In the shower Madeline adjusted the jet option to “massage” and let out a gasp. It occurred to me that Ellis was on drugs. His face was damp.

“We fluked it, you know,” he said. “Finding you. An agent from France came over following a suspect, turns out the suspect was following you. We thought you were still in Paris.”

At the absolute top of my held breath I said very quickly: “Why didn’t the agent kill me?”

“Come on, Jake. You’re Strictly Grainer. You know that. All the Hunt knows it, all WOCOP. It’s like one of the Five Pillars.”

The pain was diversifying: stabbings in the abdomen; a dark red headache; something devious and knifey in the colon; the need to vomit. I got up on one elbow and released a burp, which felt like a little miracle.

“I won’t lie to you,” Ellis said. “I’ll be sorry to see you go. I don’t like endings, not on this scale, not of an era. ” One of Madeline’s stockings lay next to his hand. He fingered it, idly, with his awful white asparagus digits, seemed for the first time to be reconstructing my night. It was irrelevant to him. I remembered Harley’s description of him: magnificently abstracted, carries with him an inscrutable scheme of things next to which your own feels paltry. You have to remind yourself it’s just because he’s half insane. “There’s a literary anticlimax available,” Ellis continued, discarding the stocking. “You and Grainer come face-to-face and he realises that killing you will take away his purpose, his identity, so he lets you live. I’ve discussed it with him. He didn’t dismiss it straight away.”

I’d been exploring positional alternatives while he spoke and had ended up (again I say God being dead, irony still rollickingly alive) in exactly the attitude Madeline had adopted last night for receipt of buggery. Humour lightens. “But he did dismiss it,” I helium-squeaked.

“He did dismiss it. He considered it, he weighed it, he dismissed it. Filial honour trumps all.”

Filial honour. Forty years ago I killed and ate Grainer’s father. Grainer was ten at the time. There’s always someone’s father, someone’s mother, someone’s wife, someone’s son. This is the problem with killing and eating people. One of the problems.

“That’s a shame,” I wheezed. Ellis didn’t laugh. (He doesn’t laugh, Harley had told me. It’s not that he doesn’t get it. It’s that amusement no longer makes him laugh. He’s transcended too much.)

“I agree,” Ellis said. “It’s a goddamned crying shame. But unfortunately it’s not my decision.”

With monumental belatedness I wondered what he was doing here, manifestly not putting a silver bullet in my brain or lopping off my head. The question troubled me, my other self, the one that wasn’t filling with joy at having just managed to breathe out slightly.

Someone knocked. “That’ll be your breakfast,” Ellis said. “I’ll leave you to it.” He got up and, stepping over me again, opened the door. I heard him say: “Take it in, would you?” Then he was gone.

A young hair-gelled man in Zetter livery entered with Madeline’s Full English on an enormous tray.

“Cramp,” I gasped. “I’m fine. Just put it on the bed.”

8

HARLEY’S PHONE WAS off when I called him, which meant he was either at the WOCOP offices or dead. I couldn’t shuck the conviction they were onto him. An hour after Madeline’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 Ellis’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 Harley’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 Harley from the Zetter’s bar, when, after eight in the evening, I got through to him at last. “Ellis was here this morning.”

“I heard,” he 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.”

“Jake, no. You’re being paranoid. I spoke to the French chap myself.”

“What?”

“The twit with the Magnum. Cloquet. 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.