Talulla Rising

by Glen Duncan

  ‘Let’s go,’ the Russian repeated. ‘Now.’

  18

  New York, smiling, held us just behind the gates. My skin tingled. Adrenaline forced its way through exhaustion. Cloquet buzzed with pointless action calculations. Less than a minute and the Russian pulled-up in a mirror-windowed BMW 4x4. The only available blindfold was Cloquet’s vast handkerchief. Could I be trusted to keep my eyes closed? Or was I going to have to have a jacket over my head? The Russian drove. New York turned in his seat to make sure I wasn’t peeking. He should have been a surfer. His face was full of masculine prettiness and immensely likeable. Which, by horror’s law of inverted aesthetics, made me sure we were being taken to our death.

  We travelled for less than ten minutes, then were hustled stumbling from the car into the lobby of what I assumed was a projects block. A shuddering graffiti’d lift that stank of urine and hash took us up to the twentieth floor. The Russian checked the landing before we crossed to the unnumbered door of a flat. From a floor below someone was singing with a karaoke machine, Paul McCartney’s ‘Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time’, completely out of tune. ‘Beyond doubt the worst Christmas song ever written,’ New York said to me, quietly. ‘Like a request to God to end the universe. Watch your step there.’

  Inside was dismal second-hand furniture, threadbare carpet, a spartan bathroom with exposed pipes and the side of the tub missing, and a tiny but surprisingly clean blue and white kitchen off the living room. Smells of Chinese take-out and empty beer bottles and stale cigarette smoke. A dartboard broken almost completely in two leaned in a corner. The living room’s one large window gave a view over night-time London: St Paul’s; Canary Wharf; the Eye; the Gherkin. A sprawl of lights under the low soft cloud. The beauty of it hurt my heart for a moment, the way the Christmas tree in the diner used to when my dad turned the fairy lights on for the first time. To the left of the window a glass door opened onto a narrow balcony occupied by a rusty bike frame and a broken clothes rack. It was just after two a.m. The rain had stopped. I thought, This is the way of it: a place turns out to be the place you die.

  They shut us in the living room and went into murmuring confab in the hall. Mainly New York, by the sound of it. Cloquet had turned how terrified he was into simmering fury. He tried the door to the balcony, which wasn’t locked, and did us no good, unless we wanted to jump twenty storeys. Jumping twenty storeys wouldn’t kill me – or Zoë – but even with wulf’s recuperative powers it would be a while before we got up from the concrete. I walked back and forth with Zoë, rocking her. In a minute or two she was asleep. I was thinking about what she meant in this situation. In this situation she meant they could make me do whatever they wanted. There was no end to the things they could make me do. (How come? Hadn’t I hardened my heart to her?) I started thinking about these things. I thought about how slowly time would pass once they began. I thought about how familiar the drab room would become, the broken dartboard, the faux leather couch with the stuffing coming out, the oil stain on the green carpet. I thought how familiar they would become, the two men, the feel of their hands and mouths and cocks, the sound of their voices, the unique smell of their violence. I thought how if they were WOCOP – even ex-WOCOP – they’d have silver ammunition or the means to cut my head off. That meant they’d do whatever they wanted to do knowing that when they’d had enough, when they were sick of me, they could kill me, and that would be that. I imagined Jacqueline showing the footage to my son. I’m sure you must have been thinking maman will be coming for you. Well, as you can see, she won’t be, now.

  I hadn’t realised but while all this was going through my head I’d been scouring the place for any kind of weapon. There was a bread knife in one of the kitchen drawers. A sharp little fruit knife in another. I filled the electric kettle and put it on. That would be boiling water, if I could get to it. There was nothing else. I gave Cloquet the bread knife. He tore the lining of his jacket and slid it in. I tried the fruit knife in my jeans back pocket but it cut into me if I sat down. In the end I put it in my jacket pocket and told myself I’d have to make whatever move before they made me take it off.

  All with a baby strapped to me.

  The kettle switched itself off just as they came back in.

  ‘Okay,’ New York said, taking a seat at the battered dining table and giving us another delighted smile. ‘Who wants to start?’

