The Damnation Game (7 page)

“I’m thinking of filling in the outdoor pool.”

Toy thanked God Whitehead had changed the subject. No talk of the past, for tonight at least.

“—I don’t swim out there any longer, even in the summer.”

“Put some fishes in.”

Whitehead turned his head slightly to see if there was a smile on Toy’s face. He never signaled a joke in the tone of his voice, and it was easy, Whitehead knew, to offend the man’s sensibilities if one laughed when no joke was intended, or the other way about. Toy wasn’t smiling.

“Fishes?” said Whitehead.

“Ornamental carp, perhaps. Aren’t they called koi? Exquisite things.” Toy liked the pool. At night it was lit from below, and the surface moved in mesmerizing eddies, the turquoise enchanting. If there was a chill in the air the heated water gave off a wispy breath that melted away six inches from the surface. In fact, though he’d hated swimming, the pool was a favorite place of his. He wasn’t certain if Whitehead knew this: he probably did. Papa knew most things, he’d found, whether they’d been voiced or not.

“You like the pool,” Whitehead stated.

There: proof.

“Yes. I do.”

“Then we’ll keep it.”

“Well not just—”

Whitehead raised his hand to ward off further debate, pleased to be giving this gift.

“We’ll keep it,” he said. “And you can fill it with koi.”

He sat back down in the chair.

“Shall I put the lawn lights on?” Toy asked.

“No,” said Whitehead. The dying light from the window cast his head in bronze, a latter-day Medici perhaps, with his weary-lidded, pit-set eyes, the white beard and mustache cropped nickingly close to his skin, the whole construction seemingly too weighty for the column supporting it.

Aware that his eyes were boring into the old man’s back, and that Joe would surely sense it, Toy sloughed off the lethargy of the room and pressed himself back into action.

“Well … shall I fetch Strauss, Joe? Do you want to see him or not?” The words took an age to cross the room in the thickening darkness.

For several heartbeats Toy wasn’t even certain that Whitehead had heard him.

Then the oracle spoke. Not a prophecy, but a question.

“Will we survive, Bill?”

The words were spoken so quietly they only just carried, hooked on motes of dust and wafted from his lips. Toy’s heart sank. It was the old theme again: the same paranoid song.

“I hear more and more rumors, Bill. They can’t all be groundless.”

He was still looking out the window. Rooks circled above the wood half a mile or so across the lawn. Was he watching them? Toy doubted it.

He’d seen Whitehead like this often of late, sunk down into himself, scanning the past with his mind’s eye. It wasn’t a vision Toy had access to, but he could guess at Joe’s present fears—he’d been there, after all, in the early days—and he knew too that however much he loved the old man there were some burdens he would never be capable, or willing, to share. He wasn’t strong enough; he was at heart still the boxer Whitehead had employed as a bodyguard three decades before. Now, of course, he wore a four-hundred-pound suit, and his nails were as immaculately kept as his manners. But his mind was the same as ever, superstitious and fragile. The dreams the great dreamed were not for him. Nor were their nightmares.

Again, Whitehead posed the haunted question:

“Will we survive?”

This time Toy felt obliged to reply.

“Everything’s fine, Joe. You know it is. Profits up in most sectors …”

But evasion wasn’t what the old man wanted and Toy knew it. He let the words falter, leaving a silence, after the faltering, more wretched than ever. Toy’s stare, now fixed on Whitehead again, was unblinking, and at the corners of his eyes the murk that had taken over the room began to flicker and crawl. He dropped his lids: they almost grated across his eyeballs. Patterns danced in his head (wheels, stars and windows) and when he opened his eyes again the night finally had a stranglehold on the interior.

The bronze head remained unmoved. But it spoke, and the words seemed to come from Whitehead’s bowels, dirtied with fear.

“I’m afraid, Willy,” he said. “All my life I’ve never been as frightened as I am now.”

He spoke slowly, without the least emphasis, as if he despised the melodrama of his words and was refusing to magnify it further.

“All these years, living without fear; I’d forgotten what it was like. How crippling it is. How it drains your willpower. I just sit here, day in, day out. Locked up in this place, with the alarms, the fences, the dogs. I watch the lawn and the trees—”

He was watching.

