The Last Werewolf (2 page)

When I’d imagined this moment I’d imagined clean relief. Now the
moment had arrived there was relief, but it wasn’t clean. The sordid little flame of selfhood shimmied in protest. Not that my self’s what it used to be. These days it deserves a sad smile, as might a twinge of vestigial lust in an old man’s balls. “Shot him, did they?” I asked. “Herr Wolfgang?”

Harley took a fretful drag, then while exhaling through his nostrils mashed the Gauloise in a standing obsidian ashtray. “They didn’t shoot him,” he said. “Ellis cut his head off.”

A
LL PARADIGM SHIFTS ANSWER
the amoral craving for novelty. Obama’s election victory did it. So did the Auschwitz footage in its day. Good and evil are irrelevant. Show us the world’s not the way we thought it was and a part of us rejoices. Nothing’s exempt. One’s own death-sentence elicits a mad little hallelujah, and mine’s egregiously overdue. For ten, twenty, thirty years now I’ve been dragging myself through the motions. How long do werewolves live? Madeline asked recently. According to WOCOP around four hundred years. I don’t know
how
. Naturally one sets oneself challenges—Sanskrit, Kant, advanced calculus, t’ai chi—but that only addresses the problem of Time. The bigger problem, of Being, just keeps getting bigger. (Vampires, not surprisingly, have an on-off love affair with catatonia.) One by one I’ve exhausted the modes: hedonism, asceticism, spontaneity, reflection, everything from miserable Socrates to the happy pig. My mechanism’s worn out. I don’t have what it takes. I still have feelings but I’m sick of having them. Which is another feeling I’m sick of having. I just … I just don’t want any more
life
.

Harley crashed from anxiety to morbidity to melancholy but I remained dreamy and light, part voluntary obtuseness, part Zenlike acceptance, part simply an inability to concentrate. You can’t just ignore this, he kept saying. You can’t just fucking
roll over
. For a while I responded mildly with things like Why not? and Of course I can, but he got so worked up—the bone-handled cane came back into play—I feared for his heart and changed tack. Just let me digest, I told him. Just let me think. Just let me, in fact, get laid, as I’ve arranged to do, as I’m paying for even as we speak. This was true (Madeline waited at a £360-a-night boutique hotel across town) but it wasn’t a happy shift of topic for Harley: prostate surgery three months ago left his libido in a sulk and London’s rent boys bereft of munificent patronage. However, it got me out of there. Tearily drunk, he embraced me and insisted I borrow a woollen hat and made me promise
to call him in twenty-four hours, whereafter, he kept repeating, all this pathetic sissying cod Hamlet bollocks would have to stop.

It was still snowing when I stepped out into the street. Vehicular traffic was poignantly stupefied and Earl’s Court Underground was closed. For a moment I stood adjusting to the air’s fierce innocence. I hadn’t known the Berliner, but what was he if not kin? He’d had a near miss in the Black Forest two years ago, fled to the States and gone off-radar in Alaska. If he’d stayed in the wilderness he might still be alive. (The thought, “wilderness,” stirred the ghost animal, ran cold fingers through the pelt that wasn’t there; mountains like black glass and slivers of snow and the blood-hot howl on ice-flavoured air …) But home pulls. It draws you back to tell you you don’t belong. They got Wolfgang twenty miles from Berlin.
Ellis cut his head off
. The death of a loved one brutally vivifies everything: clouds, street corners, faces, TV ads. You bear it because others share the grief. Species death leaves no others. You’re alone among all the eerily renewed particulars.

Tongue out to taste the cold falling flakes I got the first inklings of the weight the world might put on me for the time I had left, the mass of its detail, its relentless plotless insistence. Again, it didn’t bear thinking about. This would be my torture: All that didn’t bear thinking about would devote itself to forcing me to bear thinking about it.

I lit a Camel and hauled myself into focus. Practicalities: Get to Gloucester Road on foot. Circle Line to Farringdon. Ten minutes flailing trek to the Zetter, where Madeline, God bless her mercenary charms, would be waiting. I pulled the woollen cap down snug over my ears and began walking.

Harley had said: Grainer wants the monster not the man. You’ve got time. I didn’t doubt he was right. There were twenty-seven days to the next full moon and thanks to the interference Harley had been running WOCOP still had me in Paris. Which knowledge sustained me for a few minutes despite the growing conviction—
this is paranoia, you’re doing this to yourself
—that I was being followed.

