Dreamer's Cat: a sci-fi murder mystery with a killer twist

by Stephen Leather

  DREAMER’S CAT

  by Stephen Leather

  So it’s two o’clock in the morning and just under three weeks before deadline and I’m sitting in a bar somewhere in Manila’s red light area with a Japanese Scotch on the rocks in my hand and a thumping great headache.

  Am I worried? Damn right I’m worried. When you work for the Cerebral Broadcasting Services Corporation you don’t miss deadlines. Still, I’m doing okay. I’ve got the central character all fixed up, an aging private eye on the trail of a serial killer, and I’ve got a good idea of the locations - Manila, New York, London and an undersea vacation centre off the Seychelles. Some of the scenes I can play back time and time again in my head but there are still a few grey areas in the plot. Too many for comfort, and less than three weeks to get them sorted out. Yeah, okay, I admit it. I’m worried.

  From my bar stool I can see myself reflected in the mirror behind the scantily dressed dancing girls and it makes me wince. I do not look good. I do not look good at all. I’m only 48 years old for God’s sake but every hair on my head is grey and the laugh lines around my eyes and mouth are still there even when I’ve nothing to smile about. I look old. And tired. And worried.

  ‘You look old. And tired. And worried,’ says Ruth.

  She is sitting on the stool next to mine. Cute. ‘How long have you been there?’ I ask.

  ‘Not long,’ she says. ‘This is a dump.’

  I ignore her and drain the contents of my glass. A bargirl who has seen better days comes over and asks me if I want another.

  ‘He’s had enough,’ says Ruth, but the girl doesn’t acknowledge her, just keeps looking at me with raised plucked eyebrows. I nod. My head hurts. She brings me a refill and leans her thickening forearms on the bar.

  ‘You on vacation?’ she asks me in a voice as brittle as spun glass.

  ‘Sort of,’ I say. ‘Calm before the storm, you might say.’

  ‘Manila is a good place for a vacation,’ she says, obviously not listening.

  Ruth leans over the bar and puts her face close to the girl’s cheek. ‘Go away you foul-smelling hag,’ hisses Ruth.

  I try not to laugh. ‘What’s funny?’ asks the girl.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say.

  ‘Have you visited Manila before?’ she asks.

  ‘No,’ I answer. The truth.

  ‘And never again,’ says Ruth.

  ‘And never again,’ I say.

  ‘Where are you from?’ she asks.

  ‘I was born in London. Now I live in Chicago. And Paris.’

  ‘And sometimes on a small island about three hundred miles from Sri Lanka that isn’t even on the map,’ says Ruth. The truth.

  A young guy, thirty at most, wearing cut-off denim jeans and a grubby white t-shirt, appears at my shoulder and motions at Ruth’s chair.

  ‘Anyone sitting here, Buddy?’ he asks me in a mid-Western drawl. I shake my head and regret it immediately. It hurts. It hurts a lot.

  ‘Tell him to sit somewhere else,’ hisses Ruth.

  I grin at her. ‘You tell him,’ I say.

  ‘Say what?’ says the guy.

  ‘You sit there,’ I say. ‘You can help me entertain this charming young lady here.’

  Ruth jumps off the stool just before he slides on and she stalks up and down behind me, her stub of a tail twitching in annoyance and growling occasionally. I ignore her. I have to when other people were around. They wouldn’t understand.

  ‘Thanks, Buddy,’ says the man.

  ‘Leif,’ I say. ‘The name’s Leif.’

  ‘Leif me outta this,’ growls Ruth. She is not taking rejection well.

  ‘Jack,’ he says. ‘Jack Rosenberg. From Houston.’

  He orders a beer for himself and a whisky and ice for me. I tell the girl to put them on my tab. She asks if I’ll buy her a drink and I shake my head and she asks Jack and he says yes but I tell her to put that on his bill. If Jack the Lad from Houston wants to be taken for a ride he can do it under his own steam.

  The girl asks Jack what he does for a living and he tells her he is a real estate agent looking around for big chunks of the Philippines for folks back home.

  ‘What do you do, Leif?’ she asks me. I think about lying but then think, what’s the point? It was two in the morning and I’ve lost count of the whiskies I’ve put away and they won’t believe me anyway.

