“Oh, that’s too long a story for now. Stay for dinner and I’ll tell you. Right now I absolutely must take a shower.” She got to her feet.
“This is the technique then, is it? Keep me dangling?”
“Well, if you’re not going to see reason.”
“What makes you think I give a fuck these days? I don’t give a fuck, actually, now that I think of it.”
“Then feel free to leave. If you genuinely have no interest then walk out the way we came in. You’ll find my driver at the gate. He’s instructed to take you wherever you care to go.”
“What
She turned, one hand in the pocket of her robe, and looked out through the wall of glass. “I told you,” she said. “I want you to live.”
I FINISHED DRESSING. Sunlight filled the perfumed room. I went to the huge window and, as she had, looked out. Dark conifers swept down to the pale line of the beach and the sea’s glitter. Blue cloudless sky, London’s recent snow a world away and a century ago, though this was still Europe, still early March. The sex had carried us into late afternoon. My shoulders ached. The junkie’s gobbled life was finding room, incredibly, the last seat in a packed arena, that solid deafening crowd of living dead. Somewhere among them an unripe foetus the size of a plum, my daughter, my son.
There were two explanations for what I was doing here. One was that Jacqueline Delon was sufficiently bored and unhinged for the keeping of a werewolf as an erotic pet to seem a rejuvenating novelty. The other was that she had a motive as yet unknown which required, in addition to the palaver of kidnapping me and accessorising herself to murder, temporary dissemblance. A woman of intriguingly acute ambiguity even without the bait of Quinn’s book.
Oh Jesus, Quinn’s book.
Thirty-seven-year-old Alexander Quinn went out to Mesopotamia for the third and final time in the spring of 1863. A double first in classics and ancient history from Oxford ought to have bricked him into academia for life, but by the time he left Kings in 1848 he was ravenous for the world beyond college walls. Brief failed stints in the British Museum, the Foreign Office (Burma) and the East India Company (Bombay) finagled by his Old Etonian dad confirmed the futility of sticking him behind a desk, and by 1854 he was on his first archaeological expedition to the Middle East under the Bacchic eye of Lord William Greaves, a known occultist roue, whom Quinn (no sluggard with the ladies himself) had met and befriended as a fellow whorer at Kate Hamilton’s. Greaves, a collector of religious antiquities and student of the Black Arts, had been thrilled to read of Botta’s discoveries at Nineveh and Khorsabad and was convinced ancient objects of talismanic power were there for the taking if one merely had the money, leisure and inclination to go and dig them up. Quinn, desperate to get his hands dusty and put his colloquial Arabic to use, pretended an interest in diabolism and offered his services as an interpreter-cum-right-hand-man. Which, over the next nine years, is exactly what he became. Along with site management and the cataloguing of finds Quinn greased the requisite bureaucrats, landowners, tribal elders and customs officers and still found time to score opium and girls for his lordship.
How do I know all this?
Because I spent time finding it out.
Why did I spend time finding it out?
Because before his death in 1863 Quinn claimed to have discovered the origin of werewolves.
It’s a ridiculous story, of course, but history’s full of ridiculous stories.
As so often with Great Finds, the man looking was looking for something else. Quinn had travelled to the town of Al Qusayr, whence rumour had reached the archaeologists of an underground temple fifteen miles away, literally fallen into by a retarded goatherd. Greaves, sceptical (the natives had learned quickly there was money to be made selling “information” to eccentric Europeans), had given Quinn the site as a pet project, and the protege had set off from the camp in Al Qusayr with camels, a guide and two servants, one of whom was to be despatched with the guide back to his lordship to summon hands and equipment should the rumours turn out to be fact.
Which, to everyone’s surprise, they did. The subsequent excavations at Gharab revealed not just a temple but an entire sunken village dating from the third millennium B.C. Lord Greaves cleaned up his act and led the dig, partly because the wealth of artefacts shocked him into a renaissance of genuine interest and partly out of respect for the good man he’d lost.
For Alexander Quinn never made it back to camp. He and his little scouting party were ambushed by bandits on their return journey. Quinn, the guide and one of the servants were killed. The other servant, John Fletcher, though left for dead, survived a knife wound to the shoulder, wandered delirious for a day in the desert, then was picked up by a merchant caravan. On the strength of the only word they understood, “Qusayr,” the merchants returned him to Greaves there two days later, where, having made it through fever and miraculously dodged infection, he told his lordship the whole story.
The night before the attack, Fletcher reported, the party, camped by the temple site, had been startled by the arrival of an astonishingly old man in rags, who’d come crawling on hands and knees out of the darkness. Skeletal and half blind, he spoke a dialect even the guide only partly understood, but they didn’t need the translator to see the old fellow was close to death. When Quinn made to send for help the old man stopped him. No point. Time to die. But listen. Keep story. No children so tell you. You write down. Keep story. He’d laughed when he said this, at himself it seemed. Fletcher had supposed him mad. Quinn, unwilling to simply let the man die, sent the servants back to the village for help, but by the time they returned the old man had expired. In those two hours he had told, Quinn claimed, an extraordinary story, a story which, if its provenance was genuine, had been passed down from the days before Etana and which would provide the oldest account of the origin of a near worldwide myth—of humans who became wolves.
Quinn, via the guide’s translation, had written the whole thing down in his journal.
That wasn’t all. But for the rags on his back the old man’s only possession, wrapped in the remains of a gunnysack, was a piece of stone, some ten inches by eight, clearly a fragment of a larger tablet, bearing hieroglyphs Quinn couldn’t decipher, but which, according to the old man, was proof of the truth of his tale.
Which isn’t much, is it? Hardly sufficient, you’d think, to form the basis of a neurotic obsession for the better part of forty years. Because
There’s a limit to what one can do. I interviewed John Fletcher, Lord Greaves, all the surviving members of the 1863 expedition. I travelled with an interpreter to Al Qusayr and on to the excavated temple at Gharab. I sought out bandit chiefs and offered rewards for information. I retained half a dozen dealers in antiquities and rare books to keep an eye on the market, despite the laughably overwhelming likelihood that Quinn’s diary had simply been deemed worthless and chucked away to be long since swallowed by the desert sand. It all took time, money, mental illness. I knew it was a ludicrous fixation. (One knows one’s madnesses, by and large. By and large the knowledge is vacuous. The notion of naming the beast to conquer it is the idiot optimism of psychotherapy.) When the
Of course I’d
