The Ultimate Werewolf (13 page)

I traveled back to my father's house.

Months later, I met a woman called Joy who reminded me of bright days and laughter beyond all earthly considerations. We married. When we had children, I held them close and stroked their fine golden hair and told them they were jewels of inestimable value. I often dreamed of Marie and Gamier. I would awaken cold and sweaty, afraid of the darkness and the beasts within. One night when I awakened in terror, I told my wife about the dreams. She kissed me and pulled me out of bed. "Dance with the beasts," she said. "Don't be frightened by them." We laughed and danced together in a shaft of silver moonlight that fell across our floor.

Afterward, the dreams stopped. From that time forward, when I thought of Marie, I imagined her dancing in the arms of someone who knew how to embrace the beast and love her well.

Jerome Charyn

▼▼▼

I
h
E
mayor was going out of her mind. She didn't need another Wolf Man scare. Tourism was down thirteen percent. Manhattan was becoming a ghost town toward midnight. If
this
Wolf Man continued to strike with such alarming regularity, then Her Honor would have to go into the street and sing love songs to a vanishing New York. The first Wolf Man had added a festive touch to the city. He was a starving actor who wore a crazy mask and bit women on the neck without leaving a hint of blood. He came and went with the holiday season. But the new Wolf Man made his own seasons. He had claws and big yellow teeth and ran away with enormous pieces of flesh. Surgeons had to sew people together after the Wolf Man struck. Whatever witnesses there were claimed he had the clearest blue eyes under a great maw of fur, a kind of whisker that extended to his forehead like some extraordinary foliage. The blue eyes were intelligent. But the Wolf Man clawed without mercy. Nineteen men and women lay in the hospital because of him. Half were lingering in a life-support system, the eyes all yellow, the faces like waxen masks.

Becky Karp blamed the whole affair on Isaac Sidel. He was her police commissioner, and Isaac hadn't slowed the Wolf Man's walk across Manhattan.

"Isaac, do something, or my whole administration will sink."

"I'm doing what I can. I have my deputies out on the street day and night."

"It's not good enough," she screamed at Isaac, who looked like a woolly bear with sideburns. "I want a special werewolf patrol, with an ace psychologist who can talk about all the implications . . . what's that word again?"

"Lycanthropy," Isaac said.

"Yes, lycanthropy. We need a spokesman, Isaac. Someone who can calm the public, who can give the right definitions, take a scientific approach. Not a policeman like you. You're too primitive, Isaac. I want a scientist on this case. Either you pick one, or I will."

"Then I'll resign," Isaac said.

"You won't resign. You're too interested in the Wolf Man . . . it's sink or swim, Isaac. Get me a scientist."

Isaac marched out of City Hall with reporters on his back, nibbling like little vampires. What could he say? He'd captured the other Wolf Man, Harvey Montaigne, because Isaac had discovered his modus operandi. There was something theatrical about Montaigne in all the tracks he left, that desire to play at harming people, as if he were caught in some perpetual Halloween, and was waiting for Isaac, who stumbled upon him in a hotel room, lonely and depressed, a couple of days after Christmas.

"How'd you find me?" Harvey Montaigne had asked.

"By chance."

"I've seen you on the tube. Your sideburns are too big. How'd you find me?"

But Isaac wouldn't give his secrets away. While his own detectives scoured the city, looking for some maniac in a mask, Isaac had gone through hundreds of theatrical bills, until he happened upon a bill that belonged to a small theatre company in Queens, the Corona Players, which was offering an ensemble production of "The Monster Hours, a Musical by Many Hands." It wasn't simply that the Corona Players had a Wolf Man in their ensemble. They also had a Frankenstein and a Dracula. And these monsters were played "by Many Hands," which bothered Isaac. Because there was a terrible sadness built into the idea of monsters shaking their musical bones in some obscure corner of Queens. And so Isaac trespassed upon the anonymity of the Corona Players, interviewed Harvey's mother, who was the head cashier, and broke the case.

He was called the number-one detective in the world, Sidel, who reached outside his own Department to bring in Harvey Montaigne.

And now the public expected him to sustain his own magic and have another success. But this Wolf Man didn't wear a mask. He took wicked bites out of people's throats, he chewed on their flesh. He held to Manhattan, but that wasn't much of an MO. The Wolf Man might decide to cross a bridge one afternoon and start a whole other life.

And Isaac was hounded by reporters, foreign and domestic, because the Wolf Man was international news, a totem of our times, the beast within the belly of the beast. Isaac gave no interviews. But he couldn't shuffle between Headquarters and City Hall without being noticed.

"Isaac, is this another Harvey Montaigne?"

"No comment."

And he withdrew into the red maze of One Police Plaza. But Becky had already found a scientist for
her
werewolf patrol. He was a professor of psychology at Brooklyn College who specialized in lycanthropy and other kinds of cannibalism. He was much younger than Isaac, a mulatto from Los Angeles who'd migrated to Bedford-Stuy. He looked like a cherub. His name was Walter Gunn.

"Let's get one thing straight, Professor Gunn."

"Walter will do," the cherub said. "I don't like formalities when I'm on a case."

"You've worked for other police departments?"

"As a consultant, yes. You don't think your Wolf Man is the only one around, do you, Commissioner?"

"Call me Isaac."

"Then don't fuck with me. I didn't ask for this assignment."

"You're a civilian," Isaac said.

"So are you."

"But I still have a badge and a gun. Let Becky Karp play her politics. I give the orders around here. If you're her spy, Walter, then say so. I'll respect that. You can sleep on my carpet and collect your honorariums. Just leave me alone."

"Yeah, you're the boy who found Harvey Montaigne. But this one isn't Harvey. He eats human flesh."

