The Last Werewolf (20 page)

“I may be gone some time,” I said.

W
HEN 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.

N
ATURALLY 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 piece of glassware. A quick check to my right revealed the two ground-floor guards now both with night-vision goggles trained on the trees. They hadn’t heard.

Nil time to think. I sprang across the patio, pulled Marcel’s body in from the doorway and closed the plate glass behind me. This was the lounge we’d had our first drink in that morning, and aside from Jacqueline, myself and the late Marcel it was empty. Mme Delon’s shoulders came down slightly. A gesture with the Luger made her position plain: If she made a sound, I’d shoot her. I did shoot people. Witness Marcel here. Her eyes said she understood. Her shoulders came all the way down. She relaxed. “My goodness,” she said. “I thought I’d lost you forever.”

“No horseshit, please. I know about the vampire deal. I’m here for
Quinn’s book and the stone. Vault in the basement. No time to lose. Chop-chop. Yes?”

She raised her eyebrows. There was music playing softly. Dusty Springfield’s “No Easy Way Down.” Also an unusually strong scent of patchouli. It hadn’t smelled like that this morning.

“It’s not quite so straightforward,” she said. She was making what looked like an effort not to really look at me, or indeed at anything in particular. Outside one of the guards said: “No, Marcel’s with her. We need two more up here right now for a full perimeter sweep. Copy?” I went to her and grabbed her by her hair and put the gun under her chin, a move which required dropping the javelin at my feet. “Don’t fuck about.
Please
. Let’s go. Right now.”

“You misunderstand me,” she said. “I don’t have the book. Or the stone.”

“Since this morning. I think not.”

“It’s true. They’re in someone else’s possession.”

“Just for a laugh,” I said, “whose?”

Certain tensions rustle up clairvoyance. I knew she was going to look up, over my left shoulder, behind me. She looked up, over my left shoulder, behind me. “His,” she said.

I took a moment to concede there was no point saying, You don’t seriously expect me to fall for that, do you? Then I turned around.

He’d been there the whole time, “he” being a vampire and “there” being thirty feet up with his back against the room’s ceiling directly above the door. A senior, I inferred, gravity defiance being an elite sport that takes, allegedly, centuries to master. As I watched he descended, slowly, a neat slender man in what ought to be his early fifties (though he’d probably rubbed shoulders with Rameses) with artfully cropped greying hair and an elegant calm little face. Grey-green eyes and a thin mouth. The hint of a cleft in his delicate chin. Black close-fitting trousers and black rollneck sweater. I remembered the days when seeing someone move through the air like that would have been a thrilling shock, the days before we’d all seen it countless times in the movies. Modernity’s mimetic inversion: You see the real and are struck by how much it looks like a tediously seamless special effect.

“Since you know about the vampire deal,” the vampire said, when his feet touched the polished oak floor, “let’s not waste time. Donate your services voluntarily in exchange for access to Quinn’s book and the friendship of the Fifty Houses for the rest of your life.”

No point saying: Or what? Now that I could see the vampire I could smell him, too, suggestible schmuck that hybrid perception is. Stubborn pockets of wolf shivered and heaved. Here was the all-but-overwhelming limbic imperative to rip his boochie head off. Here, too, packed tight in the phantom animal haunches, was coiled flight. A migrainy ambivalence: Get him. Run. Get him. Run. There was a burst of automatic weapons fire outside, from the roof guard, I guessed.

“What’s going on out there?” Jacqueline said. I still held her by her hair. Hot scalp and the odour of shampoo. The room’s overdose of patchouli had been to mask
parfum de vamp
. He stood perfectly still, feet together, hands by his sides, no smile, just the trademark physical economy and the intolerable self-possession of a mime artist or juggler. He’d spoken English with an Italian accent. Casa Mangiardi? It didn’t matter. What mattered was that I hadn’t counted heads getting into the people-carrier. Four departed, one stayed behind. In a moment he’d make his move, a move so fast I’d be living in its upshot (doped, gagged, bagged and cuffed) without realising it had happened. In wolf mode I would have been a match. Human, I might as well be a blow-up doll.

“Jacob, please,” Jacqueline said. “That’s really hurting.”

Surrender made itself sensuously available, a lover who’d stolen up behind me and put her arms around me and pulled me close and was breathing on my ear. Here, if I wanted it, was the peace of dissolving into the bigger will. Cloquet’s peace with Mme Delon, no doubt.

