The Damnation Game (20 page)

“Well, stranger,” said Toy, “and how are you doing?”

“I’m OK,” Marty said. Toy looked as if he hadn’t slept in a long while. “And you?”

“I’ll survive.”

“Any idea of what’s going on?”

Toy offered a wry smile. “Not really,” he said, “I’ve never been a moneyman. Hate the breed. Weasels.”

“Everyone’s saying it’s a disaster.”

“Oh, yes,” he said with equanimity, “I think it probably is.”

Marty’s face fell. He’d been hoping for some words of reassurance.

Toy caught his discomfort, and its origins. “Nothing terrible’s going to happen,” he said, “as long as we stay levelheaded. You’ll still be in a job, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“It did cross my mind.”

“Don’t let it.” Toy put his hand on Marty’s shoulder. “If I thought things looked that bad, I’d tell you.”

“I know. I just get jittery.”

“Who doesn’t?” Toy tightened his grip on Marty. “What say the two of us go on the town when the worst of this is over?”

“I’d like to.”

“Ever been to the Academy Casino?”

“Never had the money.”

“I’ll take you. We’ll lose some of Joe’s fortune for him, eh?”

“Sounds good to me.”

The anxiety still lingered on Marty’s face.

“Look,” said Toy, “it’s not your fight. You understand me? Whatever happens from now on, it won’t be your fault. We’ve made some mistakes along the way, and now we’ve got to pay for them.”

“Mistakes?”

“Sometimes people don’t forgive, Marty.”

“All this” — Marty spread a hand to take in the whole circus — “because people don’t forgive?”

“Take it from me. It’s the best reason in the world.”

It struck Marty that Toy had become an outsider of late; that he wasn’t the pivotal figure in the old man’s worldview that he had been. Did that explain the sour look that had crept across his weary face?

“Do you know who’s responsible?” Marty asked.

“What do boxers know?” Toy said with an unmistakable trace of irony; and Marty was suddenly certain the man knew everything.

T
he panic days stretched into a week without any sign of letup. The faces of the advisers changed, but the smart suits and the smart talk remained the same. Despite the influx of new people, Whitehead had become increasingly laxer with his security arrangements. Marty was required to be with the old man less and less; the crisis seemed to have put all thoughts of assassination out of Papa’s head.

The period was not without its surprises. On the first Sunday Curtsinger took Marty aside and undertook a labored seduction speech that began with boxing, moved laterally to the pleasures of inter-male physicality, and ended up with a straight cash offer. “Just half an hour; nothing elaborate.” Marty had guessed what was in the air several minutes before Curtsinger came clean, and had prepared a suitably polite refusal. They parted amicably enough. Such diversions aside, it was a listless time. The rhythm of the house had been broken, and it was impossible to establish a fresh one. The only way Marty could preserve his sanity was by keeping out of the house as much as he could. He ran a great deal that week, often chasing his tail around and around the perimeter of the estate until an exhaustion fugue set in, and he could go back to his room, threading his way through the well-dressed dummies who loitered in every corridor. Upstairs, behind a door that he happily locked (to keep them out, not to keep himself in) he would shower and sleep for long hours the deep, dreamless sleep he enjoyed.

C
arys had no such liberty. Since the night the dogs had found Mamoulian she had taken it into her head, on occasion, to play the spy. Why this was, she wasn’t certain. She’d never been much interested in goings-on at the Sanctuary. Indeed she’d actively avoided contact with Luther, and Curtsinger, and all the rest of her father’s cohorts. Now, however, strange imperatives stirred her without warning: to go into the library, or into the kitchen or the garden, and simply watch. She got no pleasure out of this activity. Much that she heard she found impossible to understand; much more was simply the vacuous gossip of financial fishwives. Nevertheless she would sit for hours, until some vague appetite was satisfied, and then she’d move on, perhaps to listen in on another debate. Some of the conversationalists knew who she was; to those who didn’t she offered the plainest of introductions. Once her credentials had been established nobody questioned her presence.

