The beauty of chronic ambivalence is that even tiny shifts of detail have the power to tip the scales. Jacqueline turned the shower off and exhaled, heavily, and the sound rushed me up out of my stupor. Suddenly the uncertainty of my status here—was I a prisoner or not?—was intolerable. I have Quinn’s book . She wasn’t lying (and even now the thought of it within reach after all these years was like a violent drop in blood pressure) but I couldn’t stand the thought of simply waiting to see how things played out . With the abrupt cessation of the water’s flow and that one female sigh the weeks of passivity caught up with me and yanked me to my feet (without intending to, I’d gone back to the bed and sat down) in a contained paroxysm of self-disgust. I crossed the soft carpet, picked up my overcoat from where I’d dropped it by the door, then quietly let myself out of the room.

27

JUST WALK OUT OF HERE was all I had. Not much, but enough. Take her at her word and see how far I got before someone stopped me. Before someone tried stopping me. That was what I wanted, something concrete to launch myself at, physically, partly for the relief of not having to think, partly to get out from under the weight of shame that had accumulated. She makes a fool of you and you lick her hand. Holds up the baby toy of Quinn’s book and you dribble and coo. Meanwhile it wasn’t painless and it wasn’t quick.

The house was solid silence. If there were staff they were hidden, though there was no mistaking the weird protoconsciousness of CCTV following me from room to empty room. Behind the butch front I was still talking myself out of looking for Quinn’s journal. It wouldn’t be visible, and if it was it wouldn’t be accessible. And in any case what was the point? Suppose I found it and it said werewolves came on a silver ship out of the sky five thousand years ago, or were magicked up out of a burning hole in the ground by a Sumerian wizard, or were bred by impregnating women with lupine seed—so what? Whatever the origin of my species it would no more make cosmic sense than the origin of any other. The days of making sense, cosmic or otherwise, are long over. For the monster as for the earthworm as for the man the world hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain, and we are here as on a darkling plain … I found the lounge, opened one of the glass doors and stepped outside.

The house was built, I now saw, on the flat summit of a series of landscaped terraces. At the front a little red-earthed cactus garden led via white stone steps (one flight on the eastern side, one on the western) down to a tier of olive and cypress interspersed with lavender and thyme, with more steps down to a paved mezzanine over the garages, beyond which the white gravel driveway through the dark evergreens began.

I stood at the top of the first flight and scanned the grounds. No one visible. The indoor silence continued out here, gravid, surveillance rich. I pictured goons manning a closed-circuit console. He’s just exited the lounge, Madame. Do we intercept? Not yet. Is everyone in position? Good. Wait for my command.

In less than half a minute, unmolested, I stood on the driveway. The sun had dropped below the top floor of the house and the little sweat of self-contempt I’d worked up was cooling on my skin. Ahead the conifers made a dark green resinous tunnel, an odour like a nightmarish overdose of Christmas. I began walking.

Off the drive a floor of dead needles and the firs embracing like mourners overhead. A memory of being in my mother’s wardrobe as a child, the thrill of secret enclosure. Presumably a Freudian enactment of a return to the womb. The realisation that I hadn’t thought of my mother for years. In a universe sans afterlife the dead soon become negligible. Unless they’re the dead you’ve killed and eaten. Then you are the afterlife, the overcrowded spirit prison, the packed ghost hotel.

I walked slowly with my full-of-thinking head down—yet when the attack came I was prepared for it. In spite of myself recent events had rebooted the defence systems, dusted down the schema of combat. Jake in reverie at a stately pace, yes, but with aura madly vigilant, trip-switched, motion-sensored, hair-triggered, so that when the figure launched itself from the trees’ murk I was ludicrously ready.

It happened very fast, the reversal. One moment he was barely arm’s length from me, silver-tipped javelin on a collision course with my chest, the next (the silver forced a rush of sickness, as if I’d looked down to see my feet an inch from the cliff edge) he was on his belly groaning into the gravel. There had been a vertiginous second when I grabbed the weapon but I burned through it, snatched the thing from him, spun it Little John–style and struck low to take his shins out from under him. Since he’d flipped facedown with his legs invitingly parted I kicked him hard in the balls—terrible squish of testes on bone—then with some irritation at how inadequate a release this had been put my foot on the back of his neck and jabbed the point an inch or so into his left buttock. He wriggled, soundlessly, since he couldn’t breathe. I removed the spear and gave him a second jab next to the first. More silent contortion. I removed it a second time, got my foot under his hip, hoofed him over onto his back. Recognised the big-lipped young man formerly armed with a Magnum, Paul Cloquet. Wearing the same trench coat, the same ridiculous mascara. His right hand was now grubbily bandaged.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said. “You?”

Speaking was temporarily beyond him, what with the testicular trauma and ass-stabbing. He brought his knees up and rolled over onto his side, facing the tips of my shoes. I checked him for further weaponry, found none. Instead a gold cocaine tin and spoon, a crumpled pack of Marlboro reds, a copper Zippo, loose matches, an iPhone, a pair of binoculars, a hip flask, a credit card–filled wallet and five hundred euros in cash. Also, touchingly, a pack of cashew nuts. Since he was going nowhere I took a minute to establish there weren’t accomplices lurking. The forest’s lush consciousness said no, just this nut job. We were in quiet partnership against the purely human, me and the forest. Nature livens to the latent animal, concedes you contain a divine fragment of the pantheistic whole, that you are, at least in part, part of it. A mere domestic dog lolloping through the woods knows this, feels it, is happy.

“Well?” I said, returning. “Let’s hear it.”

He closed his kohled eyes, spent what seemed to me an inordinately long time parting and bringing together the Jaggerish lips over the excellent large teeth. Shook his head, slowly: Can’t talk yet. The balls. Must wait for the balls. I got down on my haunches and began slowly rubbing his back. It was what I’d wished someone could’ve done for me when Ellis mashed my nuts that morning at the Zetter. As is the way of it once two men have shared the intimacy of violence, Cloquet took the gesture as if it were the most natural thing in the world. His eyes opened.