  The Russian, who’d been poking around in the kitchen, emerged carrying an almost full bottle of Stolichnya and four (odd) glasses. He set them down on the dining table, poured us each a large measure and handed them round. Which he surely wouldn’t do, I thought, if the two of them were going to kill Cloquet then rape, torture and murder me? (Not necessarily. One thing didn’t always mean another. Reality could be serving drinks first. The world was free with its extraordinary juxtapositions. Even the movies had cottoned on. These days you rarely met an on-screen psycho who didn’t hum Bartok or reel off chunks of Paradise Lost.) I knew I was supposed to avoid alcohol when breastfeeding (or rather I knew humans were) but since we were going to die here anyway what difference did it make? I took a big gulp. Instant benevolent fire in my chest. The first liquor since the road to California with Jake. It reminded me of him, brought the raw space where his ghost should’ve been. I thought of meeting him in the afterlife I didn’t believe in. Our dead children wouldn’t be there. They’d be somewhere else. We’d never see them again. He’d say: It wasn’t your fault, Lu. I don’t blame you. But he’d seem strange to me, a version of himself I didn’t know. The version that lied.

  ‘Hey,’ New York said, glass raised. ‘You didn’t give me a chance to say stin iya sas!’

  ‘It’s stin iya mas,’ I said. ‘Unless you’re excluding yourself from the toast.’

  ‘Damn. I always screw that up.’

  ‘What?’ Cloquet said. ‘What does he say?’

  ‘Nothing. He’s saying cheers in Greek.’

  ‘Stin iya mas,’ New York said, and downed his shot in one.

  ‘Do you work for WOCOP or not?’ Cloquet said.

  New York sighed, closed his eyes, opened them. Which meant: I’m trying to be civilised about this, but this person is fucking it up. Or it was a pretence of that, part of a satirically polite persona he adopted for this kind of thing for his or the Russian’s amusement, although the Russian looked as if his amusement circuits had been burned out – along with his capacity to sleep – decades ago. ‘How about this,’ New York said. ‘A radical suggestion: I tell you our story, you tell us yours.’ He looked from Cloquet to me, smiling, always smiling. To Cloquet the smile said: you need to dial it down, motherfucker, because I’m losing patience. To me it said: this schmuck’s going to get you killed – and yes, I’m attracted to you, yes I want you, in that way, but only if it’s mutual. (And since life loves impropriety, wulf’s libido twitched in its sleep, sent the first signal that waking up was on the cards. Of course now. Of course when it was least wanted. Of course when death might already be in the room. I looked away.) ‘I promise you,’ New York said, ‘you’re in zero danger from us. I’d give you the weapons back right now to prove it, but the problem is – ’ looking at Cloquet – ‘there’s a good chance you’d shoot us out of Gallic indignation.’

  ‘You don’t need the knives,’ the Russian said. Soft voice the colour of his starved eyes. ‘But keep them if it makes you feel better.’

  ‘Knives?’ New York said, but the Russian just shook his head. We weren’t going to be any trouble with our knives.

  ‘Oh, right, the kitchen. And the boiling water. I get it. You won’t need any of that. But I understand. No offence taken.’

  Cloquet, standing by the window, had his jacket’s hem in his hands, a tic of his I hadn’t seen for a while. I sat down on the end of the couch. Zoë’s head smelled the way babies’ heads smell, which was one of those things that without warning refreshed or reloaded the fact that she was mine. One of mine. I felt, suddenly, the gulf of time that had
passed since the vampires had taken Lorcan. If these two really were ex-WOCOP maybe they’d know something. If they had information and weren’t interested in killing us I’d give them money for it. A lot of money. I’d fuck them, if that would help. A surprisingly easy decision to make, but pointless, since I couldn’t let myself believe they weren’t going to kill us, whether either of them wanted to fuck me or not.

  ‘Will you tell us who you are?’ I said.

  New York refilled his glass and the Russian’s, then held the bottle out for Cloquet, who let go of his jacket hem but shook his head, no.

  ‘I’m Walker. He’s Mikhail Konstantinov. We used to work for WOCOP. Now we don’t. Now we’re freelance.’

  ‘What do you want us for?’ Cloquet growled.

  ‘Jeez Louise,’ Walker said. ‘It’s lucky we are friendly because otherwise I’d’ve shot you in the nuts by now. Is he always this uptight?’

