The Damnation Game (21 page)

“What sort of risk?”

“Nothing so simple as a wheel, or a game of cards. I wish it were. Then maybe I could explain to you, instead of asking for an act of faith. But it’s so complicated. And I’m tired.”

“Bill said something—”

Whitehead broke in.

“Toy’s left the estate. You won’t be seeing him again.”

“When did he go?”

“Earlier in the week. Relations between us have been deteriorating for a while.” He caught Marty’s dismay. “Don’t fret about it. Your position here is as secure as it ever was. But you must trust me absolutely.”

“Sir—”

“No affirmations of loyalty; they’re wasted on me. Not because I don’t believe you’re sincere. But I’m surrounded by people who tell me whatever they think I want to hear. That’s how they keep their wives in furs and their sons in cocaine.” His gloved fingers clawed at his bearded cheek as he spoke. “So few honest people. Toy was one. Evangeline, my wife, was another. But so very few. I just have to trust to instinct; I have to blot out all the talk and follow what my head tells me. And it trusts you, Martin.”

Marty said nothing; just listened as Whitehead’s voice became quieter, his eyes so intense now a glance from them might have ignited tinder.

“If you stay with me—if you keep me safe—there’s nothing you can’t be or have. Understand me? Nothing.”

This was not the first time the old man had offered this seduction; but circumstances had clearly changed since Marty first arrived at the Sanctuary. There was more at risk now. “What’s the worst that can happen?” he asked.

The mazed face had slackened: only the incendiary eyes still showed life.

“The worst?” Whitehead said. “Who knows the worst?” The burning eyes seemed about to be extinguished by tears; he fought them. “I have seen such things. And passed by them on the other side. Never thought … not once …”

A pattering announced rain; its soft percussion accompanied Whitehead as he stumbled to speak. All his verbal skills had deserted him suddenly; he was bereft. But something—a vast something—demanded to be said.

“Never thought … it would ever happen to me.”

He bit back more words, and shook his head at his own absurdity.

“Will you help me?” he asked, in place of further explanation.

“Of course.”

“Well,” he replied. “We’ll see, eh?”

Without warning he suddenly stepped past Marty and returned the way they’d come. The jaunt was apparently over. For several minutes they walked as they had, Whitehead taking the lead, with Marty trailing a discreet two yards behind. Just before they came in sight of the house Whitehead spoke again. This time he didn’t break the rhythm of his step, but threw the inquiry over his shoulder. Just four words.

“And the Devil, Marty?”

“What, sir?”

“The Devil. Did you ever pray to him?”

It was a joke. A little leaden maybe, but the old man’s way of making light of his confessional.

“Well, did you?”

“Once or twice,” Marty answered, skirting a smile. As the words left his lips Whitehead froze dead in his tracks, a hand outstretched behind him to check Marty.

“Ssh.”

Twenty yards ahead, arrested as it crossed their path, was a fox.

It hadn’t seen its observers yet, but it could only be a matter of moments before their scent reached its nostrils.

“Which way?” Whitehead hissed.

“What?”

“Which way will it run? A thousand pounds. Straight bet.”

“I haven’t got—” Marty began.

“Against a week’s pay.”

Marty began to smile. What was a week’s pay? He couldn’t spend it anyway.

“A thousand pounds says it runs to the right,” said Whitehead.

Marty hesitated.

“Quickly, man—”

“Done.”

Even on the word, the animal caught their scent. Its ears pricked, its head turned, and it saw them. For an instant it was too stupefied by surprise to move; then it ran. For several yards it took off away from them along the path, not veering to one side or the other, its heels kicking up dead leaves as it went. Then, without warning, it sliced away into the cover of the trees, to the left. There was no ambiguity about the victory.

“Well done,” said Whitehead, pulling off his glove and extending his hand to Marty. When he shook it, Marty felt it tingle like the chips had on a winning night.

B
y the time they got back, the rain was beginning to come on more heavily. A welcome hush had descended on the house. Apparently Pearl, unable to bear the barbarians in her kitchen any longer, had thrown a fit and left. Though she’d gone, the offending parties seemed well chastened. Their babble was reduced to a murmur, and few of them made any approach to Whitehead as he entered. Those few that did were quickly slapped down. “Are you still here, Munrow?” he said to one devotee; to another, who made the error of thrusting a sheaf of papers at him, he quietly suggested the man “choke on them.” They reached the study with the minimum of interruptions. Whitehead unlocked the wall safe.

“You would prefer cash, I’m sure.”

Marty studied the carpet. Though he’d won the bet fairly, he was embarrassed by the payoff.

“Cash is fine,” he murmured.

Whitehead counted out a wad of twenty-pound notes and handed them across.

“Enjoy,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me,” Whitehead said. “It was a straight bet. I lost.”

An awkward silence fell while Marty pocketed the money.

“Our talk …” the old man said, “… is in the strictest confidence, you understand?”

“Of course. I wouldn’t—”

Whitehead raised his hand to ward off his protestations.

“—The strictest confidence. My enemies have agents.”

Marty nodded as though he understood. In a way, of course, he did. Perhaps Whitehead suspected Luther or Pearl. Maybe even Toy, who was so abruptly
persona non grata
.

“These people are responsible for the present fall in my fortunes. It’s all meticulously engineered.” He shrugged, eyes like slits. God, Marty thought, I’d never want to be on the wrong side of this man. “I don’t fret about these things. If they want to plan my ruin, let them. But I wouldn’t like to think that my most intimate feelings were available to them. Do you see?”

“They won’t be.”

“No.” He pursed his lips; a cold kiss of satisfaction.

“You’ve seen something of Carys, I gather? Pearl says you spend time together, is that right?”

“Yes.”

Whitehead came back with a tone of detachment that was patently fake.

“She seems stable much of the time, but essentially that’s a performance. I’m afraid she’s not well, and hasn’t been for several years. Of course she’s seen the best psychiatrists money can buy but I’m afraid it’s done no good. Her mother went the same way in the end.”

“Are you telling me not to see her?”

Whitehead looked genuinely surprised.

“No, not at all. The companionship may be good for her. But please, bear in mind she’s a highly disturbed girl. Don’t take her pronouncements too seriously. Half the time she doesn’t know what she’s saying. Well, I think that’s it. You’d better go and pay off your fox.”

He laughed, gently.

“Clever fox,” he said.

I
n the two and a half months Marty had been at the Sanctuary Whitehead had been an iceberg. Now he had to think about revising that description. Today he’d glimpsed another man altogether: inarticulate, alone; talking of God and prayer. Not just God. There had been that final question, the one he’d thrown away so carelessly:

“And the Devil? Did you ever pray to him?”

Marty felt he’d been handed a pile of jigsaw pieces, none of which seemed to belong to the same portrait. Fragments of a dozen scenes: Whitehead resplendent among his acolytes, or sitting at a window watching the night; Whitehead the potentate, lord of all he surveyed, or betting like a drunken porter on the way a fox might run.

This last fragment puzzled Marty the most. In it, he sensed, was a clue that could unite these disparate images. He had the strangest feeling that the bet on the fox had been fixed. Impossible, of course, and yet, and yet … Suppose Whitehead
could
put his finger on the wheel anytime he wanted to, so that even the petty chance of a fox running to the right or left was available to him? