The Damnation Game (38 page)

Near the foes’ ships, did by their shot decay;

So all were lost, which in the ship were found,

They in the sea being burnt,

They in the burnt ship drowned.

—JOHN DONNE, “A Burnt Ship”

IX

Bad Faith

Chapter 49

T
he Deluge descended in the driest July in living memory; but then no revisionist’s dream of Armageddon is complete without its paradox. Lightning appearing out of a clear sky; flesh turned to salt; the meek inheriting the earth: all unlikely phenomena.

That July, however, there were no spectacular transformations. No celestial lights appeared in the clouds. No rains of salamanders or children. If angels came and went that month-if the looked-for Deluge broke, then it was, like the truest Armageddons, metaphor.

There are, it’s true, some freakish occurrences to be recounted, but most of them take place in backwaters, in ill-lit corridors, in shunned wastelands among rain-sodden mattresses and the ashes of old bonfires. They are local; almost private. Their shock waves—at best—made gossip among wild dogs.

Most of these miracles, however—games, rains and salvations—were slipped with such cunning behind the facade of ordinary life that only the sharpest-sighted, or those in search of the unlikely, caught a glimpse of the Apocalypse showing its splendors to a sun-bleached city.

Chapter 50

T
he city didn’t welcome Marty back with, open arms, but he was glad to be away from the house once and for all, his back turned on the old man and his madness. Whatever the consequences of his departure in the long term—and he would have to think very carefully about whether he now turned himself in—he at least had a breathing space; time to think things through.

The tourist season was under way. London was thronged with visitors, making familiar streets unfamiliar. He spent the first couple of days just wandering around, getting used to being footloose and fancy-free again. He had precious little money left: but he could turn his hand to a laboring job if need be. With summer at its height the building trade was hungry for fit workhorses. The thought of an honest day’s work, its production of sweat paid for in cash, was attractive. If necessary he would sell the Citroen that he’d taken from the Sanctuary in one last, and probably ill-advised, gesture of rebellion.

After two days of liberty, his thoughts turned to an old theme: America. He’d had it tattooed on his arm as a keepsake of his prison dreams. Now, perhaps, was the time for him to make it a reality. In his imagination, Kansas beckoned, its grain fields running to the eye’s limit in every direction, and not a man-made thing in sight. He’d be safe there. Not just from the police and Mamoulian, but from history, from stories told again and again, round in circles, world without end. In Kansas, there would be a new story: a story that he could not know the end of. And wasn’t that a working definition of freedom, unspoiled by European hand, European certainty?

To keep himself off the streets while he planned his escape he found a room in Kilburn, a dingy one-room flat with a toilet two flights down, which was shared, the landlord informed him, with six other people. In fact there were at least fifteen occupants of the seven rooms in the house, including a family of four in one. The bawling of the youngest child kept his sleep fitful, so he’d rise early and leave the house to its own devices all day, only returning when the pubs were closed, and then only grudgingly. Still, he reassured himself, it wasn’t for long.

There were problems about the departure, of course, not the least of which was getting a passport with a visa stamp in it. Without it he would not be allowed to step onto American soil. Securing himself these documents would have to be a speedy operation. For all he knew his parole-jumping had been reported by Whitehead and damn what tales Marty told. Perhaps the authorities were already combing the streets for him.

On the third day of July, a week and a half after leaving the estate, he decided to take fate by the horns and visit Toy’s place. Despite Whitehead’s insistence that Bill was dead, Marty kept hope intact. Papa had lied before, many times: why not in this instance?

The house was in an elegant backwater in Pimlico; a road of hushed facades and expensive automobiles straddling the narrow pavements. He rang the doorbell half a dozen times, but there was no sign of life. The venetian blinds were drawn on the downstairs windows; there was a fat wedge of mail-circulars mostly-thrust in the mailbox.

He was standing on the step staring dumbly at the door, knowing full well it wasn’t going to open, when a woman appeared on the next-door step. Not the owner of the house, he was sure: more likely a cleaner. Her tanned face—who wasn’t tanned this blistering summer?—bore the suppressed delight of a bad-news bringer.

