by Glen Duncan
I stubbed out the Marlboro. Just on the edge of audibility the sound of an approaching car. “Well,” I said, “at the moment walking out of here still seems a luminously good idea.” Except you don’t get the book, the stone, the beginning. Nausea redux, the earlier untenable simultaneity of knowing it was too late and knowing it wasn’t too late. A five-thousand-year-old story. A story. A fucking story. Wild dogs and dead bodies. I told myself I was imagining it, the bone-deep, the cellular recognition, the old blood taste of shame. Not, Jake, mythic resonance or species memory or ringing a bell or striking a chord. Just, dear Jake, the desperate desire not to die a mystery to yourself. Wild dogs and dead bodies. A disgusting story’s better than no story at all.
“How did you get in here?”
“I shot the two guards on the south gate.”
“With what, for God’s sake?”
“My gun. It’s probably over there. I dropped it.” He indicated the spot of his failed ambush. A quick search turned the weapon up, a silenced CZ 75 B cal. 9mm Luger, serial number erased. I checked the ammo: silver bullets.
“Why didn’t you use this? I’d be dead by now.”
“I know. But I had the javelin custom-made. You see this running down the shaft? That’s my name and hers in Angelic script.”
The car was nearer. The car—there was no denying it—was Coming Here. “That’s them,” Cloquet said, trying to get to his feet, managing only to struggle onto all fours, with a look of being about to vomit. I pocketed the handgun and dragged us farther in under the trees. The vehicle—a black people-carrier with mirrored windows—went past slowly over the pale gravel, around which the darkness was now complete. “Why didn’t they pick me up from the ship?” I said. “I was already in a cage.”
Cloquet shook his head. “I don’t know. I thought that was the plan. Keep you on board until sunset. She must have worried the Coast Guard bribe wouldn’t hold. Maybe WOCOP had a vessel close. I don’t know. Maybe she just wanted to fuck you. You fall in love with her because she shows you straight away she’ll never feel anything for you.”
We had to work our way around through the woods to get a downwind view, a struggle for Cloquet, who hobbled, one hand covering his stabbed backside, the other his discordantly singing balls. When we stopped under tree cover not far from the front of the house he dropped to his knees and threw up, quietly. Quietly repeated merde, merde, merde until I hissed at him to shut up.
Five vampires got out of the car. Three males, two females. Beyond that it was too dark for details. Jacqueline Delon, flanked by two armed goons (ammo’d with what? wooden bullets?), appeared at the top of the steps in a pale dress to meet them.
“What happened?” one of the vampires said. The characteristic boredom (a version of seen-it-all teen tedium, forgivable, since so many of them have seen it all) was missing from his voice.
“Come up,” Jacqueline said. “Just come up. We’ll talk.”
Four of them went up the stairs. The fifth, one of the females, stopped halfway and turned. Looked directly at us. I felt Cloquet holding his breath. Realised I was holding mine. Since I couldn’t feel her she shouldn’t, by rights, be able to feel me. I’d left enough distance between us. Even downwind her scent was very slight; mine would be imperceptible. But there she stood, alert. The odour of Cloquet’s vomit, perhaps?
Oh, for fuck’s sake: the blood from his wound.
It’s the obvious things you don’t think of.
She hesitated, lifted her head, took her hands out of her pockets, took a step forward and leaned into the darkness.
“Mia, get up here.”
For a moment her extended sense groped at the edge of our aura. Then it passed, missed us, shrank back to its centre. She turned and went quickly up the steps.
28
“NOW WHAT?” CLOQUET SAID.
Good question. What I really wanted was to lie down there on the soft dead needles under the pines and let myself drift into a deep sleep, come what may. There was profound comfort in it, that phrase, come what may. “I’ll tell you something,” I said. “You’ll find this hard to believe, but all I’m trying to do is stay alive until the next full moon so that a man whose father I killed and ate forty years ago can cut my werewolf head off or put a silver bullet in my werewolf heart.”
Cloquet was on his knees and elbows next to me, apparently a position that maximally relieved his butt, nuts and guts. “I don’t feel well,” he said. “I’ve lost a lot of blood.”
