The Damnation Game (10 page)

“Impressive, eh?”

Marty nodded. Again, the sight woke echoes.

“It offers a measure of security,” Whitehead said.

He turned left at the fence, and began to walk its length, the conversation—if that it could be called—coming from him in the form of a series of non sequiturs, as if he were too impatient with the elliptical structure of normal exchanges to bear with it. He simply threw statements, or clusters of remarks, down, and expected Marty to make whatever sense he could of them.

“It’s not a perfect system: fences, dogs, cameras. You saw the screens in the kitchen?”

“Yes.

“I’ve got the same upstairs. The cameras offer total surveillance day and night.” He jerked a thumb up at one of the camera’s floodlights mounted beside them. There was one set on every tenth upright. They swiveled back and forth slowly, like the heads of mechanical birds.

“Luther’ll show you how to run through them in sequence. Cost a small fortune to install, and I’m not sure it’s more than cosmetic. These people aren’t fools.”

“You’ve had break-ins?”

“Not here. At the London house it used to happen all the time. Of course, that was when I was more visible. The unrepentant tycoon. Evangeline and me in every scandal sheet. The open sewer of Fleet Street; it never fails to appall me.”

“I thought you owned a newspaper?”

“Been reading up on me?”

“Not exactly; I—”

“Don’t believe the biographies, or the gossip columns, or even Who’s Who. They lie. I lie” —he finished the declension, entertained by his own cynicism—“he, she, or it lies. Scribblers. Dirt peddlers. Contemptible, the lot of them.”

Was that what he was keeping out with these lethal fences: dirt peddlers? A fortress against a tide of scandal and shit? If so, it was an elaborate lay to go about it. Marty wondered if this wasn’t simply monstrous egotism. Was the hemisphere that interested in the private life of Joseph Whitehead?

“What are you thinking, Mr. Strauss?”

“About the fences,” Marty lied, proving Whitehead’s earlier point.

“No, Strauss,” Whitehead corrected him. “You’re thinking: what have I got myself into, locked up with a lunatic?”

Marty sensed any further denial would sound like guilt. He said nothing.

“Isn’t that the conventional wisdom where I’m concerned? The failing plutocrat, festering in solitude. Don’t they say that about me?”

“Something like that,” Marty finally replied.

“And still you came.”

“Yes.”

“Of course you came. You thought that however offbeat I am, nothing could be as bad as another stretch behind locked doors, isn’t that right? And you wanted out. At any cost. You were desperate.”

“Of course I wanted out. Anybody would.”

“I’m glad you admit to that. Because your wanting gives me considerable power over you, don’t you think? You daren’t cheat me. You must cleave to me the way the dogs cleave to Lillian, not because she represents their next meal but because she’s their world. You must make me your world, Mr. Strauss; my preservation, my sanity, my smallest comfort must be uppermost in your mind every waking moment. If it is, I promise you freedoms you never dreamed of experiencing. The kind of freedoms that are only in the gift of very wealthy men. If not, I will put you back in prison with your record book irredeemably spoiled. Understand me?”

“I understand.”

Whitehead nodded.

“Come then,” he said. “Walk beside me.”

He turned and walked on. The fence swung around behind the back of the woods at this point, and rather than plunging into the undergrowth Whitehead suggested they truncate their journey by heading toward the pool.

“One tree looks much like the next to me,” he commented. “You can come here and trudge around to your heart’s content later on.” They skirted the edge of the woods long enough for Marty to get an impression of their density, however. The trees hadn’t been systematically planted; this was no regimented Forestry Commission reserve. They stood close to each other, their limbs intertwined, a mixture of deciduous varieties and pines all fighting for growing space. Only occasionally, where an oak or a lime stood bare-branched this early in the year, did light bless the undergrowth. He promised himself a return here before spring prettified it.

Whitehead summoned Marty’s thoughts back into focus.

“From now on I expect you to be within summoning distance most of the time. I don’t want you with me every moment of the day … just need you in the vicinity. On occasion, and only with my permission, you’ll be permitted to leave on your own. You can drive?”

