The Last Werewolf

Conradian truth: The first horror is there’s horror. The second is you accommodate it. And there in the espresso- dark eyes was the accommodation, the submission to experience she’d made in the silence of her heart, astonished at herself, once she’d decided to accept what she was, once she’d decided to kill others instead of herself. She suffered fiery Hunger and did vile deeds now, had begun teaching herself enlarging self-forgiveness. You do what you do because it’s that or death. She’d had a girlhood of secrets and now here was the Big Secret to justify them. She was—

Steady, Marlowe. For God’s sake, think! Practicalities. Could they know about her? How could they not know about her? Harley had known, I felt certain of it, and if Harley then why not the rest of the organisation?

No way of telling. Therefore assume they don’t. And from this moment do everything you can to make sure they never, ever find out.

Something else was going on. (Whatever is happening, as the late Susan Sontag noted, something else is always going on. It’s literature’s job to honour it. No wonder no one reads.) The something else going on here was my detached admission that the scales had tipped back—crashed back, with laughable immediacy—in favour of life. Detached admission—or deflated? Resignation to death at least simplified the living you had left. Now what? Complexity? Rigmarole? Bothering again? And something else was going on. (The number of these something elses is infinite, the hell literature faces every day. It’s a wonder anyone writes.) Underneath the first admission was a sullen second: One whiff of her had done what Harley’s torture and death could not. That was my measure, a giant standing stone of disappointment if I wanted to look at it. But there came again the sensational stink of her—dear God—and a new yokel leap of dick-blood. Let the factions of conscience quibble: I had work to do.

And the life without love?

My dead like a trade union in a silent phalanx with Arabella, shop steward, at their head.

The Heathrow Express pulled away. All but a handful of disembarked passengers had gone through the exits and were hurrying to the escalators. A sly peep showed me she was still there, apparently brushing at a speck of smut on her skirt, in fact with ravished consciousness still searching for the source of the scent that had felled her. My scent. Me. She had recovered herself, though her face still wore its sheen of sweat. She’d been blind-sided, yes, but now curiosity was at work, smart female lights in the liquid dark eyes. She reached up and with her little finger raked back a strand of hair that had stuck to her damp forehead. Very slightly raised her chin. She was breathing heavily, a lovely insinuation of her breasts against the blouse. I know you’re here, somewhere.

I waited until she moved through her nearest exit, left as much of a delay as I dared, then followed her.

35

THE CHALLENGE, TRAILING her down the aerated tunnels and moving walkways into the bright lights and echoing announcements of departures, was to keep my distance. Just once I got too near and she stopped, turned and took a few steps in my direction. I had to duck into a doorway to break the connection—and do it with sufficient casualness to keep the WOCOP tail in the dark.

There was a vampire, it turned out, a tall black male with greying hair and a gold hoop earring looking down from the check-in hall’s balcony. A further headache: I must keep close enough to my girl to blanket her scent without turning her head or treading on her heels. She’d taken off the fawn raincoat and slung it over her arm, revealing a trim figure and deportment projective of not natural but acquired confidence. I could not shuck the idea of her as the good daughter of immigrant U.S. parents, mindful of the toil and suffering borne to make her what she was, their bona fide American Girl, fluent in brand names and armed with education, health insurance, political opinions, orthodontic work, earning power—though this and all other inaugural projections were polluted by the vampire’s presence like hands pressing down on my skull from above.

She stopped under one of the information screens. I stopped, ostensibly to make a call on my mobile. Logistical problems were stacking up: In a moment she’d find her check-in desk, get her boarding pass and go through security into the sprawling purgatory of the departures lounge. How would I follow her? Obviously, I’d buy a ticket to wherever she was going. But unless her desk handled one flight only, how would I know where she was going? I hadn’t been close enough to read the label on her case. And what if she used self check-in?

Nothing else for it: I had to approach her now.

As soon as I moved towards her she moved away—but only as far as the queue for the Travelex window. She was fourth in line.

“Don’t turn around,” I said, quietly. I still had the mobile to my ear. In the twenty paces it had taken me to reach her I’d sensed her sensing my approach, forcing herself to stay calm, willing herself not to turn around. Heat enveloped her in a rippling aura. Her scent was a ring through my bull’s nose. She was trembling. You had to be close to see it, in the high heels, in the wrists, in the hair. At the very last I pulled back from grabbing her hips and pressing my groin to her ass and filling my hands with her breasts and burying my nose in her nape.

“I know what you are and you know what I am. Do you have a cell phone?”

“Yes.”

“Give me the number.”

American, the accent confirmed as she recited it without hesitation. I keyed in the number but didn’t store or dial. “I’m being watched,” I said. “And for all I know you are too, so change some currency here then go to the Starbucks directly opposite and wait for me to call. Understood?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t be afraid.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re feeling this, right?”

“Yes.”

A great darkness of relief went through me. I nearly fainted. She moved to the exchange counter and opened her purse.

36

GOD ONLY KNEW if the mobile was safe. Other than to replay Harley’s cut-off message I hadn’t used it, but since it had passed through the hands of Jacqueline Delon I had to assume it was compromised. I copied the number onto the back of my hand and deleted it from the Nokia’s screen. Travelex furnished me with ten one-pound coins and I stepped across to a pay phone.

She said: “Hello?”

“I can see you. Are you within earshot of those two guys with the backpacks?”

“No.”

“Okay, good. But don’t look too obviously in this direction.”

“You were on the platform.”

“Yes, sorry about that.”

“I felt it. This is … Who’s watching you?”

“Long story. Not here. Where are you flying?”

“New York.”

“That’s home?”

“Yes.”

“What time’s your flight?”

“Eleven-thirty.” She risked a direct look. Our first transparent exchange. It silenced us for a moment, since it confirmed we’d entered the realm of inevitability. “I can miss it,” she said.

You’re feeling this, right? Yes. Not just the foregone sexual conclusion but the