by Glen Duncan
“Jake?”
“Yeah. Look, don’t fuck about, Harley. Is there somewhere you can go?”
I heard him exhale, saw the aging linen-suited frame sag. It was upon him, suddenly, what it would mean if his WOCOP cover was blown. Seventy’s too old to start running. Over the phone’s drift of not silence I could sense him visualising it, the hotel rooms, the bribes, the aliases, the death of trust. No life for an old man. “Well, I can go to Founders, I suppose, assuming no one shoots me between here and Child’s Street.” Founders was the Foundation, Harley’s satirically exclusive club, sub-Jeeves butlers and state-of-the-art escorts, priceless antiques and cutting-edge entertainment technology, massage therapists, a resident Tarot reader and a three-Michelin-starred chef. Membership required wealth but forbade fame; celebrity drew attention, and this was a place for the rich to vice quietly. According to Harley fewer than a hundred people knew of its existence. “Why don’t you let me check first?” he said. “Let me get into WOCOP and—”
“Give me your word you’ll take the gun and go.”
He knew I was right, just didn’t want it. Not now, so unprepared. I pictured him looking around the room. All the books. So many things were ending, without warning.
“All right,” he said. “Fuck.”
“Call me when you get to the club.”
It did occur to me to similarly avail myself of Flamingo, since there it was. No Hunter would risk so public a hit. From the outside the night club was an unmarked dark brick front and a metal door that might have served a bank vault. Above it one tiny pink neon flamingo none but the cognoscenti would divine. In the movie version I’d go in and sneak out of a toilet window or meet a girl and start a problematic love affair that would somehow save my life at the expense of hers. In reality I’d go in, spend four hours being watched by my assassin without figuring out who it was then find myself back on the street.
I moved away from the queue. A warm beam of consciousness followed me. One glance at the glamour boy in the trench coat revealed him pocketing his mobile and setting off in my wake, but I couldn’t convince myself it was him. The ether spoke of greater refinement. I looked at my watch: 12:16. Last train from Gloucester Road wouldn’t be later than 12:30. Even at this pace I should make it. If not I’d check in at the Cavendish and forgo Madeline, though, since I’d given her carte blanche with room service over at the Zetter, I’d most likely be bankrupt by morning.
These, you’ll say, were not the calculations of a being worn out by history, too full of content, emptily replete. Granted. But it’s one thing to know death’s twenty-seven days away, quite another to know it might be making your acquaintance any second now. To be murdered here, in human shape, would be gross, precipitate and—despite there being no such thing as justice—unjust. Besides, the person tracking me couldn’t be Grainer. As Harley said, his lordship prized the wulf not the wer, and the thought of being despatched by anyone less than the Hunt’s finest was repugnant. And this was to say nothing of my one diarist’s duty still undischarged: If I was snuffed out here and now who would tell the untellable tale? The whole disease of your life written but for that last lesion of the heart, its malignancy and muse. God’s gone, Meaning too, and yet aesthetic fraudulence still has the power to shame.
All of which, my cynic said, as I stopped under a street lamp to light another Camel, was decent enough, unless it was just a fancy rationalisation for the sudden and desperate desire not to die.
At which point a silenced bullet hit the street lamp’s concrete three inches above my head.
3
COGNITIVE PILE-UP. On the one hand I was busy cataloguing the perceptual facts—Christmas cracker snap, puff of dust, clipped ricochet—to confirm I had indeed just been shot at, on the other I was already past such redundancies and springing—yes, springing is the correct present participle—into the doorway of a former Bradford & Bingley for cover.
One wants clean, 007ish reactions at times like these. One wants all sorts of things. Backed into the urinous doorway, however, I found myself thinking (along with oh for fuck’s sake and Harley can publish the journals and what will survive of us is nothing) of the refreshing abruptness with which financial institutions—B & B among them—had collapsed in the Crunch. Ads for banks and building societies had continued to run days, sometimes weeks after the going concerns had gone. For many it was impossible to believe, watching the green-jacketed lady in black bowler hat with her smile fusing sexual and financial know-how, that the company she represented no longer existed. I’ve seen this sort of thing before, obviously, the death of certainties. I was in Europe when Nietzsche and Darwin between them got rid of God, and in the United States when Wall Street reduced the American Dream to a broken suitcase and a worn-out shoe. The difference with the current crisis is that the world’s downer has coincided with my own. I must repeat: I just don’t want, I really can’t take (in both senses of the verb) any more life.