“Yes.”

“Well, there’s no shortage of cars, so we’ll sort something out for you. This isn’t strictly within the guidelines set out by the parole board. Their recommendation was that you remain, as it were, in custody here for six probationary months. But I frankly see no reason to prevent you visiting your loved ones-at least when there are other people around to look after my welfare.”

“Thank you. I appreciate it.”

“I’m afraid I can’t allow you any time just at the moment. Your presence here is vital.”

“Problems?”

“My life is constantly threatened, Strauss. I, or rather my offices, receive hate mail all the time. The difficulty is in separating the crank who spends his time writing filth to public figures from the genuine assassin.”

“Why should anyone want to assassinate you?”

“I’m one of the wealthiest men outside America. I own companies that employ tens of thousands of people; I own tracts of land so large I could not walk them in the years remaining to me if I began now; I own ships, art, horseflesh. It’s easy to make an icon of me. To think that if I and my life were brought down there’d be peace on earth and goodwill to men.”

“I see.”

“Sweet dreams,” he said bitterly.

The pace of their march had begun to slow. The great man’s breath was rather shorter now than it had been half an hour before. Listening to him talk it was easy to forget his advanced years. His opinions had all the absolutism of youth. No room here for the mellowness of advancing years; for ambiguity or doubt.

“I think it’s time we headed back,” he said.

The monologue had finally lapsed, and Marty had no taste for further talk. No energy either. Whitehead’s style-with its unsignaled swerves and bends-had exhausted him. He’d have to get used to the pose of the attentive listener: find a face to use when these lectures began, and put it on. Learn to nod knowingly in the right places, to murmur platitudes at the appropriate breaks in the flow. It would take a while, but he’d get the trick of handling Whitehead in time.

“This is my fortress, Mr. Strauss,” the old man announced as they approached the house. It didn’t look particularly garrisoned: the brick was too warm to be stern. “Its sole function is to keep me from harm.”

“Like me.”

“Like you, Mr. Strauss.”

Behind the house, one of the dogs had started barking. The solo rapidly became a chorus.

“Feeding time,” Whitehead said.

Chapter 15

I
t took several weeks’ living on the estate for Marty to understand fully the rhythm of the Whitehead household. Like the benign dictatorship it was, the shape of each day was defined absolutely by Whitehead’s plans and whims. As the old man had told Marty that first day, the house was a shrine to him; his worshipers came daily to touch the hem of his opinion. Some of their faces he recognized: captains of industry; two or three government ministers (one of whom had recently left office in disgrace; was he coming here, Marty wondered, asking for forgiveness or retribution?); pundits, guardians of public morality—many people Marty knew by sight but couldn’t name, even more he didn’t know at all. He was introduced to none of them.

Once or twice a week he might be asked to remain in the room while the meetings were held, but more often than not he was required only to be within hailing distance. Wherever he was, he was invisible as far as most of the guests were concerned: ignored, treated at best as part of the furniture. At first it was irritating; everyone in the house had a name but him, it seemed. As time passed, however, he grew to be glad of his anonymity. He wasn’t required to give an opinion on everything, so he could let his mind drift with no danger of being called into the conversation. It was good too to be dislocated from the concerns of these almighty people: their lies seemed, he thought, fraught and artificial. He saw in many of their faces looks he recognized from his years in Wandsworth: the constant fretting over minor gibes, over their place in the hierarchy. The rules might be more civil in this circle than in Wandsworth; but the struggles, he began to understand, were fundamentally the same. All power games of one kind or another. He was pleased to have no part in them.

Besides, his mind had more important issues to mull over. For one thing, there was Charmaine. More out of curiosity than passion, perhaps, he had begun to think about her a good deal. He found himself wondering how her body looked seven years on. Did she still shave the thin line of hair that ran down from her navel to her pubes; did her fresh sweat still smell so pungent? He wondered too if she still loved love the way she had. She had shown more unreserved appetite for the physical act than any woman he’d known; it was one of the reasons he’d married her. Was it still so? And if it was, with whom did she slake her thirst? He turned these and a dozen other questions about her over and over in his head, and promised himself that at the first opportunity he’d go and see her.

