The Damnation Game (31 page)

The waiter withdrew. Marty went to the cashier and bought eight hundred pounds of chips, then went into the roulette room.

He’d never been much of a card-player. It required techniques that he’d always been too bored to learn; and much as he admired the skill of great players, that very skill blurred the essential confrontation. A good card-player used luck, a great one rode it. But roulette, though it too had its systems and its techniques, was a purer game. Nothing had the glamor of the spinning wheel: its numbers blurring, the ball rattling as it lodged and jumped again.

He sat down at the table between a highly perfumed Arab who spoke only French, and an American. Neither said a word to him: there were no welcomes or farewells here. All the niceties of human intercourse were sacrificed to the matter at hand.

It was an odd disease. Its symptoms were like infatuation—palpitations, sleeplessness. Its only certain cure, death. On one or two occasions he’d caught sight of himself in a casino bar mirror or in the glass of the cashier’s booth, and met a hunted, hungry look. But nothing—not self-disgust, not the disparagement of friends—nothing had ever quite rooted out the appetite.

The waiter brought the drink to his elbow, its ice clinking. Marty tipped him heavily.

There was a spin of the wheel, though Marty had joined the table too late to place money. All eyes were fixed on the circling numbers …

It was an hour or more before Marty left the table, and then only to relieve his bladder before returning to his seat. Players came and went.

The American, indulging the aquiline youth who accompanied him, had left the decisions to his companion, and lost a small fortune before retiring.

Marty’s reserves were running low. He’d won, and lost, and won; then lost and lost and lost. The defeats didn’t distress him overmuch. It wasn’t his money, and as Whitehead had often observed, there was plenty more where that came from. With enough chips left for one more bet of any consequence, he withdrew from the table for a breather. He’d sometimes found that he could change his luck by retiring from the field for a few minutes and returning with new focus.

As he got up from his seat, his eyes full of numbers, somebody walked past the door of the roulette room and glanced in before moving on to another game. Fleeting seconds were enough for recognition.

When Marty’d last met that face it had been ill-shaven and waxen with pain, lit by the floods along the Sanctuary fence. Now Mamoulian was transformed. No longer the derelict, cornered and anguished. Marty found himself walking toward the door like a man hypnotized. The waiter was at his side—”Another drink, sir?” —but the inquiry went ignored as Marty stepped out of the roulette room and into the corridor. Contrary feeling ran in him: he was half-afraid to confirm his sighting of the man, yet curiously excited that the man was here. It was no coincidence, surely.

Perhaps Toy was with him. Perhaps the whole mystery would unravel here and now. He caught sight of Mamoulian walking into the baccarat room. A particularly fierce match was going on there, and spectators had drifted in to watch its closing stages. The room was full; players from other tables had deserted their own games to enjoy the battle at hand. Even the waiters were lingering on the periphery trying to catch a glimpse.

Mamoulian threaded his way through the crowd to get a better view, his thin gray figure parting the throng. Having found himself a vantage point he stood, light shining up from the baize onto his pale face. The wounded hand was lodged in his jacket pocket, out of sight; the wide brow was clear of the least expression. Marty watched him for upward of five minutes. Not once did the European’s eyes flicker from the game in front of him. He was like a piece of porcelain: a glazed facade onto which a nonchalant artisan had scrawled a few lines. The eyes pressed into the clay were incapable, it seemed, of anything but that relentless stare. Yet there was power in the man. It was uncanny to see how people kept clear of him, cramming themselves into knots rather than press too close to him at the tableside.

Across the room, Marty caught sight of the pen-mustache waiter. He pushed his way between the spectators to where the young man stood.

“A word,” he whispered.

“Yes, sir?”

“That man. In the gray suit.”

The waiter glanced toward the table, then back to Marty.

“Mr. Mamoulian.”

“Yes. What do you know about him?”

The waiter gave Marty a reproving look.

“I’m sorry, sir. We’re not at liberty to discuss members.”

He turned on his heel and went into the corridor. Marty followed. It was empty. Downstairs, the girl on the desk—not the same he’d spoken with—was giggling with the coat-check clerk.