She also went to see Lillian and the dogs at that dispiriting compound behind the house. It wasn’t because she liked the animals, she simply felt impelled to see them, for the sake of seeing; to look at the locks and the cages and at the pups playing around their mother. In her mind she charted the position of the kennels relative to the fence and to the house, pacing it out in case she needed to find them in the dark. Why she would ever need that facility escaped her.

In these trips she was careful not to be seen by Martin, or Toy, or worst of all, her father. It was a game she was playing, though its precise purpose was a mystery. Maybe she was making a map of the place. Was that why she walked from one end of the house to the other several times, checking and rechecking its geography, working out the length of the corridors, memorizing the way the rooms let on to each other? Whatever the reason, this foolish business answered some unspoken need in her, and when it was done, and only then, would that need pronounce itself satisfied, and let her be for a while. By the end of the week she knew the house as she never had before; she’d been in every room except that one room of her father’s, which was forbidden even to her. She had checked all the entrances and exits, stairways and passages, with the thoroughness of a thief.

Strange days; strange nights. Was this insanity, she began to wonder?

O
n the second Sunday—eleven days into the crisis—Marty was summoned to the library. Whitehead was there, looking somewhat tired perhaps, but not substantially cowed by the enormous pressure he was under. He was dressed for the outdoors; the fur-collared coat he’d worn the first day, on that symbolic visit to the kennels.

“I haven’t left the house in several days, Marty,” he announced, “and my head’s getting stale. I think we should take a walk, you and I.”

“I’ll fetch a jacket.”

“Yes. And the gun.”

They headed out the back way, avoiding the newly arrived delegations who still thronged the stairs and hallway, waiting for access to the holy of holies.

It was a balmy day; the nineteenth of April. The shadows of lightheaded clouds passed across the lawn in dissolute troupes. “We’ll go to the woods,” the, old man said, leading off. Marty walked a respectful couple of yards behind, acutely aware that Whitehead had come out here to clear his mind, not to talk.

The woods were buzzing with activity. New growth poking through the rot of last year’s fall; daredevil birds plummeting and rising between the trees, courtship voices on every other branch. They walked for several minutes, following no particular path, without Whitehead so much as looking up from his boots. Out of sight of the house and his disciples, he wore the burden of siege more nakedly. Head bowed, he trudged between the trees, indifferent to birdsong and leaf-burst alike.

Marty was enjoying himself. Whenever he’d crossed this territory before it had been at a run. Now his pace was forcibly slowed, and details of the woods became apparent. The confusion of flowers underfoot, the fungi sprouting in the damp places between the roots: all delighted him. He picked up a selection of pebbles as he went. One bore the fossilized imprint of a fern. He thought of Carys and of the dovecote, and an unexpected longing for her lapped at the edges of his consciousness. Having no reason to prevent its access, he let it come.

Once admitted, the weight of his feeling for her shocked him. He felt conspired against; as though in the last few days his emotions had worked in some secret place in him, transforming mild interest in Carys into something deeper. He had little chance to sort the phenomena out, however. When he glanced up from the stone fern Whitehead had got a good way ahead of him. Putting thoughts of Carys aside, he picked up his pace.

Passages of sun and shadow moved through the trees as the light clouds that had sat on the wind earlier gave way to heavier formations. The wind had begun to chill; there was an occasional speckle of rain in it. Whitehead had pulled his collar up. His hands were plunged into his pockets. When Marty reached him, he was greeted with a question.

“Do you believe in God, Martin?”

The inquiry came out of nowhere. Unprepared for it, Marty could only answer, “I don’t know,” which was, as answers to that question went, honest enough.

But Whitehead wanted more. His eyes glittered.

“I don’t pray, if that’s what you mean,” Marty offered.

“Not even before your trial? A quick word with the Almighty?”

There was no humor, malicious or otherwise, in this interrogation.

Again, Marty answered as honestly as he could.

“I don’t remember, exactly … I suppose I must have said something, then, yes.” He paused. Above them, the clouds passed over the sun. “Much good it did me.”

“And, in prison?”

“No; I never prayed.” He was sure of that. “Never once.”

“But there were God-fearing men in Wandsworth, surely?”