“Hardly any. Don’t be a baby. Here, have a toot.” I handed him his coke tin. A pause. Two snorts. A businesslike groan of pleasure.
“C’est bon. Aie. C’est beau. Will they kill her?”
“Who knows? They probably won’t be able to summon the requisite vim.”
“Vim?”
“Energy.”
“But what are we going to do?”
“Nothing. Watch and wait. And who the fuck are ‘we’? Starsky and Hutch?”
He chuckled, wheezily. The cocaine had cheered him. “In a way,” he said, “I wish you had fucked her. Then you’d know. Then you’d know the sublime … Her asshole, for example. It’s like a stern coquettish spoiled secretary working for Himmler—”
“Shut up, will you? I need to think. Give me a cigarette.”
The sensible thing would have been to break Cloquet’s neck and slip away. Vampires wanted me alive—so what? It added to the vocabulary of my predicament but the grammar remained unchanged.
Except for Quinn’s book. The disgusting story. Wild dogs and dead bodies and the iron taste of ancient memory. Proximal enlightenment was a throbbing headache that wouldn’t subside.
I cupped the Zippo, lit up, took a ferocious drag. The facts remained, no matter how long I stood there shuffling them: Either the story’s true or it’s false. Either Jacqueline has the book or she doesn’t. If she has it, either I get it or I walk away. If I get it, either it will make a difference to me or it won’t.
Simultaneously (in the inner voice of a female American cultural studies professor): Only meaning can make a difference and we all know there’s no meaning. All stories express a desire for meaning, not meaning itself. Therefore any difference knowing the story makes is a delusion.
Cloquet was now lying on his side with his knees pulled up. In the darkness I could just discern the large wet black blinking eyes and the glimmer of the hip flask. “I’m starving,” he said. “I don’t suppose you’ve got anything to eat, have you?”
I remembered the binoculars and began going through his pockets for them.
“There’s a little place in Le Marais,” he said, not seeming to mind the manhandling, “that makes the best choux pastry in the world. I could kill for one of their vanilla éclairs right now. This is the beauty of not modelling anymore. I can eat whatever I want.”
“You really were a model? That’s hilarious. Here, have these.”
“My cashews. Thank God. But what I really want is something sweet. When she comes, you know, she looks at you with such pure and remote clear hatred. The contempt … It’s the contempt. I spent so many years looking for a woman who truly despised me.”
The binoculars didn’t help much. Mme Delon had science-fiction technology in her windows, which were now, without the aid of curtains or shutters or blinds, completely opaque. Three of her security men in puffer jackets and combat trousers were visible: two on the ground, one on the roof. They paced, chewed gum, smoked, exchanged occasional quiet words. The firs were a dark fraternal presence around us. Cloquet munched his cashews, breathing through his nose. It got uncomfortably cold. An hour passed.
“She’ll negotiate,” Cloquet said, availing himself of another two hits of coke. “You don’t know how she operates. Do you know about the African kids? Angola, Nigeria, Congo. Kids accused of witchcraft. She takes them off their parents’ hands, pays handsomely too. Then what? What do you think she does with—”
“Quiet! Fuck, I nearly missed them.” I’d been wat
ching the front of the house but the vampires must have come from an unseen exit on the garage level below. Only the sound of the people-carrier door opening alerted me. I put the silencer to the back of Cloquet’s head. “One squeak and you’re dead.”
The ridiculous, of course, waits only for the moment of intense seriousness. In a tiny whisper Cloquet said: “I have to sneeze.” Hardly surprising after the barrel of coke he’d inhaled. I dropped the gun and the binoculars and grabbed him, one hand pinching his nostrils shut, the other clamped over his mouth. One of the vehicle’s side doors slid closed with a rasp and a thud. The female vampire, Mia, lingered, again with her nose lifted in our direction. In the light from the van’s interior I saw a young high-cheekboned face and shoulder-length yellow-blond hair.
