Moving low, I worked my way silently through the trees, back past where Cloquet and I had first left the drive and on to the very edge of the conifers. From here twenty feet of open ground separated me from the garages. Darkness ample to foil the naked eye but if one of the guards should chance to raise a pair of night-vision binoculars … I went across in an absurd tiptoeing sprint, got my back to the wall below the mezzanine’s overhang, caught my breath. An accommodating deus ex machina would have been to find one of the garage doors open, and inside the garage a second door to the villa’s basement. I did check. All three were locked. I wondered what Jacqueline drove, got a mental snapshot of her in a ’65 ivory Mercedes convertible, red leather interior matching her lipstick and nails.

A pleasing image, but not helpful. I hunted for something to throw. You throw something and according to screen fictions the noise takes at least one guard out of position to investigate. There was nothing to throw. What had I expected? Loose plant pots? Rocks? Empties? Some goddamned thing. Welcome to the downside of dissolving into the flow.

In the end I threw Cloquet’s binoculars. Up across the mezzanine onto the steps on the eastern side of the terrace, where they landed with a (surely?) intriguing clatter. A guard or better still guards would come to check it out, leaving the stairs on the western side free for my stealthy ascent.

“Hear that?”

“Heard it. Call it in.”

I was already on my speedy-tiptoe way (something like the goosestep touchdown celebrations of American footballers) to the western stairs.

Clear. I passed the mezzanine and since there was no reason not to hurried on up the next flight to the level of olive and thyme just below the cactus garden and the villa itself. There, hunkered in a well of shadow between balustrade and trees, I halted to take stock. One guard had indeed descended to the mezzanine, automatic rifle readied, and was cautiously poking about. The roof guard was scanning with (night-vision!) binoculars, but looking in entirely the wrong direction. The second ground-floor guard was less than ten feet away, just above me.

“It’s a pair of fucking binoculars,” the investigating guard said. “Did you call it in?”

“Yes, I called it in.”

“I think someone’s in the woods,” the roof guard called down. “Definite movement in the woods. Nine o’clock.”

Movement in the woods? Was it possible Cloquet had got free?

“Who’s with the boss?”

“Marcel.”

“What can you see?”

“Movement.”

“What kind of fucking movement?”

The guard nearest me was a coward, God bless him. He should have done an immediate sweep of the western side. Instead he went to the top of the eastern stairs and called down to his mate. “Get back up here.”

“Movement in more than one place.”

“What is it?”

This was my chance. Not one of them was looking my way. I crawled out from my hiding place and leaped swiftly—balletically in fact, albeit with neck-tendons straining—up the last set of stone stairs.

At precisely the moment I reached the top a door in the wall of glass opened and the guinea pig–faced goon from the ship—Marcel, evidently—stepped out directly opposite me.

30

NATURALLY WE LOOKED at each other. Naturally the single second that passed was more than enough time to enjoy a purified intimacy, to note each other’s details and feel the exact weight of each other’s history. Naturally our essences, peremptorily denuded, exchanged a stunned glance.

Then I shot him in the face.

It was a near thing. A near thing that he didn’t shoot me first, I mean. His weapon’s muzzle was on its way up, certainly. I was aware of this empathically, as if it were my own arm raising it. In fact my own arm, as if it were the weight on the end of a piece of gym equipment worked by someone else, came up in a perfect 45-degree arc to level the Luger at his head, whereupon my hand—another part of a precision mechanism in someone else’s control—pulled the trigger.

The silenced bullet went into his forehead (a large messily applied bindi ) and he collapsed with barely a sound. Jacqueline Delon, in a silk dress the colour of buttermilk, stood in the room a few feet behind him. She was wincing and her shoulders were hunched, as if she’d just heard someone drop a priceless piece of glassware. A quick check to my right revealed the two ground-floor guards now both with night-vision goggles trained on the trees. They hadn’t heard.

Nil time to think. I sprang across the patio, pulled Marcel’s body in from the doorway and closed the plate glass behind me. This was the lounge we’d had our first drink in that morning, and aside from Jacqueline, myself and the late Marcel it was empty. Mme Delon’s shoulders came down slightly. A gesture with the Luger made her position plain: If she made a sound, I’d shoot her. I did shoot people. Witness Marcel here. Her eyes said she understood. Her shoulders came all the way down. She relaxed. “My goodness,” she said. “I thought I’d lost you forever.”

“No horseshit, please. I know about the vampire deal. I’m here for Quinn’s book and the stone. Vault in the basement. No time to lose. Chop-chop. Yes?”

She raised her eyebrows. There was music playing softly. Dusty Springfield’s “No Easy Way Down.” Also an unusually strong scent of patchouli. It hadn’t smelled like that this morning.

“It’s not quite so straightforward,” she said. She was making what looked like an effort not to really look at me, or indeed at anything in particular. Outside one of the guards said: “No, Marcel’s with her. We need two more up here right now for a full perimeter sweep. Copy?” I went to her and grabbed her by her hair and put the gun under her chin, a move which required dropping the javelin at my feet. “Don’t fuck about. Please . Let’s go. Right now.”

“You misunderstand me,” she said. “I don’t have the book. Or the stone.”

“Since this morning. I think not.”

“It’s true. They’re in someone else’s possession.”

“Just for a laugh,” I said, “whose?”

Certain tensions rustle up clairvoyance. I knew she was going to look up, over my left shoulder, behind me. She looked up, over my left shoulder, behind me. “His,” she said.

I took a moment to concede there was no point saying, You don’t seriously expect me to fall for that, do you? Then I turned around.