The Last Werewolf (16 page)

R
EADER
, I
ATE HIM
.

About three hours after resolving I wouldn’t.

Throughout the dull solo feast the refrain from Tennyson’s “Mariana” repeated in the hot spaces of my gorging head:

I would that I were
—Yet here was the flesh that took my teeth in helpless succulence and the warm sour fountain of blood, the puncture moment that never gets old but stops being enough. And afterwards the swollen headache of my unsurprised self, the old exhausted cognisance of all the times I’ve vowed it was the last time and all the times it wasn’t.

Don’t misunderstand me: There was no guilt. Only the cavity where guilt used to be. This and the weight of my own still-hereness slumped on me like a corpse. For a long while I lay in the recovery position, eyes closed. Total self-disgust is a kind of peace.

At dawn Jacqueline returned, accompanied by the baby-faced skinhead. Both wore rubber boots over surgical scrubs. From the doorway they unrolled a length of plastic to form a walkway up to the cage. A hosepipe was unwound from a corner of the hold. I understood: a murder scene in the age of CSI. Leftovers were in the crate. The kid’s half-eaten carcase in a gelid blood soup. Wolf remnants wriggled under my human skin like rats in a sack. My fingernails, as always after the withdrawal of their wolf counterparts, hurt like hell.

“It’s warm water,” Jacqueline said. “Do you mind? I’ll help as best I can, with your permission.”

I sat (naked, obviously) in profile to my captors at the side of the cage with my back to the bars, knees drawn up, face smeared and sated.
I was full-bellied, heavy in the human-again limbs. The wolf’s ghost dimensions played with me when I moved, the snout’s weight and the long hybrid feet, the haunches still struggling to unload their late mass. The goon had his gun levelled at my belly, but at his mistress’s gesture lowered it.

“Here,” Jacqueline said, handing me a squeezy bottle. “It’s just a sterilising detergent. Would you prefer it if he holds the hose?”

“Decorum and I don’t keep company,” I said, my throat howl-sore. “Besides, the role of prison guard suits you. Go ahead.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Really I am. I promise this is the very last discomfort you’ll suffer as my guest. Please forgive me.”

To repeat: Total self-disgust is a kind of peace—because further ignominy can add nothing to it. Standing there washing myself in front of her I made an intellectual concession to the debasement, but it was only moments before I was enjoying the soft soap and perfectly adjusted heat of the water. Put the right music behind this, I thought, and I could be advertising shower gel.

I dried off with a white towel that might have been manufactured in heaven. The flesh can’t help it. The flesh merely reports. When I’d finished I was tired and roseate and curiously pleased with the ongoing failure of myself.

“The ammunition is pure silver,” Jacqueline said. “I tell you this not as a threat but only so that you know you’ll die if you decide to attack me the minute I open the door. I wouldn’t blame you. You must be furious with me. But there’s a helicopter waiting which will have us at my home in thirty minutes. Once there, I promise you nothing but luxury, rest and conversation. If you prefer, I can make arrangements for you to be taken to any destination you choose, and I’ll never bother you again. But I so much hope you’ll agree to hear what I have to say. Is it safe for me to open the door?”

The heroic thing would have been to refuse. Take her at her word and get the chopper to drop me at the nearest airport.
Fuck
conversation. But I was exhausted. The appeal of putting myself in someone else’s hands bordered the sensuous.

“I assume you keep a full bar at home?”

“Three full bars.”

“Then it’s safe to open the door.”

When we stood facing each other on the plastic she offered me her hand. I was tempted to take it and bite off a finger (leftover wolf aplenty for that) but settled for a gentle squeeze. “Now we can be relaxed,” she said. “I’m so pleased to meet you.”

I followed her to the doorway. The gargoyle with the gun stayed put. In the short corridor facing us was a little fold-out table, on it, my clothes (including the woollen hat Harley had given me) washed, dried, pressed. She opened a door on her left, which revealed a small locker. I saw a shower unit, a plastic chair, a dress the colour of wheat on a hanger. “I just need to get out of these,” she said, indicating the scrubs. I was checking the overcoat’s inside pocket for the journal. It was there, along with passports and wallet. I didn’t waste time wondering if she’d read it. “And?” I asked.

“Fascinating,” she said. “But let’s discuss it over a drink.”

