by Glen Duncan
I turned. A tall paunchy guy in his early fifties in jeans, white shirt and black blazer. Side-parted brown hair and gold-rimmed spectacles. He had a moony face and an annoying little smile—and a padded surgical dressing over his nose. His face was bruised. My first thought was that he’d been in a car crash. Then, somehow, I felt sure he hadn’t. I felt sure someone had done this to him. With good reason. There was a smell coming off him, too: bitter cologne and some tomato sauce thing he’d eaten recently, and something else it took me a moment to identify: incense.
“What?” I said, while every muscle tightened and my dumb brain still registered the piped hotel music softly filling the air-conditioned space around us, a bad cover version of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.”
“You seem distressed,” he said, looking as if my distress was just about the nicest thing he’d ever seen. “I was just wondering if you were … If you needed any help?”
For a moment I stood there, mentally jammed, hands and feet and throat packed with panicking blood. The sun was a big sick smile waiting to break over the horizon. The cells in my face were screaming, silently.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Thanks.”
I turned my back on him but I could still feel him there, sense him smiling, as if his smile were a tiny fragment of the sun’s, one of its messengers that came on ahead of it. If my turn hadn’t come I don’t know what I would’ve done, but the businessman in front of me picked up his briefcase and headed for the elevators and suddenly there was the beautiful Thai clerk, a girl who couldn’t have been more than twenty, smiling at me and saying “Welcome to the Sofitel. Are you checking-in?” and I had to focus on registering, though my hands were shaking so badly I could hardly sign.
And even then he didn’t budge. I could feel him behind me, a sort of smug energy coming off him. I thought again of all the stupid, careless mistakes I’d made since leaving Los Angeles. All I wanted right then was enough time to do what I had to do. It wouldn’t need twenty thousand years. Forty-eight hours should be enough.
“Sorry, ma’am,” the receptionist said. “I’m getting an incorrect PIN message. Would you like to try again?”
I would have turned on him then—told him to back the fuck off, punched him, screamed at him, whatever, I don’t know—but his cellphone rang, and he walked away to answer it, talking in Italian.
There was no sign of him when I looked after checking-in (I was so spooked it took me another two attempts to key the PIN in correctly; I knew the number, it was just I couldn’t control my goddamned hands) and in any case there was no time. I got to my room on the nineteenth floor, hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign, locked the door, killed the lights and shut myself in the bathroom.
67
Remshi
I FLOPPED ONTO the bed, feeling, frankly, terrible.
“What is it that makes you think she’s in danger?” Mia said to me.
We’d just checked-in to the Novotel at Suvarnabhumi. Hardly a first choice, but even with Damien’s near-infallible jiggery-pokery we were too close to sunrise for anything further afield. It had been a frustrating few days. Commercial airlines would have been faster, but the risks of losing the night—without the jet’s blackout-room fallback—were too high. I’d been tormented by the image of Justine going up in daylight flames in her airplane seat, or the back of a cab, or in the lobby of a hotel just like this one. Three days ago Hannah had called with the necessaries on Duane Schrutt. Duane Schrutt. The near-misses I’d had—Dale, Wayne—were a minor irritant, a bit of grit in my mind’s eye. A minor irritant, I repeat. The major irritant was too major to be described as an irritant. It was more of a disaster. A recurring disaster. I’d suffered several more inexplicable episodes of … of what? Unconsciousness. Nausea with nothing to throw up. Periods of being—I was tiring of the phrase—as weak as a kitten, when the lifting of my hand or the turning of my head called for an energy that felt—in the tissues, the vessels, the bones—like a logical impossibility. I had no appetite whatsoever. The jet’s blood-stock was at my companions’ disposal. Caleb didn’t like it, that I didn’t drink. He didn’t like it in the way human children don’t like the urine-and-Vicks smell of the human old. I told him it was no biggie. I told him that when you got to my age you just didn’t need … You just weren’t that thirsty. I was becoming, I could tell, an alarming disappointment to the lad. I had, however, opened a numbered account in Mia’s name in Geneva and transferred five million dollars into it to start her off. (Her only surviving account after Fifty Families ostracisation was, pitifully, a chequing account at Chase Manhattan. You might as well put cash in a coffee jar.) Five million probably sounds like a lot. It’s not. Even in human terms, these days, it’s not. This is, after all, the age which spawned the economist’s joke: A trillion here, a trillion there … Pretty soon you’re talking real money. I watch people on game shows losing all dignity and restraint when they win One Hundred Thousand Dollars! How long do they think that’s going to last? They think their lives have changed. They haven’t. Not unless they put the lot on a million-to-one shot at the track and it comes in. Then they might find out where their freedom takes them. Then they might find out who and what they really are … But, in any case, an indefinite lifespan makes five million nothing, makes five million change.