“Wait a moment.”

When the waiter looked back, Marty was producing his wallet, still amply enough filled to present a decent bribe. The other man stared at the notes with undisguised greed.

“I just want to ask a few questions. I don’t need the number of his bank account.”

“I don’t know it anyway.” The waiter smirked. “Are you police?”

“I’m just interested in Mr. Mamoulian,” Marty said, proffering fifty pounds in tens. “Some bare essentials.”

The waiter snatched the money and pocketed it with the speed of a practiced bribee.

“Ask away,” he said.

“Is he a regular here?”

“A couple of times a month.”

“To play?”

The waiter frowned.

“Now you mention it I don’t think I’ve ever seen him actually play.”

“Just to watch, then?”

“Well, I can’t be sure. But I think if he did play I’d have seen him by now. Strange. Still, we have a few members who do that.”

“And does he have any friends? People he arrives with, leaves with?”

“Not that I remember. He used to be quite pally with a Greek woman who used to come in. Always won a fortune. Never failed.”

That was the gambler’s equivalent of the fisherman’s tale, the story of the player with a system so flawless it never faltered. Marty had heard it a hundred times, always the friend of a friend, a mythical somebody whom you never got to meet face-to-face. And yet; when he thought of Mamoulian’s face, so calculating in its supreme indifference, he could almost imagine the fiction real.

“Why are you so interested in him?” the waiter asked.

“I have an odd feeling about him.”

“You’re not the only one.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s never said or done anything to me, you understand,” the waiter explained. “He always tips well, though God knows all he ever drinks is distilled water. But we had one fellow came here, this is a couple of years ago now, he was American, over from Boston. He saw Mamoulian and let me tell you-he freaked out. Seems he’d played with a guy who was his spitting image, this is in the 1920s. That caused quite a buzz. I mean, he doesn’t look like the type to have a father, does he?”

The waiter had something there. It was impossible to imagine this Mamoulian as a child or a pimply adolescent. Had he suffered infatuation, the death of pets, of parents? It seemed so unlikely as to be laughable.

“That’s all I know, really.”

“Thank you,” said Marty. It was enough.

The waiter walked away, leaving Marty with an armful of possibilities. Apocryphal tales, most likely: the Greek with the system, the panicking American. A man like Mamoulian was bound to collect rumors; his air of lost aristocracy invited invented histories. Like an onion, unwrapped and unwrapped and unwrapped again, each skin giving way not to the core but to another skin.

Tired, and dizzy with too much drink and too little sleep, Marty decided to call it a night. He’d use the hundred or so left in his wallet to bribe a taxi driver to drive him back to the estate, and leave the car to be picked up another day. He was too drunk to drive. He glanced one final time into the baccarat room. The game was still going on; Mamoulian had not moved from his station.

Marty went downstairs to the bathroom. It was a few degrees colder than the interior of the club, its rococo plasterwork facetious in the face of its lowly function. He glanced at his weariness in the mirror, then went to relieve himself at the urinal.

In one of the stalls, somebody had begun to sob, very quietly, as if attempting to stifle the sound. Despite his aching bladder, Marty found he was unable to piss; the anonymous grief distressed him too much. It was coming from behind the locked door of the stalls. Probably some optimist who’d lost his shirt on a roll of the dice, and was now contemplating the consequences. Marty left him to it. There was nothing he could say or do; he knew that from bitter experience.

Out in the foyer, the woman on the desk called after him.

“Mr. Strauss?” It was the English rose. She showed no sign of wilting, despite the hour. “Did you find Mr. Toy?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Oh, that’s odd. He was here.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. He came with Mr. Mamoulian. I told him you were here, and that you’d asked after him.”

“And what did he say?”

“Nothing,” the girl replied. “Not a word.” She dropped her voice.

“Is he well? I mean, he looked really terrible, if you don’t mind me saying so. Awful color.”

Marty glanced up the stairs, scanned the landing.

“Is he still here?”

“Well, I haven’t been on the desk all evening, but I didn’t see him leave.”

