by Glen Duncan
Call it an aesthetic judgement. One admits beauty to consummate sadism, but this confused pudding of cruelty was an offence. Dez and Georgie, at least, wobbled with sentimental notions: blue-collar fellowship; the Queen; family; Mum; graft; this sceptred isle. Match days would find these two Englishmen in full voice on the terraces, open-armed, in tears. By contrast Terry had depth but lacked the courage and vision that might have usefully plumbed past it and out into the world of others. His imagination would stick forever at himself. I had a bizarre little image of him sitting on the toilet, face slack from absorption in his own schemes—then I was moving.
Fast. Laughably too fast for them. Georgie was dead before the other two even noticed. I’d torn his throat out (redundantly since I’d already broken his neck) and still had most of its wet tubing in my left hand as I approached Terry and Dez. There was nothing to be said. For me this was just the relief of walking out of a bad play. Dez tried to run. Terry sat down somewhat in slow motion, mouth open, then made an attempt to get up on noodle legs. I took one bite out of Dez’s midriff as his life slipped away, swallowed, got a flash of a cobbled street corner and a plain blond woman’s moist frowning face—but stopped. I’d fed to saturation already. You ingest a life, trust me, it fills you. Terry watched everything like someone who couldn’t quite assimilate the surprise party even after everyone had jumped out and shouted surprise. He did say, as I stood over him trailing the warm sausages of Dez’s intestines, Please. Please.
Harley, their victim, had dragged himself a few feet away and stalled. I squatted next to him. He was at the pitch of fear that resembles calm. I very gently eased the gag from his mouth, pressed my finger, my awful hybrid finger—shshsh—against his lips. He nodded, or shuddered in revulsion, at any rate didn’t make a sound. I found his trousers in the doorway of the tomb, brought them to him. His face was a mob of glistening swellings. The left eye was plum-fat and gummed shut. The right tried to watch me. Untying his hands took a wearying while, what with my hands. His three broken fingers made getting the trousers on a dreamy labour. I daren’t risk helping him with them. He was too close to the edge of himself. I remained on my haunches a few feet away. It occurred to me that I hadn’t thought past ridding him of his attackers. Had he run or walked or crawled away I suppose I would have let him, though it would have meant immediate flight for me (this night’s work was bad enough now that I’d killed on my own doorstep) but he didn’t. He struggled to his feet, took three or four steps, then collapsed, unconscious.
The sky said maybe half an hour till dawn. I hadn’t made much of a mess, considering. Quickly I got bodies and gore into the Cortina. The sleeve of Dez’s shirt made a fuse, worked into the tank with a twig. By the grace of the random universe a stainless steel Ronson was in Terry’s pocket. I picked Harley up, slung him over my shoulder, lit the sleeve and ran.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
5
I PHONED HARLEY from the Zetter’s lobby.
“They’re not onto me,” he said. “I just got a call from Farrell. They didn’t know you were here. They weren’t following you, they were following the other chap. Wasn’t even the London unit. It was one of the French. I could have been at home in bed, I hope you realise.”
My young man, Paul Cloquet, had been under WOCOP’s Paris surveillance for a month. “Lightweight stuff,” Harley said. “He’d been clocked in the wrong place once too often. Plus he was having it off with Jacqueline Delon, apparently.” Jacqueline Delon is heiress to the Delon Media fortune, also a compulsive occultist and borderline wacko. I saw her once in the flesh ten years ago leaving the Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai. She would have been in her mid-thirties then, a lean, immaculately cosmeticised redhead in a tight-fitting green dress, big sunglasses, a thin-lipped mouth suggesting outer amusement over inner boredom. I’d imagined alluring espresso breath and slight constipation, psyche a compressed mass of Freudian maggots. Her father, who’d started in shipping, was a renowned Sadean debauchee. Allegedly she’d inherited his tastes as well as his fortune. “The French agent wasn’t even supposed to be in the UK,” Harley said. “He was supposed to call and let us take over from Portsmouth. But this is the French. They think we’re all incompetent queers.”
