Immediately, I subsided, stood down, shook my head dear-oh-dear fashion, a portion of dignity regained. The table I’d woken up on was, I now saw, a huge metal crate. I sauntered back to it and lay down, hands folded on my belly, ankles crossed. Jacqueline laughed, with charming subdued musicality.

“Fuck me ,” the baby-faced skinhead said.

“He’s playing with you,” Jacqueline said. Then to the Tranquilizer: “For God’s sake, don’t be such a baby. Turn off the cameras.”

Apparent nonchalance notwithstanding, I was booming with Hunger. And in a cage. Mentally I flashed forward a few hours to the cold turkey scene from every heroin-addict movie. Please, man, just somethin, you gotta give me some thin. I’m not gonna make it. Oh God, it hurts …

Jacqueline stepped forward and wrapped her red-nailed fingers (blouse-matching) around the bars of the cage. “Jacob,” she said, in English, “I’m so sorry for all this. It’s not what it appears, I promise. I know you can’t answer me, so just let me talk for a moment. My name is Jacqueline Delon. I’ve wanted to speak with you for some time. I have a proposition for you. But that can wait. You must be wondering where you are.”

I didn’t move. The cage was bolted to the floor. Other than a few wooden crates, some heaps of rope, rolls of tarp and half a dozen oil drums the hold was empty.

“You’re on board the freight ship Hecate and we’re en route to Biarritz where I have a comfortable place and where I hope we can have a mutually rewarding conversation. Aside from this current indignity, for which I apologise again, I intend you absolutely no harm or discomfort, and as soon as you’re no longer a risk to myself or my crew, which should be”—she looked at her watch—“in approximately eight hours, your liberty will be restored to you, and I will personally do everything in my power to compensate you for this inconvenience. In the meantime, as a peace offering, please accept my gift to you. You’ll find it in the container you’re lying on.”

She stepped away from the cage and said quietly, “Let’s go.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“The cameras?”

“Leave them off. I’ve got what I wanted.”

The men went ahead of her. At the hold door she turned and looked back at me. “I’m so excited to meet you at last,” she said. “You’re everything I hoped you would be. I know this can be the start of something exceptional.”

After she’d gone I forced myself to lie still, listening to the Hunger turning the volume up in my blood, heartbeat the buzz-thud of a car with the stereo’s bass set to max.

Lie still .

An idiotic injunction.

Lie still .

Because you and I know.

Lie still .

What’s underneath us in the box.

22

IT’S NO ACCIDENT that the great moral philosophers invariably wrote on aesthetics, too. Figuring out what made something Right (or Wrong) was akin to figuring out what made something Beautiful (or Ugly). These days scientists are in on the act: At the unprovable cosmological fringes beauty swings it. Now mathematical models are like supermodels: They have grace, symmetry, elegance. It’s hardly surprising. Modernity having done away with Absolute Moral Values and Objective Reality, there’s only beauty left . What theory won’t we espouse if it’s beautiful? What atrocity won’t we excuse?

Or what instinct (to stick, as Madeline would have it, to the story) won’t we overcome?

For a while, standing with my warm lethal hairy hands wrapped around the cold bars of my cage, I resisted opening the container. Truth was I felt slightly seasick. The tip of my snout was dry. Beyond my confines the full moon made its inexhaustible suggestion, sent down its unbankruptable love, weirdly mingled just then with the memory of Jacqueline Delon’s thin face and tightly red-wrapped breasts. In the meantime, as a peace offering, please accept my gift to you . Clearly she’d moved beyond customary limits. Courtesy of wealth. You’re everything I hoped you would be . The remark was an affront, subject and object in each other’s seats. I live up to her expectations? Who the fuck did she think she was?

This, of course, was the embarrassing heart of the matter. I was an animal who’d been caught, caged and observed on camera. My scrotum shrank from the shame of having been seen changing—worse, of having been filmed changing. And now left to perform, to do what it was in my nature to do. I was l’objet d’une voyeuse . Even the lion knows his debasement, mounting his mate while the bored zoo crowd looks on. To kill and eat here, now, in captivity and on show (I suspected the cameras despite Madame’ s instruction; I suspected other cameras, CCTV, spyholes) would be a rich and vulgar degradation, an aesthetic (dear Maddy) offence.

Thus the Hunger got its first inkling that resistance was on the table. You’re kidding, right? the Hunger said. Then a little more sternly, You are kidding, right?

I moved quickly to the container and threw open the lid.

Inside was a naked, white, epicene young man of perhaps twenty, gagged, bound, and judging by his pupils heavily drugged. Dirty blond greasy hair and tiny nipples. Junkie arms and a long thin penis. Whatever the drugs they weren’t proof against the vision I must have presented. His sore-looking eyes first focused then bugged. He roared behind his gag. An odour of fear on his nostril breath like bitters.

Oh, the Hunger said. Oh you sweet, sweet thing.

In their cellular prison my devoured dead roused. (A consequence of eating people: The ingested crave company. Every new victim adds a voice to the monthly chorus.) Ganymede’s ankles and wrists were blood-bruised where he’d fought his restraints. Blue circulatory webbing showed through the white skin of his belly. Terror’s mouth-watering secretions crept from his pores. My salivary glands duly discharged. In the face of such … such meat the thought of eight hours ahead without feeding made my teeth and nails hurt. My hair ached. Mentally, weakness worked its angle: Resistance would be futile. I’d crack, I’d kill him and devour him and Jacqueline Delon would watch while getting head or smoking a cigarette or eating a crème brûlée or filing her nails.

And yet.

There remained the profound aesthetic repugnance. Or less loftily, self-disgust. At getting so feebly captured. At finding myself the Entertainment. At the decades spent sick of Being a Werewolf. At carrying on regardless. At costing Harley his life. (His poor head must still be in the Vectra’s boot. The locals would notice a smell. It would make the news, pass to the world via the anchorman’s autocued disbelief: “In the Welsh village of Trefor today police discovered the severed head of …” Christ, the exhausting predictability of it all.)