Marty took the stairs two at a time. He wanted to see Toy so much. There were questions to ask, confidences to exchange. He scoured the rooms, looking for that worn-leather face. But though Mamoulian was still there, sipping his water, Toy was not with him. Nor was he to be found in any of the bars. He had clearly come and gone. Disappointed, Marty went back downstairs, thanked the girl for her help, tipped her well, and left.

It was only when he had put a good distance between himself and the Academy, walking in the middle of the road to waylay the first available taxi, that he remembered the sobbing in the bathroom. His pace slowed.

Eventually he stopped in the street, his head echoing to the thump of his heart. Was it just hindsight, or had that ragged voice sounded familiar, as it chewed on its grief? Had it been Toy sitting there in the questionable privacy of a toilet stall, crying like a lost child?

Dreamily, Marty glanced back the way he’d come. If he suspected Toy was still at the club, shouldn’t he go back and find out? But his head was making unpleasant connections. The woman at the Pimlico number whose voice was too horrid to listen to; the desk-girl’s question: “Is he well?”; the profundity of despair he had heard from behind the locked door. No, he couldn’t go back. Nothing, not even the promise of a faultless system to beat every table in the house, would induce him to return. There was, after all, such a thing as reasonable doubt; and on occasion it could be a balm without equal.

VIII

Raising Cain

Chapter 45

T
he day of the Last Supper, as he was to come to think of it, Marty shaved three times, once in the morning and twice in the afternoon. The initial flattery of the invitation had long since faded. Now all he prayed for was some convenient get-out clause, a means by which he could politely escape what he was certain would be an excruciating evening. He had no place in Whitehead’s entourage. Their values were not his; their world was one in which he was no more than a functionary. There could be nothing about him that would give them more than a moment’s entertainment.

It wasn’t until he put on the evening jacket again that he began to feel more courageous. In this world of appearances, why shouldn’t he carry off the illusion as well as the next man? After all, he’d succeeded at the Academy. The trick was to get the superficies right—the proper dress code, the correct direction in which to pass the port. He began to view the evening ahead as a test of his wits, and his competitive spirit began to rise to the challenge. He would play them at their own game, among the clinking glasses and the chatter of opera and high finance.

Triply shaved, dressed and cologned, he went down to the kitchen. Oddly, Pearl wasn’t in the house: Luther had been left in charge of the night’s gourmandizing. He was opening bottles of wine: the room was fragrant with the mingled bouquets. Though Marty had understood the gathering to be small, several dozen bottles were assembled on the table; the labels on many were dirtied to illegibility. It looked as though the cellar were being stripped of its finest vintages.

Luther looked Marty up and down.

“Who’d you steal the suit off?”

Marty picked up one of the open bottles and sniffed it, ignoring the remark. Tonight he wasn’t going to be needled: tonight he had things figured out, and he’d let no one burst the bubble.

“I said: where’d you—”

“I heard you first time. I bought it.”

“What with?”

Marty put the bottle down heavily. Glasses on the table clinked together. “Why don’t you shut up?”

Luther shrugged. “Old man give it to you?”

“I told you. Shove it.”

“Seems to me you’re getting in deep, man. You know you’re guest of honor at this shindig?”

“I’m going along to meet some of the old man’s friends, that’s all.”

“You mean Dwoskin and those fuckheads? Aren’t you the lucky one?”

“And what are you tonight: the wine-boy?”

Luther grimaced as he pulled the cork on another bottle. “They don’t have no waiters at their special parties. They’re very private.”

“What do you mean?”

“What do I know?” Luther said, shrugging. “I’m a monkey, right?”

Between eight and eight-thirty, the cars started to arrive at the Sanctuary. Marty waited in his room for a summons to join the rest of the guests. He heard Curtsinger’s voice, and those of women; there was laughter, some of it shrill. He wondered if it was just the wives they’d brought, or their daughters too.

The phone rang.

“Marty.” It was Whitehead.

“Sir?”

“Why not come up and join us? We’re waiting for you.”