“You mean ‘They think we’re all incompetent queers.’ ”
“Hilarious. Anyway, fuck knows how but it turns out Cloquet had been watching you in Paris and followed you here. Fancied making a name for himself with a big scalp. My guess is he’s a rejected WOCOP applicant with a pomme frite on his shoulder. The French operative followed him here and ended up, vicariously, as it were, following you.”
“That’s not possible,” I said. “If this knob had been following me in Paris I’d have known. He’s not very good.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Ice cubes clinked in a glass. Harley sipped, swallowed. Around me the Zetter’s lobby was warm and softly lit. The murmur and tinkle of the still-serving bar was a great reassurance. Two crisp-bloused young women were stationed at reception. When I’d walked in they’d smiled at me as if my arrival was a wholesome erotic surprise. The point of civilisation is so that one can check in to a quality hotel. “Well, he managed it somehow, Jacob, I assure you. I’ve just got off the phone with Farrell at HQ. The French agent identified you and—belatedly—called us. Trust me, WOCOP knows you’re here, but only as of ten minutes ago.”
I wasn’t convinced, but Harley sounded exhausted and I couldn’t bring myself to worry him further. It was true I’d been preoccupied in Paris. One of my companies was involved in a large takeover and I’d had too much contact with my human proxies for comfort. It was just possible, I told myself, that I might, with a headful of irritating practicalities, have missed a tail, even the moron with the Magnum. The bullets of which, Harley had also confirmed, were pure Mexican silver. Whoever Cloquet was, he knew the nature of his quarry.
“Obviously we oughtn’t meet face-to-face for a while,” Harley said.
“What while? In twenty-seven days I’ll be dead.”
Quiet on his end. Remorse on mine.
“Don’t you trust me anymore, Jake?”
“I’m sorry. Forget it.”
“I don’t blame you. Sad old queen with hypertension and a sore arse. We should have found you someone young by now. We should have found you someone who—”
“Forget it, Harls, please.” Again quiet. It was possible Harley was crying. He’s prone to emotional fracture since the prostate surgery. The truth is we should have found someone else, or rather no one else, since I haven’t actually needed a human familiar for a century or more. The real truth is I should never have let Harley in to begin with, but I’d been in a phase of deep loneliness the night I put him in my exploitable debt. Now, hearing him sniff, once, and take a big sip, I thought: This is me. Every present anger derives from past weakness. Enough. Let it come down. “Ignore me,” I said. “I’m just miffed about this tool following me.”
Harley cleared his throat. Sometimes the sound of him doing this, or the sight of him struggling to open a pickle jar, or patting his pockets for the specs that are resting on his forehead breaks my heart. But what’s heartbreak? A feeling. I’ve had it with feelings, even if they haven’t had it with me. “Well, there’s no point leaving the Zetter tonight,” he said. “They already know you’re there. Why don’t you call me tomorrow morning when you’ve had some sense fucked into you?”
“Why don’t I do just that?”
Another pause. There are these silences in which I can feel him restraining the word “love.”
“Who is it tonight?” he asked. “Not the one with the plastic twat?”
“That’s Katia,” I said. “This is Madeline. No plastic. All real.”
6
A VAMPIRE HAS written: “The great asymmetry between immortals and werewolves (apart from the obvious aesthetic asymmetry) is that whereas the vampire is elevated by his transformation the werewolf is dimini
shed by his. To be a vampire is to be increased in subtlety of mind and refinement of taste; the self opens the door of its dismal bed-sit to discover the house of many mansions. Personality expands, indefinitely. The vampire gets immortality, immense physical strength, hypnotic ability, the power of flight, psychic grandeur and emotional depth. The werewolf gets dyslexia and a permanent erection. It’s hardly worth making the comparison …” For all of which you can read: Werewolves get to have sex and we don’t.
