The Damnation Game (46 page)

It was the middle of the afternoon by the time he reached Charmaine’s place. He drove around the block, looking for somewhere to park, and eventually found a space around the corner from the house. His feet were somewhat reluctant; the abasement ahead wasn’t particularly attractive. But Carys was waiting.

The front door was just slightly ajar. He rang the bell nevertheless, and waited on the pavement, unwilling simply to step into the house. Perhaps they were upstairs in bed, or taking a cool shower together. The heat was still furious, even though the afternoon was well advanced.

Down at the end of the street an ice-cream van, playing an off-key version of “The Blue Danube,” appeared and stopped by the curb to await patrons. Marty glanced toward it. The waltz had already attracted two customers. They drew his attention for a moment: sober-suited young men whose backs were turned to him. One of them boasted bright yellow hair: it shone in the sun. They were taking possession of their ice creams now; money was exchanged. Satisfied, they disappeared around the corner without looking over their shoulders.

Despairing of an answer to his bell-ringing, Marty pushed the door open. It grated across the coconut matting, which bore a threadbare “Welcome.” A pamphlet, stuck halfway through the mailbox, dislodged and fell on the inside, facedown. The sprung mailbox snapped loudly back into place.

“Flynn? Charmaine?”

His voice was an intrusion; it carried up the stairs, where dust motes thronged the sunlight through the half-landing window; it ran into the kitchen, where yesterday’s milk was curdling on the board beside the sink.

“Is anybody in?”

Standing in the hallway, he heard a fly. It circled his head, and he waved it off. Unconcerned, it buzzed off down the hallway toward the kitchen, tempted by something. Marty followed it, calling Charmaine’s name as he went.

She was waiting for him in the kitchen, as was Flynn. They had both had their throats cut.

Charmaine had sunk down against the washing machine. She sat, one leg bent beneath her, staring at the opposite wall. Flynn had been placed with his head over the sink as though bending to douse his face. The illusion of life was almost successful, even to the splashing sound.

Marty stood in the doorway, while the fly, not as finicky as he, flew around and around the kitchen, ecstatic. Marty just stared. There was nothing to be done: all that was left was to look. They were dead. And Marty knew without the effort of thinking about it that the killers were dressed in gray, and had turned that far corner, ice creams in hand, accompanied by “The Blue Danube.”

They’d called Marty the Dancer of Wandsworth—those who’d called him anything at all—because Strauss was the Waltz King. He wondered if he’d ever told Charmaine that, in any of his letters. No, he probably hadn’t: and now it was too late. Tears had begun to sting the rims of his eyes. He fought them back. They would interrupt the view, and he hadn’t finished looking yet.

The fly who’d brought him here was circling close to his head again.

“The European,” he murmured to it. “He sent them.”

The fly zigzagged, excitedly. “Of course,” it buzzed.

“I’ll kill him.”

The fly laughed. “You don’t have any idea what he is. He could be the Devil himself.”

“Fucking fly. What do you know?”

“Don’t get so grand with me,” the fly replied. “You’re a shit-walker, same as I am.”

He watched it rove, looking for a place to put its dirty feet. It landed, at last, on Charmaine’s face. Atrocious that she didn’t raise a lazy hand to swat it away; terrible that she just sprawled there, leg bent, neck slit, and let it crawl on her cheek, up to her eye, down to her nostril, supping here and there, careless.

The fly was right. He was ignorant. If they were to survive, he had to root out Mamoulian’s secret life, because that knowledge was power. Carys had been wise all along. There was no closing your eyes and turning your back on the European. The only way to be free of him was to know him; to look at him for as long as courage allowed and see him in every ghastly particular.

He left the lovers in the kitchen and went to look for the heroin. He didn’t have to search far. The packet was in the inside of Flynn’s jacket, which was casually thrown over the sofa in the front room. Pocketing the fix Marty went to the front door, aware that stepping out of this house into the open sunlight was tantamount to inviting a murder charge. He would be seen and easily recognized: the police would be after him—in hours. But there was no help for it; escaping by the back door would look every bit as suspicious.

