We both knew this was a juvenile phase that would pass, or, if it became a monolithic perversion, cause trouble, choke the sexual stream, breed pestilence. For now, however, she’d looked at me in rousing collusion, yes, I know . How not? How should she, six victims deep, not know the joy of the fall beneath the Fall?

The floor’s chill had become unpleasant. I got up and took a hot shower. I wanted to go back to her clean and put my nose in her cunt, my tongue in her sweet young asshole, the cunning animal scent down there that answered the years of asking. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they loved it . But all the while and all the while and all the while the world. We couldn’t stay here. That business with the dart didn’t make sense. Grainer’s days of live specimen capture were long over. Although of course it had been Ellis, not Grainer, after Alfonse in the desert. In any case we’d have to move. Dumb to have come to Manhattan in the first place, where among the multitudes surveillance was harder to spot.

I brushed my teeth and went back into the bedroom just as she was wrapping up her call. She looked at me. We didn’t laugh, but if it was a movie that’s what the script would have settled for as a way of showing it was the kind of thing where seeing each other again after ten minutes in separate rooms was a return to the only reality that mattered.

“You’re all scrubbed,” she said.

“Maximal contrast. I want your dirt.”

“Yikes. Okay.”

I went to the bed and lay down next to her. “Tonight we can luxuriate,” I said. “Tomorrow we have things to do.”

39

PARANOIA MADE THE decisions over the next few days. We met only four times, never in the same place. She had to prep Nikolai for her absence (he was prone to quarrelling with Ambidextrous Alison, prone to interfering ) and I had logistical matters to attend to. California number plates, an array of wigs, spectacles, false moustaches, centrally the procurement of a fake driving licence for and the transfer of assets worth approximately twenty million dollars to Talulla Mary Apollonia Demetriou. The po-faced spirit of political correctness put its head around the door but my girl dismissed it. Obviously I should feel whored-out or patronised, she said. Well, I don’t. I barely heard her. Even with the recent global mugging twenty million’s a minor prang in my ride. It’s walking-around money, I told her. I need more time to sort you out properly. Offshore. Swiss. This is just in case of … Yes. Well. The bad smell around the transfer of lucre was that it smacked of providing for her after my death . Neither of us could quite keep that out. Therefore we gave it its moment in the spotlight. I plan on staying alive, I said. But in case I don’t you’ll have what you need. Just promise me you’ll always buy beautiful underwear. You drive a hard bargain, she said, but okay.

However, the paranoia. I had business lawyers in Manhattan (four of my companies have their head offices here) but insisted on meeting for instruction and signatures out of town. (Such meetings are a palaver. My face is rubber masked—I’ve been Richard Nixon; Marilyn; the Wolfman—and I affect one of a dozen accents. The relevant identity’s established first by code numbers and secondly via fingerprint-recognition technology in a portable gizmo. All tiresome, and used only when there’s no alternative.) I hired a car from JFK and drove to Philadelphia. An opportunity, I deemed, to check for surveillance or pursuit. The results were uncertain. No sign of the undead, but I thought I made a couple of WOCOP agents in Philly. I left the car at the airport and took a flight to Boston, dodged around the city for twenty-four hours, then plane-hopped for three days getting increasingly dehydrated: Detroit; Indianapolis; D.C.; Philadelphia. I picked up the car, drove back to JFK and took a cab into the city.

Where I all but bumped into a vampire.

I was getting out of the cab on Fifth Avenue and he was exiting a deli, tearing the cellophane off a pack of American Spirits. The reek hit me when I was halfway out of the car. I went down on one knee on the sidewalk, an impromptu genuflection. Looked up to see him stopped in his tracks with an expression of outraged revulsion. I didn’t recognise him. Tall, long-faced, with short thick hair dyed deep purple. Skinny jeans, leather three-quarter-length coat, orange Converse boots. Humanly you’d say mid-twenties cyberpunk. I got up off my knee. For a few moments we just stood and stared at each other, gorges rising. He looked as if this was new to him, this business of how Jesus Christingly awful running into a werewolf made you feel. Manhattan, needless to say, flowed around us, honked, glimmered, flashed, steamed, whistled, whooped and subterraneanly shuddered. Eventually, shaking his head, he backed, turned, and stumbled away downtown.

“An accident, right?” Talulla said. “I mean he wasn’t following you?” We’d moved to the Waldorf Astoria, a suite overlooking Park Avenue. I was Matt Arnold again. Couldn’t rest easy in any of the aliases.

“I don’t believe he was,” I said. “I’m getting it. I’ve assumed all the vampires know about the virus. They don’t. This is one lot looking for leverage. Why am I so slow?”

Talulla sat in one of the room’s red rococo armchairs with her feet up on a footstool. We were playing this, our condition, what we were , with bright circumspection. The hideous central fact informed everything we did but only took full unironic ownership of us when we fucked. In the sack wulf was stinkily eloquent, the odorous truth around which everything else fainted away. Out of the sack we conceded it like a childless couple who’d agreed to invent a fictional son, the premise, now that I thought of it (God still being dead, etc.), of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It was as if each of us was daring the other to admit it wasn’t true. Actually it was her daring me. Or asking me. It reminded me how new she was to the Curse that she had such willingness to believe the whole thing—changing into a monster once a month and killing and eating people—might yet turn out to be a horrible dream. We’d avoided the question of what she’d gone to England for, though I knew: Five victims, however widely she’d spread them across the U.S., had started to feel too close. You go to another country—get in, do it, get out—the police are looking for a native, you’re long gone. England because they spoke English. You want maximum fluency. She knew I’d worked this out. It introduced me to the guilty version of her face, the look an anchor-woman would have on air when someone in her earpiece says he knows all about the abortions or kinky photos, a slight swelling of the cheeks and the mouth momentarily without its guiding will. Sexually becoming, of course, the ghost of Eve’s look, lips still wet with the juice of forbidden fruit.