"I don't believe in werewolves, Walter. And if this mother is a cannibal, then I'll kick his ass."

"He eats flesh, Isaac. The victims will die of blood poisoning or pernicious anemia, and you'll have more than a curio on your hands. You'll have a killer, whoever or whatever he is. You need me, Isaac, or you'll never get near him."

"Then what's your guess?" "The Bangor Wolf. He came down from Canada and he's been causing havoc ever since."

"Is he some trapper who started hallucinating in the woods?"

"All I know is he's a werewolf."

"Whiskers and all that shtick. Did they run saliva tests on this Bangor baby's victims?"

"Yes, they found human spittle and human blood. But Bangor is human, Isaac. That's the whole point. He only has certain characteristics of a wolf."

"Blame it on the moon," Isaac said.

"Or some deep psychosis. It doesn't matter. Bangor has fur on his face and unholy blue eyes. He's down from the north woods, I'm telling you. And he's nesting in Manhattan."

"Then why haven't you volunteered this information until now?"

"I did. But your detectives wouldn't believe me."

"So you went to Becky Karp."

"No. Her Honor came to me."

"Grand," Isaac said, imitating his Irish forebears at the NYPD. "Nesting in Manhattan. But I thought he has a fondness for woods."

"He does. I'd say he's living in Central Park."

"And he won't foul his nest. So he waltzes into the side streets whenever he wants a meal. But he seems to have a fondness for lower Manhattan. Nine of his hits have been below Fourteenth Street. What does he do, Walter? Hail a cab? Or does he hop around after midnight, stealing clothes from the best boutiques?"

"No. He uses the subway system."

"A straphanger, huh?"

"A man can move awful fast in those tunnels, Isaac. There are abandoned lines and everything. All he'd have to do is wear a long coat and step down into the tracks."

Isaac began to look at the cherub. "You've done your homework . . . I shouldn't have been so gruff."

"You're a police commissioner. You have to be suspicious."

"Don't compliment me, Walter. I'm a son of a bitch."

▼▼▼

The Wolf Man knocked down a widow on Madison and Twenty-ninth, ate off half her neck. But the widow wouldn't die. She lingered like the others until Isaac felt he inhabited this same half-world between the living and the dead. Whiskers. Blue Eyes. Homo lupus, the wolf who walked upright.

Isaac avoided the slow-eyed detectives from the Central Park precinct. They could catch their own case. He brought in a squad of men who looked like state troopers. They pummeled through the grass. They knocked open abandoned caves in the northern heights of the Park. They poked around in the Harlem Meer, frightening users of crack. Isaac worked with an enormous blueprint. He was like some pirate searching for the secret treasure of a Wolf Man's droppings. There were no signs of the Wolf Man's nest. Isaac broke up a small smuggling ring that operated out of an old abandoned fort. He arrested half a dozen crack dealers and a rapist. But Isaac wanted the Wolf Man.

He went into the bowels of Manhattan with two engineers from the Metropolitan Transit Authority. He rode in a little electric car. It was like Coney Island under the ground. One of the engineers kept socking at rats' heads with a shovel. They entered a subway line that had been closed in nineteen twenty-six. Isaac had to get out of the little car, because there was no electricity on this line. He was given a pair of boots and a miner's lamp that he wore over his brain. The old subway station was intact. And Isaac marveled at the different-colored tiles, mosaics that spelled out Beaver Street and Cherry Street on this phantom line. Isaac was a little jealous. His own dead uncles and aunts might have been among the human cargo seventy years ago. A piece of his own history had eluded Isaac, the expert on Manhattan.

He made thirty arrests. He collared a gang of pickpockets that had used the Cherry Street station as their private sanctuary. There were no signs of the Wolf Man. Isaac grew more and more depressed.

He visited Harvey Montaigne, who lived at a half-way house run by the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. He wasn't sure what this earlier Wolf Man could divine for him, but Isaac needed Harvey somehow.

"Have you been acting again?"

"No. I couldn't seem to pick up on my career."

"I could have talked to a couple of producers."

"Yeah, and I'd have to play the Wolf Man for the rest of my life."

"You shouldn't have gone around biting people. I had no choice. Someone could have been killed. A cop might have seen you in your mask and shot your head off . . . Harvey, I need your help."

"That's a laugh," the Wolf Man said.

"I'm not kidding. What's your opinion about this Wolf Man?"

"I have no opinions."

"But you have to feel something. I mean, it has to touch you somewhere. Another Wolf Man."

"He's a perfect stranger to me."

"But who do you think he is?"

"One more actor, Mr. Isaac, in a fucking world of actors."

▼▼▼

The Wolf Man struck again. He had his own cosmology. The moon could wax or wane around him. He was always out on the street with that furry head and bottomless blue eyes. And Isaac began to wonder if the Wolf Man was some horrible visitation upon the city itself, as if all the monstrosities of Manhattan had taken flesh.

But he didn't have time to ponder. Becky's scientist had been hit by a bus. Isaac brought him flowers at Mount Sinai Hospital. Walter Gunn's lips had turned entirely blue. He lay like some discarded man inside intensive care. Isaac had to use all his influence to enter Walter's tiny closet.

"I saw the Wolf Man," Walter said, puffing out his blue lips.

"Why'd you go tracking him on your own?"

"Because you wouldn't believe that he hibernates in Central Park."

"Bears hibernate," Isaac said. "Not wolves."

"Our man hibernates whenever he's in the mood."

"And he gets up periodically to eat some human flesh . . . Walter, we combed Central Park. We searched every cave. We didn't find his fucking nest."

"But I caught him coming out of the Park."

"How can you tell it was the Bangor Wolf?"