At the door he stooped and snatched up the pamphlet that had slid from the letterbox. It bore the smiling face of an evangelist, one Reverend Bliss, who was standing, microphone in hand, raising his eyes to Heaven.
“Join the Crowd,”
the banner proclaimed,
“and Feel the Power of God in Operation. Hear the Words! Feel the Spirit!”
He pocketed it for future reference.

On his way back to Kilburn he stopped at a telephone box and reported the murders. When they asked him who he was he told them, admitting that he was a parole jumper to boot. When they told him to turn himself in to the nearest police station, he replied that he would, but first he had to attend to some personal business.

As he drove back to Kilburn through streets now littered with the aftermath of the march, his mind turned over every possible lead to Whitehead’s whereabouts. Wherever the old man was, there, sooner or later, Mamoulian would be. He could try to get Carys to find her father of course. But he had another request to make of her, one that it might take more than gentle persuasion to get her to concede to. He would have to locate the old man by his own ingenuity.

It was only as he drove back, and caught sight of a signpost to Holborn, that he remembered Mr. Halifax and the strawberries.

Chapter 61

M
arty smelled Carys as soon as he opened the door, but for a few seconds he mistook the scent for pork cooking. Only when he crossed to the bed did he see the burn on her open hand.

“I’m all right,” she told him very coolly.

“He’s been here.”

She nodded. “But he’s gone now.”

“Didn’t he leave me any messages?” he asked, with a crooked smile.

She sat up. Something was horribly wrong with him. His voice was odd; his face was the color of fish meat. He stood off from her, as if the merest touch would shatter him. Looking at him made her almost forget the appetite that still consumed her.

“Message,” she said, “for you?” She didn’t understand. “Why? What’s happened?”

“They were dead.”

“Who?”

“Flynn. Charmaine. Somebody slit their throats.”

His face came within an ace of crumpling up. This was the nadir, surely. They had no further to fall.

“Oh, Marty …”

“He knew I was going back to my house,” he said. She looked for accusation in his voice, but there was none. She defended herself nevertheless.

“It couldn’t have been me. I don’t even know where you live.”

“Oh, but he does. I’m sure he makes it his business to know everything.”

“Why kill them? I don’t see why.”

“Mistaken identity.”

“Breer knows who you are.”

“It wasn’t Breer who did it.”

“You saw who?”

“I think so. Two kids.” He fished for the pamphlet he’d found behind the door. The assassins had delivered it, he guessed. Something about their sober suits, and that glimpsed halo of blond hair, suggested doorstep evangelists, fresh-faced and lethal. Wouldn’t the European delight in such a paradox?

“They made an error,” he said, slipping off his jacket and starting to unbutton his sweat-soaked shirt. “They just went into the house and murdered the first man and woman they met. Only it wasn’t me, it was Flynn.” He pulled his shirt out of his trousers and slung it off. “It’s so easy, isn’t it? He doesn’t care about the law—he thinks he’s above all that.” Marty was forcibly aware of how ironic this was. He, the ex-con, the despiser of uniforms, cleaving to the notion of law. It wasn’t a pretty refuge, but it was the best he’d got at the moment. “What is he, Carys? What makes him so certain he’s immune?”

She was staring down at the fervent face of the Reverend Bliss.

“Baptism in the Holy Ghost!” he promised, blithely.

“What does it matter what he is?” she said.

“Otherwise it’s over.”

She made no reply. He went to the sink and washed his face and chest in cold water. As far as the European was concerned, they were like sheep in a pen. Not just in this room, in any room. Wherever they hid he’d find their refuge in time, and come. There might be a small struggle—do sheep fight the oncoming execution? he wondered. He should have asked the fly. The fly would have known.

He turned from the sink, water dripping from his jawline, to look at Carys. She was staring at the floor, scratching herself.

“Go to him,” he said without warning.

He’d tried a dozen ways to open this conversation as he drove back, but why try to sweeten the pill?

She looked up at him, empty-eyed. “What did you say?”

“Go to him, Carys. Go
into
him, the way he goes into you. Reverse the procedure.”

She almost laughed; there was a sneer mustering in reply to this obscenity. “
Into
him?” she said.

“Yes.”

“You’re insane.”

“We can’t fight what we don’t know. And we can’t know unless we look. You can do that; you can do it for both of us.” He started across the room toward her, but she bowed her head again. “Find out what he is. Find a weakness, a hint of a weakness, anything that can help us survive.”