Then, turning into Cromwell Road, the denial allowance was spent and there was nothing between me and the livid fact: I
was
being followed.

This is paranoia
, I began again, but the mantra had lost its magic. Pressing
on me from behind was warm insinuation where should have been uninterrupted cold: surveillance. Snow and buildings molecularly swelled in urgent confirmation:
They’ve found you. It’s already begun
.

Adrenaline isn’t interested in ennui. Adrenaline floods, regardless, in my state not just the human fibres but lupine leftovers too, those creature dregs that hadn’t fully conceded transformation. Phantom wolf energies and their
Homo sapiens
correlates wriggled and belched in my scalp, shoulders, wrists, knees. My bladder tingled as in the too fast pitch down from a Ferris wheel’s summit. The absurdity was being unable, shin-deep in snow, to quicken my pace. Harley had tried to press a Smith & Wesson automatic on me before I’d left but I’d laughed it away. Stop being a granny. I imagined him watching now on CCTV saying, Yes, Harley the granny. I hope you’re happy, Marlowe, you fucking idiot.

I tossed the cigarette and shoved my hands into my overcoat pockets. Harley had to be warned. If the Hunt was tailing me then they knew where I’d just been. The Earl’s Court house wasn’t in his name (masqueraded instead as what it was perfectly equipped to be, an elite rare book dealership) and had hitherto been safe. But if WOCOP had uncovered it then Harley—for nearly fifty years my double agent, my fix-it, my familiar, my friend—might already be dead.

If, then
 … 
If, then
 … This, aside from the business of monthly transformation, the inestimable drag of Being a Werewolf, is what I’m sick of, the endless logistics. There’s a reason humans peg-out around eighty: prose fatigue. It looks like organ failure or cancer or stroke but it’s really just the inability to carry on clambering through the assault course of mundane cause and effect. If we ask Sheila then we can’t ask Ron. If I have the kippers now then it’s quiche for tea. Four score years is about all the ifs and thens you can take. Dementia’s the sane realisation you just can’t be
doing
with all that anymore.

My face was hot and tender. The snow’s recording studio hush made small sounds distinct: someone opening a can of beer; a burp; a purse snapping shut. Across the road three drunk young men hysterically scuffled with one another. A cabbie wrapped in a tartan blanket stood by his vehicle’s open door complaining into a mobile. Outside Flamingo two hotdog-eating bouncers in Cossack hats presided over a line of shivering
clubbers.
Nothing like the blood and meat of the young. You can taste the audacity of hope
. Post-Curse these thoughts still shoot up like the inappropriate erections of adolescence. I crossed over, joined the end of the queue, with Buddhist detachment registered the thudding succulence of the three underdressed girls in front of me, and dialled Harley on the secure mobile. He answered after three rings.

“Someone’s following me,” I said. “You need to get out of there. It’s compromised.”

The expected delay. He’d been drunk-dozing with the phone in his hand, set to vibrate. I could picture him, creased, struggling up from the couch, hair aloft with static, fumbling for the Gauloise. “Harley? Are you listening? The house isn’t safe. Get out and go under.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. Don’t waste time.”

“But I mean they don’t know you’re
here
. They absolutely do not. I’ve seen the intel updates myself. For fuck’s sake I
wrote
most of them. Jake?”

Impossible in the falling snow to get a lock on my footpad. If he’d seen me cross he’d have got into a doorway. There was a dark-haired artfully stubbled fashion-model type in a trench coat across the road ostensibly arrested by a text message, but if that was him then he was either an idiot or he wanted me to see him. No other obvious candidate.

“Jake?”

“Yeah. Look, don’t fuck about, Harley. Is there somewhere you can go?”

I heard him exhale, saw the aging linen-suited frame sag. It was upon him, suddenly, what it would mean if his WOCOP cover was blown. Seventy’s too old to start running. Over the phone’s drift of not silence I could sense him visualising it, the hotel rooms, the bribes, the aliases, the death of trust. No life for an old man. “Well, I can go to Founders, I suppose, assuming no one shoots me between here and Child’s Street.” Founders was the Foundation, Harley’s satirically exclusive club, sub-Jeeves butlers and state-of-the-art escorts, priceless antiques and cutting-edge entertainment technology, massage therapists, a resident Tarot reader and a three-Michelin-starred chef. Membership required wealth but forbade fame; celebrity drew attention, and this was a place for the rich to vice quietly. According to Harley fewer than a hundred people
knew of its existence. “Why don’t you let me check first?” he said. “Let me get into WOCOP and—”

“Give me your word you’ll take the gun and go.”

