You'll Be Surprised
Chapter Seven

New York City - Present Day

After the unfortunate incident in the Finch Tower elevator, Eichhorst decided to employ the empty hours before sunset and his next move by trying to remember every little detail about his time with Sandra Edwards in Berlin, in order to discover her weakness.

While strigoi were incapable of truly learning or being creative in the same way as humans, they possessed complete and perfect recall of every single event that occurred since Turning was complete, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant. This was because they didn't have to rely on memory archived in the impermanent and intrinsically flawed flesh that was the human brain. Those fragile pink blancmanges began to deteriorate physically in early middle age and only ever stored selective memories for the long term. The brain of Chosen strigoi was immaculate and eternal and no information need ever be discarded.

However, the very quantity of data accumulated meant that, while recall was total, it was not instantaneous and Eichhorst needed a bit of time to sift through seventy years of minute detail.

He started by searching for a link, a hook to drag to the surface. Where had they met? Berlin. When? October 1989. Why had he been in Berlin then?

Why? Ah, yes. The Master had assigned him the task of terminating A229467. Eichhorst recalled this assignment...

He had completed the termination clinically but not without a certain audacious flair in the set-up. He'd even got himself invited to Friday night dinner with David Kaplan's family. He would have indulged his pride in remembering his ingenuity in greater detail but he (like you and I!) wanted to get quickly to those parts of his memory that involved Sandra Edwards.

Their story hadn't started with their meet cute though. Eichhorst's first encounter with the couple was an accidental meeting with the boy.

Not being immediately reassigned by his Master, Eichhorst had lingered in Berlin hoping that the murder of David, his comrade from the camp, might tempt A230385 from his transatlantic bolthole.

Eichhorst had spent the summer inveigling himself into the upper echelons of the power structure of the Eastern half of the city. He'd always enjoyed that game and he was good at it. He'd established some accommodation, complete with a feeding room, in a very secure building and he waited.

He knew that Dr Werner Dreverhaven had been sent to Amsterdam to meet Abraham Setrakian for some undisclosed purpose and Eichhorst was jealous that he'd been passed over for the mission. The doctor had claimed it was because the Master knew how Eichhorst felt about the Jew and that he couldn't be trusted with him. That was clearly nonsense; Dreverhaven had been obsessed with the young Abraham in the camp and was still unreliable where that particular Jew was concerned, whereas Eichhorst had always followed orders. Well, okay, maybe toying with the Setrakians in Albania had been an embellishment of those orders but there was something poetic about making Abraham's own wife kill him. The Jew wasn't supposed to survive the encounter but he'd been forced to slay his beloved Miriam in the full knowledge that it was his obsession that had left her at Eichhorst's scant mercy. There would, after all, be many other encounters over the years, many future opportunities to finish the job.

It did not occur to Eichhorst that avoiding a clean kill of Setrakian at Castle Drisht may have been a sub-conscious bid to ensure those future encounters and was likely the reason the Master overlooked him for this job.

But anyway, he thought, back to Sandra and her young man…

Berlin - 1989

That evening, Eichhorst was out hunting as soon as the sun had fallen. He had taken to prowling around A229467's campus every now and then, seeing if he could get a sniff of Abraham's blood. It was Fall so already dark by home-time and there were plenty of people scurrying about heading for homes or dorms or bars or wherever they felt they had to go at the end of the day. Eichhorst, suited and made up, did not stick out except that he was the only one standing still and just watching. He was the only one who knew they were exactly where they were supposed to be in that moment. He leaned against a tree trunk, closed his eyes and smell-tasted the air, searching for a hint of the one he'd almost given up hope of finding. The old Jew wouldn't smell of weed or cologne like these youngsters. He would be pure of any contaminant other than that Hebrew blood.

Eichhorst was so focused on his sense of olfaction that he nearly missed a heard clue. Someone was speaking Dutch. It was a language he knew well enough to recognize but not to speak fluently. It nudged bittersweet memories to the surface and it was out of place even on the cosmopolitan university campus where the lingua franca was usually English.

Those were reasons enough to seek the source but there was something else about the speaker that drew Eichhorst's attention. He couldn't name it but that sixth sense was exactly right. He spotted a young blond man, shouldering his way blindly through a herd of people from an office building and he caught his own name amid the mumbling.

Eichhorst slotted into the crowd a few people back, half closed his eyes and leisurely scented the young man. His eyes flew open in shock. He couldn't believe his luck. There was the expected perfume of the shower gel and antiperspirant (spicy, not feminine), the natural scent of a young woman that promised an unparalleled drinking experience when he finally caught her. And the very, very faint smell of Abraham Setrakian.

So… he had come. Eichhorst could hardly wait to catch up with his old friend.

Corey Henke whirled around, drinks and buns in hand and sprinted off back to the campus nearly knocking over the silvery-haired gentleman in the fabulous suit.

Eichhorst followed the young Dutchman with his eyes and smiled.

There had been something else about the boy that he couldn't describe properly and didn't want to dwell on. It wasn't even a smell, more the memory of a feeling or the feeling of a memory.

It wasn't possible, though. Eichhorst had left no Loved Ones.