The Ultimate Werewolf

by Byron Preiss (ed)

  Becky Karp blamed the whole affair on Isaac Sidel. He was her police commissioner, and Isaac hadn't slowed the Wolf Man's walk across Manhattan.

  "Isaac, do something, or my whole administration will sink."

  "I'm doing what I can. I have my deputies out on the street day and night."

  "It's not good enough," she screamed at Isaac, who looked like a woolly bear with sideburns. "I want a special werewolf patrol, with an ace psychologist who can talk about all the implications . . . what's that word again?"

  "Lycanthropy," Isaac said.

  "Yes, lycanthropy. We need a spokesman, Isaac. Someone who can calm the public, who can give the right definitions, take a scientific approach. Not a policeman like you. You're too primitive, Isaac. I want a scientist on this case. Either you pick one, or I will."

  "Then I'll resign," Isaac said.

  "You won't resign. You're too interested in the Wolf Man . . . it's sink or swim, Isaac. Get me a scientist."

  Isaac marched out of City Hall with reporters on his back, nibbling like little vampires. What could he say? He'd captured the other Wolf Man, Harvey Montaigne, because Isaac had discovered his modus operandi. There was something theatrical about Montaigne in all the tracks he left, that desire to play at harming people, as if he were caught in some perpetual Halloween, and was waiting for Isaac, who stumbled upon him in a hotel room, lonely and depressed, a couple of days after Christmas.

  "How'd you find me?" Harvey Montaigne had asked.

  "By chance."

  "I've seen you on the tube. Your sideburns are too big. How'd you find me?"

  But Isaac wouldn't give his secrets away. While his own detectives scoured the city, looking for some maniac in a mask, Isaac had gone through hundreds of theatrical bills, until he happened upon a bill that belonged to a small theatre company in Queens, the Corona Players, which was offering an ensemble production of "The Monster Hours, a Musical by Many Hands." It wasn't simply that the Corona Players had a Wolf Man in their ensemble. They also had a Frankenstein and a Dracula. And these monsters were played "by Many Hands," which bothered Isaac. Because there was a terrible sadness built into the idea of monsters shaking their musical bones in some obscure corner of Queens. And so Isaac trespassed upon the anonymity of the Corona Players, interviewed Harvey's mother, who was the head cashier, and broke the case.

  He was called the number-one detective in the world, Sidel, who reached outside his own Department to bring in Harvey Montaigne.

  And now the public expected him to sustain his own magic and have another success. But this Wolf Man didn't wear a mask. He took wicked bites out of people's throats, he chewed on their flesh. He held to Manhattan, but that wasn't much of an MO. The Wolf Man might decide to cross a bridge one afternoon and start a whole other life.

  And Isaac was hounded by reporters, foreign and domestic, because the Wolf Man was international news, a totem of our times, the beast within the belly of the beast. Isaac gave no interviews. But he couldn't shuffle between Headquarters and City Hall without being noticed.

  "Isaac, is this another Harvey Montaigne?"

  "No comment."

  And he withdrew into the red maze of One Police Plaza. But Becky had already found a scientist for her werewolf patrol. He was a professor of psychology at Brooklyn College who specialized in lycanthropy and other kinds of cannibalism. He was much younger than Isaac, a mulatto from Los Angeles who'd migrated to Bedford-Stuy. He looked like a cherub. His name was Walter Gunn.

  "Let's get one thing straight, Professor Gunn."

  "Walter will do," the cherub said. "I don't like formalities when I'm on a case."

  "You've worked for other police departments?"

  "As a consultant, yes. You don't think your Wolf Man is the only one around, do you, Commissioner?"

  "Call me Isaac."

  "Then don't fuck with me. I didn't ask for this assignment."

  "You're a civilian," Isaac said.

  "So are you."

  "But I still have a badge and a gun. Let Becky Karp play her politics. I give the orders around here. If you're her spy, Walter, then say so. I'll respect that. You can sleep on my carpet and collect your honorariums. Just leave me alone."

  "Yeah, you're the boy who found Harvey Montaigne. But this one isn't Harvey. He eats human flesh."

  "I don't believe in werewolves, Walter. And if this mother is a cannibal, then I'll kick his ass."