The weeks saw his physique improve. The strict regime of exercise he’d set for himself that first night began as a torment, but after a few days of punished and complaining muscles the exertion began to bear fruit.

He got up at five-thirty each morning and took an hour-long run around the grounds. After a week of following the same circuit he altered the route, which allowed him to explore the estate at the same time as exercising.

There was a great deal to see. Spring hadn’t arrived in force yet, but there were stirrings. Crocuses were beginning to show themselves, as were the spears of daffodils. On the trees, fat buds were starting to split; leaves were unfurling. It had taken him almost a week to cover the estate fully, and to work out the relation of one part of it to another; now he more or less had a grasp of the arrangement. He knew the lake, the dovecote, the swimming pool, the tennis courts, the kennels, the woods and the gardens. One morning, when the sky was exceptionally clear, he had circuited the entire grounds, hugging the fence all the way around the estate even when it threaded its way along the back of the woods. He now reckoned he had as thorough a knowledge of the place as anyone, including its owner.

It was a joy; not just the exploration, and the freedom of running miles without someone looking over your shoulder all the time, but the reacquaintance with a dozen natural spectacles. He loved being up to watch the sun rise, and it was almost as though he was running to meet it, as though dawn was for him and him alone, a promise of light and warmth and life to come.

He soon lost the ring of flab around his middle; the divide of his abdominals showed again: the washboard stomach he’d always been so proud of as a younger man, and thought he’d lost forever. Muscles he’d forgotten he had came back into play, at first to make their presence felt in aching, then to simply live a glowing, ruddy life. He was sweating out years of frustration and showering it away, and he was lighter for it. He was aware, once more, of his body as a system, its parts correspondents, its health dependent on balance and respectful usage.

If Whitehead noted any change in his manner or physique, no comment was made. But Toy, on one of his trips up to the house from London, immediately registered the change in him. Marty noted an alteration in Toy too, but for the worse. It wasn’t plausible to comment on how weary he looked Marty felt their relationship wouldn’t yet allow for such familiarity. He just hoped Toy wasn’t suffering from something serious. The sudden wasting of his wide face suggested a devouring somewhere in the man’s innards. The nimbleness in his step, which Marty put down to Toy’s years in the ring, had also gone.

There were other mysteries here, besides Toy’s decline. For one thing, there was the collection: the works of the great masters that lined the corridors of the sanctuary. They were neglected. Nobody had dusted their surfaces in months, perhaps years, and in addition to the yellowing varnish that dimmed their fineness they were further spoiled by a layer of grime. Marty had never had much taste for art, but given time to look at these pictures, he found his appetite for it good. Many of them, the portraits and the religious works, he didn’t really like: they weren’t of people he knew or events he understood. But in a small hallway on the first floor that led to the extension that had been Evangeline’s suite, and was now the sauna and solarium, he found two paintings that caught his imagination. They were both landscapes, by the same anonymous hand, and to judge by their poky location they were not great works. But their curious amalgam of real scenery-trees and winding roads under blue and yellow skies—with totally fanciful details—a dragon with speckled wings devouring a man on that road; a flight of women levitating above the forest; a distant city, burning—this marriage of real and unreal was so persuasively painted that Marty found himself going back and back again to these two haunted canvases, finding more fantastical detail hidden in thicket or heat-haze each time he went.

The paintings weren’t the only things that whetted his curiosity.

The upper floor of the main house, where Whitehead had a suite of rooms, was entirely out-of-bounds to him, and he was more than once tempted to slip up when he knew the old man was otherwise engaged, to nose around the forbidden territory. He suspected Whitehead used the top story as a vantage point from which to spy on his acolytes’ comings and goings. That went some way to explaining the other mystery: the sense, he had, running his circuits, that he was being watched. But he resisted the temptation to investigate. It was perhaps more than his job was worth.