Holy Fire - Bruce Sterling [116]
Maya ran as well, dashing out into the damp and chilly Roman street. Then she turned and ran back into the squat.
She snatched up her backpack. The sewer guardian was sitting half-buried in an enormous wad of foaming sealant. It turned at her, aimed camera eyes at her, lifted two flanges on its neck, and began flashing red alarm lights. It then said something very ominous in Italiano. Maya turned and fled.
She reached the hotel at five in the morning. It had begun to rain a little, misting and damp.
She tottered into the hotel bar, knees buckling. It would have been lovely to go anywhere else, but she was tired of having no place to go. At least the walk and the lonely ride on an empty Roman trolley had given her something like a plan.
She would wait until Novak woke up, and then she would confess everything to him. Maybe, somehow, he would conquer his disgust and anger and take pity on her. Maybe he would even intercede somehow. And if he didn’t, well, he deserved the chance to turn her in. The chance to avenge himself properly.
The cops in Praha seemed a little odd, so maybe they would be gentler about it than cops in Roma, or cops in Munchen, or cops in San Francisco. And she owed Novak that much; she owed him the truth. She owed the old man the truth after throwing her worthless self into his life.
She sat at a barstool, which whirled beneath her. The world went black for a moment and spun like a carousel. The dull realization struck her that she hadn’t eaten all day. It had never once occurred to her to eat.
The bar was deserted. A bartender emerged from a staff door behind the bar. It was five in the morning, but maybe the doordog had tipped him off. The bartender strode over, a picture of solicitous concern. He was handsome and dapper and an infinitely better human being than she was. The hotel had very nice staffers, Roman people in their forties, kids who made it their business to serve the rich. “Signorina?”
“I need a drink,” Maya groaned.
The bartender smiled gallantly. “A long night, signorina? An unlucky night? May I suggest a triacylglycerol frappé?”
“Great. Make that a double. And don’t spare the saturated fats.”
He brought her a tall frappé and a squat little clear protein chaser and a fluted bowl of Roman finger snacks. The first cold mouthful hit her such a metabolic shock that she almost passed out. But then it warmed inside her and began to seep into her famished bloodstream.
By the time the frappé was half gone, the panic had left her. She was able to sit up straight on the barstool. She stopped trembling, and kicked off her shoes. The bartender wandered tactfully to the end of the bar and engaged in some menu-pecking ritual with a partially disassembled house robot.
She opened her backpack and fetched out her compact and looked at her face and shuddered. She scraped the worst of the damage off with a cream-wipe and touched fresh lipstick on.
A Roman in elegant evening dress wandered into the bar from the direction of the house casino. He tapped on the bar with the edge of a poker chip and ordered caffeine macchiato. She could tell from the brittle look on his powdered and aquiline face that the tables had been cruel to him tonight.
The Roman took his demitasse, sat on a barstool two seats away, and glanced at her in the mirror behind the bar. Then he turned and looked at her directly. He looked at her legs, her bare arms, her bare feet. He judged her bustline and approved wholeheartedly. He deeply and sincerely admired the intimate contact of her hips with the barstool. It was a gaze of direct and total male sexual interest. A look that could not have cared less that her mind was a shredded mess of anguish. A warm and scratchy look that wrapped around her flesh like a Mediterranean sun.
He shot two inches of cream-colored tailored cuff and put his elbow on the bar and propped his sleek dark head on his hand. Then he