J
ACQUELINE
D
ELON’S VILLA
sits a few miles south of Biarritz on a wooded hill a little west of the tiny town of Arbonne. Modern, white, glass, oak and steel, surrounded by eight private acres. The trappings you’d expect: helipad, infinity pool, tennis court, gym, CCTV, a combo-staff of domestics and security personnel. The rooms are big, full of light, ornamented with artefacts reflecting her obsession with the occult. From the upper floors (there are three, plus roof terrace) you can look down over the tops of the evergreens to the pale beach, the surf line, the ocean. In the basement there’s a library to rival Harley’s. All the tech hardware is up to the minute. There are indeed three bars—lounge, pool, master bedroom suite—and it was to the first of these Mme Delon and I retired alone on our arrival.

I lit the first deeply needed cigarette since transformation (a softpack of Camels on the counter; she’d done her homework) while my hostess fixed drinks. Tanqueray and tonic for me (too much sunlight in the room for whisky), a Tom Collins for herself. Nicotine and alcohol embraced in my system like long-parted siblings, grateful to me for reuniting them.

“It’s ages since I’ve made drinks,” she said. “There’s always someone else. But I thought it best for it to be just the two of us.” She’d taken a seat—the bar had six high swivel chairs of white leather—next to mine, and was poking at her cocktail’s ice cubes with her index fingernail. The wall to my left was glass, and looked out onto a patio of terra-cotta tiles and a cactus garden. Soil red as chilli powder. It was only mid-March but the sky was clear and the air still. You could feel the blinding brilliance summers would have here. Small birds whirred to and from a feeder bracketed to one white wall.

“So,” she said, “I must explain myself. What it comes to, Jacob, is …” She looked down, smiled, had a brief inner dialogue with herself, let her shoulders sag, then slid from her stool and stood in front of me. “Come
with me,” she said, offering me her hand. She might have been a nine-year-old with a tree house to show off. “Come.”

I took her hand (retained the Camel, the G&T), got to my feet and followed her.

Through two large rooms (one with a central circular designer fire pit and a large standing stone but little else) down a corridor to a steel door with keypad entry. Beyond, varnished oak stairs led down to the formidable library. Air-con and the feel of soundproof walls. Other heavy doors, also keypadded, led off. Jacqueline paused at one of them, looked me in the eye for a moment, then punched the access code and opened the door.

The room it revealed was small and windowless. A filing cabinet, a desk, a computer—and the wall above it covered in press clippings. All of them related one way or another to me.
BODY OF MISSING GIRL FOUND. CORAL INDUSTRIES ESTABLISHES SUB-SAHARAN AIDS CHARITY. VECTOR IN AGGRESSIVE BUY-OUT. MUTILATED BODY DISCOVERED. FAMILY MASSACRED IN MANSON-STYLE ATTACK. MYSTERY DONOR FUNDS PIONEERING CANCER RESEARCH. WHO RUNS LAERSTERNER INTERNATIONAL? “WEREWOLF” EYEWITNESS IS CLASS-A DRUG-USER. UNNAMED DONOR INJECTS NEW LIFE INTO VACCINE DISTRIBUTION. “SILVER BULLETS” FOUND AFTER NIGHT OF MYSTERY GUNSHOTS. VECTOR NOW TO TRADE AS HERNE. FULL-MOON MURDERS ARE COINCIDENCE, POLICE MAINTAIN
.

“Press Enter,” Jacqueline said.

The animal remnants don’t like small spaces. I forced myself past it and sat down at the desk. Hit the key as instructed. Instantly footage began to run. Me coming out of International Arrivals in Tokyo. Caption: JM Tokyo, 07/02/06. Me leaving the Algonquin. Me on the beach at Galveston. Me going into Harley’s Earl’s Court house. Me strolling down the Rue de Rivoli. Me in a Cairo café. All shot in the last three years. The last sequence: me dressed as a woman, getting out of a taxi and entering the Leyland Hotel.

“I take it I’m supposed to be surprised?” I said.

“Not at all,” she said. “Just convinced of my dedication.”

There was nothing to put my cigarette out in, so I downed the Tanqueray and dropped the butt in the glass. “Well, you’ve got the transformation
footage now. Essential for a name-and-shame operation. The kill too, no doubt. Congratulations. Prepare yourself for the weight of public indifference.”

“Please don’t insult me. You know that’s not what this is.”

“Then what is this?”

“A chance for sanctuary.”