  ‘Me?’ I say. ‘I’m a Dreamer.’

  ‘They won’t believe you,’ says Ruth in a sing-song voice.

  The girl looks at me wide-eyed and Jack the Lad snorts into his San Mig. ‘Bullshit,’ he says, froth on the end of his nose. ‘Bull fucking shit.’

  ‘Told you they wouldn’t believe you,’ sings Ruth.

  ‘I thought Dreamers were all young. Teenagers,’ says the girl.

  ‘We are,’ I say. ‘We just age quickly.’

  ‘You’re too old to be a Dreamer,’ she says.

  ‘And you’re too old to be working behind a bar,’ I answer. I love witty repartee.

  ‘And too ugly,’ adds Ruth. She sits down behind my stool and begins scratching her ear with her left rear leg, grunting with each stroke.

  ‘Buddy, everyone knows that there isn’t a Dreamer in the world older than 25. And it looks to me as if you’ll not be seeing 50 again,’ says Jack. ‘If you’re a Dreamer then I’m the Prime Minister of Russia.’ He drains his glass and the girl moves away to refill it. He turns his body towards me and looks me up and down like a butcher weighing up a carcass.

  ‘You ain’t no Dreamer,’ he says.

  ‘Whatever you say,’ I reply, avoiding his eyes. Perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea telling him.

  ‘Smart boy,’ says Ruth. She stops scratching and sits proudly, watching the American with a mischievous grin on her face. ‘Telling this deadhead was real smart. Real smart.’

  That’s the trouble with Ruth, she knows what I’m thinking before I even think it, yet her mind is a closed book to me. Bitch.

  ‘Language,’ she says throatily.

  ‘Behave,’ I say.

  ‘In your dreams,’ she hisses.

  ‘What do you mean, behave?’ says the American. ‘You looking for trouble?’

  So what could I say? I’m not talking to you, Jack, I’m talking to the cat. Sure, that’d open up a nasty seething can of worms, wouldn’t it. Better to say nothing.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say and look down into my glass and watch the ice cubes melt.

  ‘Good grief,’ sighs Ruth.

  Jack decides I’m not worth talking to and swaggers along the bar to another stool. The bargirl carries his drink over and sits opposite him. She says something to him and he laughs out loud and the two of them look over at me and laugh again.

  ‘Wimp,’ says Ruth. She rears up on her haunches and leaps smoothly back onto the stool. Poetry in motion. No awkwardness, no strain, no effort. Smooth. She is a lovely mover.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, accepting the unspoken compliment.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ I say softly.

  Don’t get me wrong. I don’t usually talk to Ruth. Not in public anyway. People wouldn’t understand. All they would see is me chatting to myself and it wouldn’t be long before they’d carry me off and measure me up for a white jacket with very long sleeves. Ruth has to stay a secret. People wouldn’t understand. But it’s easy to forget after a few drinks, to forget that she isn’t real and that the rest of the world can’t see the grey and brown bobcat with the tufted ears and the white teeth and the knowing brown eyes and the sharp tongue.

  ‘Hazel,’ Ruth interrupts my thoughts. ‘My eyes are haze
l.’

  I raise my glass to her. ‘To the cat with hazel eyes,’ I say. Jack and the bimbo laugh again but I ignore them. That’s one of the pluses of being a Dreamer. I can ignore anything. Except Ruth.

  Three weeks to go before deadline. Three lousy weeks before I had to put up or shut up. ‘You’ll make it,’ says Ruth. ‘You always do.’

  I nod at her and take another pull on the Scotch. It’s a Japanese malt, a good one. It’s expensive, but what the hell, I can afford it. It doesn’t make my throbbing head feel any better, but then again nothing ever does. The headaches go with being a Dreamer. The headaches and the slide into insanity. Perks of the job.

  ‘Don’t forget the money,’ says Ruth as she begins grooming her stiff white whiskers with her left paw.

  Yeah, the money. Access to more money than Jack or the bimbo could even imagine, more money than any one person could ever spend in a lifetime. While you’re under contract you have access to the huge resources of the Corporation. You can have anything in the world you want. Anything. But unless you run the full course of the contract you don’t get to keep a cent. It keeps us on our toes. That’s the idea, anyway.

