The Last Werewolf

couldn’t shuck the conviction they were onto him. An hour after Madeline’s departure (I spent the bulk of breakfast nursing my keening plums on the bed while she ate—with meticulous greed, since she allows herself only one fry-up a month) I’d arrived at the conclusion that Ellis’s visit was simply to reinforce the story of how they’d found me. The man’s mental style—oblique, tangential, possibly stoned—made him hard to read but there was surely something hokey about the way he’d volunteered that We fluked it, you know, finding you. The only motive that made sense was WOCOP’s desire to preserve the illusion that Harley’s cover was intact. Which meant it wasn’t.

I passed the afternoon supine with a cold flannel pressed to my forehead, tracking my gonads’ slow return to quiescence, CNN on the plasma screen for the lulling white noise of the news. I’m immune to news, the news, breaking news, rolling news, news flashes. Live long enough and nothing is news. “The News” is “the new things.” That’s fine, until a hundred years go by and you realise there are no new things, only deep structures and cycles that repeat themselves through different period details. I’m with Yeats and his gyres. Even The News knows there’s no real news, and goes to ever greater lengths to impart urgent novelty to its content. Have Your Say, that’s the latest inanity, newscasters reading out viewer emails: “And Steve in Birkenhead writes: ‘Our immigration laws are the laughing stock of the world. This is the Feed the World mentality gone mad …’ ” I can think back to a time when something like this would have annoyed or at least amused me, that the democracy Westerners truly got excited about was the one that made every blogging berk a critic and every frothing fascist a political pundit. But now I feel nothing, just quiet separation. In fact the news already feels postapocalyptically redundant to me, as if (silent dunes outside, insects the size of cars) I’m sitting in one of the billions of empty homes watching video footage of all the stuff that used to matter, wondering how anyone ever thought it did.

“I had a visitor,” I told Harley from the Zetter’s bar, when, after eight in the evening, I got through to him at last. “Ellis was here this morning.”

“I heard,” he said. “I’m not surprised. Hunt consensus is you need your nose rubbed in it.”

“That’s not what worries me. It played as an effort to deliver the official ‘how we found you’ story. Which means that’s not how they found me.”

“Jake, no. You’re being paranoid. I spoke to the French chap myself.”

“What?”

“The twit with the Magnum. Cloquet. They brought him in for questioning. I was there during the interrogation. He was following you. Had been following you for a week in Paris.”

I sipped my Scotch. The bar was low-lit, dark tones and soft furnishings, a carefully designed atmosphere of deserved indulgence. The long white calves of a moody brunette sitting with one leg crossed over the other on a high stool opposite me offered a momentary distraction. She was doodling in her cocktail with a straw. In the film version I’d go over and open with a gambit of jaded brilliance. Only in films is a woman alone at a bar actually a woman alone at a bar. The thought added itself to the mental racket I was sick of. Every Hollywood movie now is part of the index of Western exhaustion. I had a vision of my death like a lone menhir in an empty landscape. You just walked towards it. Simple as that. The peace of wrapping your arms around cold stone. Peace at last.

“What for?” I asked.

I heard the shick of Harley’s malachite Zippo and his first intemperate drag. “That’s what we’re not clear on,” he said. “He claims he’s a free agent with a grudge against werewolves, but he’s been fornicating with Jacqueline Delon for the last year so it can’t be that simple. Trouble is he’s somewhat gaga. High as a kite when we picked him up. Farrell told me he’d enough coke on him to get a horse airborne. My guess is even cleaned up he’s borderline psychotic. In any case Madame Delon’s the last person to be ordering a hit on a werewolf. She loves you lot.” He caught himself. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. Bad choice of words.”

“Forget it,” I said. I sniffed my Scotch. It was supposed to be Oban but it didn’t taste right. “What about the WOCOP agent tracking him? Did you talk to him?”

“Broussard,” Harley said. “He’s back in France. I didn’t speak to him, but Farrell did. Story confirmed: He was keeping an eye on Cloquet, went out of his jurisdiction, realised Cloquet was tailing you, and rather sheepishly called us in. Jake, seriously, stop worrying. I’m fine. We’re fine. No one knows.”

I’d left my room to call Harley in case Ellis had planted a bug I’d been unable to find, though I’d spent two hours looking. Perhaps I was being paranoid. Either way I felt tired, suddenly, weighed down again by the saddlebags of ifs and thens, the swag of dead currency. There’s an inner stink comes up at times of all the meat and blood that’s passed down my gullet, the offal I’ve buried my snout in, the guts I’ve rummaged and gorged on. Harley’s crispness reminded me we weren’t seeing this the same way.

“Okay, listen,” he said, as if with clairvoyance. “We’ve got to get you sorted. It’s going to take me a week, maybe ten days to get a solid out in place. That’s lousy, I know, but in this climate everything’s got to be quadruple-checked. I’m thinking—”

“Harley, stop.”

“Jake, I’m not going to keep having this argument.”

“Funny, isn’t it, how now that it’s come to this we both always knew it would come to this?”

“Please don’t.”

One develops an instinct for letting silence do the heavy lifting. In the three, four, five seconds that passed without either of us speaking, the many ways the conversation could go came and went like time-lapse film of flowers blooming and dying. When it was over all the relevant information was in. Paradoxically, it renewed our licence to pretend.

“Fuck you, Jake,” Harley said. “This is how it’s going to work. I’m getting you an out anyway. If you’re still bent on this absurd suicidal melodrama when the time comes then you needn’t avail yourself of it. But it’ll be there. It’ll be there.”

Pity and irritation curdled, gave me an inkling of the energy I’d need to fight him. Well, let be. He needed this for himself. I was secondary. This is what I’ve reduced him to: a human whose raison d’etre is keeping a werewolf alive.

“Okay,” I said.

“I should bloody well think so.”

“Okay I said.”

“Well, for God’s sake. Why do you keep sniffing, by the way?”

“I ordered Oban. I think they’ve given me Laphroaig.”

“The crosses you bear, Jake. You ought to get an award.”

We discussed immediate logistics. Naturally the Zetter was being watched. WOCOP had tried to get an agent in but an international pharmaceutical sales conference had started today and the hotel was full, would be for the next forty-eight hours. The manager knew me and could be trusted to run light interference but staff would be susceptible to bribes. We had to assume my movements were marked.

“Which suits us,” Harley said.

“Because?”

“Because you’re getting out of the city tomorrow and surveillance is going with you. I can’t set up an out with the whole organisation watching London. I’m good, but I’m not God. I need their attention elsewhere.”

This is how it is: You come alert, wait, feel a piece fall into place, know the joy of aesthetic inevitability. I said: “Fine.”

“What, no tantrum?”

“There’s something I need to do. I’ll want peace and quiet. Do you care where I go?”

“What do you need to do?”

I don’t tell that part of the story. She’d looked into my eyes and said, It’s you. It’s you.

“Set the record straight,” I said. “Does Cornwall give you enough room to manoeuvre?”

“Cornwall’s what I was thinking.”

“We should change phones again.”

“No time. Have to trust to luck.”