The Damnation Game (37 page)

“And you didn’t see him again?”

“Oh, no, I saw him. He came back to the house twice, each time unannounced. Things hadn’t gone well for him, it seemed. I don’t know what it was, but he’d lost the magic touch somehow. The first time he came back he was so decrepit I scarcely recognized him. He looked ill, he smelled foul. If you’d seen him in the street you’d have crossed over the road to avoid him. I could scarcely credit the transformation. He didn’t want even to step into the house—not that I would have let him—all he wanted was money, which I gave him, and then he went away.”

“And it was genuine?”

“What do you mean,
genuine
?”

“The beggar performance: it was real, was it? I mean, it wasn’t another story …?”

Whitehead raised his eyebrows. “All these years … I never thought of that. Always assumed …” He stopped, and began again on a different tack. “You know, I’m not a sophisticated man, despite appearances to the contrary. I’m a thief. My father was a thief, and probably his father too. All this culture I surround myself with, it’s a facade. Things I’ve picked up from other people. Received good taste, if you like.

“But after a few years you begin to believe your own publicity; you begin to think you actually are a sophisticate, a man of the world. You start to be ashamed of the instincts that got you where you are, because they’re part of an embarrassing history. That’s what happened to me. I lost any sense of what I was.”

“Well, I think it’s time the thief had his say again: time I started to use
his
eyes,
his
instinct. You taught me that, though Christ knows you weren’t aware of it.”

“Me?”

“We’re the same. Don’t you see? Both thieves. Both victims.”

The self-pity in Whitehead’s pronouncement was too much. “You can’t tell me you’re a victim,” Marty said, “the way you’ve lived.”

“What do you know about my feelings?” Whitehead snapped back. “Don’t
presume
, you hear me? Don’t think you understand, because you don’t! He took everything away from me;
everything
! First Evangeline, then Toy, now Carys. Don’t tell me whether I’ve suffered or not!”

“What do you mean, he
took
Evangeline? I thought she died in an accident?”

Whitehead shook his head. “There’s a limit to what I can tell you,” he said. “Some things I can’t express. Never will.” The voice was ashen.

Marty let the point go, and moved on.

“You said he came back twice.”

“That’s right. He came again, a year or two after his first visit. Evangeline wasn’t at home that night. It was November. Toy answered the door, I remember, and though I hadn’t heard Mamoulian’s voice I knew it was him. I went into the hallway. He was standing on the step, in the porch light. It was drizzling. I can see him now, the way his eyes found me. ‘Am I welcome?’ he said. Just stood there and said, ‘Am I welcome?’”

“I don’t know why, but I let him in. He didn’t look in bad shape. Maybe I thought he’d come to apologize, I can’t remember. Even then I would have been friends with him, if he’d offered. Not on the old basis. As business acquaintances, perhaps. I let my defenses down. We started talking about the past together”—Whitehead chewed the memory over, trying to get a better taste of it—“and then he started to tell me how lonely he was, how he needed my companionship. I told him Warsaw was a long time gone. I was a married man, a pillar of the community, and I had no intention of changing my ways. He started to get abusive: accused me of ingratitude. Said I’d cheated him. Broken the covenant between us. I told him there’d never been a covenant, I’d just won a game of cards once, in a distant city, and as a result, he’d chosen to help me, for his own reasons. I said I felt I’d acceded to his demands sufficiently to feel that any debt to him had been paid. He’d shared my house, my friends, my life for a decade: everything that I had, had been his to share. ‘It’s not enough,’ he said, and he began again: the same pleas as before, the same demands that I give up this pretense to respectability and go off somewhere with him, be a wanderer, be his pupil, learn new, terrible lessons about the way of the world. And I have to say he made it sound almost attractive. There were times when I tired of the masquerade; when I smelled war, dirt; when I saw the clouds over Warsaw, and I was homesick for the thief I used to be. But I wasn’t going to throw everything away for nostalgia’s sake. I told him so. I think he must have known I was immovable, because he became desperate. He started to ramble, started to tell me he was frightened without me, lost. I was the one he’d given years of his life and his energies to, and how could I be so callous and unloving? He laid hands on me, wept, tried to paw my face. I was horrified by the whole thing. He disgusted me with his melodrama; I wanted no part of it, or him. But he wouldn’t leave. His demands turned into threats, and I suppose I lost my temper. No suppose about it. I’ve never been so angry. I wanted an end to him and all he stood for: my grubby past. I hit him. Not hard at first, but when he wouldn’t stop staring at me I lost control. He didn’t make any attempt to defend himself, and his passivity only inflamed me more. I hit him and hit him, and he just took it. Kept offering up his face to be beaten—” He took a trembling breath. “God knows I’ve done worse things. But nothing I feel so ashamed of. I didn’t stop till my knuckles began to split. Then I gave him to Toy, who really worked him over. And all the time not a peep out of him. I go cold to think about it. I can still see him against the wall, with Bill at his throat and his eyes not looking at where the next blow was coming from but at me. Just at me.