  ‘And how many Dreamers actually fulfill their contracts?’ asks Ruth. ‘Answer me that.’ Yeah, that’s the rub. Three at most. Four if I can meet my deadline. Since the psi-disc boom started 10 years ago only three Dreamers have gone the distance.

  ‘And where are they now?’ she asks. Persistent.

  Nobody knows. But lets face it, if I lay down my tenth psi-disc and I get to collect my retirement cheque then you’re not going to see me for dust either. Whatever happened to Leif Ableman? Did he ever finish his last psi-disc? Did he collect his pot of gold? Or is he in a padded room in some secluded asylum dribbling down his chin and chewing the fat with an imaginary cat? Nine down, one to go.

  ‘You’ll make it,’ says Ruth. My biggest fan.

  The door to the bar opens with a hiss and I turn to see a tall, thin greying man with a stoop step into the gloom, blinking his hooded eyes until they get used to the lack of light. Herbert Chastel de Beauville. My minder, helper, gopher, sometime pimp and banker. Go back far enough and his family probably owned vast estates in France and for all I know his distant relatives lost their heads during the Revolution but now there wasn’t a trace of French in his accent, his voice is a nasal Brooklyn whine with missing consonants and vowels strangled at birth. He always speaks as if he has a head cold. As usual he is dressed in a black suit that is slightly baggy around the knees and too short in the arms and the shoulders are flecked with dandruff.

  ‘Leif,’ he says, running a hand through his hair in much the same way that Ruth has been cleaning her whiskers. He moves to sit on the stool next to mine and Ruth slides down to the floor again with a soft growl.

  ‘Herbie,’ I say, giving him a genuine smile. ‘Let me buy you a little refreshment.’

  There is no need to ask him how he knows where I am. He can track me all over the world with the company chipcard, and anyway I’d told him I was working on the Manila angle last time I’d called him in the Chicago office. But the deadline was still three weeks away.

  ‘No time,’ he says. He pinches the top of his hooked nose with his fingers and rubs the corners of his eyes. He looks tired.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I ask, putting my empty glass on the bar.

  ‘Another one has died,’ he says quietly. ‘Jimmy Kratzer. You know him?’

  I shake my head. ‘Heard of him, sure. But never met him. One of the rising stars isn’t he? Yeah, now I remember. He did ‘Breakout’ didn’t he?’

  ‘That and a couple of others. The company reckoned his next one was sure to go platinum.’ Platinum means a billion sales in a year. Two of mine had hit platinum. Two of my earlier psi-discs. The last one sold just under 400 million in five months so there was a chance it would make it too. Not that the company worried about one year’s sale figures. It was the repeats that counted, and the quality stuff like mine would go on for years. That’s the beauty of the psi-discs, the customer never gets bored with them. Every time is like the first time, you live them rather than view them. That’s the sales pitch, anyway.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Same as before. He was laying down his disc and he just died. Total brain death, no neural activity, no pulse, nothing.’

  Kratzer is the third Dreamer to have died in as many months. Not that Dreamers are immortal, far from it. Their death rate is higher than combat soldiers, but usually they drive their cars off cliffs or jump out of luxury hotel windows or blow their brains out or withdraw into a coma and just give up on life. This was different. Someone was killing Dreamers while they were laying down their psi-discs. And I was only three weeks away from my deadline.

  Herbie falls silent as he continues to massage the bridge of his nose. He is the bearer of bad news and isn’t sure how to break it to me so I decide to make it easy for him.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I ask.

  He looks at me gratefully. ‘They want you in Chicago. Soonest.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it,’ sneers Ruth from behind me. ‘They want you to find out what happened.’

  ‘They didn’t say,’ says Herbie.

  ‘He’s lying,’ says Ruth as she paces backwards and forwards, her powerful shoulders flowing under her grey and brown fur.

  Maybe he is and maybe he isn’t, but either way they’ve gone to the trouble of sending my minder in person rather than just telexing or phoning. For a moment I wonder what would happen if I tell Herbie to sod off and that I’ll see him in Chicago in three weeks but deep down I know there is no point. Sooner or later I am going to have to start work on my psi-disc and God only knows what will happen to me then.

