by Glen Duncan
“How long have you known about Harley?”
“Years. You two were pretty slack. That wasn’t much of a challenge, either.”
“Surveillance?”
“Everything. The phones, the mobiles, the Earl’s Court place, Harley’s club. Jesus, Jake, we’ve had you bugged a dozen times.”
Some relief, naturally. You can’t live in dread of something for long without beginning to crave it.
“So the French story, this idiot Cloquet, that’s bullshit?” Questions stacked up. Only one mattered: What had they done with Harley? Jesus Christ, Jake, listen. There’s—
Grainer shook his head. “That guy, God what a loon. No, the story you got from Harley was true, as far as it went. Cloquet was tailing you in Paris, and the WOCOP agent was tailing him. The only thing Harley didn’t know was that we knew all about it. We’ve known your whereabouts more or less continuously since 2003. Harley’s been your surveillance, albeit unwittingly. Anyway, when it became apparent Cloquet was planning to take you out himself he was stopped. By me, as a matter of fact. As you know, I consider you my responsibility. Exclusively.”
“And Cloquet is?”
“Jacqui Delon’s boyfriend, or one of them. Cokehead wastrel. That’s all we know. She seemed pretty pissed when she found out he’d pulled a gun on you.”
“Are you a spy?” Madeline asked me, quietly.
“No,” I said.
“He’s a werewolf, honey,” Grainer said. “Surely you’ve told her, Jake?”
“As a matter of fact I have.” I felt tired again. Maddy’s look of fraught computation. I sincerely hoped they wouldn’t kill her. Surviving this experience might be just the epiphany to get her out of prostitution.
“It’s no way to end a war, Jake,” Grainer said. “Sit there and just …”
“Let it come down?”
“Let it come down. Doesn’t ring the right bell in the universe.”
“This is the way the world ends,” I said.
“Not your world. You’re the last of a great species. You owe the narrative something better.”
“There is no narrative. You know that.”
“There’s the one we make. It’s our responsibility.”
Ellis nodded. “Just because life’s meaningless doesn’t mean we can’t experience it meaningfully,” he said.
“Wow,” I said. “You should patent that. I’ve got one too: You don’t have to be mad to work here, but it helps.” Anger, after all, was rising through the blood vessels. Not at Ellis’s banality (nor Grainer’s arrogance) but at being forced into something when all I wanted was nothing.
“So,” Grainer said, “Madeline’s going to come downstairs with us for a moment. You’ll stay here. We’ll send her back with the key for the cuffs, and the information you’ll need.”
“Information?”
“About Harley. Madeline, do that and you’re absolutely free to go. Fuck it up or try anything and you’re dead. Understood?” Maddy nodded, swallowed. Her little nostrils flared. Under the gun’s gentle direction she got to her stilettoed feet. The faintest tremor in her knees. Ellis stood, replaced the chair. “Sit tight, Jake,” Grainer said. “She’ll be back soon.”
I waited. The room waited. Tomorrow night’s full moon tugged and tweaked and smacked. There are these pretransformation shenanigans, ghost spasms, the muscles and bones getting ahead of themselves. The monster knows the length of its wait as a dog knows the length of its leash, but like the dog it pulls and chokes. My front tooth was already starting its grow-back with a fibrous tickle. Information about Harley. They had him somewhere, presumably. This is the deal: He stays alive as long as you do. Give up and he gets it. Ellis’s idea, I was sure. A scheme of simple symmetry handed down from his remote height. I’d imagined … What had I imagined? Kneeling like Anne Boleyn while Grainer’s blade caught the moonlight? Sitting full-lotus smiling down the muzzle of a silver-loaded gun? At any rate I’d imagined yielding. Stillness, stars, reverence for the last benignly indifferent details. A happy death.
The door opened and Madeline entered, unaccompanied, carrying a small leather holdall. Also the handcuffs’ key. She closed the door behind her and put the bag on the floor. Then she helped me to my feet and unlocked the restraints. All done I could tell in accordance with specific instructions. She radiated moist heat. In the cleavage of the black halterneck her breasts were wet. One of the clipped-up strands of hair was down. Poignant to see her this way, stripped of her professional self, a human, afraid. Dangerous, too: Artless humanity made her wrongly appetising. Now that she’d been forced into depth I’d want to kill and eat her. One way or another my time with her was over.
