The Damnation Game (56 page)

The thief shook his head.

“No,” he said.

He would not give up his breath. Not for an
orchard
of trees, not for a
nation
of despairing faces. He turned his back on Muranowski Square and its plaintive ghosts. The soldiers were shouting nearby: soon they would arrive. He looked back toward the hotel. The penthouse corridor was still there, across the doorstep of a bombed house: a surreal juxtaposition of ruin and luxury. He crossed the rubble toward it, ignoring the soldiers’ orders for him to halt. Vasiliev’s cries were loudest, however. “Bastard!” he screeched. The thief blocked his curses and stepped out of the square and back into the heat of the hallway, raising his gun as he did so.

“Old news,” he said, “you don’t scare me with it.” Mamoulian was still standing at the other end of the corridor; the minutes the thief had spent in the square had not elapsed here. “I’m not afraid!” Whitehead shouted. “You hear me, you soulless bastard?
I’m not afraid
!” He fired again, this time at the European’s head. The shot hit his cheek. Blood came. Before Whitehead could fire again, Mamoulian retaliated.

“There are no limits,” he said, his voice trembling, “to what I shall do!”

His thought caught the thief by the throat, and twisted. The old man’s limbs convulsed; the gun flew out of his hand; his bladder and bowels failed him. Behind him, in the square, the ghosts began to applaud. The tree shook itself with such vehemence that the few blossoms it still carried were swept into the air. Some of them flew toward the door, melting on the threshold of past and present, like snowflakes. Whitehead fell against the wall. Out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of Evangeline, spitting blood at him. He began to slide down the wall, his body jangled as if in the throes of a grand mal. He let out one word through his rattling jaws. He said:

“No!”

On the bathroom floor Marty heard the denial howled out. He tried to stir himself, but his consciousness was sluggish, and his beaten body ached from scalp to skin. Taking hold of the bath, he hoisted himself to his knees. He’d clearly been forgotten: his part in the proceedings was purely comic relief. He tried to stand, but his lower limbs were traitorous; they buckled beneath him, and he fell again, feeling every bruise on impact.

In the hallway Whitehead had sunk down onto his haunches, mouth gaga. The European moved in for the
coup de grace
, but Carys interrupted.

“Leave him,” she said.

Distracted, Mamoulian turned toward her. The blood on his cheek had traced a single line to his jaw. “You too,” he murmured. “No limits.” Carys backed off into the gaming room. The candle on the table had begun to flare. Energy was loose in the suite, and the spitting flame was fat and white on it. The European looked at Carys with hunger in his eyes. There was an appetite on him—an instinctive response to his blood loss—and all he could see in her was nourishment. Like the thief: hungry for another strawberry though his belly was full enough.

“I know what you are,” Carys said, deflecting his gaze.

From the bathroom, Marty heard her ploy. Stupid, he thought, to tell him that.

“I know what you did.”

The European’s eyes widened, smoky.

“You’re nobody,” the girl started to say. “You’re just a soldier who met a monk, and strangled him in his sleep. What have you got to be so proud of?” Her fury beat against his face. “You’re nobody! Nobody and nothing!”

He reached to catch hold of her. She dodged him around the card table once, but he threw it over, the pack scattering, and caught her.

His hold felt like a vast leech on her arm, taking blood from her and giving only the void, only purposeless dark. He was the Architect of her dreams again.

“God help me,” she breathed. Her senses crumbled and grayness streamed in to take their place. He pulled her out of her body with one insolent wrench and took her into him, dropping her husk to the floor beside the overturned table. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked up at the evangelists. They were standing in the doorway staring at him. He felt sick with his greed. She was in him—all of her at once—and it was too much. And the Saints were making it worse, looking at him as though he were something loathsome, the dark one shaking his head. “You killed her,” he said. “You killed her.”

The European turned away from the accusations, his system boiling over, and leaned elbow and forearm on the wall like a drunk about to vomit. Her presence in him was a torment. It wouldn’t be still, it raged and raged. And her turbulence unlocked so much more: Strauss piercing his bowels; the dogs at his heels, unleashing blood and smoke; and then back, back beyond these few terrible months to other ordeals: yards and snow and starlight and women and hunger, always hunger. And still at his back he felt the stare of the Christians.

