The Damnation Game (35 page)

Thinking of his father, of the past, Marty alighted upon a memory that made some sense of Whitehead’s reminiscences. He’d been a boy of five or six when a woman who’d lived three doors down the terrace died. She’d had no relatives apparently, or none that cared sufficiently to remove what few possessions she’d had from the house. The council had reclaimed the property and summarily emptied it, carting off her furniture to be auctioned. The day after, Marty and his playmates had found some of the dead woman’s belongings dumped in the alley behind the row of houses. The council workmen, pressed for time, had simply emptied all the drawers of worthless personal effects into a pile, and left them there. Bundles of ancient letters roughly tied up with faded ribbon; a photograph album (she was there repeatedly: as a girl; as a bride; as a middle-aged harridan, diminishing in size as she dried up); much valueless bric-a-brac; sealing wax, inkless pens, a letter opener. The boys had fallen on these leavings like hyenas in search of something nourishing. Finding nothing, they scattered the torn-up letters down the alley; they dismembered the album, and laughed themselves silly at the photographs, although some superstition in them prevented them tearing those. They had no need to do so. The elements soon vandalized them more efficiently than their best efforts could have done. In a week of rain and night-frost the faces on the photographs had been spoiled, dirtied and finally eroded entirely. Perhaps the last existing portraits of people now dead went to mush in that alley, and Marty, passing down it daily, had watched the gradual extinction; seen the ink on the scattered letters rained off until the old woman’s memorial was gone away utterly, just as her body had gone. If you’d upended the tray that held her ashes onto the trampled remains of her belongings they would have been virtually indistinguishable: both gray dirt, their significance irretrievably lost. Muck held the whip hand.

All this Marty recalled mistily. It wasn’t quite that he saw the letters, the rain, the boys—as much as retouching the feelings the events had aroused: the buried sense that what had happened in that alley was unbearably poignant. Now his memory meshed with Whitehead’s. All the old man had said about muck, about the isness of things, made some sense.

“I see,” he murmured.

Whitehead looked up at Marty.

“Perhaps,” he said.

“I was a gambling man in those days; far more than I am now. War brings it out in you, I think. You hear stories all the time, about how some lucky man escaped death because he sneezed, or died for the same reason. Tales of benign providence, or fatal bad fortune. And after a while you get to look at the world a little differently: you begin to see chance at work everywhere. You become alive to its mysteries. And of course to its flip side; to determinism. Because take it from me there are men who make their own luck. Men who can mold chance like putty. You talked yourself of feeling a tingle in your hands. As though today, whatever you did, you couldn’t lose.”

“Yes …” That conversation seemed an age away; ancient history.

“Well, while I was in Warsaw, I heard about a man who never once lost a game. A card-player.”

“Never lost?” Marty was incredulous.

“Yes, I was as cynical as you. I treated the stories I heard as fable, at least for a while. But wherever I went, people told me about him. I got to be curious. In fact I decided to stay in the city, though God knows there was precious little to keep me there, and find this miracle worker for myself.”

“Who did he play against?”

“All comers, apparently. Some said he’d been there in the last days before the Russian advance, playing against Nazis, and then when the Red Army entered the city he stayed on.”

“Why play in the middle of nowhere? There can’t have been much money around.”

“Practically none. The Russians were betting their rations, their boots.”

“So again: why?”

“That’s what fascinated me. I couldn’t understand it either. Nor did I believe he won every game, however good a player he was.”

“I don’t see how he kept finding people to play him.”

“Because there’s always somebody who thinks he can bring the champion down. I was one. I went searching for him to prove the stories wrong. They offended my sense of reality, if you like. I spent every waking hour of every day searching the city for him. Eventually I found a soldier who’d played against him, and of course lost. Lieutenant Konstantin Vasiliev.”

“And the card-player … what was his name?”

“I think you know …” Whitehead said.

“Yes,” Marty replied, after a moment. “Yes, you know I saw him. At Bill’s club?”

“When was this?”

“When I went to buy my suit. You told me to gamble what was left of the money.”

“Mamoulian was at the Academy? And did he play?”

“No. Apparently he never does.”

“I tried to get him to play, when he came here last, but he wouldn’t.”