“Jacob, please,” Jacqueline repeated. “Please.” I relaxed my grip on her hair. Let her go. She moved away. A small woman with an elfin head and a body just beginning to lose the fight. I thought of Cloquet’s enthusiasm for her anus, and smiled.

“Very good,” the vampire said. “Shall we?”

No illusions. I was going willingly or I was going after a touchingly brief struggle, but I was going. A mad cinematic montage burgeoned, of myself assimilated into vamp-camp, prisoner, yes, but civilly treated,
swapping monster yarns by the evening fire, gradually rewiring revulsion, finding the common ground, investing in Helios for the sheer science, against all odds—against
nature
starting a verboten interspecies affair, the glacial Mia and her lovely legs—jump cut to a shot of myself in lupine form spread-eagled on a brushed-steel slab, limbs shackled and head clamped, screaming, attended by white-coated boochies and state-of-the-art invasive gizmology, blood running from my ears, nose, rectum …

More gunfire from without. Shouts. A helicopter. I wondered where poor Cloquet was in all of it, whatever it was. Wondered too, since for a few moments now the javelin had been a modest little sentience next to my foot, whether I could get down to it and hurl it before the vampire did to me whatever he was going to do. Of no more practical use (obviously, since it was metal, not wood) than giving him the finger, but in my fey state the punk pointlessness of the gesture appealed.

“Take me with you,” Jacqueline said to him. “I know it didn’t go precisely to plan, but after all you’re getting what you wanted. I swear you won’t regret it.”

“Don’t speak,” the vampire said, not looking at her. Then several things happened very fast.

An explosion shattered the wall of glass and a bolus of smoke and flame
woofed
into the room and almost immediately retreated again. The force of the blast blew all three of us off our feet. I smashed into the stools by the bar and felt a rib crack. The javelin went too, missed my head by six inches, buried itself in the bar’s mosaic flank behind me. The vampire, closest to the detonation, sailed spectacularly
over
the bar, and went into the mirror-backed brilliant bottles with a flailing crash.

Jacqueline Delon was on her hands and knees two stools down from me. A large shard of glass protruded bloodily from her outer thigh. Another from her shin. Another from the side of her head. She reached up and gently plucked this one out and looked at it. It occurred to me I might be similarly inconvenienced. Sure enough, dreamy investigation discovered a large scalene fragment sticking out of my left shoulder. I followed Jacqueline’s example and tenderly extracted it. Blood welled and hurried out. With a sort of abstracted apathy I took hold of the javelin. The out-of-sight
helicopter was a deafening evocation of
Apocalypse Now
. The explosion had filled the room with heat, briefly; now cool air rushed in like an angel. The javelin wasn’t budging. I struggled to my feet. Jacqueline, in the silence of freakish stoicism or deep shock, hauled herself via one of the stools onto hers. One stiletto had absconded. Even in her state the imbalance was intolerable. She reached down and removed the remaining shoe. We looked at each other as if we’d both just been born.

The vampire appeared behind her. He wasn’t there, then he was. This is the way of it. Fast. Too fast. His natty little face was glass-flecked, glass-studded, beaded with blood. He wiped it,
swiped
it, actually, as if it were covered in maddening flies, though his expression of compact enlightenment remained intact. “Shall we go?” he said.

Then the helicopter appeared. Descended in profile like Miss Muffet’s spider. Thudding chop and the room’s lethal wreckage crazily aswirl. A WOCOP Bluebottle, lightweight, fast, handleable. The bulbous smoked-glass head dipped, once, as if in decorous greeting—Ellis beamed out at me from the pilot’s seat—then turned through 45 degrees to face us with its brutal lights.

I knew what it was packing. So did the vampire. So, most likely, did Jacqueline. They call the ammunition “hail”: eight-inch hickory darts discharged at the rate of thirty per second. They call the gun, naturally enough, “Mary.”

He didn’t get away clean. At least a dozen shots hit him—I saw one go straight through his throat, another struck just below his eye—but he was fast enough,
just
fast enough, to cover his vulnerable heart.

With the nearest shield to hand.

Two seconds, no more. I got one glimpse of Jacqueline’s floodlit body magically covered in quills before the vampire launched himself—and her—backwards, shot over the bar’s shattered remains and smashed through the window on the other side of the room, out into the night.