Cloquet’s moment was near. I tightened my grip—too much. He wriggled, desperately. I rolled on top of him as if for buggery and held on. Mia got into the front passenger seat. Legs and high heels that would have been at home in an ad for luxury stockings lifted in gracefully. She reached for the door handle.
Chsszn! With an almighty effort Cloquet wrested enough of his nose free to release his bizarre sneeze—by the mercy of the gods precisely synchronised with the clunk shut of the passenger door. I nearly broke his neck there and then. But the engine started and the people-carrier, carrying its immortal people, swung round and pulled away.
A gobbet of Cloquet snot clung to the back of my hand. “Thanks for that,” I said, wiping it on his lapel. “Now. On your feet, soldier.”
“What?”
“Get up. Back against here, please.”
Improvisation. His belt secured his hands around the tree trunk behind him. He didn’t protest much. Evidently he had a penchant for surrender. A little moment formed between us when I’d fastened him. He looked at me.
“What?” I said.
“You lied. I smelled her cunt on your fingers.”
“Oh. Yes. Sorry about that.”
“You’re going back for more. Everyone goes back for more.”
“I’m going back for the book.”
“You think you’re safe. You’re wrong. She already knows what you’re thinking.”
“I’ll take my chances. I’ll also take your Luger and our friend the custom-made javelin here.” I balled up his five hundred euros, shoved them in his mouth and appropriated half the wrist bandage for a gag. God only knows why I didn’t kill him. He was too absurd to murder. The cashews and the mascara and the abandoned modelling career. That sneeze.
“I may be gone some time,” I said.
29
WHEN YOU NEED a plan and don’t have one a retarded giddy indifferent faith takes over. Improv comics know this, criminals, soldiers too. Self dissolves into the flow and will reassemble on the other side of the job—or not. Either way you’re doing it. Either way you’re in.
Moving low, I worked my way silently through the trees, back past where Cloquet and I had first left the drive and on to the very edge of the conifers. From here twenty feet of open ground separated me from the garages. Darkness ample to foil the naked eye but if one of the guards should chance to raise a pair of night-vision binoculars … I went across in an absurd tiptoeing sprint, got my back to the wall below the mezzanine’s overhang, caught my breath. An accommodating deus ex machina would have been to find one of the garage doors open, and inside the garage a second door to the villa’s basement. I did check. All three were locked. I wondered what Jacqueline drove, got a mental snapshot of her in a ’65 ivory Mercedes convertible, red leather interior matching her lipstick and nails.
A pleasing image, but not helpful. I hunted for something to throw. You throw something and according to screen fictions the noise takes at least one guard out of position to investigate. There was nothing to throw. What had I expected? Loose plant pots? Rocks? Empties? Some goddamned thing. Welcome to the downside of dissolving into the flow.
In the end I threw Cloquet’s binoculars. Up across the mezzanine onto the steps on the eastern side of the terrace, where they landed with a (surely?) intriguing clatter. A guard or better still guards would come to check it out, leaving the stairs on the western side free for my stealthy ascent.
“Hear that?”
“Heard it. Call it in.”
I was already on my speedy-tiptoe way (something like the goosestep touchdown celebrations of American footballers) to the western stairs.
Clear. I passed the mezzanine and since there was no reason not to hurried on up the next flight to the level of olive and thyme just below the cactus garden and the villa itself. There, hunkered in a well of shadow between balustrade and trees, I halted to take stock. One guard had indeed descended to the mezzanine, automatic rifle readied, and was cautiously poking about. The roof guard was scanning with (night-vision!) binoculars, but looking in entirely the wrong direction. The second ground-floor guard was less than ten feet away, just above me.
“It’s a pair of fucking binoculars,” the investigating guard said. “Did you call it in?”
“Yes, I called it in.”
“I think someone’s in the woods,” the roof guard called down. “Definite movement in the woods. Nine o’clock.”
Movement in the woods? Was it possible Cloquet had got free?
“Who’s with the boss?”
“Marcel.”
“What can you see?”
“Movement.”
“What kind of fucking movement?”