  "He eats flesh, Isaac. The victims will die of blood poisoning or pernicious anemia, and you'll have more than a curio on your hands. You'll have a killer, whoever or whatever he is. You need me, Isaac, or you'll never get near him."

  "Then what's your guess?" "The Bangor Wolf. He came down from Canada and he's been causing havoc ever since."

  "Is he some trapper who started hallucinating in the woods?"

  "All I know is he's a werewolf."

  "Whiskers and all that shtick. Did they run saliva tests on this Bangor baby's victims?"

  "Yes, they found human spittle and human blood. But Bangor is human, Isaac. That's the whole point. He only has certain characteristics of a wolf."

  "Blame it on the moon," Isaac said.

  "Or some deep psychosis. It doesn't matter. Bangor has fur on his face and unholy blue eyes. He's down from the north woods, I'm telling you. And he's nesting in Manhattan."

  "Then why haven't you volunteered this information until now?"

  "I did. But your detectives wouldn't believe me."

  "So you went to Becky Karp."

  "No. Her Honor came to me."

  "Grand," Isaac said, imitating his Irish forebears at the NYPD. "Nesting in Manhattan. But I thought he has a fondness for woods."

  "He does. I'd say he's living in Central Park."

  "And he won't foul his nest. So he waltzes into the side streets whenever he wants a meal. But he seems to have a fondness for lower Manhattan. Nine of his hits have been below Fourteenth Street. What does he do, Walter? Hail a cab? Or does he hop around after midnight, stealing clothes from the best boutiques?"

  "No. He uses the subway system."

  "A straphanger, huh?"

  "A man can move awful fast in those tunnels, Isaac. There are abandoned lines and everything. All he'd have to do is wear a long coat and step down into the tracks."

  Isaac began to look at the cherub. "You've done your homework . . . I shouldn't have been so gruff."

  "You're a police commissioner. You have to be suspicious."

  "Don't compliment me, Walter. I'm a son of a bitch."

  ▼▼▼

  The Wolf Man knocked down a widow on Madison and Twenty-ninth, ate off half her neck. But the widow wouldn't die. She lingered like the others until Isaac felt he inhabited this same half-world between the living and the dead. Whiskers. Blue Eyes. Homo lupus, the wolf who walked upright.

  Isaac avoided the slow-eyed detectives from the Central Park precinct. They could catch their own case. He brought in a squad of men who looked like state troopers. They pummeled through the grass. They knocked open abandoned caves in the northern heights of the Park. They poked around in the Harlem Meer, frightening users of crack. Isaac worked with an enormous blueprint. He was like some pirate searching for the secret treasure of a Wolf Man's droppings. There were no signs of the Wolf Man's nest. Isaac broke up a small smuggling ring that operated out of an old abandoned fort. He arrested half a dozen crack dealers and a rapist. But Isaac wanted the Wolf Man.

  He went into the bowels of Manhattan with two engineers from the Metropolitan Transit Authority. He rode in a little electric car. It was like Coney Island under the ground. One of the engineers kept socking at rats' heads with a shovel. They entered a subway line that had been closed in nineteen twenty-six. Isaac had to get out of the little car, because there was no electricity on this line. He was given a pair of boots and a miner's lamp that he wore over his brain. The old subway station was intact. And Isaac marveled at the different-colored tiles, mosaics that spelled out Beaver
Street and Cherry Street on this phantom line. Isaac was a little jealous. His own dead uncles and aunts might have been among the human cargo seventy years ago. A piece of his own history had eluded Isaac, the expert on Manhattan.

  He made thirty arrests. He collared a gang of pickpockets that had used the Cherry Street station as their private sanctuary. There were no signs of the Wolf Man. Isaac grew more and more depressed.

  He visited Harvey Montaigne, who lived at a half-way house run by the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. He wasn't sure what this earlier Wolf Man could divine for him, but Isaac needed Harvey somehow.

  "Have you been acting again?"

  "No. I couldn't seem to pick up on my career."

  "I could have talked to a couple of producers."

  "Yeah, and I'd have to play the Wolf Man for the rest of my life."

  "You shouldn't have gone around biting people. I had no choice. Someone could have been killed. A cop might have seen you in your mask and shot your head off . . . Harvey, I need your help."

  "That's a laugh," the Wolf Man said.

