The Last Werewolf
Page 35
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“Jake, please . It’s so obvious.”
“And yet I don’t see it.”
She shook her head, smiling. Popped a strawberry into her mouth, chewed, swallowed. Wiped her hands on a fat napkin. “Yes, you do. You’re just embarrassed by it. You’ve held on to language because without language there’s no morality.”
“Ah, yes, I spend a lot of time considering morality, when I’m not slaughtering people and gobbling them all up.”
“I’m talking about testimony. I’m talking about bearing witness to yourself . What is this—what are the journals—if not the compulsion to tell the truth of what you are? And what is the compulsion to tell the truth if not a moral compulsion? It’s perfectly Kantian.”
She presented a peculiarly annoying attractive figure sitting there in her ivory silk robe with her legs tucked under her. “What was your phrase? ‘God’s gone, meaning too, yet aesthetic fraudulence still has the power to shame …’ Aesthetic fraudulence, notice. Telling the truth is a beautiful act even if the truth itself is ugly—and my dear man, you can’t stop caring about beauty. That is your real predicament, your real curse.”
“Fascinating the way other people see things,” I said. “But I really must be going.” I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and reached for my trousers.
“I have Quinn’s book,” she said.
There’s a distinctive aural quality to lies. This didn’t have it. It cost me some effort to hold—after the briefest hesitation—to my purpose with the trousers. I stood and pulled them on. You pull your trousers on and everything seems fractionally less desperate. Nonetheless I felt sick. You get used to no one having anything (except their flesh and blood, except their life ) you could possibly want. You take your sufficiency for granted. You forget it’s contingent. You forget it’s a luxury.
“Good,” she said, observing. “I see you know I’m telling the truth. That saves us some time.”
“How did you get it?” I asked, though I was pretty sure I knew. The memory of Harley— someone hit one of Mubarak’s places three months ago —like the punch line that draws a groan.
“Oh, that’s too long a story for now. Stay for dinner and I’ll tell you. Right now I absolutely must take a shower.” She got to her feet.
“This is the technique then, is it? Keep me dangling?”
“Well, if you’re not going to see reason.”
“What makes you think I give a fuck these days? I don’t give a fuck, actually, now that I think of it.”
“Then feel free to leave. If you genuinely have no interest then walk out the way we came in. You’ll find my driver at the gate. He’s instructed to take you wherever you care to go.”
“What do you want from me?” I asked her.
She turned, one hand in the pocket of her robe, and looked out through the wall of glass. “I told you,” she said. “I want you to live.”
26
I FINISHED DRESSING. Sunlight filled the perfumed room. I went to the huge window and, as she had, looked out. Dark conifers swept down to the pale line of the beach and the sea’s glitter. Blue cloudless sky, London’s recent snow a world away and a century ago, though this was still Europe, still early March. The sex had carried us into late afternoon. My shoulders ached. The junkie’s gobbled life was finding room, incredibly, the last seat in a packed arena, that solid deafening crowd of living dead. Somewhere among them an unripe foetus the size of a plum, my daughter, my son.
There were two explanations for what I was doing here. One was that Jacqueline Delon was sufficiently bored and unhinged for the keeping of a werewolf as an erotic pet to seem a rejuvenating novelty. The other was that she had a motive as yet unknown which required, in addition to the palaver of kidnapping me and accessorising herself to murder, temporary dissemblance. A woman of intriguingly acute ambiguity even without the bait of Quinn’s book.
Oh Jesus, Quinn’s book.
Thirty-seven-year-old Alexander Quinn went out to Mesopotamia for the third and final time in the spring of 1863. A double first in classics and ancient history from Oxford ought to have bricked him into academia for life, but by the time he left Kings in 1848 he was ravenous for the world beyond college walls. Brief failed stints in the British Museum, the Foreign Office (Burma) and the East India Company (Bombay) finagled by his Old Etonian dad confirmed the futility of sticking him behind a desk, and by 1854 he was on his first archaeological expedition to the Middle East under the Bacchic eye of Lord William Greaves, a known occultist roué, whom Quinn (no sluggard with the ladies himself) had met and befriended as a fellow whorer at Kate Hamilton’s. Greaves, a collector of religious antiquities and student of the Black Arts, had been thrilled to read of Botta’s discoveries at Nineveh and Khorsabad and was convinced ancient objects of talismanic power were there for the taking if one merely had the money, leisure and inclination to go and dig them up. Quinn, desperate to get his hands dusty and put his colloquial Arabic to use, pretended an interest in diabolism and offered his services as an interpreter-cum-right-hand-man. Which, over the next nine years, is exactly what he became. Along with site management and the cataloguing of finds Quinn greased the requisite bureaucrats, landowners, tribal elders and customs officers and still found time to score opium and girls for his lordship.
How do I know all this?
Because I spent time finding it out.
Why did I spend time finding it out?
Because before his death in 1863 Quinn claimed to have discovered the origin of werewolves.
It’s a ridiculous story, of course, but history’s full of ridiculous stories. You can’t make this shit up , one finds oneself saying, whenever the seemingly prosaic old world lifts the veil on its synchronicities. Meanwhile the seemingly prosaic old world shrugs: Hey, don’t ask me. I just work here.
As so often with Great Finds, the man looking was looking for something else. Quinn had travelled to the town of Al Qusayr, whence rumour had reached the archaeologists of an underground temple fifteen miles away, literally fallen into by a retarded goatherd. Greaves, sceptical (the natives had learned quickly there was money to be made selling “information” to eccentric Europeans), had given Quinn the site as a pet project, and the protégé had set off from the camp in Al Qusayr with camels, a guide and two servants, one of whom was to be despatched with the guide back to his lordship to summon hands and equipment should the rumours turn out to be fact.