“I have to say something,” she said. “What they told me. They said to say to you: ‘Think of it as an incentive.’ Now you’re supposed to open the bag.”
She hadn’t opened the bag. Had been told not to. She would have carried it up in the lift denying it was there, denying her own hand holding it, her arm, her shoulder, that whole side of her body. Because of course the lower animal in her knew. The lower animal knew and the higher animal threw up the ice wall of denial. She said nothing now as I knelt and opened the zip, only leaned back against the door, bare shoulders held a fraction higher than usual. Instinct warned her this was a big moment. She might not be able to carry on being herself after it. The possibility gave her an aliveness she’d never known, as if she’d suddenly been lifted a thousand feet in the air. In spite of everything a part of me wondered what she might become. This is the slow, grinding compulsion I’m sick of, this inevitably getting interested in people. You love life because life’s all there is, Harley had insisted. There’s no God and that’s His only Commandment.
Inside the holdall was a second bag made of tough transparent plastic, tightly sealed with tape. Inside that was Harley’s head.
20
THERE WAS A note stuck over his mouth with a message written on it in black marker: IT WASN’T PAINLESS. IT WASN’T QUICK.
“Oh my God,” Madeline said. She stood with her bare white shoulders slightly hunched and her hands pressed against her midriff. “Jesus fucking Christ.”
The face had been beaten. At leisure, I imagined. Creases in the plastic held bubbles of blood, as with vacuum-sealed beef in the supermarket. They’d made sure his eyes were open.
Just stay, he’d said.
It would be heartening to say I broke down in tears. I didn’t. The moment merely updated the inventory of all the things I should feel but didn’t. I very carefully opened the seal, reached in and peeled the note from his mouth. Like it or not the image of myself sticking it across Grainer’s lips after I tracked him down and killed him came to me, which of course was the idea. Grainer’s idea after all. Ellis would have kept Harley alive. Ellis’s money was on guilt, conscience, responsibility—mine. Grainer’s was on eye-for-an-eye vengeance—mine. New and Old Testaments respectively.
“Jake?” Madeline said. “Is that real? That’s not real, is it?”
I closed Harley’s eyes. You have to. Open, the eyes of the dead are a travesty, a parody, make a fool of the deceased. Open, the eyes of the dead perform that most indecent subtraction, show the person without his life. I knew now all the times I’d pictured Harley’s recuperative solitude after my death I’d never really believed in it. The worst horrors confirm a suspicion you’ve hidden even from yourself.
IT WASN’T PAINLESS. IT WASN’T QUICK.
I’m used to the body as a thing separable violently into its constituent parts. To me a torn-off arm’s no more searingly forlorn than a chicken drumstick is to you. Still, it was Harley, what was left of him, a blunt testament to the defilements he’d suffered. A farcical testament, if you let yourself see it that way. Naturally torturers giggle while they work: The body’s dumb obedience to physics (pull hard enough and this comes off, squeeze tight enough and that pops out) against which the nuances of the victim’s personality count for nothing has in it one of the roots of come
dy—the spirit’s subservience to the flesh. You can cut a head off and shove it in a bag, stick it on a pole, play volleyball or footie with it. Hilarious, among other things. This too is what I’m tired of, the friability of boundaries, the nearness of opposite extremes, the depressing bleed-ability of grief into laughter, good into evil, tragedy into farce.
Meanwhile Madeline was filling with unruly energies. I knew if she stayed shock would wear off and the demand for coherence take its place. With careful handling I put the head back in the holdall, zipped up gently, found myself out of deep inane habit hoping the darkness would come as a relief to him.
“You should go,” I said to Madeline.
“Who is that?”
“Never mind.”
“We have to call the police.”
“It’s best if you just go. The police aren’t part of this.”
“But—”
“No one will harm you, I promise. Just go and let me deal.” My window was that her system had temporarily crashed. I grabbed everything of hers I could find and stuffed it willy-nilly into the Louis Vuitton. She remained stalled by the door.