“Did you hear me?” Mia said.
“What? Oh, yes. Sorry. I don’t know. She’s new. She’s … There’s an emotional investment in the victim. I promised I wouldn’t leave her. I just hope we’re not too late. She’s a bit unpredictable.”
Mia stood with her hands in the leather jacket pockets, looking down at me on the bed. She really was extraordinarily beautiful. The cold blonde hair and cold blue eyes and cold white skin and warm red mouth. A shocking, perfect contrast. I thought: Beauty just keeps coming into the world and passing away, coming in and passing away. You can’t blame beauty. Beauty doesn’t know what else to do.
“What’s the matter?” she said. “What is it? Are you in pain?”
You’re a bit fragile, Fluff, Justine had said. It felt like a long time ago. Sometimes, when I was forced to consider my sense of time, it was like looking out of a carriage window to see that the wheels were running right on the edge of a sheer and infinite drop. I forced myself to sit up, dried my eyes. Laughed a little.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Forgive me. I’m a bit … I’m sorry. Kindness hurts.”
“Kindness?”
“You and Caleb. You’ve been very kind to me.”
I felt the reflex in her, to reply that I was paying them. I felt the huge, tense, ever-ready reflex, which was to strip away sentiment at all costs. I felt her suppress it—just—with the words on the tip of her tongue. Instead she said, quietly, “I think you should give me your spare room key. In case you oversleep.”
In case you have another episode. I was thinking of all the old people I’d ever heard say: I don’t want to be a burden to anyone.
“You’re absolutely right,” I said. I gave her the spare. Nowadays a hotel key was a piece of magnetised plastic. It’s a mark of the state I was in that that fact made the idiotic tears well again. The thought of the human world moving forward with its shifty bravery, inspired madness, bloody inversions, deafening ignorance. It’s hard not to love your species’ dedication to craftily making things physically easier, even though you know by now it just leaves more room for getting mentally fucked-up. Corkscrews. Ironing boards. Aeroplanes. Cellphones. You kill me with these things. Walking on the moon! A group of humans sitting around discussing walking on the moon. Knowing the mathematical razor wire it’s going to roll them in, knowing the scale, the ludicrous giantness of the undertaking, knowing all this but still assuming it’ll get done because the giant undertaking breaks down into a million small things like the manufacture of single tiny components and the necessity of one minus one equalling zero. The labour you lot are willing to put in from there breaks my heart. And then as soon as you’ve done it you’re on to the next thing. M
ars. The Genome. CERN. It’s a sort of nymphomania or satyriasis of consciousness, a hopelessly promiscuous carrying on.
I’ll miss it.
At the door, Mia turned. “Are you going to be all right?” she said. “Do you want me to …?”
For a moment I thought she meant, Do you want me to stay here with you? But then I realised she meant, Do you want me to help you into the bathroom?
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “I’m sorry. You must think …”
“I think you say sorry too much.”
Don’t cry again. Do not start that obscene blubbering again.
“Sleep well,” Mia said, and a moment later she was gone.
Leaving me to face sleep—and the dream—alone.
68
Talulla
I WASN’T SHOWN or told “the method.”