The guard nearest me was a coward, God bless him. He should have done an immediate sweep of the western side. Instead he went to the top of the eastern stairs and called down to his mate. “Get back up here.”
“Movement in more than one place.”
“What is it?”
This was my chance. Not one of them was looking my way. I crawled out from my hiding place and leaped swiftly—balletically in fact, albeit with neck-tendons straining—up the last set of stone stairs.
At precisely the moment I reached the top a door in the wall of glass opened and the guinea pig–faced goon from the ship—Marcel, evidently—stepped out directly opposite me.
30
NATURALLY WE LOOKED at each other. Naturally the single second that passed was more than enough time to enjoy a purified intimacy, to note each other’s details and feel the exact weight of each other’s history. Naturally our essences, peremptorily denuded, exchanged a stunned glance.
Then I shot him in the face.
It was a near thing. A near thing that he didn’t shoot me first, I mean. His weapon’s muzzle was on its way up, certainly. I was aware of this empathically, as if it were my own arm raising it. In fact my own arm, as if it were the weight on the end of a piece of gym equipment worked by someone else, came up in a perfect 45-degree arc to level the Luger at his head, whereupon my hand—another part of a precision mechanism in someone else’s control—pulled the trigger.
The silenced bullet went into his forehead (a large messily applied bindi) and he collapsed with barely a sound. Jacqueline Delon, in a silk dress the colour of buttermilk, stood in the room a few feet behind him. She was wincing and her shoulders were hunched, as if she’d just heard someone drop a priceless piece of glassware. A quick check to my right revealed the two ground-floor guards now both with night-vision goggles trained on the trees. They hadn’t heard.
Nil time to think. I sprang across the patio, pulled Marcel’s body in from the doorway and closed the plate glass behind me. This was the lounge we’d had our first drink in that morning, and aside from Jacqueline, myself and the late Marcel it was empty. Mme Delon’s shoulders came down slightly. A gesture with the Luger made her position plain: If she made a sound, I’d shoot her. I did shoot people. Witness Marcel here. Her eyes said she understood. Her shoulders came all the way down. She relaxed. “My goodness,” she said. “I thought I’d lost you forever.”
“No horseshit, please. I know about the vampire deal. I’m here for Quinn’s book and the stone. Vault in the basement.
No time to lose. Chop-chop. Yes?”
She raised her eyebrows. There was music playing softly. Dusty Springfield’s “No Easy Way Down.” Also an unusually strong scent of patchouli. It hadn’t smelled like that this morning.
“It’s not quite so straightforward,” she said. She was making what looked like an effort not to really look at me, or indeed at anything in particular. Outside one of the guards said: “No, Marcel’s with her. We need two more up here right now for a full perimeter sweep. Copy?” I went to her and grabbed her by her hair and put the gun under her chin, a move which required dropping the javelin at my feet. “Don’t fuck about. Please. Let’s go. Right now.”
“You misunderstand me,” she said. “I don’t have the book. Or the stone.”
“Since this morning. I think not.”
“It’s true. They’re in someone else’s possession.”
“Just for a laugh,” I said, “whose?”
Certain tensions rustle up clairvoyance. I knew she was going to look up, over my left shoulder, behind me. She looked up, over my left shoulder, behind me. “His,” she said.
I took a moment to concede there was no point saying, You don’t seriously expect me to fall for that, do you? Then I turned around.
He’d been there the whole time, “he” being a vampire and “there” being thirty feet up with his back against the room’s ceiling directly above the door. A senior, I inferred, gravity defiance being an elite sport that takes, allegedly, centuries to master. As I watched he descended, slowly, a neat slender man in what ought to be his early fifties (though he’d probably rubbed shoulders with Rameses) with artfully cropped greying hair and an elegant calm little face. Grey-green eyes and a thin mouth. The hint of a cleft in his delicate chin. Black close-fitting trousers and black rollneck sweater. I remembered the days when seeing someone move through the air like that would have been a thrilling shock, the days before we’d all seen it countless times in the movies. Modernity’s mimetic inversion: You see the real and are struck by how much it looks like a tediously seamless special effect.