A second silenced shot buried itself thud-gasp in the B & B brick. Silver ammo? I had nothing to fear if it wasn’t, but no way of finding out other than taking one in the chest and seeing if I dropped dead. (This was so typically unreasonable of the universe. Apart from a few days to do what I had to do I didn’t want any more life. What’s a few days after two hundred years? But that’s the universe for you, decades of even-handedness then suddenly zero negotiation.) I got down on my belly. The concrete’s odour of stale piss was a thing of cruel joy. Low, moving in tiny increments, I stole a look round the doorway’s edge.
The supermodel in the trench coat stood twenty yards away with his back to me. His left hand was in his pocket. Either he’d shot at me and was now making a suicidal target of himself for my return fire, or the shots had come from somewhere else, in which case only clinical moronism could excuse him from not having worked that out. The scene was an eighties album cover, his overcoated silhouette and the snow and the odd-angled cars. I was tempted to call out to him, though to communicate what, God only knew. Possibly words of love, since imminent death fills you with tenderness for the nearest life.
Hard to say how long he stood there like that. The big moments distend, allow intellectual expansion … a disused London doorway in a twinkling becomes a public toilet; the lower animal functions pounce the second the higher ones look away; civilisation remains in Manichean deadlock with the beast … but eventually he turned and began to walk towards me.
Flush to the wall I got back on my feet, inwardly loud with calculations. Hand-to-hand with me this marionette wouldn’t last three seconds but somehow I didn’t see it going that way. Between here and the junction with Collingham Road thirty yards away there was cover, four cars parked or ditched on my side of the road and a pair of old-style phone booths on the corner. Risky. But unarmed in the doorway I was a sitting duck.
Meantime my pretty young lord and his cheekbones had halved the distance between us and stopped again. For a moment he frowned slightly, as if he’d forgotten his purpose. Then, precisely as I opened my mouth to say, What the fuck do you want?, his left hand came out of its pocket, languidly, holding a silenced .44 Magnum, a tool of such prodigious bulk it was hard to imagine him having the strength to lift and aim it. He smiled at me, however—big sensuous mouth and brilliant teeth in a bony face ensouled by dark mascaraed eyes—then with a surprisingly steady arm raised the weapon slowly and pointed it at me.
The body gets on with things while consciousness prattles. Without realising it I’d bent my knees to leap (and there was the great futile ghost of wolf hindquarters, a feeling of exquisite useless memory); my hands were out, fingers spread, head full of gossip but a shame not to see the first crocuses and if there’s an afterlife but no just something like your mouth filling with soil then nothing—
His hand—hit by a bullet—jerked and spat blood as the gun flipped away. He did a queer little simultaneous yelp and hop, staggered two steps forward clutching his wrist, then sank to his knees in the snow. His face, far from
the Tragedy mask you might expect, showed something like bewildered disappointment, although as I watched, his mouth opened and stayed that way. A pendulum of spittle (a phenomenon all but exclusively appropriated by modern pornography) hung from his lower lip, stretched, broke, fell. The bullet had gone through his palm, which meant bleeding from the superficial veins only. If it had severed the median nerve there might be lasting damage, but with today’s surgical top guns I doubted it. He sat back on his heels and looked about, vaguely, as if he’d lost his hat. The Magnum might have been a cigarette butt for all the attention he paid it.
The sniper’s message emerged: If I can hit our friend’s hand from here I could have hit you anytime. It was as if we’d been having a conversation and he or she just said this, quietly.
“Who are you?” I said to the young man.
He didn’t answer, but very sadly got to his feet, left forearm cradled close. The pain would be transforming the limb into something big and hot and beyond placation. With careful effort he bent, retrieved the Magnum, put it back into his coat pocket. Then without a word or further look at me he turned and began trudging away.