  This playful shtick of his would have started as a defence against something, his conscience maybe, memories, whatever had happened to him. Now it was part of him, like a hat he never took off. To the people who knew him it would be alarming if he ever did take it off. I groped for a sense of what the relationship between him and Konstantinov was, but there was too much else going on. The Russian was simultaneously intense and remote, like a star seen through a telescope.

  ‘To answer your question,’ Walker said to Cloquet, ‘we don’t want you for anything. We were as surprised to see you at Merryn’s as you were to see us.’ Then when Cloquet visibly didn’t soften: ‘Okay, listen. I get it. You’re suspicious. I’ll go first.’

  I tried to keep hold of the belief that the friendliness was a sadistic ruse, designed to heighten our horror (and so their pleasure) when the moment came for us to realise we’d fallen for it. But the longer Walker talked, the harder it was not to be disarmed. WOCOP, he told us, had split. Ellis’s plot to kill Grainer and key upper-echelon players had provoked a backlash. A programme of ‘identifying and eliminating’ members of the rebel faction had been launched, initially based on intelligence, soon spiralling out into Stalinesque paranoia. Agents who’d had nothing to do with Ellis were ‘exposed’, court-martialled, executed. ‘You know the way it goes,’ he said. ‘People getting arrested for wearing suspicious glasses, for having suspicious haircuts. The organisation’s killed more than two hundred of its own in the last four months.’

  ‘So you were with the rebels?’ I asked. I’d remembered – astonished at my own slowness – that the renegades’ agenda was to avoid redundancy by letting werewolf numbers go up. World Organisation for the Creation of Occult Phenomena. In which case, obviously...

  ‘No,’ Walker said. ‘I mean I got it – Ellis’s logic was sound: the organisation was making itself obsolete – but I was ready to get out anyway. I’d had enough. Plus I couldn’t stand Ellis. He was too white and too wacko. I always imagined him having alien genitals. Like maybe a ball with stalks coming out of it. Or something like an artichoke. Anyway he gave me the royal heebie-jeebies.’

  I was getting an idea of Walker. I couldn’t help it. Some early loss or violence had made the particular form of how he made a living irrelevant to him. He’d been shoved by shock too young into the truth that nothing meant anything. The smile, the delight, the slacker clothes, it all derived from that. That was what the shtick defended against. He could sense me reading this from him. It excited him, but it unnerved him too, took him back to whatever it was that had broken his contract with life in the first place, the thing around which this sad bright pearl of his identity had been wrought. Love. Or death. Or both. Meanwhile a part of me stood off, arms folded, lips pursed, shaking her head at the rest of me, the shambles. Really? This? Now?

  ‘So if you weren’t with the rebels,’ I asked, ‘why’s the organisation after you?’

  Pause. A glance exchanged between him and Konstantinov.

  ‘The guy who took over from Grainer is John Murdoch,’ Walker said. ‘He runs ground operations now. He’s not a fan of mine.’

  Pause.

  ‘It’s purely personal.’

  ‘He slept with Murdoch’s wife,’ Konstantinov said, neutrally.

  ‘Yes, I did,’ Walker said, with a serious face he couldn’t take seriously. ‘And I testify to you here and now that it was a good and honest and beautiful event between two people in a chaotic world. Angela’s a good person. Getting away from that psychopath was the best thing she ever did, and if I helped her do it I’m glad as butter. She’s a beautiful smart complicated spirit and he... isn’t.’ The smile flashed on and off as he was speaking. Here was more information, whether I liked it or not: he’d always had women. Women gravitated to him in spite of themselves. Even when he was a kid at school the little girls would have found themselves exempting him from their exasperation with boys. At fourteen or fifteen there would have been a divorced aunt or local widow, horrified at herself, but nonetheless... Since then he’d accepted it as a gift, like a photographic memory or perfect pitch, compensation for the broken contract with life. There was no cruelty in him. He was a child of Eros. I pictured Murdoch’s wife as an unstable brunette with strappy high heels and confused energies and a quota of crazy things she had to do to get away at last from the toxic marriage. I couldn’t help thinking it probably had been a good thing in the world. For the first time since Merryn’s, I relaxed a little.

