by Glen Duncan
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this when you came to see me at the Zetter? Or in Cornwall?”
He nodded, lips pursed and eyes lowered, as in admission of a weakness. “Fear and unpreparedness,” he said. “Grainer was supposed to meet me that morning at the Zetter. We knew you’d start to wonder if Harley’s cover was secure. The suits’ thinking was the story of the French idiot needed reinforcing. Then at the last minute I got a call from the office saying Grainer was tied up with something and that I should go ahead on my own. To this day I don’t know whether they were testing me. They could have bugged the room, or there was your escort, whatsername, Madeline, who for all I knew had been recruited. Anyway, I didn’t like the setup and I wasn’t going to put my head on the block. Too much riding on it.”
“Madeline’s not WOCOP, is she?” I asked, with a genuine feeling of fracture. Maddy not being what she seemed would be a uniquely dismal disappointment, the sort of thing that makes you say, Jesus, is nothing sacred?
“Pure civilian,” Ellis said. “A nobody. Forget her.”
Small mercies.
“Okay, but what about the stakeout in Cornwall?”
“That was just shit luck. I was literally just about to spill the beans to you when I got a message from the crew that two more vampires had been spotted. I had to go. FYI, we killed another three that night, but it took all night—and in the morning you hauled ass back to London before I had a chance to speak to you.”
“You’re not in charge of this, obviously,” I said.
“Holy crap, no way. Wouldn’t want the headache.”
A transparent lie—we both knew he was on the path to remote supremacy—but I ignored it. “So who is?”
“Come on, Jake, that’s classified. Why should you care?”
Madeline would have said: Because I want the organ-grinder, not his monkey.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe it’s because you seem to move back and forth between sounding deeply rational and completely insane.”
He nodded. “It’s a difficulty of manner,” he said. “I’m oblique, they tell me. You know I’m an orphan, right?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“My mom left me in a Kmart in Los Angeles when I was less than a year old. I still dream of the place, a kind of blurry Christmas glitter.”
His consciousness was like a lethal ocean undertow. Before you knew it you were in colder water, miles from shore. I stood up. “Enough shit,” I said. “Just tell me what to do.”
“Cool your heels, Jacob. Nothing, yet. Seventeen days to full moon. Grainer still wants the animal. As far as he knows you’re off-radar. In a couple of weeks you’ll contact him and lay it out. Revenge for Harley. You and him, winner takes all. Stick with your original site in the Welsh forest. We’re set up for that. I’m leaving three guys with you in case the vamps pick up your trail, but keep your own wits about you, will you? Oh, and don’t waste your money trying to buy her location off my boys. They don’t know it. You’re on a flight to London tonight. Here’s a new phone and charger. You keep it clear 24/7. The only person ringing you on it will be me. For the time being you just go home and sit tight.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it. Trust me, Jake, everything’s going to be fine. We’re both going to come out of this winners.”
His own phone rang again. This time he answered, said, “Go,” then paused for a moment before holding it out to me. “Here,” he said. “Talk to your lady.”
48
THE SKY SUFFERED a particle surge, briefly went a deeper blue. Sweat bloomed in my palm as I took the phone.
“Lu?”
“Jake?”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m okay. Where are you?”
“You’re not hurt? They haven’t hurt you?”
“No, I’m not hurt.”
“Don’t be afraid. I’m going to get you out. Everything’s going to be okay.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m at the villa still. You don’t know where you are?” I could sense Ellis peripherally with the face saying, Come on, Jake, don’t be silly.
“I don’t know. I think I was on a plane. It’s like a hospital. There’s a doctor here, or a least a guy dressed as a doctor.”
“What have they done to you?”
“Nothing. Took a blood sample, a urine sample. Everyone’s very solicitous.”
“Lu, listen. They’re going to keep you for seventeen days. I’ll be able to talk to you on and off—” I looked at Ellis. Not very often, his face said. “But just sit tight. I’m going to get you out, okay?”
There was a pause in which I felt, like a sudden drop in temperature, how afraid she was. “Promise?” she said.