I didn’t doubt my reading, my risk assessment, my temporary safety, but those first steps out from the shelter of the doorway called for force of will. I took three and stopped. Pictured the sniper watching through the cross-hairs and, since every mutual understanding gives some sort of pleasure, smiling. My back livened to all the clean cold space behind me for a silver bullet to fly through. The smell of the falling snow was a mercy, though I was sure my clothes had picked up the doorway’s vicious scent of old piss. I took four more steps, five, six … ten. Nothing happened.
The warmth of being watched never left me, but I walked to Gloucester Road without incident and boarded the last Circle Line Tube to Farringdon.
Harley had called and left a message while I was underground. He’d made it to the Foundation safely.
4
IT’S HARD NOT to think of 1965, the year I saved Harley’s life, as one of rising sexual anarchy. Anti–Vietnam War demonstrations brought young men and women together and revealed the erotic potential of political activism. Mailer’s taboo-breaking An American Dream was published. Brigitte Bardot was on all the U.S. magazine covers and in England it emerged that Myra Hindley and Ian Brady got turned on by murdering children. If not quite Anything Goes, then certainly Everything’s Going On.
It’s hard not to think this way, but to do so is to succumb to the compressions of popular history. The facts are true, the interpretation false. The 1965 contemporary humans imagine didn’t really come about till 1975, and even by that jaded year what happened to Harley that night would still have happened. It was still happening ten years later, twenty, thirty. It’s still happening now.
Wayland’s Smithy is a five-thousand-year-old megalithic tomb in the Vale of Uffington, a mile east of the village of Ashbury, just southwest of White Horse Hill in the Berkshire Downs. It sits hidden by a little gathering of trees fifty yards off the Ridgeway, a chalk track following the line of the Downs Homo sapiens have been walking (knuckles gradually leaving the ground) for more than a quarter of a million years. Local legend is that if you leave your horse by the tomb with a coin on the lintel stone you can return to find it shod by Wayland, the smith of the old Saxon gods. During the day people stroll up from White Horse Hill, take photos, poke around, lower their voices, don’t linger. The stones exude meat-freezer cold. At night the place is deserted.
They’d taken Harley there to torture him.
I shouldn’t have been there. I should have been behind my own bars in the cellar of a purpose-acquired farmhouse a mile away. (Ah, the machinations of those premicrotechnology days! My cell contained a cast-iron safe with the key to the door taped inside it. The safe was welded shut, but with a hole in it just big enough to admit a human hand. A human hand. Once I’d Changed I had to wait until I’d Changed back. The simplest solutions are always the best.) I should, I repeat, have been under lock and key, self-gaoled and self-sedated, but at the last moment I’d weakened. I was in a phase of one kill every other full moon (less ethics than fear of the Hunt, who’d been on a recruitment drive since the postwar revelations of Nazi occultism) but abstinence was agony, even with the barbiturates, the benzodiazepines, the chloroform, the ether. That night I’d paused at the top of the cellar steps, contemplated the hours ahead. You go down, you take the drugs, you suffer near-death, you come through. You’re still alive and you haven’t killed anyone. Well, yes. But. The bare walls, the bars, the stone-flagged floor, the cheerful solid fatuous safe. Even underground the rising full moon like the Virgin Mary on a bed saying please, please, please just fuck me, will you?