“That guy said you were a—”
“It’s a code word. It’s a word agents use.”
He’s a werewolf, honey. Naturally that had gone in. Naturally she’d made the connection.
“But you’ve said … All that stuff. It’s not true. There’s no such things.” This last utterance without much conviction, almost a question.
“Of course there are no such things,” I said. “That’s just a routine of mine, a gimmick. It’s nothing. Come on. Here, take the cash.” Six thousand. She took it, but numbly. Her face was clammy, her white hands lovely with veins. I had to keep pushing her forward against her need to stop, rewind, go over, make sense. In the end I half-propelled her through the door. I knew there was every chance she’d go straight to the police.
From which followed my own hasty pack-up and check-out. I put the holdall with my bag in the boot of the Vectra and drove. South. No specifics, just the sudden claustrophobic need to get out of the town’s clutter to the clean spaces of the coast.
It was dark, raining. I kept imagining discussing all this with Harley—then realising Harley was dead. It was a mental loop, augmented by the windscreen wipers’ two-syllable mantra, wichok, wichok, wichok. I must have been feeling something like grief (or self-pity) because I took the car’s responsive steering and smell of new vinyl as anthropomorphic sympathy. I didn’t cry. Real things don’t make me cry. Only false or sentimental things can do that. In this respect I’m like most civilised humans. Instead I drove, fluently, with reverence for the small actions, still going through the same loop of imagining talking events over with Harley then realising he was dead. When the loop faltered a giant contained emptiness took its place.
The road ran down the coast. To the west, Caernarfon Bay and the Irish Sea, occasional boat lights, a tanker or two. East and south the land rose into another stack of vowel-starved hills: Bwlch Mawr; Gyrn Ddu; Yr Eifl. Of course I was being followed, had been since leaving the hotel. A black transit van, which was unusual for the Hunt, who normally use something quicker.
You were pleased to see me. It was depressing as hell. I don’t want that. Of course he didn’t. Forty years he’d been building up to avenging his father’s death. Not much of an avenging if the murderer was going to be grateful to him for it. Therefore provoke the murderer into something other than gratitude.
The question was: Had it worked? Was Harley’s death (or as I must infer, torture and death) incentive enough to bring the wolf out fighting?
Human standards would convict me of obscene weakness if the answer was no. Harley, a man who’d devoted his life to my protection, who’d loved me, whose love I’d exploited when it suited and stonewalled when it didn’t, had been mutilated and killed for my sake. I knew his killer or killers, I had the resources and experience to avenge the crime, and if I didn’t do it no one else would.
But my standards aren’t human. How could they be? The thought of resisting Grainer tomorrow night weakened my hands on the Vectra’s wheel. Revenge entails a belief in justice, which I don’t have. (You can’t count my monster philanthropy, my werewolf good deeds. That’s vestige, habit, a moribund personal accounting system. It doesn’t derive from a principle, it just provides the moral equivalent of hand relief.) I knew what I ought to feel. I knew Grainer (and Ellis, since he would have joined in) ought to be made to pay. But ought and I parted company when I murdered my with-child wife and ate her and carried on living.
I turned off the main road at Trefor and the WOCOP vehicle followed, stopped a token fifty feet behind me when I pulled over at the seaward edge of the village. I was sweating. The Curse played preview blasts of free jazz in my blood, my goosefleshed skin. The hand I lifted to wipe my face was the impatient ghost of the other hand, the hybrid thing, heavy, elegant, claw-tipped. Transformation was less than twenty-four hours away. My body heat filled the car. I got out.
Better. Cold wind and rain. Hands, throat, face, scalp, all cooled. The beach was near. A pale footpath led down to it. I took it, overcoat flapping. A WOCOP van door opened, closed. This would very soon become intolerable, this low-tech, this panto surveillance, ordered surely by Grainer, an extra satirical irritant, but I couldn’t think about it now. There was only the one thing to think about, the one thing to decide.
It wasn’t painless. It wasn’t quick.