I had to swallow. And turn away from Ellis. “I promise. I’m going to get you out. Just wait for me.”
“Okay, I’ll try.”
“They want me to—” The line went dead.
I spun on Ellis. “Jesus fucking Christ, get her back. Get her back right now.”
“Jake, Jake, calm down. Calm down. You know the way these things work. You’ve spoken to her. You’ve established it’s your woman. You know she’s okay. I promise you nothing’s going to happen to her. I’ve seen the room she’s being held in and you know what? It’s nice. She’s got a TV and a comfortable bed and her own little bathroom with a shower and everything right there. So seriously, stop fretting.”
He reached out for the phone but I held on to it. Her voice had come through it, felt still there in my hand.
“Come on now, Jacob. Don’t be an ass.”
I gave him back the phone. “You listen to me,” I said. “I’m not doing anything for you until I’ve seen her. Understand? With my own eyes, in the flesh. I see her in person or you get dick. Nonnegotiable.”
Ellis got to his feet. Looked at me curiously for a moment, then turned and rested his hands on the veranda’s rail, looking out over the red roofs and white boats to the shimmering blue of the Ionian. “Jake,” he said. “You’re in love with her, aren’t you?”
I didn’t answer him. My head throbbed. A smell of raw fish came up from the village. A Jet Ski thumped across the bay. I was aware of having done something stupid.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s cool. I’m intrigued. I mean you’ve been around for two hundred years. I’m assuming the Death of the Heart at some point. The End of Love. I’m assuming decades of emotional … What’s the French word? Longueurs. Look at that, I surprise myself. Decades of longueurs, then suddenly zammo, this, love again.”
His tone hadn’t changed much, but it had changed enough. I remained silent. The sun and the heat like a million spider bites.
“Don’t make me make them do anything,” Ellis said, quietly. “With sulphuric acid or anything. On her leg or someplace.”
“Please,” I said—but he held up his hand.
“You don’t have sufficient power to dictate terms, Jake,” he said. “I understand the impulse, but you’re not, you know, congruent with reality.”
The leg or someplace. Someplace is somewhere else, her face or breasts or between her legs. Acid makes a sound like a sigh of relief or ecstasy. It would heal but it would hurt so much and they can just keep doing it and this is the possibility you sign up for with love as Arabella had signed up and said, It’s you it’s you, so of course this would be the long-winded justice but not Talulla just me not her just do whatever it is to me.
“You’ll get to talk to her again,” Ellis said. “And we can discuss you seeing her once—maybe—before you do your part. But Jake, seriously, come into line with things, you know? The tone, man. The tone’s all wrong.”
In films a soldier looks down between his feet and sees he’s millimetres from a mine. He looks farther. Mines everywhere. From now on every step is a matter of life and death.
“Okay,” I said. “You’re right. Emotions. I understand. But can I just make a suggestion, an observation?”
&n
bsp; “Of course. Shoot.”
“You don’t need to do this. You don’t need to keep her. Let me explain. In fact let me ask you a question: Why was Harley killed?”
“To get you riled up,” Ellis said. “Although between you and me I thought we’d have done better to hold him, alive, until you were willing to play ball.”
“Exactly. Harley was killed because you knew I needed an incentive to make a fight of it. And you were right. A month ago I’d had enough. A month ago I didn’t want to live.” He was already nodding, slowly, with a smile. “Now everything’s different. Now I have her. I’ll kill Grainer anyway, with satisfaction and relief, because as long as he’s alive he’s a threat to the woman I love.”
The smile wasn’t just advance comprehension. It was the recognition of a fellow strategist. “That’s nice again, Jake,” he said. “The logic’s sound. I like it. And for what it’s worth I believe you. But you know it’s not going to fly. Aside from the fact that it’s still just you trying to negotiate a concession we have zero reason to make, it’s not even my call. As I said, I’m not running this.”
Silence. Mentally the equivalent of someone trapped in a room repeatedly trying the doors he already knows are locked. Blood and urine. Why? Everyone’s very solicitous. Solicitous captors worse than brutal ones in the long run. We know this. She knew it. It had been in her voice.