“No.”

“Because if you don’t, whatever we try to do, wherever we try to go, he’s going to come, him or one of his cohorts, and slit my throat the way he did Flynn’s. And you? God knows, I think you’ll be wishing you’d died the way I did.” This was brutal stuff, and he felt dirtied by the very saying of it, but he knew how passionately she’d resist. If bullying didn’t work, he still had the heroin. He squatted on his haunches in front of her, looking up at her.

“
Think
about it, Carys. Give the idea a chance.”

Her face hardened. “You saw his room,” she said. “It’d be like locking myself in an asylum.”

“He wouldn’t even know,” he said. “He wouldn’t be prepared.”

“I’m not going to discuss it. Give me the smack, Marty.” He stood up, face slack.
Don’t make me cruel
, he thought.

“You want me to shoot up, and then wait, is that it?”

“Yes,” she said, faintly. Then more strongly: “Yes.”

“Is that all you think you’re worth?” She didn’t reply. Her face was impossible to read. “If you thought that, why’d you burn yourself?”

“I didn’t want to go. Not without … seeing you again. Being with you.” She was trembling. “We can’t win,” she said.

“If we can’t win, what’s to lose?”

“I’m tired,” she replied, shaking her head. “Give me the smack. Maybe tomorrow, when I’m feeling better.” She looked up at him, eyes shining in the bruises of her eye sockets. “Just give me the smack!”

“Then you can forget all about it, eh?”

“Marty, don’t. It’s going to spoil—” She stopped.

“Spoil what? Our last few hours together?”

“I need the dope, Marty.”

“That’s very convenient. Fuck what happens to me.” He suddenly felt this to be indisputably true; that she didn’t care what he suffered and never really had. He’d run into her life and now, once he’d brought her dope, he could fade out of it again and leave her to her dreams. He wanted to hit her. He turned his back on her before he did.

Behind him, she said: “We could have some dope—you too, Marty, why not? Then we could be together.”

He didn’t reply for a long moment. When he did he said:

“No fix.”

“Marty?”

“No fix until you go to him.”

It took Carys several seconds to register the full impact of his blackmail. Hadn’t she said, a long time ago, that he’d disappointed her because she’d expected a brute? She’d spoken too soon.

“He’ll know,” she breathed, “he’ll know the moment I get near him.”

“Tread softly. You can; you know you can. You’re clever. You’ve crept into my head often enough.”

“I can’t,” she protested. Didn’t he understand what he was asking?

He made a face, sighed, and crossed to his jacket, which was where he’d dropped it on the floor. He rummaged around in the pocket until he found the heroin. It was a pitifully small packet, and if he knew Flynn, the stuff was cut. But that was her business, not his. She stared, transfixed, at the packet.

“It’s all yours,” he said, and threw it over to her. It landed on the bed beside her. “You’re welcome to it.”

She still stared; now at his empty hand. He broke her look to pick up his stale shirt, and slip it back on.

“Where are you going?”

“I’ve seen you high on that crap. I’ve heard the garbage you talk. I don’t want to remember you like that.”

“I have to have it.”

She hated him; she looked at him standing in a patch of late-afternoon sun, with his bare belly and his bare chest, and she hated every fiber of him. The blackmail she could understand. It was crude, but functional. This desertion was a worse kind of trick altogether.

“Even if I was to do as you say …” she began; the thought seemed to shrink her. “… I won’t find out anything.”

He shrugged. “Look, the smack’s yours,” he said. “You’ve got what you wanted.”

“And what about you? What do you want?”

“I want to live. And I think this is our only chance.”

Even then it was such a slim chance; the slimmest crack in the wall through which they might, if fate loved them, slip.

She weighed up the options; why she even contemplated his idea she wasn’t certain. On another day she might have said: for love’s sake.

Finally she said: “You win.”

H
e sat down and watched her prepare for the journey ahead. First, she washed. Not just her face, her whole body, standing on a spread towel at the little sink in the corner of the room, with the gas-fired water heater roaring as it spat water into the bowl. Watching her, he got an erection, and he felt ashamed that he should be thinking of sex when so much was at issue. But that was just the puritan talking; he should feel whatever felt right. She’d taught him that.