  "I'm not kidding. What's your opinion about this Wolf Man?"

  "I have no opinions."

  "But you have to feel something. I mean, it has to touch you somewhere. Another Wolf Man."

  "He's a perfect stranger to me."

  "But who do you think he is?"

  "One more actor, Mr. Isaac, in a fucking world of actors."

  ▼▼▼

  The Wolf Man struck again. He had his own cosmology. The moon could wax or wane around him. He was always out on the street with that furry head and bottomless blue eyes. And Isaac began to wonder if the Wolf Man was some horrible visitation upon the city itself, as if all the monstrosities of Manhattan had taken flesh.

  But he didn't have time to ponder. Becky's scientist had been hit by a bus. Isaac brought him flowers at Mount Sinai Hospital. Walter Gunn's lips had turned entirely blue. He lay like some discarded man inside intensive care. Isaac had to use all his influence to enter Walter's tiny closet.

  "I saw the Wolf Man," Walter said, puffing out his blue lips.

  "Why'd you go tracking him on your own?"

  "Because you wouldn't believe that he hibernates in Central Park."

  "Bears hibernate," Isaac said. "Not wolves."

  "Our man hibernates whenever he's in the mood."

  "And he gets up periodically to eat some human flesh . . . Walter, we combed Central Park. We searched every cave. We didn't find his fucking nest."

  "But I caught him coming out of the Park."

  "How can you tell it was the Bangor Wolf?"

  "The whiskers, Isaac, and the eyes."

  "Was he wearing clothes?"

  "A dirty pea coat, dark pants, shoes without socks."

  "No socks? Are you sure?"

  "His pants were rolled up. He didn't have shoelaces. He didn't have socks. He rushed past me. I tried to follow him and . . ."

  Walter shut his eyes and never opened them again. He was the first fatality in the war against the Wolf Man.

  Isaac returned to Central Park with a complement of detectives and trained dogs. The dogs devoured rabbits in the north woods. The detectives tore through every patch of ground. Isaac called off the search. He sat in his office at One Police Plaza like some melancholiac. He wouldn't take calls from Becky Karp. He set up his miniature chessboard and replayed the opening gambits of Bobby Fisher, the former world champion who was hibernating in his own north woods.

  He allowed only one visitor, Harvey Montaigne, who'd walked out of his half-way house in a pair of slippers and a flannel robe. "Mr. Isaac, I'm sorry I was so glib. I want to help."

  "It's too late."

  "I want to help."

  Harvey Montaigne wore his flannel robe in Isaac's limousine. People mistook him for a medium Isaac had hired. They forgot he was the former Wolf Man. Isaac visited the catacomb of old abandoned subway stations with Harvey Montaigne. They heard the beat of water over their heads. They discovered more and more stations until Isaac realized there was a whole New York he knew nothing about. He existed at the scratchy surface of things. The interior had never been his.

  Harvey caught a cold. Isaac fed him Bufferin and brought him home to the half-way house. He had his aides look for any other reference to the Bangor Wolf. There were none. He faxed all the police chiefs of

  Maine. No one could recall any previous sightings of the Bangor Wolf.

  ▼▼▼

  The moon turned a marble color and was eaten up in the sky. Isaac slept in his office. Hairs grew on his face. He was one more hibernating man. He got a call from Central Park. The Wolf Man had been spotted. Isaac didn't even get out of his chair. Fifty patrol cars converged upon the Park. Sharpshooters were arriving from Tactical Services. The dogs were taken out of the kennels at the Police Academy. And Isaac sat.

  He looked at his own hairy face and left One Police Plaza. He entered the catacombs through a door near the tracks of Becky's own subway station at City Hall. Isaac walked a half mile under the ground and arrived at the Cherry Street station of the old Kings County line. He had his pocket flashlight and a small, collapsible shovel with a very sharp blade. My man likes a direct north to south line, with only a little bit of a bias, Isaac muttered to himself. He knew Bangor would escape the sharpshooters and the dogs.

  Isaac whistled to himself and waited.

  He heard the trudge of feet against the tracks.

  He put out the light and opened the shovel's neck. Ah, he said. Should have brought my baseball bat. But the shovel had been more convenient.