“After you’ve seen the proof,” Olek said. “Believe me, it’ll sound too incredible without it.”
He was a little tedious. This was his show, so he would have it played his way. He did, however, tell me what he wanted from me. I followed him back up the stairs to minus one, and through the first two rooms of the lab. Another vault door (where the fuck did he get these from? did he have them airlifted in?) opened onto a third room, similar to the first, although more obviously the site of physical experiments. There was unfathomable kit here, in glass and steel, but plenty of minimally winking hardware too. Also a single very large—keypad entry, again—refrigeration unit.
“WOCOP, as we know,” he said, “is no more. It was always a sloppy, unwieldy organisation—in fact ‘organisation’ was a misnomer—but in its death throes it was in chaos. Total chaos. I don’t know whether you know but we bought pretty much all the research material they had, all the science. Outbid the Militi Christi on the lot. The Directors were simply flogging everything for cash.”
He was turning the gold and garnet ring on his finger as he spoke. It looked very glamorous against his dark skin.
“Their science division was all over the place,” he went on. “They’d had so many personnel changes, conflicting directives from the suits, people running for the hills. Murdoch—whom you knew, of course—was operating as a law unto himself … Well, I shan’t bore you with the details. The long and short of it is that by the time the whole thing fell apart they didn’t even know what science they had. They’d spent God only knows how much money and time on lycanthrope research. Which also happens to be one of my areas of expertise.”
He hit the keypad buttons and the fridge door gasped open. Colder than a regular icebox, I gathered. The little wisps of expanding air cleared in a moment, to reveal several shelves of black canisters. He beckoned me over. In among the black was a single white flask.
“I won’t take it out,” he said. “Can’t afford a significant temperature drop until we’re ready to use it.”
Pause. For dramatic effect. He couldn’t quite suppress a smile.
“Okay,” I said. “I give up. What am I looking at?”
The smile broadened. “Haven’t you guessed? It’s the virus.”
He didn’t say anything else. Just let me put two and two together. Then he closed the refrigerator door.
“They had all the bio-chemistry they needed to synthesise it. It was all there in the notes, in the samples, in the data. They were just too dumb to see it. A simple business of joining the dots. I hate to lean on a cliché, but you really can’t make this shit up.”
I felt tired. My ex, Richard (my human ex), was annoyingly fond of the French saying Plus ça change (plus c’est la même chose). The more it changes, the more it stays the same.
“And you want to infect me with it,” I said. “Again. Are you serious? Actually, scratch that. I know you’re serious. I’ve got depressingly good at knowing when people are serious.”
“Of course I’m serious,” he said. “Vampires bitten by a werewolf carrying the virus show increased sunlight tolerance. Do you know how old I am, Talulla?”
“You know I don’t,” I said.
“I was born as a vampire more than seven thousand years ago. I’m old, even by the reckoning of my kind. I know I don’t have much longer. Even in a world as perversely fascinating as this one fatigue sets in. Plus, I know I’m not what I once was. There are signs of … Well. Let’s just say everything I’ve learned tells me I’m not going to live forever. Do you read Bowles at all?”
“Bowles?”
“Paul Bowles. The novelist. I saw him in his last days, in Tangier. Charming man. Do you know he and his wife once shared a house in Brooklyn with W. H. Auden and Gypsy Rose Lee? Dalí was there for a while, too. What evenings they must have had! Apparently they took turns cooking. You will perhaps have seen the movie, The Sheltering Sky?”
I had seen it. With Richard. In the old life. Debra Winger. Bedouin. Sex. I couldn’t remember much more about it. It was a movie that didn’t encourage you to read the novel. I was annoyed (why not?) by his assumption that I was more likely to have seen the movie than read the book. Especially since he was right.
