The Last Werewolf

IT WAS A long night after Madeline fell asleep around three, leaving me alone in the inaptly named small hours, when so many big things happen in the heart. I lay for a while on the bathroom floor in the dark. I smoked. I went out onto the suite’s roof terrace, where the undisturbed fall was deep (and crisp, and even) and looked across the roofs of Clerkenwell. Snow makes cities innocent again, reveals the frailty of the human gesture against the void. I thought of waking Maddy to share the scene’s queer quiet beauty—and felt the impulse immediately sucked into the furnace of absurdity, where all such impulses of mine must go, accompanied by a feeling of dead hilarity. After a while the only thing you can do with loneliness is laugh at it. I drank the minibar’s spirits, one by one, with reverence for their different personalities. I watched television.

I don’t tell that part of the story.

Haven’t told. Yet.

Gritters worked with jovial British inadequacy through the darkness, but by the time the Zetter’s kitchen started up snow was falling heavily again. Londoners would wake, look out, be grateful: not business as usual. Thank God. Anything, anything but business as usual. Daybreak was the slow development of a daguerreotype. Madeline woke—she does this with startling high-energy abruptness—and made it obvious by twitching her ankles that she was waiting for the sexual all-clear. “Why don’t you jump in the shower,” I said, “and I’ll order us some breakfast.” Which was what I assumed had arrived when, fifteen minutes later (the mere preamble or tune-up to Maddy’s ablutions barely begun) there was a knock on the door.

“Hey,” Ellis said with a smile when I opened it. “Not room service.”

He knew there was only a moment before I’d slam the door or jump at him, so immediately put his hands up and said: “Unarmed. Just here to talk.” Soft voice, Californian accent. Three years ago on a freezing night in the Dolomites he and Grainer had hunted and almost killed me. He looked the same: waist-length white hair centre- parted over a candlewax face with a big concave drop from cheekbones to jaw. For a second you thought albino— but the eyes stopped you: lapis lazuli, full of weird self-certainty. At an average height he would’ve been a grotesquely striking man. At six-four he entered the margins of science fiction. You couldn’t shake the feeling he’d started life as a willowy San Franciscan hippy girl then had his genes diabolically fiddled with. He was wearing black leather trousers and a faded Levis jacket.

“May I come in?”

“No, you may not.”

He rolled his eyes and began, “Oh come on, Jake, it’s—” then kicked me with high-speed gymnastic accuracy between the legs.

I’ve been good at fighting, in the past. I’ve been dangerous. I know karate, kung-fu, jujitsu, how to kill someone with a Yale key. But you’ve got to keep your hand in, and I haven’t humanly hit anyone for decades. I did what a man does, inhaled, suddenly, through the white light detonation and dropped, first to my knees, then, parts cupped, onto my side, knowing I’d never exhale again. Ellis stepped over me in a draught of damp biker boots and mushroomy foot odour and closed the door. In the power shower, Madeline sneezed. He ignored it, sat on the edge of the bed.

“Jake,” he said. “We want you to know something. Do you know what I’m going to say?”

I didn’t, but responding was out of the question. Everything other than staying curled up holding my balls and inhaling more and more air was out of the question.

“What I’m going to say is: You’re the last. All the resources are dedicated. There’s no one else left. It’s all for you.”

I closed my eyes. It didn’t help. I opened them again. All I wanted was to breathe out but my lungs were annealed. Ellis sat knees apart, elbows on thighs. Behind him the windows were filled with pale cloud against which the snow looked like a fall of ash. History’s given snow new evocation options: ticker-tape parades; Nazi crematoria; World Cup Finals; 9/11 fallout.

“Did you know?” he asked.