“But in Warsaw? You played him there?”

“Oh, Yes. That’s what he’d been waiting for. I see that now. All these years I pretended I was in charge, you know? That I’d gone to him, that I’d won by my own skills—”

“You won?” Marty exclaimed.

“Certainly I won. But he let me. It was his way of seducing me, and it worked. He made it look difficult, of course, to give some weight to the illusion, but I was so full of myself I never once contemplated the possibility that he’d lost the game deliberately. I mean, there was no reason for him to do that, was there? Not that I could see. Not at the time.”

“Why did he let you win?”

“I told you: seduction.”

“What, do you mean he wanted you in bed?”

Whitehead made the gentlest of shrugs. “It’s possible, yes.” The thought seemed to amuse him; vanity bloomed on his face. “Yes, I think I probably was a temptation.” Then the smile faded. “But sex is nothing, is it? I mean, as possessions go, to fuck somebody is trite stuff. What he wanted me for went far deeper and was far more permanent than any physical act.”

“Did you always win when you played him?”

“I never played against him again, that was the first and only time. I know it sounds unlikely. He was a gambler and so was I. But as I told you, he wasn’t interested in cards for the betting.”

“It was a test.”

“Yes. To see if I was worthy of him. Fit to build an Empire. After the war, when they started rebuilding Europe, he used to say there were no real Europeans left—they’d all been wiped out by one holocaust or another—and he was the last of the line. I believed him. All the talk of Empires and traditions. I was flattered to be lionized by him. He was more cultured, more persuasive, more penetrating than any man I had met or have met since.” Whitehead was lost in this reverie, hypnotized by the memory.

“All that’s left now is a husk, of course. You can’t really appreciate what an impression he made. There was nothing he couldn’t have been or done if he’d put his mind to it. But when I said to him: why do you bother with the likes of me, why don’t you go into politics, some sphere where you can wield power directly, he’d give me this look, and say: it’s all been done. At first I thought he meant those lives were predictable. But I think he meant something else. I think he was telling me that he’d been these people, done those things.”

“How’s that possible? One man.”

“I don’t know. It’s all conjecture. It was from the beginning. And here I am forty years later, still juggling rumors.”

He stood up. By the look on his face it was obvious that his sitting position had caused some stiffness in the joints. Once he was upright, he leaned against the wall, and put his head back, staring up at the blank ceiling.

“He had one great love. One all-consuming passion. Chance. It obsessed him. ‘All life is chance,’ he used to say. ‘The trick is learning how to use it.’”

“And all this made sense to you?”

“It took time; but I came to share his fascination over a period of years, yes. Not out of intellectual interest. I’ve never had much of that. But because I knew it could bring power. If you can make Providence work for you”—he glanced down at Marty—“work out its system if you like-the world succumbs to you.” The voice soured. “I mean, look at me. See how well I’ve done for myself …” He let out a short, bitter laugh. “… He cheated,” he said, returning to the beginning of their conversation. “He didn’t obey the rules.”

“This was to be the Last Supper,” Marty said. “Am I right? You were going to escape before he came for you.”

“In a way.”

“How?”

Whitehead didn’t reply. Instead he began the story again, where he’d left off.

“He taught me so much. After the war we traveled around for a while, picking up a small fortune. Me with my skills, him with his. Then we came to England, and I went into chemicals.”

“And got rich.”

“Beyond the dreams of Croesus. It took a few years, but the money came, the power came.”

“With his help.”

Whitehead frowned at this unwelcome observation. “I applied his principles, yes,” he replied. “But he prospered every bit as much as I did. He shared my houses, my friends. Even my wife.”

Marty made to speak, but Whitehead cut him off.

“Did I tell you about the lieutenant?” he said.

“You mentioned him. Vasiliev.”

“He died, did I tell you
that
?”

“No.”

“He didn’t pay his debts. His body was dragged out of the sewers of Warsaw.”

“Mamoulian killed him?”

“Not personally. But yes, I think—” Whitehead stopped in midflow, almost cocked his head, listening. “Did you hear something?”

“What?”

“No. It’s all right. In my head. What was I saying?”

“The lieutenant.”