Though I’m not a misogynist I only have sex with women I dislike. Emotionally there’s no alternative, but it’s tough. Not because dislike impedes desire (on the contrary, as we modernly know, as we’re modernly cool with) but because my dislike rarely lasts, especially with prostitutes, most of whom go out of their way to be likeable. Very many contemporary metropolitan escorts are ruinously likeable. Last year I hired a twenty-nine-year-old Argentinean girl, Victoria, whose soul spoke to mine in its own occult tongue within the first minute of our encounter. I had oral, vaginal and anal sex with her (in that order; I repeat, I’m not a misogynist) over a period of six hours (£3,600) then we went shopping at Borough Market and had breakfast overlooking the Thames. Crossing the Hungerford bridge we held hands and the wind lifted her dark hair and she turned her face up to mine for the inevitable kiss with already languorous knowledge of what was possible between us and I liked her enormously and she said, This is going to be trouble, isn’t it? So I called the agency after putting her in a cab on the Embankment and told them never to send her to me again.
Why then, if they’re so likeable, rely on prostitutes? Why not trawl the ranks of lady neo-Nazis or the register of paedophile mums? There’s a deep reason and a shallow one. The deep reason I’ll get to, by and by. The shallow one you can have now: In short, because nonprostitutes require reciprocal desire. I’m not an ugly man (or werewolf either, judging by some of the pug-faced lollopers I’ve seen in Harley’s sneaked WOCOP files) but I’m a long way from taking any woman’s attraction for granted. I can’t hang around waiting for someone who fancies me. It’s time-consuming. It’s labour intensive. Therefore professional escorts, for whom, like therapists and mercenaries (and in happy contradiction of Lennon and McCartney), all you need is cash.
Madeline, white-skinned, green-eyed, with straightened blond hair, a short upper body and alert, pop-kittenish breasts, is self-congratulatory, vain, materialistic, brimming with tabloid axioms and fluent in cliché. She’s been there done that, bought the T-shirt. She goes ballistic. She gets paralytic. She wants the organ-grinder not his monkey. She wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire. Amis’s mouldering novelties are her lingua franca. Her telephone farewell is mmbaah. This more than her spiritual deficits has kept my dislike going, but it can’t last forever. A month in I can see the confused child in there, the gaping holes and wrong bulges in the long-ago fabric of love. There was a Doting and borderline Dodgy Dad, a fading and viciously Jealous Mum. This is the drag of having lived so long and seen so many: Biography shows through, all the mitigating antecedents. People teem with their own information and I start to get the headache of interest in them. Which is pointless, since when you get right down to it they’re first and foremost food.
She was waiting for me in the Zetter’s deluxe rooftop studio suite, albeit with a look of having just freshened-up from a quickie—moonlighted on my dollar since I’d booked her for the whole night. “Hiya,” she said, raising her glass, muting the TV, summoning the feline glitter. Extreme Cosmetic Surgery was on. A woman was having fat from her abdomen removed and stuffed into her buttocks.
“Feel that,” I said, extending my frozen hand. “Shall I put that on you somewhere?” Madeline’s hand, French-manicured, was warm, lotioned and in even its moist fingerprints promissory of transactional sex.
“Only if you like hospital food, babes,” she said. “D’you want champagne? Or something from the minibar?”
“Not yet. I’m going to wash the world off. You watch the rest of this. Order whatever you want.”
Brutally thawed after three minutes in the shower I stood letting the hot jets hammer wolf dregs from my shoulders. Habit had me mentally busy with disappearance strategies and WOCOP blind spots (the Middle East, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Zimbabwe, all the fun destinations), Swiss bank account numbers, timer-equipped holding cells, fake passports, weapons caches, bent hauliers—but underneath it all was something like my own voice saying: This is what you wanted. Stop. Be at peace. Let it come down.