“I remember he said: ‘Do you know what you’ve done?’ Just like that. Very quietly, blood coming out with the words.

“Then something happened. The air got thick. The blood on his face started to crawl around like it was alive. Toy let him go. He slid down the wall; left a smear down it. I thought we’d killed him. It was the worst moment of my life, standing here with Toy, both of us staring down at this bag of bones we’d beaten up. That was our mistake, of course. We should never have backed down. We should have finished it then and there, and killed him.”

“Jesus.”

“Yes! Stupid, not to have finished it. Bill was loyal: there would have been no comeback. But we didn’t have the courage. I didn’t have the courage. I just made Toy clean Mamoulian up, then drive him to the middle of the city and dump him.”

“You wouldn’t have killed him,” Marty said.

“Still you insist on reading my mind,” Whitehead replied, wearily.

“Don’t you see that’s what he wanted? What he’d come for? He would have let me be his executioner then, if I’d only had the nerve to follow through. He was sick of life. I could have put him out of his misery, and that would have been the end of it.”

“You think he’s mortal?”

“Everything has its season. His is past. He knows it.”

“So all you need do is wait, right? He’ll die, given time.” Marty was suddenly sick of the story now; of thieves, of chance. The whole sorry tale, true or untrue, repulsed him. “You don’t need me anymore,” he said.

He stood and crossed to the door. The sound of his feet in the glass was too loud in the small room.

“Where are you going?” the old man wanted to know.

“Away. As far as I can get.”

“You promised to stay.”

“I promised to listen. I have listened. And I don’t want any of this bloody place.”

Marty began to open the door. Whitehead addressed his back.

“You think the European’ll let you be? You’ve seen him in the flesh, you’ve seen what he can do. He’ll have to silence you sooner or later. Have you thought of that?”

“I’ll take the risk.”

“You’re safe here.”

“Safe?” Marty repeated incredulously. “You can’t be serious.
Safe
? You really are pathetic, you know that?”

“If you go—” Whitehead warned.

“What?” Marty turned on him, spitting contempt. “What will you do,
old man
?”

“I’ll have them after you in two minutes flat; you’re skipping parole.”

“And if they find me, I’ll tell them everything. About the heroin, about her out there in the hall. Every dirty thing I can dig up to tell them. I don’t give a monkey’s toss for your fucking threats, you hear?”

Whitehead nodded. “So. Stalemate.”

“Looks like it,” Marty replied, and stepped out into the corridor without looking back.

There was a morbid surprise awaiting him: the pups had found Bella. They had not been spared Mamoulian’s resurrecting hand, though they could not have served any practical purpose. Too small, too blind. They lay in the shadow of her empty belly, their mouths seeking teats that had long since gone. One of them was missing, he noted. Had it been the sixth child he’d seen move in the grave, either buried too deeply, or too profoundly degenerated, to follow where the rest went?

Bella raised her neck as he sidled past. What was left of her head swung in his general direction. Marty looked away, disgusted; but a rhythmical thumping made him glance back.

