The Last

8

Maikoa's phone was off when I called her, which meant she was either at the WOCOP offices or dead. I couldn't shuck the conviction they were onto her. An hour after Rao's departure (I spent the bulk of breakfast nursing my keening plums on the bed while she ate-with meticulous greed, since she allows herself only one fry-up a month) I'd arrived at the conclusion that Alaron's visit was simply to reinforce the story of how they'd found me. The man's mental style-oblique, tangential, possibly stoned-made him hard to read but there was surely something hokey about the way he'd volunteered that We fluked it, you know, finding you. The only motive that made sense was WOCOP's desire to preserve the illusion that Maikoa's cover was intact. Which meant it wasn't.

I passed the afternoon supine with a cold flannel pressed to my forehead, tracking my gonads' slow return to quiescence, CNN on the plasma screen for the lulling white noise of the news. I'm immune to news, the news, breaking news, rolling news, news flashes. Live long enough and nothing is news. "The News" is "the new things." That's fine, until a hundred years go by and you realise there are no new things, only deep structures and cycles that repeat themselves through different period details. I'm with Yeats and his gyres. Even The News knows there's no real news, and goes to ever greater lengths to impart urgent novelty to its content. Have Your Say , that's the latest inanity, newscasters reading out viewer emails: "And Steve in Birkenhead writes: 'Our immigration laws are the laughing stock of the world. This is the Feed the World mentality gone mad ...' " I can think back to a time when something like this would have annoyed or at least amused me, that the democracy Westerners truly got excited about was the one that made every blogging berk a critic and every frothing fascist a political pundit. But now I feel nothing, just quiet separation. In fact the news already feels postapocalyptically redundant to me, as if (silent dunes outside, insects the size of cars) I'm sitting in one of the billions of empty homes watching video footage of all the stuff that used to matter, wondering how anyone ever thought it did.

"I had a visitor," I told Maikoa from the Zetter's bar, when, after eight in the evening, I got through to him at last. "Alaron was here this morning."

"I heard," she said. "I'm not surprised. Hunt consensus is you need your nose rubbed in it."

"That's not what worries me. It played as an effort to deliver the official 'how we found you' story. Which means that's not how they found me."

"Sans, no. You're being paranoid. I spoke to the French chap myself."

"What?"

"The twit with the Magnum. Staz. They brought him in for questioning. I was there during the interrogation. He was following you. Had been following you for a week in Paris."

I sipped my Scotch. The bar was low-lit, dark tones and soft furnishings, a carefully designed atmosphere of deserved indulgence. The long white calves of a moody brunette sitting with one leg crossed over the other on a high stool opposite me offered a momentary distraction. She was doodling in her cocktail with a straw. In the film version I'd go over and open with a gambit of jaded brilliance. Only in films is a woman alone at a bar actually a woman alone at a bar. The thought added itself to the mental racket I was sick of. Every Hollywood movie now is part of the index of Western exhaustion. I had a vision of my death like a lone menhir in an empty landscape. You just walked towards it. Simple as that. The peace of wrapping your arms around cold stone. Peace at last.

"What for?" I asked.

I heard the shick of Maikoa's malachite Zippo and her first intemperate drag. "That's what we're not clear on," she said. "He claims he's a free agent with a grudge against werewolves, but he's been fornicating with Kimiko Delon for the last year so it can't be that simple. Trouble is he's somewhat gaga. High as a kite when we picked him up. Farrell told me he'd enough coke on him to get a horse airborne. My guess is even cleaned up he's borderline psychotic. In any case Madame Delon's the last person to be ordering a hit on a werewolf. She loves you lot." She caught himself. "Sorry, sorry, sorry. Bad choice of words."