“Bowles himself makes a cameo appearance at the end of the film,” Olek said, “where he gives a famous little speech in voiceover. It’s from the novel, obviously. He says: ‘Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.’ ” He smiled again. To my astonishment, his eyes had tears in them. “I want to see the blue of the ocean again, Talulla,” he said. “I want to see leaf-shadows on green grass. I want to watch the sun rise. You will forgive the whiff of portent, but I feel the finiteness of my days.”
Well. Surprise. Was there anything other than sunshine a vampire ended up wanting? Is there anything other than what we don’t have that we all end up wanting? Who knew that if not me?
“It costs you nothing,” he said. “You’ve had the virus before. You carry it, you bite me. We go our ways. I’ll even throw in a shot of the anti-virus, too, so you don’t have to be a carrier any longer than you like. Everyone wins. And in return, your children get a normal life, free from persecution. You, too, if you want. Your face is known, certainly, but I know several very good plastic surgeons. The identity paperwork will be your own business, but you have the contacts and the resources for that. I’m offering you a door back into the life you lost.”
He sounded eminently civilised. Eminently sane. I wondered again if I’d been drugged, or if he was pulling some boochie mind-trick, since I felt lulled by the simplicity of the equation. I had an image of picking Zoë and Lorcan up from a school in Manhattan. Books. Homework. No more care (except the benign aesthetic one) for the next full moon. No more blood on our hands. Were they young enough to forget? Could I tell them it had all been a dream?
“Why didn’t you just use Devaz?” I said. For all Olek’s suavity the vision of his other guest’s despair was fresh. “You’ve got your werewolf right there. I’m sure he would’ve obliged. He’s probably broke. He’d probably have done it for fifty bucks.”
Olek nodded. “He would have,” he said. “When I found him he’d have done it for a pack of cigarettes or a decent pair of shoes. But back then I was still missing several vital pieces to the puzzle. And I’m afraid my curiosity about the cure got the better of me. I can’t tell you how much the timing depressed me. But I must repeat, when I tried the cure on Devaz it was in a spirit of complete scepticism. I simply wasn’t expecting it to work. Well, that was a lesson!”
The refrigerator hummed. As far as Olek was concerned, he’d said all he needed to say. The opening line of “Childe Roland” came back to me. My first thought was, he lied in every word.
/> “Let’s go up,” my host said. “I don’t expect you to answer until you’ve seen proof of the cure, obviously. Besides, I don’t want Mikhail and Natasha to start worrying I’ve done something unpleasant to you.”
On the last landing before the living quarters, he stopped and turned: “Before we rejoin your friends,” he said, “let me reassure you, since you’ve been too polite to ask, that your feeding needs have been provided for. All you’ll need to do is walk fifty metres into the trees beyond the garden. Acceptable?”
Only because it was the simplest thing to do, I nodded.
“Very good,” Olek said. “Now, let’s rejoin the company.”
69
ABSURDITY HAS A momentum you can surrender to. As does exhaustion. Olek left Konstantinov, Natasha and me at our leisure to “catch up” (throughout which Walker was the invisible fourth person in the room, loudly not mentioned by any of us; he must have short-versioned it to Konstantinov over the phone—and really, what was the long version?) but by two in the morning jet-lag and tantrumming wulf had me at my limit. I gobbled four codeine and took a large Macallan with me upstairs to my quarters. These were a cedar-scented sitting room of dark wooden panelling, Indian silk paintings, a lute, a statue of Krishna, and a bedroom of soothing pale walls with one huge framed mandala over the bed, carpeted with at least twenty more of the fabulous fringed rugs. An en suite with a free-standing tub and a walk-in shower, mosaic tiled in a dozen shades of blue, frangipani incense sticks burning in a tiny brass pot. I was escorted there—with impeccable deference—by what looked like a freshly scrubbed and hair-oiled Grishma, who handed over matching white towels and robe that had plainly never been used before. Sensuous pleasures present themselves regardless of circumstances, and I was tired and unhinged enough to let them in. An hour soaking in the tub to allow the pills and booze to take off what edge they could, then I undressed and got into a large double bed that recieved me like a lover who’d been waiting for my body for a thousand years.