“Excuse me. Can I help you?” she inquired hopefully.

He was suddenly glad he’d dressed in jacket and tie to come to the house; this woman looked the kind who’d report her slightest suspicions to the police.

“I was looking for Bill. Mr. Toy.”

She clearly disapproved; if not of him, of Toy.

“He’s not here,” she said.

“Do you happen to know where he’s gone?”

“Nobody knows. He just left her. He just upped and left.”

“Left who?”

“His wife. Well … lady friend. She was found in there a couple of weeks ago, didn’t you read about it? It was all over the papers. They interviewed me. I told them; I said he wasn’t a pretty piece of work: not at all.”

“I must have missed it.”

“It was all over the papers. They’re looking for him at the moment.”

“Mr. Toy?”

“Murder Squad.”

“Really.”

“You’re not a reporter?”

“No.”

“Only I’m willing, you know, to tell my story, if the price is right. The things I could tell you.”

“Really.”

“She was in a terrible state, apparently …”

“What do you mean?”

Mindful of her salability, the matron had no intention of divulging the details, even if she knew them, which Marty doubted. But she was willing to offer a tantalizing trailer. “There was mutilation,” she promised, “unrecognizable, even to her nearest and dearest.”

“Are you sure?”

The woman looked affronted by this smear on her authenticity.

“She either did it to herself, or else somebody did it to her and kept her in there, locked up, bleeding to death. For days and days. The smell when they opened the door—”

The sound of the slushy, lost voice that had answered the telephone came back to Marty, and he knew without doubt that Toy’s lady had already been dead when she spoke. Mutilated and dead, but resurrected as a telephonist to keep up appearances for a useful while. The syllables ran in his ear: “Who is this?” she’d asked, hadn’t she? Despite the heat and light of a brilliant July, he started to shiver. Mamoulian had been here. He’d crossed this very threshold in search of Toy. He had a score to settle with Bill, as Marty now knew; what might a man not plan, while the humiliations festered, in return for such violence?

Marty caught the woman staring at him.

“Are you all right?” she said.

“Thank you. Yes.”

“You need some sleep. I have the same problems. Hot nights like these: I get restless.”

He thanked her again and hurried away from the house, without looking back. Too easy to imagine the horrors; they came without warning, out of nowhere. Nor would they go away. Not now. The memory of Mamoulian was with him-night and day and restless night-from then on. He became aware (was it just his dream life, denied its span in sleepless nights, spreading into wakefulness?) of another world, hovering beyond or behind the facade of reality.

There was no time for prevarication. He had to leave; forget Whitehead and Carys and the law. Trick his way out of the country and into America any way he could; away to a place where real was real, and dreams stayed under the eyelids, where they belonged.

Chapter 51

R
aglan was an expert at the fine art of forgery. Two telephone calls located him, and Marty struck a deal with the man. The appropriate visa could be forged in a passport for a modest fee. If Marty could bring along a photograph of himself the job could be done in a day; two at the most.

It was the fifteenth of July: the month was simmering, a few degrees off the boil. The radio, blaring from the room next door, had promised a day as faultlessly blue as the one preceding, and the one preceding that. Not even blue; white. The sky was blind white these days.

Marty set out for Raglan’s house early, partially to avoid the worst of the heat, and partially because he was eager to get the forgery made, buy his ticket, and be away. As it was, he got no further than Kilburn High Road Tube Station. It was there, on the cover of the Daily Telegraph that he read the headline: MILLIONAIRE RECLUSE FOUND DEAD AT HOME. Beneath it, a picture of Papa; a younger, beardless Whitehead, snapped at the height of his looks and influence. He bought the paper, and two others that carried the story on their covers, and read them standing in the middle of the pavement, while harried commuters nudged and tutted at him as they surged down the stairs into the station.

“The death was announced today of Joseph Newzam Whitehead, the millionaire head of the Whitehead Corporation, whose pharmaceutical products had, until recent falls, made it one of the most successful companies in Western Europe. Mr. Whitehead, sixty-eight, was found at his hideaway sanctum in Oxfordshire in the early hours of yesterday morning by his chauffeur. He is believed to have died of heart failure. Police say there are no suspicious circumstances. For Obituary; see page seven.”