For what seemed a long time Ellis and I stood without speaking, him looking out into the blue-silver bay, me with my face and wrists and fingers full of useless life. He had the air of a man thinking sentimental thoughts. Engendered, perhaps, by the memory of being abandoned in a Kmart. Then he turned to me and stretched out his hand. Sunlight blazed in his white-blond hair. “So,” he said. “Do we have a deal?”
49
THERE WAS NO talking him out of the three-goon bodyguard but I managed to get a break on London quarters: After a low-voiced call to whoever was running the show it was agreed I could hole up at Harley’s place in Earl’s Court—and thus, after passing through the first hours of pointless incredulity, I’ve spent thirteen of the seventeen days confined here, brought takeout food by the agents (a fourth drafted in for rooftop duty when the attic skylights were discovered), working my way through Harley’s whisky, bringing this journal up to date and living for the rationed phone contact with Talulla.
“Half the problem’s boredom,” she said, yesterday. “You know what the other half is.” Three-quarters into the lunation she, like me, had stopped eating. I’d told Ellis she’d need cigarettes, booze, water, and he’d promised me, apparently in good faith, to make sure she got them. But a higher authority had intervened. Poulsom, I inferred, the sound of whom I liked less and less. Water, yes, but no alcohol, no nicotine. Instead she was offered sleeping pills and muscle relaxants, which, after two nights on the Hunger’s rack, she’d accepted. Aside from the loss of her liberty this was, according to her, the first hardship she’d suffered in their custody. (Unless one counted kidney ultrasounds, of which she’d had three. Poulsom suspected stones.) She’d had the situation explained to her (by Ellis, whom she said treated her with a sort of ludicrous medieval politesse), understood there was no (avowed) intention to harm her, and that as soon as I’d delivered on my part of the deal she’d be released. Aside from the ultimate question of whether either of us would make it through this alive was the nearer mystery of what they were going to do with her come full moon.
“Poulsom says they’ve got it covered,” she told me. “Whatever that means.” False uncertainty. We knew what it meant. Either they were going to kill her or they were going to restrain her or they were going to put her in a cage with a live victim—and most likely record the spectacle for the breakaway WOCOP archives.
“Anyway, they’re taking care of me,” she said. “I’ve got Luxury Bath and Shower Gel from Harrods and a brand-new set of enormous white towels. Also a hundred-plus TV channels. I’m now an aficionado of East-Enders and Coronation Street and—”
The line went dead. Sudden amputation lest we forget who’s in charge, lest we forget by whose grace we live, lest we forget there’s a job to be done.
To deal with the obvious matter first. Ellis has no intention of letting Talulla go. And if he does, Poulsom doesn’t. Assuming there’s a genuine agenda to kick-start a new lycanthropic generation (and this I can believe), the science is in its infancy. Talulla survived the bite and—courtesy of the antivirus, apparently—Turned. Very well. But the big question, by Ellis’s own admission, is whether she can Turn victims of her own. And that question will be tackled in the laboratory. Poulsom et al. aren’t going to release her into the field when they can feed her test victims in a controlled environment.
Which means—try not to laugh—Me Rescuing Her.
Which in turn means either gangbusting her out by force or smuggling her out by guile. Sliced any way, it means me finding out where the fuck they’re holding her.
Enter: money. This is where money comes in. Thanks to the recent boom in military subcontractors one can, with sufficient resources, buy one’s own little army. (As is now widely known, the Bush administration bought one—Blackwater—and sprinkled it just above the law all over Iraq.) My resources are sufficient—but still, I don’t know where they’re holding her.
There is one infallible way of finding out.
