The Last Werewolf

“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.

“I may be gone some time,” I said.

29

WHEN YOU NEED a plan and don’t have one a retarded giddy indifferent faith takes over. Improv comics know this, criminals, soldiers too. Self dissolves into the flow and will reassemble on the other side of the job—or not. Either way you’re doing it. Either way you’re in.

Moving low, I worked my way silently through the trees, back past where Cloquet and I had first left the drive and on to the very edge of the conifers. From here twenty feet of open ground separated me from the garages. Darkness ample to foil the naked eye but if one of the guards should chance to raise a pair of night-vision binoculars … I went across in an absurd tiptoeing sprint, got my back to the wall below the mezzanine’s overhang, caught my breath. An accommodating deus ex machina would have been to find one of the garage doors open, and inside the garage a second door to the villa’s basement. I did check. All three were locked. I wondered what Jacqueline drove, got a mental snapshot of her in a ’65 ivory Mercedes convertible, red leather interior matching her lipstick and nails.

A pleasing image, but not helpful. I hunted for something to throw. You throw something and according to screen fictions the noise takes at least one guard out of position to investigate. There was nothing to throw. What had I expected? Loose plant pots? Rocks? Empties? Some goddamned thing. Welcome to the downside of dissolving into the flow.

In the end I threw Cloquet’s binoculars. Up across the mezzanine onto the steps on the eastern side of the terrace, where they landed with a (surely?) intriguing clatter. A guard or better still guards would come to check it out, leaving the stairs on the western side free for my stealthy ascent.

“Hear that?”

“Heard it. Call it in.”

I was already on my speedy-tiptoe way (something like the goosestep touchdown celebrations of American footballers) to the western stairs.

Clear. I passed the mezzanine and since there was no reason not to hurried on up the next flight to the level of olive and thyme just below the cactus garden and the villa itself. There, hunkered in a well of shadow between balustrade and trees, I halted to take stock. One guard had indeed descended to the mezzanine, automatic rifle readied, and was cautiously poking about. The roof guard was scanning with (night-vision!) binoculars, but looking in entirely the wrong direction. The second ground-floor guard was less than ten feet away, just above me.

“It’s a pair of fucking binoculars,” the investigating guard said. “Did you call it in?”

“Yes, I called it in.”

“I think someone’s in the woods,” the roof guard called down. “Definite movement in the woods. Nine o’clock.”

Movement in the woods? Was it possible Cloquet had got free?

“Who’s with the boss?”

“Marcel.”

“What can you see?”

“Movement.”

“What kind of fucking movement?”

The guard nearest me was a coward, God bless him. He should have done an immediate sweep of the western side. Instead he went to the top of the eastern stairs and called down to his mate. “Get back up here.”

“Movement in more than one place.”

“What is it?”

This was my chance. Not one of them was looking my way. I crawled out from my hiding place and leaped swiftly—balletically in fact, albeit with neck-tendons straining—up the last set of stone stairs.

At precisely the moment I reached the top a door in the wall of glass opened and the guinea pig–faced goon from the ship—Marcel, evidently—stepped out directly opposite me.

30

NATURALLY WE LOOKED at each other. Naturally the single second that passed was more than enough time to enjoy a purified intimacy, to note each other’s details and feel the exact weight of each other’s history. Naturally our essences, peremptorily denuded, exchanged a stunned glance.

Then I shot him in the face.

It was a near thing. A near thing that he didn’t shoot me first, I mean. His weapon’s muzzle was on its way up, certainly. I was aware of this empathically, as if it were my own arm raising it. In fact my own arm, as if it were the weight on the end of a piece of gym equipment worked by someone else, came up in a perfect 45-degree arc to level the Luger at his head, whereupon my hand—another part of a precision mechanism in someone else’s control—pulled the trigger.

The silenced bullet went into his forehead (a large messily applied bindi) and he collapsed with barely a sound. Jacqueline Delon, in a silk dress the colour of buttermilk, stood in the room a few feet behind him. She was wincing and her shoulders were hunched, as if she’d just heard someone drop a priceless