The Last Werewolf

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.

28

“NOW WHAT?” CLOQUET 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 eclairs 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 contempt. 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.