Knolly turf gave way to shallow sand dunes. A sudden rough fresh odour of the sea. The old Somme survivor stirred: Margate’s salt air had come in through the open window and mingled with the lovely between-the-legs taste of his girl. (Their memories clog me like arterial fur. I’m full, I said to Harley. I have achieved fucking plenum.)
A marker buoy clanged, muted by wind and rain. The lights of a tanker twinkled, conjured a vision of a snug galley, cable-knit sweaters, tin mugs, roll-up-fag smoke. I could hear a helicopter somewhere inland, a sound like an endlessly discharging machine gun.
What’s my motivation? lousy actors want to know. Grainer had given me a legitimate one. I killed your friend, now you want to kill me.
It almost worked. The fuse leading to the appropriate emotional bomb lit, crackled, glowed, dazzled for a few heartbeats, then faltered, sputtered, died. I couldn’t make it mean enough. I couldn’t make it mean anything. Vengeance for the murdered supposed the dead enjoyed sufficient afterlife to appreciate your efforts. The dead enjoyed nothing of the kind. The dead didn’t go anywhere, except, if you were the monster who’d taken their lives and devoured them, into you. That’s the gift I should have given Harley, or rather made him give me. At least that way we would have been together at the end.
I turned inland, light of heart and heavy as the Dead Sea, thinking, So thank you, dear Grainer, but no—when two things happened.
The first was that I put my hands in my coat pockets and felt in one of them the woollen hat Harley had insisted I take that night in the snow. Your fucking head will freeze, moron, he’d said. Because he’d loved me and I hadn’t loved him we’d cast the relationship as irascible doting father and moody son. It had begun self-consciously, facetiously, but like so much that begins that way acquired some of the emotional substance it lampooned. And this memory, in the perverse way of these things, did pierce me, set an ache in the empty place where the energy to go after Grainer should be.
The second was that the agent, who’d followed me and was now down on one knee not twenty feet away, fired his weapon directly at me.
I felt a single icy stab in my thigh, an eternal three seconds of something like mild outrage—then all the lights went out.
21
WHATEVER THEY USED they didn’t get the dosage right the first time. I floated up to consciousness just long enough to deduce—from the tremor, the noise, the shape of the ceiling—that I was in the helicopter. Restraints pinned my arms, legs, chest, head. A man’s voice (definitely not a vampire’s) said in French
, Fuck me, he’s awake—then I felt the scratch of a needle, and darkness closed over me again.
•
Transformation woke me to the smell of rust and fuel and seaweed. I was lying on my spasming back on a metal table and the restraints were gone. So were my clothes. Shoulders, shins, head, hands and haunches shunted blood and hurried bone to meet the Curse’s metamorphic demand. My circus of consumed lives stirred. The world felt strangely undulant. I thought, Well, I hope you’re ready for this, kidnapping fuckers, whoever you are. Then, throbbing with Hunger for living meat, I howled and rolled over onto my side.
Bright halogen lighting showed I was in a cage.
In what looked like the hold of a ship.
Being filmed.
Beyond the bars three men and a woman stood between a pair of tripod-mounted motion-sensitive cameras. One of the men was the agent who’d tranquilized me, early thirties, with a sullen, guinea-piggish face, wearing a nose stud and a black woollen cap. The other two were large skinheads in unmatching fatigues and Timberlands. One, arms covered in golden fuzz, was worryingly glazed. The other was baby-faced, with surprised eyes and a dimpled chin. Both were equipped with automatic rifles and side arms.
The woman, in tight white trousers and a clinging bloodred top, was Jacqueline Delon.
She hadn’t changed much in ten years. Slender, petite-breasted with a tiny abdomen and a lean face. Short red hair in the boyish style only French women seem able to carry off. The last time I’d seen her, outside the Burj Al Arab in Dubai, big sunglasses had hidden her eyes, and my inference—of constipation and usefully disturbed sexuality—had been drawn (wishfully, lazily) from the thin-lipped mouth and the patent narcissism of her deportment. Here, however, were the eyes, narrow and dirty green, full of insomniac intelligence, a bright front of compulsive playfulness over God only knew what, fear of death, self-avoidance, money-guilt, loneliness, hunger for love—possibly just immense boredom.