One of them spoke; the blond boy whom once he might have lusted after. He, and she, and all.

“Is this all there is?” he demanded to know. “Is this all, you fucking liar? You promised us the Deluge.”

The European pressed his hand over his mouth to stem the escaping smoke and pictured a wave curling over the hotel, over the city, descending to sweep Europe away.

“Don’t tempt me,” he said.

I
n the hallway Whitehead, his neck broken, became vaguely aware of a perfume in the air. He could see the landing outside the suite from where he was lying. Muranowski Square, with its fatal tree, had long since faded, leaving only the mirrors and the carpets. Now, as he sprawled beside the door, he heard somebody come up the stairs. He glimpsed a figure moving in the shadows; this was the perfumed one. The newcomer approached slowly, but doggedly; hesitating for only a moment at the threshold before stepping over Whitehead’s crumpled form and making his way toward the room where the two men had played cards. There had been a while, as they’d chatted over the game, that the old man had fancied he might yet make a fresh covenant with the European; might escape for a few more years the inevitable catastrophe. But it had all gone wrong. They had rowed over some trivia, the way lovers do, and by some incomprehensible mathematic it had escalated to this: death.

He rolled himself over so that he could look the other way, down the corridor toward the gaming room. Carys was lying on the floor among the spilled cards. He could see her corpse through the open door. The European had devoured her.

Now the newcomer interrupted his view as he lurched to the door. From where he lay Whitehead hadn’t been able to see the man’s face. But he saw the shine on the machete at his side.

T
om caught sight of the Razor-Eater before Chad. His unruly stomach rebelled at the mingled stench of sandalwood and putrefaction, and he threw up on the old man’s bed as Breer stepped into the room. He’d come a long way, and the miles had not been kind, but he was here.

Mamoulian stood upright from the wall and faced Breer.

He was not entirely surprised to see that rotted face, though he wasn’t sure why. Was it that his mind had not quite relinquished its hold on the Razor-Eater, and that Breer was somehow here at his behest? Breer stared at Mamoulian through the bright air, as if awaiting a new instruction before he acted again. The muscles of his face were so deteriorated that each flicker of his eyeball threatened to tear the skin of its orbit. He looked, thought Chad—his mind high on cognac—like a man full to bursting with butterflies. Their wings beat against the confines of his anatomy; they powdered his bones in their fervor. Soon their relentless motion would split him open and the air would be full of them.

The European looked down at the machete Breer was carrying.

“Why did you come?” he wanted to know.

The Razor-Eater tried to reply, but his tongue rebelled against the duty. There was just a soft palate word that could have been “good,” or “got” or “God,” but was none of them.

“Have you come to be killed? Is that it?”

Breer shook his head. He had no such intention, and Mamoulian knew it. Death was the least of his problems. He raised the blade at his side to signal his intentions.

“I can wipe you out,” Mamoulian said.

Again, Breer shook his head. “Egg,” he said, which Mamoulian interpreted, and repeated as “Dead.”

“Dead …” Chad mused. “God in Heaven. The man’s dead.”

The European murmured the affirmative.

Chad smiled. Maybe they were going to be cheated of the destroying wave. Perhaps the Reverend’s calculations had been wrong, and the Deluge wouldn’t be on them for a few more months. What did it matter? He had stories to tell—such stories. Even Bliss, with all his talk of the demons in the soul of the hemisphere, hadn’t known about scenes like this. The Saint watched, licking his lips with anticipation.

In the hallway, Whitehead had managed to drag himself three or four yards away from the front door, and he could see Marty, who had managed to stand. Leaning on the lintel of the bathroom door, Marty felt the old man’s eyes on him. Whitehead raised a beckoning hand. Groggily, Marty lurched into the hallway, his presence ignored by the actors in the gaming room. It was dark out here; the light in the gaming room, that livid candlelight, was all but sealed off by the partially closed door.

Marty knelt at Whitehead’s side. The old man took hold of his shirt.