The obituary was the usual amalgam of information gleaned from the pages of
Who’s Who
, with a brief outline of the fortunes of the Whitehead Corporation, plus a spicing of conjecture, mostly concerning the corporation’s recent fall from financial grace. There was a potted history of Whitehead’s life, though the early years were skimpily reported, as though there was some doubt as to the details. The rest of the design was there, albeit threadbare. The marriage to Evangeline; the spectacular rise in the boom years of the late fifties; the decades of consolidation and achievement; then the withdrawal, after Evangeline’s death, into mysterious and unilluminating silence.

He was dead.

Despite all the brave talk, all the defiance, all the contempt for the machinations of the European, the battle was lost. Whether it was indeed a natural death, as the papers reported, or Mamoulian’s doing, Marty could not know. But there was no denying the curiosity he felt. More than curiosity, grief. That he had a capacity for sorrow at the old man’s death came as a shock; perhaps more of a shock than the sorrow itself. He hadn’t counted on the ache of loss he felt.

He canceled the meeting with Raglan and went back to the flat, there to study the newspapers—over and over again, squeezing out every drop from the text about the circumstances of Whitehead’s death. There were few clues, of course: all the reports were couched in the bland and formal language of such announcements. Having exhausted the written word he went next door and asked to borrow his neighbor’s radio. The young woman who occupied the room, a student, he thought, took some persuading, but she eventually relinquished it. He listened to the half-hourly bulletins from midmorning on, while the heat rose in his room. The story had some prominence until noon, but thereafter events in Beirut and a drugs coup in Southampton claimed the bulk of the time, the report of Whitehead’s death steadily slipping from a major story to news-in-brief, and thence, by mid-afternoon, into invisibility.

He returned the radio, declining a cup of coffee with the girl and her cat, the smell of whose uneaten food hung around the narrow room like the threat of thunder, and returned to his own quarters to sit and think.

If Mamoulian had indeed murdered Whitehead-and he didn’t doubt that the European had the skill to do it undetected by the acutest pathologist—it was indirectly his fault. Perhaps, had he remained at the house, the old man would still be alive. It was unlikely. Far more likely, he too would be dead. But the guilt still nagged.

For the next couple of days he did very little: entropy had poured lead into his bowels. His thoughts were circular, almost obsessional. In the private cinema of his skull he ran the home movies he’d accrued; from those first, uncertain glimpses of the private life of power to his later memories-almost too sharp, too detailed-of the man alone in a glass-floored cage; the dogs; the dark. Through most, though not all, the face of Carys appeared, sometimes quizzical, sometimes careless: often sealed from him, peering up between the bars of her downcast lashes as if envying him. Late at night, when the baby had fallen asleep in the flat below, and the only sound was the traffic on the High Road, he’d rerun those most private moments between them, moments too precious to be conjured up indiscriminately for fear their power to revive him wane with repetition. For a time he had tried to forget her: it was more convenient that way. Now he clung to thoughts of that face, bereft. He wondered if he would see her again.

The Sunday newspapers all carried further reports on the death. The Sunday Times gave over the front of its Review section to a thumbnail sketch of BRITAIN’S MOST MYSTERIOUS MILLIONAIRE, written by Lawrence Dwoskin, “longtime associate and confidant of England’s Howard Hughes.“

Marty read the piece through twice, unable to scan the printed words without hearing Dwoskin’s insinuating tone in his ear “… he was in many ways a paragon,” it read, “… though the almost hermitlike history of his latter years gave rise, inevitably, to reams of gossip and tittle tattle, much of it hurtful to a man of Joseph’s sensibilities. Through all his years in public life, exposed to the scrutiny of a press that was not always beneficent, he never hardened himself to criticism, implied or explicit. To we few who knew him well he revealed a nature more susceptible to barbs than his outward show of indifference would ever have suggested. When he found rumors of misconduct or excess being circulated about him, the criticism bit deeply, especially as, since his beloved wife Evangeline’s death in 1965, he had become the most fastidious of sexual and moral beings.“