With a physical gurn and a mental bollocks to it, I turned and went back upstairs …
The initial impulse, to descend like the Angel of Death on the nearest farm or village, didn’t last. It was a mad little fantasy born of a month without live meat. Besides, I was an old dog by this time. I’d long since rarefied into dalliance and deferral. You let the Hunger run you for a while, give the lupine lineaments a workout. The muscles fire up, allow near-complete dissolution of consciousness into animal joy. You run and the night goes over you like cold silk. I crossed the Oxford–Didcot railway line north of Abingdon, swam the icy Thames, ran east into the Chiltern Hills almost as far as the London road. The Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man” had that week been displaced from number one by the Beatles’ idiotic “Help!” Both songs went irritatingly round in my head like a pair of unshooable flies. The Hunger does this, seizes some arbitrary detail and makes it an incantation or totem, a maddening recurrence. Eventually I killed and ate. On the edge of the village of Checkendon an insomniac old duffer stood in his back garden smoking a roll-up, gazing blankly at his moonlit vegetable patch. He gasped, once, when I knocked the wind out of him, but that was the only sound he made. He’d survived the Somme, killed a man in a brawl in Ostend, discovered the peace of growing food in his own ground, the queer miracle of tubers torn up from the soil. Love, way back, was a scrawny Margate tea-shop girl with dark corkscrewy hair who’d sent him into a Lawrentian blood-drowse of certainty. They’d walked out together for three months and the night before he joined his regiment made long, dreamy love in a friend’s purposely vacated room with the window open and the smell of the sea coming in. Then war and the odd ordinariness of horrors. Limbs lying around like big doll parts. You lose things. Overhear them saying, He’s not the same. His libido remained a creature of frisky cunning: a stash of mouldy adult magazines behind the creosote tins in the shed, a blasphemous erection the other day with one of the grandkids on his lap, even Nell’s old fat arse after all these years grist to the shameless mill. God could go to hell after what he’d seen, Jones’s blown-off head rolling down the trench, Sterne with maggots living in his foot where the toes had gone—
I left his remains among the blood-drenched cabbages. Slipped from the village back into the woods. Disgust came in the hour after feeding but the years had reduced it to a heavy suave embrace. Disgust doesn’t kill anyone. Loneliness, on the other hand …
At Wayland’s Smithy an hour before dawn I stopped to observe. There wasn’t, really, time to stop and observe. The farmhouse (for current purposes home) was a mile away through sparse cover. This was high ground at the mercy year-round to Valhallan winds. Trees were few. Hedgerows were thin. Darkness, or at the very least twilight, would be required to get home unseen. Nonetheless. Here were the prehistoric stones roused to sentience. Here was the air dense with human stinks, jabbering with primal energies. A Cortina was parked nearby. My flesh steamed. The last of my victim’s life found settlement in me.
By the entrance to the tomb—a soft oblong of deeper darkness between upright sarsens—two men were intent on something I couldn’t see. A third kept lookout where the trees opened onto the track.
“Terry, I should have the torch,” this third one hissed. “It’s fucking pitch-black over here.”
>
The balance of power was evident. “Terry,” in his thirties and older by perhaps ten years than the other two, was in charge. He was the bearer of the torch. The beam swung, picked out the sentry—a small-eyed face of boyish sweetness, fair hair, one hand raised against the glare—then returned with disturbing precision to its original object.
“Arse-bandit,” Terry’s nearer accomplice said, quietly. “He’s probably enjoying this.”
“Get him out again,” Terry said. “Come on, Fido, out you come.”
“Oi, bum-boy, chop-chop.”
“He’s … Gimmie a hand, Dez.”
Between them Terry and Dez dragged their victim into the open. A lean young man with curled-under long hair, a high forehead, slender wrists and ankles. They’d tied his hands and gagged him. His shirt was still nominally on his back but apart from this and one dark sock he was naked. He lay on his side, not unconscious, but beaten to the point where merely drawing his knees up—the reflex to protect the soft organs—was almost beyond him.
“Come on,” the lookout hissed. “It’s going to be fucking daylight soon.”
“One minute he’s moaning about pitch-black,” Terry said, “the next he’s on about daylight.”
“Shut up, Georgie, for fuck’s sake,” Dez said. He took a swig from a bottle of Haig, passed it to Terry. Terry sipped, poured a libation on the victim’s head, then kicked the victim in the face. As if the action had tripped a switch Dez immediately kicked the young man at least half a dozen times in the stomach and ribs. This was Dez: If Terry drank a pint Dez drank six and still didn’t end up being Terry.
The man on the ground made a blurred animal sound, not plea or protest, just a foghorn note of despair. Dez spat on him. Halfheartedly stood on his face for a couple of seconds, balanced, slipped off. Terry reached into his jacket and pulled out a six-inch knife with a serrated blade. “Well,” he said, in the tone of a patriarch at the end of a satisfactory Sunday lunch, “we know where he likes it, don’t we?”