“Oh, yes. This piece of the story … I don’t know if it’ll mean too much to you … but I have to explain, because without it the rest doesn’t quite make sense. You see, the night I found Mamoulian was an incredible evening. Useless to try to describe it really, but you know the way the sun can catch the tops of clouds; they were blush-colored, love-colored. And I was so full of myself, so certain that nothing could ever harm me.” He stopped and licked his lips before going on. “I was an imbecile.” Self-contempt stung the words from him. “I walked through the ruins-smell of putrefaction everywhere, muck under my feet-and I didn’t care, because it wasn’t my ruin, my putrefaction. I thought I was above all that: especially that night. I felt like the victor, because I was alive and the dead were dead.” The words stopped pressing forward for a moment.

When he spoke again, it was so quietly it hurt the ears to catch the words.

“What did I know? Nothing at all.” He covered his face with his shaking hand, and said, “Oh, Jesus,” quietly into it.

In the silence that followed, Marty thought he heard something outside the door: a movement in the hallway. But the sound was too soft for him to be certain, and the atmosphere in the room demanded his absolute fixedness. To move now, to speak, would ruin the confessional, and Marty, like a child hooked by a master storyteller, wanted to hear the end of this narrative. At that moment it seemed to him more important than anything else.

Whitehead’s face was concealed behind his hand as he attempted to stem tears. After a moment he took up the tail of the story again- carefully, as if it might strike him dead.

“I’ve never told anyone this. I thought if I kept my silence-if I let it become another rumor-sooner or later it would disappear.”

There was another noise in the hall, a whine like wind through a tiny aperture. And then, a scratching at the door. Whitehead didn’t hear it. He was in Warsaw again, in a house with a bonfire and a flight of steps and a room with a table and a guttering flame. Almost like the room they were in now, in fact, but smelling of old fire rather than souring wine.

“I remember,” he said, “when the game was over Mamoulian stood up and shook hands with me. Cold hands. Icy hands. Then the door opened behind me. I half-turned to see. It was Vasiliev.”

“The lieutenant?”

“Horribly burned.”

“He’d survived,” Marty breathed.

“No,” came the reply. “He was quite dead.”

Marty thought maybe he’d missed something in the story that would justify this preposterous statement. But no; the insanity was presented as plain truth. “Mamoulian was responsible,” Whitehead went on. He was trembling, but the tears had stopped, boiled away by the glare of the memory. “He’d raised the lieutenant from the dead, you see. Like Lazarus. He needed functionaries, I suppose.”

As the words faltered the scratching began again at the door, an unmistakable appeal for entry. This time Whitehead heard it. His moment of weakness had passed, apparently. His head jerked up. “Don’t answer it,” he commanded.

“Why not?”

“It’s him,” he said, eyes wild.

“No. The European’s gone. I saw him leave.”

“Not the European,” Whitehead replied. “It’s the lieutenant. Vasiliev.”

Marty looked incredulous. “No,” he said.

“You don’t know what Mamoulian can do.”

“You’re being ridiculous!”

Marty stood up, and picked his way through the glass. Behind him, he heard Whitehead say “no” again, “please, Jesus, no,” but he turned the handle and opened the door. Meager candlelight found the would-be entrant.

It was Bella, the Madonna of the kennels. She stood uncertainly on the threshold, her eyes, what was left of them, turned balefully up to look at Marty, her tongue a rag of maggoty muscle that hung from her mouth as if she lacked the strength to withdraw it. From somewhere in the pit of her body, she exhaled a thin whistle of air, the whine of a dog seeking human comfort.

Marty took two or three stumbling steps back from the door.

“It isn’t him,” Whitehead said, smiling.

“Jesus Christ.”

“It’s all right, Martin. It isn’t him.”

“Close the door!” Marty said, unable to move and do it himself. Her eyes, her stench, kept him at bay.

“She doesn’t mean any harm. She used to come up here sometimes, for tidbits. She was the only one of them I trusted. Vile species.”

Whitehead pushed himself away from the wall and walked across to the door, kicking broken bottles ahead of him as he went. Bella shifted her head to look at him, and her tail began to wag. Marty turned away, revolted, his reason thrashing around to find some sane explanation, but there was none to be had. The dog had been dead: he’d parceled her up himself. There was no question of premature burial.