“—and sooner or later, the light begins to fade.”

He paused: a long, deep hush, except for the distant crows.

“I can bear the night itself. It’s not pleasant, but it’s unambiguous. It’s twilight I can’t deal with. That’s when the bad sweats come over me. When the light’s going, and nothing’s quite real anymore, quite solid. Just forms. Things that once had shapes …”

It had been a winter of such evenings: colorless drizzles that eroded distance and killed sound; weeks on end of uncertain light, when troubled dawn became troubled dusk with no day intervening. There had been too few hard-frosted days like today; just one discouraging month upon another.

“I sit here every evening now,” the old man was saying. “It’s a test I set myself. Just to sit and watch everything eroded. Defying it all.”

Toy could taste the profundity of Papa’s despair. He hadn’t been like this ever before; not even after Evangeline’s death.

It was almost completely dark outside and in; without the lawn lights on, the grounds were pitch. But Whitehead still sat, facing the black window, watching.

“It’s all there, of course,” he said.

“What is?”

“The trees, the lawn. When dawn comes tomorrow they’ll be waiting.”

“Yes, of course.”

“You know, as a child I thought somebody came and took the world away in the night and then came back and unrolled it all again the following morning.”

He stirred in his seat; his hand moved to his head. Impossible to see what he was doing.

“The things we believe as children: they never leave us, do they? They’re just waiting for time to roll around, and us to start believing in them all over again. It’s the same old patch, Bill. You know? I mean, we think we move on, we get stronger, we get wiser, but all the time we’re standing on the same patch.”

He sighed, and looked around at Toy. Light from the hallway fawned through the door, which Toy had left slightly ajar. By it, even across the room, Whitehead’s eyes and cheeks glittered with tears.

“You’d better put on the light, Bill,” he said.

“Yes.”

“And bring up Strauss.”

There was no sign of his distress apparent in his voice. But then Joe was an expert at disguising his feelings; Toy knew that of old. He could close down the hoods of his eyes and seal up his mouth, and not even a mind reader could work out what he was thinking. It was a skill he’d used to devastating effect in the boardroom: nobody ever knew which way the old fox would jump. He’d learned the technique playing cards, presumably. That, and how to wait.

Chapter 11

T
hey had driven through the electric gates of Whitehead’s estate and into another world. Lawns laid out immaculately on either side of the sepia- graveled driveway; a distant aspect of woodland off to the right, which disappeared behind a line of cypresses as they bore around toward the house itself. It was late afternoon by the time they arrived, but the mellowing light only enhanced the charm of the place, its formality offset by a rising mist that blurred the scalpel edge of grass and tree.

The main building was less spectacular than Marty had anticipated; just a large, Georgian country house, solid but plain, with modern extensions sprawling away from the main structure. They drove past the front door, with its white pillared porch, to a side entrance, and Toy invited him through into the kitchen.

“Put your bags down and help yourself to some coffee,” he said.

“I’m just going up to see the boss man. Make yourself comfortable.”

Alone for the first time since leaving Wandsworth Marty felt uncomfortable. The door was open at his back; there were no locks on the windows, no officers patrolling the corridors beyond the kitchen. It was paradoxical, but he felt unprotected, almost vulnerable. After a few minutes he got up from the table, switched on the fluorescent light (night was falling quickly, and there were no automatic switches here) and poured himself a mug of black coffee from the percolator. It was heavy and slightly bitter, brewed and rebrewed he guessed, not like the insipid stuff he was used to.

It was twenty-five minutes before Toy came back in, apologized for the delay, and told him that Mr. Whitehead would see him now.

“Leave your bags,” he said. “Luther will see to them.”

Toy led the way from the kitchen, which was part of the extension, into the main house. The corridors were gloomy, but everywhere Marty’s eye was amazed. The building was a museum. Paintings covered the walls from floor to ceiling; on the tables and shelves were vases and ceramic figurines whose enamels gleamed. There was no time to linger, however. They wove through the maze of halls, Marty’s sense of direction more confounded with every turn, until they reached the study. Toy knocked, opened the door, and ushered Marty in.

