There was no tail, and he also nearly missed the damn train. But he did not miss it. He got in the club car and found his seat, dropped down and opened another magazine, Newsweek. He stared at it, while actually evaluating his surroundings and all the other passengers. There was a woman with two little girls, some businessmen, a couple of tourists, maybe from eastern Europe. Any of these people could be tails preset on the train. He was especially interested in the mom. That’d be a clever twist, the kind of thing they might use when a pro was the target.

Still, he didn’t think they were on him, or anywhere near him. He thought he’d have a good week before they decided to put him on wanted posters. Probably call him a serial child killer or something. Be sure to get police attention all over the damn country that way.

He gazed out the window. This was his America he was passing through, this America of rolling hills and tidy suburbs, and rusty old factories clinging to the rail line. He remembered a very long time ago when this was still the New York Central Railroad, and the cars had been painted olive drab. He’d made his first trip to New York on this line, emerging in Penn Station with saucer eyes and fifteen wadded up dollar bills in his pocket. He’d stayed at the Taft Hotel on Seventh Avenue, with three other guys from the college.

It was on that trip that he had seen his first truly great painting, Van Gogh’s Starry Night in the Museum of Modern Art. It was also on that trip that he had gone to his first opera, Turandot, about a cruel princess in a moonlit palace of long ago.

He had been a person, then—a young person, just awakening to the world around him. Fresh as the dew, drinking his first drink, smoking his first cigarette, lying in bed at night with Connie Bell on his mind.

He was a killing machine now, was Paul Ward. He’d lost his ability to love women. He could still have sex, and he did that whenever it was convenient, either with whores or causal pickups. But love? No. That part of his heart had gone out like a spent old coal.

It did not seem as though two and a half hours had passed, but they were entering the Pennsy Tunnel, sure enough.

New York. It probably wouldn’t be where matters ended, because he intended to follow this path to the last vampire in the country. He probably should have started here. But nobody they were aware of had ever even seen a vampire in those days, so Tokyo looked like found money. Too bad the Europeans had kept their programs to themselves.