”
“My family does. I’ve done a few, and I help out whenever it’s for the family. Outside of the Jaegers, any vampire has to pay extravagantly to use our service.”
“Quite the family business,” she said. Ren replied by pulling out a few more IDs, these with his face. She picked up the first one and giggled. “So, you’re a doctor?”
“Research pathologist actually,” he corrected. “Dr. Yoshida is one I use when I have to transport fluids. He’s even published. I did a paper on staphylococcal pneumonia and had to present at a conference in Orlando once. I think I did a little too well on that one.”
“So, you do humans too?” she said. She picked up another ID and asked, “Can I call you Jacob Imahara?”
“You wouldn’t like him, he’s a thug,” Ren warned.
She continued to peruse the small pile of personal identification. “I’ve never seen a Korean passport before,” she mused. Before she could pick up one green book with Republic of China on it, he snatched it back and tossed it in the drawer.
“You’ll excuse me if I keep a few secrets. I want to make sure I don’t compromise too much client confidentiality, and unlike most other visitors, I can’t be one hundred percent certain that—”
“That I’ll forget this ever happened?”
“Exactly.”
“Come on, you crazy criminal, let’s go get breakfast before I’ve really seen too much . . .”
“So why four months?” Gail asked. “Why not ninety days or something like that?”
Georgia shrugged. “They seem to be able to always get it done. There are four laws, so it makes sense with vampire logic, but I don’t really know for sure. My one theory is that it’s somehow auspicious. Four is the number of death in Japan, and the Matsuoka family is terribly Japanese in all things, and vampires are all backward with the whole death-life thing.”
Gail simply answered with a “hmm” noise. She then returned to the hunt and pointed to Georgia’s rather glitzy ring. “So? Am I going to get any of the real dirt?” she asked.
Georgia hopped up to her feet and stretched a little. “Hang on, sweetie, just have to take one call.”
Gail bounced on the sofa as she watched her interviewer once more creep to the back to have a conversation. This time her normally calm face became animated, and Gail could clearly make out a few four-letter words before Georgia turned to face the wall. Meanwhile the blonde at the bar drifted across the room and watched the little human from her new perch. Finally the staring became too much, and Gail asked, “Can I help you?”
The vampire laughed surprisingly loudly. “No, you’re here to see if you can help zee helpless one,” she said in a slurry German accent. “Too funny, you are.”
“You’re Minerva, right? Stefano’s sister?” Gail dared to ask.
In a blink the blonde was parked firmly in Georgia’s former seat. Gail jumped at the inconceivably close proximity of the inhuman creature. At the new distance, she could finally see just how alien Minerva’s bloodshot eyes and skin really were, and as the vampire smiled, it was clear as day that she had long and lovely fangs sprouting from her insanely red gums.
“Yah, I am she,” Minerva said as she continued to size up the relatively petite morsel on the sofa. “You keep wanting to know about mein bruder and zee little Berliner over there.”
Gail kept staring until it occurred to her that the vampire was staring at her staring, and she abruptly looked away. “Um, I—” she stammered.
“You should ask her about zee hot tub. I think that was their favorite spot,” Minerva said with another wicked giggle. “Oh! Did I do zee spoilers?
Gail’s eyes lit up. Minerva took the opportunity to lean in closer and say ever so softly, “Oh, there is nothing like schtupping a vampire, dearie. Why do you think your kind writes so much about it? You want to know more, neh?”
Gail looked over her shoulder to make certain that Georgia was still in her conversation before nodding enthusiastically. “So she and Stefano—?”
“What do you think? Mein bruder might not be the best-looking of our kind, but he is still Jaeger-born and we Jaegers make zee hunt exciting always.”
“Not the best-looking?” Gail muttered.
“Well, he’s not my type,” Minerva corrected. “You need green eyes to ride this ride, so to speak.”