Not that I could hold either line for long. It had been ten days since I’d fucked Madeline. Ten days takes my kind to the edge. On the Curse you’re desperate for sex with a She (if you’re straight, that is; there are, naturally, gay werewolves—one resists “queerwolves”), while off the Curse your regular libido’s amped up by the frustration of not having had sex with a She. It’s a numbers problem. Infection rates for females have always been low, WOCOP estimates one to every thousand males. As you can imagine, we don’t run into one another. I’ve never met one. In Buffy there’d be a howlers’ singles bar or dating agency. Not in the real world. The Internet’s no help: WOCOP’s set up so many entrapment sites (infamously werewolffuckfest.com, from which they wiped out almost a hundred monsters—all male; no females, if there were even any left, responded—in one month back in the mid-nineties) that no one dares take the risk. For the longest time the romantic explanation for low rates of female infection endured: Possession of a womb, it was supposed, conferred a gentleness which simply could not bear the viciousness of a lycanthropic heart. Female werewolves, masculine idiocy maintained, must be killing themselves in crazy numbers. First full moon they’d Change, devour a loved one, be unable to live with the guilt, slip away somewhere quiet and swallow a silver earring. It’s quite extraordinary, given the wealth of historical evidence to the contrary, how long this fallacy of the gentler sex lasted, but the twentieth century (years before Myra and the girls of Abu Ghraib put their two penn’orth in) pretty much did away with it. Now we know: If women don’t catch the werewolf bug, it’s certainly not because they’re sugar and spice and all things nice. Whatever the reason, there have never been enough Shes to go round. It’s one of the universe’s great sexual tragedies. It’s one of the universe’s great sexual farces too, because none of this souped-up concupiscence serves an evolutionary purpose. Werewolves don’t reproduce sexually. Howler girls are eggless, howler boys dud of spunk. If you haven’t had kids by the time you’re turned you’re not having any, get used to it. Lycanthropic reproduction is via infection: Survive the bite and the Curse is yours.
But here’s the thing, the old news, the stale headline: No one is surviving the bite anymore.
According to WOCOP not for at least a hundred years. Mauled victims die within twelve hours. It’s a mystery. I was turned in 1842 and it’s possible I was the last werewolf made. WOCOP, giddy with scientific incredulity, has captured werewolves and given them victims to bat around—without successful transmission. For the last century the species has been on a fast track to extinction, with or without WOCOP’s exterminatory zeal. By the year of the Great Exhibition we were down to fewer than three thousand. By the time Queen Victoria died just under two and a half. And by the time of the first moon landing we were a list of 793 names. Within WOCOP the Hunt’s become a joke, the guys who did their job so well they did themselves out of a job. Yearly their funding dwindles. A veil of melancholy has fallen. You’ll be Grainer’s swansong, Harley had said. His late masterpiece.
I turned the shower off, voluptuous from the heat and the perceptible pulse of Madeline’s waiting body. One hard straight fuck, allegro, to kill the fizz and settle me, then the second, third and fourth movements, adagio, ritardando, grave. This is acute desire and acute boredom in the same glass. I do what I do with the glazed despair you see in the superobese as they chomp rhythmically through their tonnage of chocolate and fried chicken. One of the things I’ve been hanging on for is the death of my libido. I’ve
lost interest in everything else, so why not? But it just keeps, as it were, coming.
A pre-coitus glance in the mirror showed the drearily familiar calm dark-eyed face (every time I see it these days I think, Oh, Jacob, do yourself a favour and stop) then I joined Madeline on the bed, where at my request she turned the TV off and lay on her back and opened her white-stockinged legs and placed her arms slave-girlishly above her head and for some fifteen minutes endured the increasingly painful realisation that I wasn’t going to get an erection, while simultaneously doing everything in her power to give me one. Eventually, emphatically soft, I accepted defeat. “Hilarious though this sounds,” I said, “we’ve just made history. This has never happened to me before.”
Her professional self was miffed, and not very good at hiding it. After a clipped exhalation and a flick of the blond hair off her clavicle she said: “Do you want to try it another way?”
It’s official.
You’re the last.
I’m sorry.
It’s called delayed shock for a reason. Until getting on top of her I’d been ethereal with not having taken it in, or with having doublethinkingly taken it in and rejected it at the same time. But I’d put my hands on her waist and felt her nipples touch my chest and the softness and heat of her breath had in the way of such mysteries returned me to full and nauseous mass. It was as if I’d been ignoring a shadow on my peripheral vision only to turn and find it was a thousand-foot tidal wave, heading my way. You’re the last.
“Maybe later,” I said. “It’s not you, incidentally.” She pulled her chin in at the absurdity of that, glanced away to the invisible documentary-maker who’s always with her. Madeline’s narcissism reconfigures awkward moments as opportunities for into-camera astonishment. Er, hello?