  He saw the blueness of the eyes, caught the heavy breathing. He couldn't tell if the Wolf Man had been wounded or not. Isaac would have to depend on surprise. His heart was pounding.

  I'll have to wait until I can feel his whiskers.

  He held the shovel in that high, classic stance of Joe DiMaggio and walloped the Wolf Man over the head.

  The Wolf Man dropped without a groan. Isaac shoved the light in his eyes. The Wolf Man was all whiskers. He looked shorter than Isaac. He slept like a little boy without his socks. His teeth weren't yellow. He had long fingernails, but he didn't have claws.

  ▼▼▼

  It was Isaac who carried him out of the catacombs, who brought him to the Elizabeth Street police station, read him his rights while the Wolf Man was still groggy. And that was Isaac's last moment of peace. There were reporters all over the place. Becky Karp arrived in her chauf- feured limousine. She had a press conference on the steps of the precinct. "Ain't he the best?" she said, pointing to Isaac, who stood outside the cage where the Wolf Man sat, hair up to his eyes.

  "You can't become a wolf man in the city of New York without getting zapped by Isaac Sidel."

  And Isaac was feeling more and more guilty. Perhaps he shouldn't have used a shovel. But if there had been detectives around from the tactical unit, they would have shot out the Wolf Man's teeth. No one, not even a wolf man, should have been subjected to this: sitting in a cage like a circus freak, while there was a fury of faces all around him.

  Her Honor entered the precinct. She was still angry at Isaac, because he'd stopped sleeping with her. Isaac was in love with Margaret Tolstoy, an undercover girl for the FBI and the KGB.

  "Is that him?" Becky said, growling into the cage. The Wolf Man blinked.

  "Becky," Isaac said, "leave the guy alone."

  "Guy? That's a fucking monster, not a guy."

  "Yeah, but if you tamper with him, some judge will put him back in the street."

  "Over my dead body . . . Isaac, have dinner with me."

  "Can't," Isaac said.

  "Ah, it's that Roumanian slut, Madame Tolstoya. She's been jerking you off, Isaac. She has a hundred boyfriends."

  "Becky, do you have to discuss my personal life in public?"

  "You have no personal life. You're my police commissioner."

  And she disappeared from Elizabeth Street.

  Isaac took the Wolf
Man out of the cage and brought him into the interrogation room. It was the last chance Isaac would have to talk with the Wolf Man, who had no Social Security card or driver's license in his pockets, no identity papers. The blue eyes seemed to converge somewhere beyond Isaac's narrow ken. "I can help you," Isaac said.

  The Wolf Man would belong to the courts once he was arraigned. "I can help you."

  The Wolf Man wouldn't take cigarettes or a sandwich from Isaac. "If the D.A. starts getting rough, call me . . . day or night," Isaac said, shoving his card into the Wolf Man's shirt pocket.

  ▼▼▼

  The Wolf Man did become a child of the courts. He sat in his own ward at Bellevue. No one could discover his name. He didn't seem to have a past outside his little history of chewing on people. Then a woman came forth and identified the Wolf Man as her son, Monroe Tapler, who'd grown up as an incorrigible in Jersey City and had moved to Manhattan at the age of twenty-two and lived in the streets. Papers began to appear in psychological journals on the subject of Monroe Tapler as sociopath "in our mean, modern season."

  Isaac wrote to the editor of one such journal.

  Dear Sir,

  In regard to the article, "Pathology of the Lycanthrope," in your November number, I would like to say that your author is skating on very thin ice. Monroe Tapler may have bitten people at nine or ten, but that would not necessarily make him a wolf man. I'm afraid your author should have moved from psychology to myth. The Wolf Man is closer to our collective unconscious than he is to any sociopathic chart.

  Sincerely, Isaac Sidel

  The letter started a controversy. But Isaac was sick of the whole thing. His whiskers grew longer and longer. He began to look like the Wolf Man. And one night, while he was in his tiny apartment on the Lower East Side, he had a visit from Margaret Tolstoy, she who slept with Mafia chieftains all across America while she busted up gangs for the FBI. She was over fifty, Isaac's age. But he couldn't take his eyes off her. She was wearing a blond wig in her latest avatar. Her cheeks were flushed. Her eyes looked like huge green marbles. She removed a pair of scissors from her handbag without saying a word and chopped off Isaac's beard.