The Last Werewolf (19 page)

“Doesn’t make sense,” I said. “There have been plenty of bites down the years. We’re like cats and dogs.”

“Yes, Clouseau, but what happened a couple of hundred years ago?
Werewolves stopped multiplying. Victims stopped surviving the bite. A virus, WOCOP says. Who knows? But whatever it is when it’s passed to a vampire it confers, to however small a degree, resistance to sunlight.” He reached for the Marlboro. I let him light one up. In the time since leaving the house late afternoon had become dusk. The forest around us was suddenly wealthy with darkness. The white gravel of the winding drive would be the last light to go. “The vampires are kicking themselves because it took them so long to spot it,” Cloquet continued. “Now that they have spotted it”—the big lips widened to free the equine grin—“
O Fortuna!
—there’s only one werewolf left.” He laughed, huskily, softly blasted me with the louche breath, forgot not to put weight on his bottom, yelped, curled back onto his side. I rather wished I’d stabbed him somewhere less awkward.

“Look,” I said, “I don’t dig vampires but they’re not stupid. It can’t possibly have taken them this long to work this out.”

He was searching his pockets—for the hip flask it turned out. I helped him unscrew the top. After a glug and a wince he said: “But of course it can. For one thing the cases are so far apart. One in 1786, one in 1860, one in 1952. In the 1952 incident the vampire never told anyone he’d been bitten. He was embarrassed. A minion found it in his journal last year and reported it. Plus you’re overstating the case for werewolf-vampire contact. The reality is that when you meet each other you just turn and go in opposite directions, no? Actual conflict rarely occurs.” He shook his head. “It’s too funny. They’re
livid.
”

I sat back on my heels.
Jesus Christ, Jake, listen. There’s
—presumably—
a vampire plot to get you. Werewolf failure to infect is the result of a virus which when passed via a bite to a vampire confers on him a resistance to sunlight
. The impulse to laugh started then immediately died. I closed my eyes. The little combat flurry had left me with a postadrenaline heaviness, worsened now by the predictability of the picture revealed by joining the dots. “Aging Jacqueline’s selling me to the boochies,” I said. “For immortality.”

“The immortal cunt.
Le con immortel.
”

“So you kill me and there’s nothing for her to sell. Dear God help us. Then what? You send her flowers and a vat of Botox and she takes you back?”

He wrinkled his nose, as if conceding a minor snag. Then smiled. He had a sort of likeable stubborn idiocy.

“Quinn’s book,” I said. “Does she have it?”

“Ah, the Men Who Became Wolves. The place where it all began! Not a very wholesome story from what I hear. Wild dogs and dead bodies. Fucking disgusting.”

My scalp went hot. I pressed the javelin’s tip against the tender meat of his throat.

“Okay, okay, fuck. Ow—”

“Does she have the book or not?”

“She has it. The stone too.”

“The stone? The original stone?”

“You can’t get to it. It’s in a vault underground. You have no clue. It’s like Fort Knox under there.”

“How did she get it?”

“How does she get anything? You know what you’re dealing with. She has the uncanniness. You know Crowley? Do what thou wilt? She has the … Things
align
for her. She bought a lot of the looted shit that came out of Iraq in the war. She’s got contacts in the military, Blackwater, the CIA, the U.S. State Department. I told you: Her cunt is a giant intelligence. What are you going to do now?”

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.

“N
OW
WHAT
?” C
LOQUET 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 con
tempt
. 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 watching 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.