Marty remembered Heseltine, with whom he’d shared a cell for a few weeks at the beginning of his stretch. An old hand at prison, Tiny had spent more years behind bars than out. Every night he’d murmur a bastardized version of the Lord’s Prayer into his pillow before he went to sleep—“Our Father, who are in Heaven, hello be thy name”--not understanding the words or their significance, simply saying the prayer by rote, as he had every night of his life, most probably, until the sense was corrupted beyond salvation— “thine by the King Dome, thine by the Glory, fever and fever, Amen.”

Was that what Whitehead meant? Was there respect for a Maker, thanks for Creation, or even some anticipation of Judgment in Heseltine’s prayer?

“No,” was Marty’s reply. “Not really God-fearing. I mean, what’s the use…?”

There was more where that thought came from, and Whitehead waited for it with a vulture’s patience. But the words sat on Marty’s tongue, refusing to be spoken. The old man prompted them.

“Why no use, Marty?”

“Because it’s all down to accident, isn’t it? I mean, everything’s chance.”

Whitehead nodded, almost imperceptibly. There was a long silence between them, until the old man said: “Do you know why I chose you, Martin?”

“Not really.”

“Toy never said anything to you?”

“He told me he thought I could do the job.”

“Well, a lot of people advised against me taking you. They thought you were unsuitable, for a number of reasons we needn’t go into. Even Toy wasn’t certain. He liked you, but he wasn’t certain.”

“But you employed me anyway?”

“Indeed we did.”

Marty was beginning to find the cat-and-mouse game insufferable. He said: “Now you’re going to tell me why, right?”

“You’re a gambler,” Whitehead replied. Marty felt he’d known the answer long before it was spoken. “You wouldn’t have been in trouble at all, if you hadn’t been obliged to pay off large gaming debts. Am I right?”

“More or less.”

“You spent every penny you earned. Or so your friends testified at the trial. Frittered it away.”

“Not always. I had some big wins. Really big wins.”

The look Whitehead gave Marty was scalpel-sharp.

“After all you’ve been through—all your disease has made you suffer—you still talk about your big wins.”

“I remember the best times, like anyone would,” Marty replied defensively.

“Flukes.“

“No! I was good, damn it.”

“Flukes, Martin. You said so yourself a moment ago. You said it was all chance. How can you be good at anything that’s accidental? That doesn’t make sense, does it?”

The man was right, at least superficially. But it wasn’t as simple as he made it out to be, was it? It was all chance; he couldn’t argue with that basic condition. But a sliver of Marty believed something else. What it was he believed, he couldn’t describe.

“Isn’t that what you said?” Whitehead pressed. “That it was accident.”

“It’s not always like that.”

“Some of us have chance on our side. Is that what you’re saying? Some of us have our fingers” —Whitehead’s forefinger described a spinning circle— “on the wheel.” The circling finger stopped. In his mind’s eye, Marty completed the image: the ball jumped from hole to hole and found a niche, a number. Some winner yelped his triumph.

“Not always,” he said. “Just sometimes.”

“Describe it. Describe how it feels.”

Why not? Where was the harm?

“Sometimes it was just easy, you know, like taking sweets from a baby. I’d go to a club and the chips would tingle, and I’d know, Jesus I’d know, I couldn’t fail to win.”

Whitehead smiled.

“But you did fail,” he reminded Marty, with courteous brutality. “You often failed. You failed till you owed everything you had, and more besides.”

“I was stupid. I played even when the chips didn’t tingle, when I knew I was on a losing streak.”

“Why?”

Marty glowered.

“What do you want, a signed confession?” he snapped. “I was greedy, what do you think? And I loved playing, even when I didn’t have a chance of winning. I still wanted to play.”

“For the game’s sake.”

“I suppose so. Yes. For the game.”

A look, impossibly complex, crossed Whitehead’s face. There was regret in it, and a terrible, aching loss; and more: incomprehension. Whitehead the master, Whitehead the lord of all he surveyed, suddenly showed—all too briefly—another, more accessible, face: that of a man confused to the point of despair.

“I wanted someone with your weaknesses,” he explained now, and suddenly he was the one doing the confessing. “Because sooner or later I believed a day like today would come; and I’d have to ask you to take a risk with me.”