  ‘Let’s go, then,’ I say to Herbie. I wave to the bargirl and she brings me the bill. I hand her my card, the black company chipcard. She looks at it with surprise written all over her face and I get a kick out of her confusion. There are hundreds of thousands of Corporation cards, but most of them are green or gold. There are a few thousand platinum ones, most of them owned by the upper echelons of Corporation management, but only a couple of dozen black cards, and they are only in the hands of Dreamers and their minders. She holds it almost reverently and then swipes it through her register. She looks at it again as if trying to imprint it on her memory before she hands it back so that she can tell her family and friends later. There was a Dreamer in our bar. A real live Dreamer. I follow Herbie out into the street, leaving the girl talking to Jack. This time neither of them are laughing.

  *

  We take the company jet back to the States. It’s not quite as fast as the supersonic Mitsubishi 797s that they use on the commercial routes but there’s no waiting for the plane to fill and no getting caught up in Customs. Herbie and I just show our company chipcards and after they’re swiped through the computer we’re on our way.

  The jet is sleek. No windows. At four times the speed of sound, who needs them? It’s all just a blur anyway. The inside is finished like an old-fashioned study, wood-panelled walls and a plush wine-coloured carpet and antique furniture. Herbie had asked me a couple of years ago how I wanted my plane fitted out and I told him I didn’t care, that I’d leave it up to him. The boy done good.

  The seats are burgundy leather wing chairs with restraining straps for take off, landing and the hour or so we spend in near-weightless conditions. There’s a full range of in-flight entertainment, including 50 or so psi-discs. Mine are all there, of course, but I never plug in. I occasionally view the latest releases, but only to see what the competition is doing.

  Yeah, I know that every commercial flight in the world, even cattle class in the Third World airlines, have psi-discs to keep the passengers happy. And I know that passengers would prefer to get out and walk at 75,000 feet rather than take off the psi-disc headbands and talk to the person next to them. But when I fly I read books or talk.

  I flick through the r
ack of discs while Herbie watches me. ‘Anything I should worry about?’ I ask him.

  ‘Alex Lee’s new one is there. ‘Killers from Korea’. It’s getting good reviews.’

  ‘Have you seen it?’

  ‘Naturally.’ Herbie sees them all, as a fan. More than a fan. Like 95 per cent of the population, he’s an addict.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s good. It’s a blood and guts Kung Fu story, but you get to take part in two of the gang fights. It feels good, there’s one bit where you’re up against two thugs with hatchets and you get to kick them both at the same time. And there’s another bit where you dodge an axe thrown by the leader of the Korean assassins and then catch it by the handle as it goes past. Good effects.’

  ‘Okay, okay, no need to sound so bloody enthusiastic about it,’ I say, somewhat hurt. Alex Lee is one of the new wave Dreamers from China. Full of emotion and colour, but lacking subtlety and depth. That’s how I feel, anyway. And the last thing I want is my minder telling me how great he is.

  ‘He’s not a patch on you, Leif, you know that,’ says Herbie, and I feel a little better.

  I’m the third Dreamer that Herbie has had under his wing. I don’t know what happened to the previous two, it’s not polite to ask. Not where Dreamers are concerned.

  ‘Yeah, I know Herbie. I just like to hear you say it,’ I tell him, to show him that I appreciate him. Him and Ruth, I can’t do without either of them.

  So where is the cat with hazel eyes? Not here, that’s for sure. She hates flying. Totally illogical, I know, that an imaginary cat should refuse to fly, but that’s the way it is. She’ll pick me up again once we’ve landed. She’s got to the stage now where she virtually comes and goes as she pleases. If I really want her around I can put pressure on her to come, but it’s not easy. She walks her own path. Take her name for example. Ruth. That was not my choice. I reckon it makes her sound like a maiden aunt with white hair and a rocking chair. I wanted to call her Bobby. Bobcat, Bobby, get it? She did and one day told me in no uncertain terms that she would not answer to such a childish name.

  ‘You may call me Ruth,’ she told me frostily.

  ‘Why Ruth?’ I’d asked and she told me. Felis Rufas. Latin for Bobcat. From Rufas to Ruth. It was a name with some style, she said, and she was a cat with style.