  Meanwhile Cloquet was all but levitating with suspicion.

  ‘Anyway,’ Walker continued, ‘Murdoch didn’t appreciate it. He worked a simple frame-up: faked email traffic between us and the rebels. His guys were all set to arrest us but we got a tip-off and got out. Since then Murdoch’s got crazier, and it’s not like he wasn’t gaga to start with. With any luck the suits’ll shut him down, but until they do he’ll keep coming after us and the Purge will continue.’

  ‘What about you?’ I asked Konstantinov. ‘Whose wife did you sleep with?’

  Konstantinov looked at me and I realised I’d said the wrong thing. The room was instantly crammed with my misjudgement. His black eyes spoke of inhuman endurance.

  ‘Go have a smoke, Mike,’ Walker said. ‘I’ll do this.’

  Konstantinov sat still and unblinking for a long moment in which I could feel the room’s wretched furniture and stained walls holding their breath. Then he got up, moved past me – his aura brushed mine – and out through the door onto the balcony, closing it behind him.

  ‘Bad choice of words,’ Walker said. ‘Mike’s got a wife of his own. Married six months ago. Now the vampires have her. Revenge for one of their crew he took out. They’re feeding on her just enough so she stays alive. They’ve been sending him video footage.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘That’s awful. I’m sorry.’ I pictured Konstantinov’s wife as a pale, dark-haired woman, ballerina skinny with eyes as black as his, someone most men would think plain. You could see in his drained face that for him the sun rose and set with her. And now she was a vending machine for vampires. Video footage. I could picture that, too, along with all the other footage I could picture, of my son on the brushed-steel table, the wire going into his eye, the coven of doctors, Jacqueline’s smile of happy concentration.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said again.

  ‘You weren’t to know,’ Walker said. ‘He won’t hold it against you.’

  Feeding on her just enough so she stays alive. Naturally the language of feeding had brought my nature into the room. Walker had to keep reminding himself what I was. The bright sexual man in him came towards me, smiling the dazzling smile, then got yanked back by the human: She’s a werewolf, for Christ’s sake. Are you insane? To which the bright sexual man, turning towards me again with the smile that wouldn’t be suppressed, said, Yeah, maybe. It was hard to look him in the eye. A little Manhattan holy spirit of inevitability hovered above us. All the sex I’d had since Jake had been bad-tempered and bleak. This was an invitation to something else. Wulf stirred, yes, but so did the long-neglected human female, the st
upid girl who hadn’t been honestly loved-up in what felt like an age. There was no end to my inappropriateness, apparently.

  ‘Which vampires have her?’ Cloquet said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Which vampires have his wife?’

  ‘Jacqueline Delon’s crew. The Disciples of Remshi.’

  ‘The what?’

  Cloquet moved to refill his glass – then remembered we were still technically under guard.

  ‘Go ahead,’ Walker said. ‘Just don’t do anything athletic, will you? I’m exhausted. Here, take a look at this.’ He pulled out his iPhone, tapped, scrolled, swiped, handed it to Cloquet. ‘Ever seen that before?’

  Cloquet stared at the image on the screen, then passed it to me. A red cuneiform-style symbol on a black background. The emblem Jacqueline and her friends had on their jackets.

  ‘They were wearing it,’ I said.

  ‘Who were?’

  ‘The vampires who took my son. Jacqueline Delon’s vampires.’

  ‘Your son?’

  I told him what had happened. All of it, without hesitation. Partly out of jet-lag, partly out of attraction, partly out of shared geography. Mostly because I’d had all I could take of not being able to trust anyone. ‘It’s what we were doing at Merryn’s,’ I said. ‘We thought he’d know where they’d taken him. But by the time we got there Merryn was dead. The vampires got there first.’

  ‘I can tell you what Merryn would have told you,’ Walker said. ‘He would have told you Jacqueline’s vampires were at a former winery in Provence. But that doesn’t help you. They cleared out. They found out Merryn was leaking intelligence.’

  ‘Merryn was a double agent?’

  ‘He worked for WOCOP for years, until this latest thing with the rebels. He favoured the breakaway group, naturally. The twilight zone was his life.’