“And yet I don’t see it.”
She shook her head, smiling. Popped a strawberry into her mouth, chewed, swallowed. Wiped her hands on a fat napkin. “Yes, you do. You’re just embarrassed by it. You’ve held on to language because without language there’s no morality.”
“Ah, yes, I spend a lot of time considering morality, when I’m not slaughtering people and gobbling them all up.”
“I’m talking about testimony. I’m talking about bearing witness to yourself . What is this—what are the journals—if not the compulsion to tell the truth of what you are? And what is the compulsion to tell the truth if not a moral compulsion? It’s perfectly Kantian.”
She presented a peculiarly annoying attractive figure sitting there in her ivory silk robe with her legs tucked under her. “What was your phrase? ‘God’s gone, meaning too, yet aesthetic fraudulence still has the power to shame …’ Aesthetic fraudulence, notice. Telling the truth is a beautiful act even if the truth itself is ugly—and my dear man, you can’t stop caring about beauty. That is your real predicament, your real curse.”
“Fascinating the way other people see things,” I said. “But I really must be going.” I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and reached for my trousers.
“I have Quinn’s book,” she said.
There’s a distinctive aural quality to lies. This didn’t have it. It cost me some effort to hold—after the briefest hesitation—to my purpose with the trousers. I stood and pulled them on. You pull your trousers on and everything seems fractionally less desperate. Nonetheless I felt sick. You get used to no one having anything (except their flesh and blood, except their life ) you could possibly want. You take your sufficiency for granted. You forget it’s contingent. You forget it’s a luxury.
“Good,” she said, observing. “I see you know I’m telling the truth. That saves us some time.”
“How did you get it?” I asked, though I was pretty sure I knew. The memory of Harley— someone hit one of Mubarak’s places three months ago —like the punch line that draws a groan.
“Oh, that’s too long a story for now. Stay for dinner and I’ll tell you. Right now I absolutely must take a shower.” She got to her feet.
“This is the technique then, is it? Keep me dangling?”
“Well, if you’re not going to see reason.”
“What makes you think I give a fuck these days? I don’t give a fuck, actually, now that I think of it.”
“Then feel free to leave. If you genuinely have no interest then walk out the way we came in. You’ll find my driver at the gate. He’s instructed to take you wherever you care to go.”
“What do you want from me?” I asked her.
She turned, one hand in the pocket of her robe, and looked out through the wall of glass. “I told you,” she said. “I want you to live.”
26
I FINISHED DRESSING. Sunlight filled the perfumed room. I went to the huge window and, as she had, looked out. Dark conifers swept down to the pale line of the beach and the sea’s glitter. Blue cloudless sky, London’s recent snow a world away and a century ago, though this was still Europe, still early March. The sex had carried us into late afternoon. My shoulders ached. The junkie’s gobbled life was finding room, incredibly, the last seat in a packed arena, that solid deafening crowd of living dead. Somewhere among them an unripe foetus the size of a plum, my daughter, my son.
There were two explanations for what I was doing here. One was that Jacqueline Delon was sufficiently bored and unhinged for the keeping of a werewolf as an erotic pet to seem a rejuvenating novelty. The other was that she had a motive as yet unknown which required, in addition to the palaver of kidnapping me and accessorising herself to murder, temporary dissemblance. A woman of intriguingly acute ambiguity even without the bait of Quinn’s book.
Oh Jesus, Quinn’s book.
Thirty-seven-year-old Alexander Quinn went out to Mesopotamia for the third and final time in the spring of 1863. A double first in classics and ancient history from Oxford ought to have bricked him into academia for life, but by the time he left Kings in 1848 he was ravenous for the world beyond college walls. Brief failed stints in the British Museum, the Foreign Office (Burma) and the East India Company (Bombay) finagled by his Old Etonian dad confirmed the futility of sticking him behind a desk, and by 1854 he was on his first archaeological expedition to the Middle East under the Bacchic eye of Lord William Greaves, a known occultist roué, whom Quinn (no sluggard with the ladies himself) had met and befriended as a fellow whorer at Kate Hamilton’s. Greaves, a collector of religious antiquities and student of the Black Arts, had been thrilled to read of Botta’s discoveries at Nineveh and Khorsabad and was convinced ancient objects of talismanic power were there for the taking if one merely had the money, leisure and inclination to go and dig them up. Quinn, desperate to get his hands dusty and put his colloquial Arabic to use, pretended an interest in diabolism and offered his services as an interpreter-cum-right-hand-man. Which, over the next nine years, is exactly what he became. Along with site management and the cataloguing of finds Quinn greased the requisite bureaucrats, landowners, tribal elders and customs officers and still found time to score opium and girls for his lordship.
How do I know all this?
Because I spent time finding it out.
Why did I spend time finding it out?
Because before his death in 1863 Quinn claimed to have discovered the origin of werewolves.
It’s a ridiculous story, of course, but history’s full of ridiculous stories. You can’t make this shit up , one finds oneself saying, whenever the seemingly prosaic old world lifts the veil on its synchronicities. Meanwhile the seemingly prosaic old world shrugs: Hey, don’t ask me. I just work here.
As so often with Great Finds, the man looking was looking for something else. Quinn had travelled to the town of Al Qusayr, whence rumour had reached the archaeologists of an underground temple fifteen miles away, literally fallen into by a retarded goatherd. Greaves, sceptical (the natives had learned quickly there was money to be made selling “information” to eccentric Europeans), had given Quinn the site as a pet project, and the protégé had set off from the camp in Al Qusayr with camels, a guide and two servants, one of whom was to be despatched with the guide back to his lordship to summon hands and equipment should the rumours turn out to be fact.