“What?”

“I want you to stay alive. I’m offering you protection, indefinitely.
Serious
protection,” she added, seeing the dismissal forming in my face. “Not that—not what you’re used to. I don’t think you have any understanding of what a subtraction from the world your death would represent. You’re something magnificent, Jake. There’s such little magnificence left.”

“Thank you very much. I think I’ll be going now.”

“Listen to me, please.”

“There’s nothing to discuss.”

“You must give me a chance to—”

“Don’t be fucking absurd.”

She fell silent. Little-girlishly dropped her head, picked at a hangnail. A performance of compressed sullenness. I remembered the small turgid breasts and inviting abdomen. Blood in my cock twitched. Of course it did. The post-Curse horn. Again: The flesh can’t help it. Laughter, desire, boredom and exhaustion did what they do as a team, cornered me into a unique paralysis. My hands in my lap like two dead crabs.
Just stay
, Harley had said.

Whatever else was wrong with Jacqueline Delon her sexual instincts were fine. She took the two steps necessary to bring herself within my reach. For such moments to work, knowing when not to speak is crucial. In silence she very carefully placed her legs either side of my knee but remained standing. Thus just above my left dead crab hand was the hot skirt-space. Into which the now livening hand slowly ascended (will always ascend, must ascend, though the gods have gone and the planet’s dying and the human race has ironied itself into terminal indifference and it wasn’t painless and it wasn’t quick) through the zones of deepening heat to the lace-enflowered tender sly swelling of her cunt.

S
HE HAD THE
complete repertoire, the full gallery of sexual personæ, and though boosted by cocaine we flirted with several of them, it was only when I lay on top of her and she stared dead-eyed at me while I went into her that we managed something like alignment. Tender and Curse-hungover I remained in danger of segueing into hysterical laughter or a crying jag. Even when I came (she gave me the raised eyebrows and half smile of sinisterly maternal triumph) it was with sad fracture, a frail sense of the poor old world’s injuries and might-have-beens and my own wretched list of losses. Closely followed by a feeling of deep fraud: Beyond the mawkish moment I remained as sick of the stinking planet as I was of my threadbare little self.

Old habits of decency dying hard, however, I got her off, orally, without the remotest illusion she cared very much, though she held my head and bruised my lips with her pubis and made a masculine noise of apparent satisfaction when she came.

“I’m going to have some food sent up,” she said. “You don’t want anything, I know.” We were in the master bedroom suite on the villa’s sunlit top floor, a large rectangular deep-carpeted Chanel-scented space, again with one wall entirely glass. Décor was ivory, with here and there a big statement: a cowhide chaise longue; a chandelier of red glass; an original Miro. It was still only early afternoon, though already the
Hecate
seemed weeks ago. Less than forty-eight hours had passed since I’d held Harley’s severed head in my hands. My whole life’s been like this, too much experience crammed into too little time. Two hundred? You feel two thousand.

“You know?” I said.

“You’re still full. It’ll take a week at least before you’re hungry. It’s why you smoke and drink so much. The boredom of the mouth. I was watching, by the way. It seems dishonourable not to tell you now.”

Watching my feast in the hold, she meant. Dishonourable now that we were going to be friends.

“We’re not going to be friends,” I said.

“Aren’t we? I assume you’d like another drink, at least?”

She rang for service. Pâté de foie gras, fresh fruit, yogurt, a selection of cured meats and cheeses, brought by a dark-skinned gold-earringed boy of perhaps thirteen dressed in crisp white pyjamas. In smiling silence he set the platter down on a low Japanese inlaid table along the wall of glass. In smiling silence he exited. Jacqueline, in a pearl-coloured silk robe (cover up; give the gentleman’s postcoital imagination fresh incentive), fixed drinks at the minimalist wet-bar. I lit a Camel.

“Tell me something,” she said. “Why did you give up the search for Quinn’s journal?”

Oh God.

“What?”

“You heard me. Quinn’s journal. Why did you give up?”

My palms needled. Forty years wasted. When I started searching for the wretched book Victoria was on the British throne and Tchaikovsky was debuting his 1812 Overture in Moscow. When I stopped George V reigned and
The Waste Land
was Europe’s massive tumour of enlightenment.

“Who wouldn’t have given up?” I said. “One gets tired of not finding what one’s looking for.”

“But you believed. Otherwise why bother?”