“You’ve got to fetch her,” he said, the voice almost faded. His eyes bulged, there was blood in his beard, and more coming with each word, but his hold was strong. “Fetch her, Marty,” he hissed.

“What are you talking about?”

“He
has
her,” Whitehead said. “In him. Fetch her, for Christ’s sake, or she’ll be there forever, like the others.” His eyes flicked in the direction of the landing, remembering the scourge of Muranowski Square. Was she there already? A prisoner under the tree, with Vasiliev’s eager hands on her? The old man’s lips began to tremble. “Can’t … let him have her, boy,” he said. “You hear me.
Won’t
let him have her.”

Marty had difficulty sewing the sense of this together. Was Whitehead suggesting that he should find his way into Mamoulian and retrieve Carys? It wasn’t possible.

“I can’t,” he said.

The old man registered disgust, and let go of Marty as though he’d discovered he had hold of excrement. Painfully, he turned his head away.

Marty looked toward the gaming room. Through the gap in the door he could see Mamoulian moving toward the unmistakable figure of the Razor-Eater. There was frailty on the European’s face. Marty studied it for a moment, and then looked down at the European’s feet. Carys lay there, her face startled by cessation, her skin bright. He could do nothing; why didn’t Papa leave him be to run away into the night and heal his bruises? He could do
nothing
.

And if he ran; if he found a place to hide, to heal, would he ever wash away the smell of his cowardice? Would this moment—the roads dividing, and dividing again—not be burned into his dreams forever? He looked back at Papa. But for the feeble movement of his lips he could have already been dead. “Fetch her,” he was still saying, a catechism to be repeated until his breath failed. “Fetch her. Fetch her.”

Marty had asked something similar of Carys—to go into the lunatic’s lair and come back with a story to tell. How could he now not return the favor?
Fetch her. Fetch her
. Papa’s words were fading with every beat of his failing heart. Maybe she was retrievable, Marty thought, somewhere in the flux of Mamoulian’s body. And if not, if not, would it be so hard to die trying to fetch her, and have an end to roads dividing, and choices turning to ash?

But how? He tried to recall how she’d done it, but the procedures were too elaborate—the washing, the silence—and surely he had scant opportunity to make his voyage before circumstances changed. His only source of hope lay in the fact of his bloody shirt—the way he’d felt, on his way here, that Carys had snapped some barrier in his head, and that the damage, once done, was permanent. Perhaps his mind could go to her through the wound she’d opened, tracing her scent as relentlessly as she’d pursued his.

He closed his eyes, shutting off the hallway and Whitehead and the body lying at the European’s feet. Sight was a trap; she’d said that once. Effort too. He must let go. Let instinct and imagination take him where sense and intellect could not.

He conjured her, effortlessly, putting the bleak fact of her corpse out of his head and evoking instead her living smile. In his mind he spoke her name and she came to him in a dozen moments: laughing, naked, puzzled, contrite. But he let the particulars go, leaving only her essential presence in his aching head.

He was dreaming her. The wound was open, and it pained him to touch it again. Blood was running into his open mouth, but the sensation was a distant phenomenon. It had little to do with his present condition, which was increasingly dislocated. He felt as though he was slipping his body off. It was redundant: waste matter. The ease of the procedure astonished him; his only anxiety was that he’d become too eager; he had to control his exhilaration for fear he throw caution to the wind and be discovered.

He could see nothing; hear nothing. The state he moved in—did he even move? —was not susceptible to the senses. Now, though he had no proof of the perception, he was sure he was abstracted from his body. It was behind, below him: an untenanted shell. Ahead of him, Carys. He would dream his way to her.

And then, just as he had thought he could take pleasure in this extraordinary journey, Hell opened in front of him—

M
amoulian, too intent on the Razor-Eater, felt nothing as Marty breached him. Breer made a half-run forward, lifting the machete and aiming a blow at the European. He sidestepped to avoid it with perfect economy but Breer pivoted around for a second strike with startling speed, and this time, more by chance than direction, the machete glanced down Mamoulian’s arm, slicing into the cloth of his dark gray suit.

“Chad,” the European said, not taking his eyes off Breer.