Meanwhile my life here is a dentist’s waiting room. A rhythm soon established itself: dayshift agents handing over to night, evenings in the library, jagged bits of sleep, raw-eyed mornings, the shift change, the daylight hours of pacing or lying on the couch. Harley never had a TV, so I can’t keep my love company in Soapland, but of course I’m surrounded by books. This afternoon I leafed through a 1607 Dutch-German edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses illustrated by Crispijn de Passe. Market value, according to a 2006 index, eight thousand pounds. I have no idea what Harley intended for the collection, whether he’d made a will, what’ll happen to the place now he’s gone. Not that the world has a clue he’s gone. Grainer & Co. have seen to the cover-up of his murder (God only knows what became of the severed head in the Vectra’s boot) though it can only be a matter of time before a utility company or Council Tax office starts chasing a payment. Harls had no living relatives. There’s a solicitor in Holborn, but since I’ve no intention of getting involved in a homicide investigation there’s little point in contacting him. Instead I wear my deceased friend’s clothes and drink his supply and pass the tight-wound time with his books. Of late I’ve found myself leaning, at idle moments, on his bone-handled cane.
I have little truck with my minders, who’ve been schooled to keep shtoom, and in any case I’m not disposed to chat. A few words exchanged with the arrival of cigarettes or firewood, but otherwise I remain mute and they talk among themselves, quietly, over their headsets. There’sa man stationed on every floor. The miserable roof detail rotates, since no one wants it. I’ve offered to take a turn myself (the Hunger with no fresh air is a soft close hell) but no dice. Sorry, chief, can’t be done. This is Russell, the one responsible for lopping off Laura Mangiardi’s head back in Cornwall, who has an appealing liveliness and who is by now so bored that he would talk to me if I didn’t keep making it obvious that I wished to be left alone. Instead he smokes and does Sudoku and thinks up wretched jokes with which he torments his fellows—What do you call a small robot vampire? Nosferatu-D2—and strips and cleans and reassembles his personal arsenal two or three times a day. The team’s firepower is a mix of conventional automatic hardware and antivamp kit: night-vision goggles, long- and short-range Stakers, UV sticks, a miniature version of the Hail Mary for whoever’s on the roof. Russell packs a small flamethrower, too, though I recall Harley telling me most Hunters regarded even the compact versions of these units—“boochie-burners” (“BBs” for short)—as obsolete. Thanks to Sigourney Weaver’s turn in Alien there had been a revival in the eighties, but the hard maths of weight-to-efficacy had soon reasserted itself, and now they were seen as an affectation. I
n any case young Russell wears one from time to time, and is wearily mocked for it by his compadres. With all this equipment dedicated to my protection I ought to feel safe. I don’t.
Outside, London goes about its business like a virile degenerate old man. By the fire’s light I sit in the window seat with a straight Macallan (two bottles remain from a case of twelve) and a Camel, watching the traffic—sudden halts and surges like blood through a complex valve—and the self-involved comings and goings of humans. As always most are full of energy, riddled with their own details, asimmer with schemes and regrets, fears, secrets, hungers, sins. Occasionally love. A very young dark-haired couple came out of a deli, not dreamily or holding hands or in any way obviously rapt but deep in conversation and glimmering with the shared wealth of each other. My in-love heart tautened to see it. In love. Oh, indeed I have the condition. Verily, reader, I am fully, absurdly sick. Life, grinning like a great white, is enjoying the joke: Years of incrementally getting ready for death and now all he wants is life. Come on, Jake, you’ve got to laugh.
I can’t. Not with my in-love heart on perpetual pleading duty, inwardly audible at every gap in my self-distraction: Please … Please … Please … There are specifics—please don’t let them hurt her; please let me see her again; please let me find out where they’re holding her—but this pleading is an emotional whole greater than the sum of its parts, addressed to the God who isn’t there, to the benignly indifferent universe, to the spirit of Story, who we know these days has a soft spot for the dark ending. Please … Please … Please …
My inner dead are asleep, sleeping very badly, dreaming of release. Love, it appears, has the power to force them under. They toss and turn. Their murmur builds, threatens a swarm into wakefulness, dies back. Love’s crude spell holds them down, just. Arabella’s ghost endures in seared wakefulness, knowing something’s over. I keep turning away from her. I keep turning my face away. For the first time in a hundred and sixty-seven years a hundred and sixty-seven years ago doesn’t seem like yesterday. For the first time in a hundred and sixty-seven years the present matters more than the past.