He knew I was right, just didn’t want it. Not now, so unprepared. I pictured him looking around the room. All the books. So many things were ending, without warning.

“All right,” he said.
“Fuck.”

“Call me when you get to the club.”

It did occur to me to similarly avail myself of Flamingo, since there it was. No Hunter would risk so public a hit. From the outside the night club was an unmarked dark brick front and a metal door that might have served a bank vault. Above it one tiny pink neon flamingo none but the cognoscenti would divine. In the movie version I’d go in and sneak out of a toilet window or meet a girl and start a problematic love affair that would somehow save my life at the expense of hers. In reality I’d go in, spend four hours being watched by my assassin without figuring out who it was then find myself back on the street.

I moved away from the queue. A warm beam of consciousness followed me. One glance at the glamour boy in the trench coat revealed him pocketing his mobile and setting off in my wake, but I couldn’t convince myself it was him. The ether spoke of greater refinement. I looked at my watch: 12:16. Last train from Gloucester Road wouldn’t be later than 12:30. Even at this pace I should make it. If not I’d check in at the Cavendish and forgo Madeline, though, since I’d given her carte blanche with room service over at the Zetter, I’d most likely be bankrupt by morning.

These, you’ll say, were not the calculations of a being worn out by history, too full of content, emptily replete. Granted. But it’s one thing to know death’s twenty-seven days away, quite another to know it might be making your acquaintance
any second now
. To be murdered here, in human shape, would be gross, precipitate and—despite there being no such thing as justice—unjust. Besides, the person tracking me couldn’t be Grainer. As Harley said, his lordship prized the
wulf
not the
wer
, and the thought of being despatched by anyone less than the Hunt’s finest was repugnant. And this was to say nothing of my one diarist’s duty still undischarged: If I was snuffed out here and now who would tell the untellable
tale?
The whole disease of your life written but for that last lesion of the heart, its malignancy and muse. God’s gone, Meaning too, and yet aesthetic fraudulence still has the power to shame
.

All of which, my cynic said, as I stopped under a street lamp to light another Camel, was decent enough, unless it was just a fancy rationalisation for the sudden and desperate desire
not to die
.

At which point a silenced bullet hit the street lamp’s concrete three inches above my head.

C
OGNITIVE PILE-UP
. On the one hand I was busy cataloguing the perceptual facts—Christmas cracker snap, puff of dust, clipped ricochet—to confirm I had indeed just been shot at, on the other I was already past such redundancies and springing—yes,
springing
is the correct present participle—into the doorway of a former Bradford & Bingley for cover.

One wants clean, 007ish reactions at times like these. One
wants
all sorts of things. Backed into the urinous doorway, however, I found myself thinking (along with
oh for fuck’s sake
and
Harley can publish the journals
and
what will survive of us is nothing
) of the refreshing abruptness with which financial institutions—B & B among them—had collapsed in the Crunch. Ads for banks and building societies had continued to run days, sometimes weeks after the going concerns had gone. For many it was impossible to believe, watching the green-jacketed lady in black bowler hat with her smile fusing sexual and financial know-how, that the company she represented no longer existed. I’ve seen this sort of thing before, obviously, the death of certainties. I was in Europe when Nietzsche and Darwin between them got rid of God, and in the United States when Wall Street reduced the American Dream to a broken suitcase and a worn-out shoe. The difference with the current crisis is that the world’s downer has coincided with my own. I must repeat: I just don’t want, I really can’t
take
(in both senses of the verb) any more life.

A second silenced shot buried itself thud-gasp in the B & B brick. Silver ammo? I had nothing to fear if it wasn’t, but no way of finding out other than taking one in the chest and seeing if I dropped dead. (This was so typically unreasonable of the universe. Apart from a few days to do what I had to do I didn’t
want
any more life. What’s a few days after two hundred years? But that’s the universe for you, decades of even-handedness then suddenly
zero negotiation.
) I got down on my belly. The concrete’s odour of stale piss was a thing of cruel joy. Low, moving in tiny increments, I stole a look round the doorway’s edge.