She had forgiven him his previous violence, apparently. Content now, with her adoring litter in her lap, she stared, eyeless, at him, while her wretched tail beat gently on the carpet.

I
n the room where Marty had left him Whitehead sat slumped with exhaustion.

Though it had been difficult to tell the story at first, it had become easier with the telling, and he was glad to have unburdened it. So many times he’d wanted to tell Evangeline. But she had signaled, in her elegant, subtle way, that if there were indeed secrets he had from her, she didn’t want to know them. All those years, living with Mamoulian in the home, she had never directly asked Whitehead
why
, as though she’d known the answer would be no answer at all, merely another question.

Thinking about her brought many sorrows to his throat; they brimmed in him. The European had killed her, he had no doubt of that. He or his agents had been on the road with her; her death had not been chance. Had it been chance he would have known. His unfailing instinct would have sensed its rightness, however terrible his grief. But there had been no such sense, only the recognition of his oblique complicity in her death. She had been killed as revenge upon him. One of many such acts, but easily the worst.

And had the European taken her, after death? Had he slipped into the mausoleum and touched her into life, the way he had the dogs? The thought was repugnant, but Whitehead entertained it nevertheless, determined to think the worst for fear that if he didn’t Mamoulian might still find terrors to shake him with.

“
You won’t
,” he said aloud to the room of glass. Won’t:
frighten me, intimidate me, destroy me
. There were ways and means. He could escape still, and hide at the ends of the earth. Find a place where he could forget the story of his life.

There was something he hadn’t told; a fraction of the Tale, scarcely pivotal but of more than passing interest, that he’d withheld from Strauss as he would withhold it from any interrogator. Perhaps it was unspeakable. Or perhaps it touched so centrally, so profoundly, upon the ambiguities that had pursued him through the wastelands of his life that to speak it was to reveal the color of his soul.

He pondered this last secret now, and in a strange way the thought of it warmed him:

He had left the game, that first and only game with the European, and scrambled through the half-choked door into Muranowski Square. No stars were burning; only the bonfire at his back.

As he’d stood in the gloom, reorienting himself, the chill creeping up through the soles of his boots, the lipless woman had appeared in front of him. She’d beckoned. He assumed she intended to lead him back the way he’d come, and so followed. She’d had other intentions, however. She’d led him away from the square to a house with barricaded windows, and ever curious, he’d pursued her into it, certain that tonight of all nights no harm could possibly come to him.

In the entrails of the house was a tiny room whose walls were draped with pirated swaths of cloth, some rags, others dusty lengths of velvet that had once framed majestic windows. Here, in this makeshift boudoir, there was one piece of furniture only. A bed, upon which the dead Lieutenant Vasiliev—whom he had so recently seen in Mamoulian’s gaming room—was making love. And as the thief stepped through the door, and the lipless woman stood aside, Konstantin had looked up from his labors, his body continuing to press into the woman who lay beneath him on a mattress strewn with Russian and German and Polish flags.

The thief stood, disbelieving, wanting to tell Vasiliev that he was performing the act incorrectly, that he’d mistaken one hole for another, and it was no natural orifice he was using so brutally, but a wound.

The lieutenant wouldn’t have listened, of course. He grinned as he worked, the red pole rooting and dislodging, rooting and dislodging. The corpse he was pleasuring rocked beneath him, unimpressed by her paramour’s attentions.

How long had the thief watched? The act showed no sign of consummation. At last the lipless woman had murmured “Enough?” in his ear, and he had turned a little way to her while she had put her hand on the front of his trousers. She seemed not at all surprised that he was aroused, though in all the years since he had never understood how such a thing was possible. He had long ago accepted that the dead could be woken. But that he had felt heat in their presence—that was another crime altogether, more terrible to him than the first.

There is no Hell, the old man thought, putting the boudoir and its charred Casanova out of his mind. Or else Hell is a room and a bed and appetite everlasting, and I’ve been there and seen its rapture and, if the worst comes to the worst, I will endure it.

Part Five

THE DELUGE

Out of a fired ship, which, by no way

But drowning could be rescued from the flame,

Some men leaped forth, and ever as they came