I very gently shook my head, no. He gave a dismissive shrug—obviously if I’d known I’d hardly admit it and prove WOCOP had a leak—then bowed his head and rolled his neck as if to ease mastoidal tension. He breathed deeply a couple of times, loosened his shoulders, then straightened, staring at me. “I’m supposed to be the leering villain,” he said. “I can feel it, a sort of narrative coercion in the ether. It’s here in this room, you know, that I should get up and take a piss on you or something.” His fingers were long and knuckly, possessed of the ugly dexterity you see in virtuoso lead guitarists. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not going to. I just felt I wanted to see you before we … you know, come to it. The last hurrah.” He looked out at the snow and said, “Jesus, this weather.” For a few moments we both watched the down-swirling flakes in silence. Then he turned back to me. “To be honest,” he said, “I’m ambivalent about the whole thing. It’s all ambivalence, now, right? Grey areas. Morality reduced to approximations. I know you know this, Jake, that everyone’s more or less okay, all things considered. Look at this guy whatsizname, Fritzl, raping his daughter in the cellar for years. We don’t mind him, really. We know there’ll be psychology, we know there’ll be causes. It’s shock-fatigue. Beyond good and evil.”

In the shower Madeline adjusted the jet option to “massage” and let out a gasp. It occurred to me that Ellis was on drugs. His face was damp.

“We fluked it, you know,” he said. “Finding you. An agent from France came over following a suspect, turns out the suspect was following you. We thought you were still in Paris.”

At the absolute top of my held breath I said very quickly: “Why didn’t the agent kill me?”

“Come on, Jake. You’re Strictly Grainer. You know that. All the Hunt knows it, all WOCOP. It’s like one of the Five Pillars.”

The pain was diversifying: stabbings in the abdomen; a dark red headache; something devious and knifey in the colon; the need to vomit. I got up on one elbow and released a burp, which felt like a little miracle.

“I won’t lie to you,” Ellis said. “I’ll be sorry to see you go. I don’t like endings, not on this scale, not of an era.” One of Madeline’s stockings lay next to his hand. He fingered it, idly, with his awful white asparagus digits, seemed for the first time to be reconstructing my night. It was irrelevant to him. I remembered Harley’s description of him: magnificently abstracted, carries with him an inscrutable scheme of things next to which your own feels paltry. You have to remind yourself it’s just because he’s half insane. “There’s a literary anticlimax available,” Ellis continued, discarding the stocking. “You and Grainer come face-to-face and he realises that killing you will take away his purpose, his identity, so he lets you live. I’ve discussed it with him. He didn’t dismiss it straight away.”

I’d been exploring positional alternatives while he spoke and had ended up (again I say God being dead, irony still rollickingly alive) in exactly the attitude Madeline had adopted last night for receipt of buggery. Humour lightens. “But he did dismiss it,” I helium-squeaked.

“He did dismiss it. He considered it, he weighed it, he dismissed it. Filial honour trumps all.”

Filial honour. Forty years ago I killed and ate Grainer’s father. Grainer was ten at the time. There’s always someone’s father, someone’s mother, someone’s wife, someone’s son. This is the problem with killing and eating people. One of the problems.

“That’s a shame,” I wheezed. Ellis didn’t laugh. (He doesn’t laugh, Harley had told me. It’s not that he doesn’t get it. It’s that amusement no longer makes him laugh. He’s transcended too much.)

“I agree,” Ellis said. “It’s a goddamned crying shame. But unfortunately it’s not my decision.”

With monumental belatedness I wondered what he was doing here, manifestly not putting a silver bullet in my brain or lopping off my head. The question troubled me, my other self, the one that wasn’t filling with joy at having just managed to breathe out slightly.

Someone knocked. “That’ll be your breakfast,” Ellis said. “I’ll leave you to it.” He got up and, stepping over me again, opened the door. I heard him say: “Take it in, would you?” Then he was gone.

A young hair-gelled man in Zetter livery entered with Madeline’s Full English on an enormous tray.

“Cramp,” I gasped. “I’m fine. Just put it on the bed.”

8

HARLEY’S PHONE WAS off when I called him, which meant he was either at the WOCOP offices or dead. I