With little but a badly remembered photograph of Whitehead to build upon, Marty’s portrait of his new employer had been chiefly invention-and totally wrong. Where he’d imagined frailty, he found robustness. Where he’d expected the eccentricity of a recluse he found a furrowed, subtle face that scanned him, even as he entered the study, with efficiency and humor.

“Mr. Strauss,” said Whitehead, “welcome.”

Behind Whitehead, the curtains were still open, and through the window the floodlights suddenly came on, illuminating the piercing green of the lawns for a good two hundred yards. It was like a conjurer’s trick, the sudden appearance of this sward, but Whitehead ignored it. He walked toward Marty. Though he was a large man, and much of his bulk had turned to fat, the weight sat on his frame quite easily. There was no sense of awkwardness. The grace of his gait, the almost oiled smoothness of his arm as he extended it to Marty, the suppleness of the proffered fingers, all suggested a man at peace with his physique.

They shook hands. Either Marty was hot, or the other man cold: Marty immediately took the error to be his. A man like Whitehead was surely never too hot or too cold; he controlled his temperature with the same ease he controlled his finances. Hadn’t Toy dropped into their few exchanges in the car the fact that Whitehead had never been seriously ill in his life? Now Marty was face-to-face with the paragon he could believe it. Not a whisper of flatulence would dare this man’s bowels.

“I’m Joseph Whitehead,” he said. “Welcome to the Sanctuary.”

“Thank you.”

“You’ll have a drink? Celebrate.”

“Yes, please.”

“What will it be?”

Marty’s mind suddenly went blank, and he found himself gaping like a stranded fish. It was Toy, God save him, who suggested:

“Scotch?”

“That’d be fine.”

“The usual for me,” said Whitehead. “Come and sit down, Mr. Strauss.”

They sat. The chairs were comfortable; not antiques, like the tables in the corridors, but functional, modern pieces. The entire room shared this style: it was a working environment, not a museum. The few pictures on the dark blue walls looked, to Marty’s uneducated eye, as recent as the furniture they were large and slapdash. The most prominently placed, and the most representational, was signed Matisse, and pictured a bilious pink Woman sprawled on a bilious yellow chaise longue.

“Your whisky.”

Marty accepted the glass Toy was offering.

“We had Luther buy you a selection of new clothes; they’re up in your room,” Whitehead was telling Marty. “Just a couple of suits, shirts and so on, to start with. Later on, we’ll maybe send you out shopping for yourself.” He drained his glass of neat vodka before continuing. “Do they still issue suits to prisoners, or did they discontinue that? Smacks of the poorhouse, I suppose. Wouldn’t be too tactful in these enlightened times. People might begin to think you were criminals by necessity—”

Marty wasn’t at all sure about this line of chat: was Whitehead making fun of him? The monologue went on, its tenor quite friendly, while Marty tried to sort out irony from straightforward opinion. It was difficult. He was reminded, in the space of a few minutes listening to Whitehead talk, of how much subtler things were on the outside. By comparison with this man’s shifting, richly inflected talk the cleverest conversationalist in Wandsworth was an amateur. Toy slipped a second large whisky into Marty’s hand, but he scarcely noticed. Whitehead’s voice was hypnotic; and strangely soothing.

“Toy has explained your duties to you, has he?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“I want you to make this house your home, Strauss. Become familiar with it. There are one or two places that will be out-of-bounds to you; Toy will tell you where. Please observe those constraints. The rest of the place is at your disposal.”

Marty nodded, and downed his whisky; it ran down his gullet like quicksilver.

“Tomorrow …”

Whitehead stood up, the thought unfinished, and returned to the window. The grass shone as though freshly painted.

“… we’ll take a walk around the place, you and I.”

“Fine.”

“See what’s to be seen. Introduce you to Bella, and the others.”

There was more staff? Toy hadn’t mentioned them; but inevitably there would be others here: guards, cooks, gardeners. The place probably swarmed with functionaries.

“Come talk to me tomorrow, eh?”

Marty drained the rest of his scotch and Toy gestured that he should stand up. Whitehead seemed suddenly to have lost interest in them both. His assessment was over, at least for today; his thoughts were already elsewhere, his stare directed out of the window at the gleaming lawn.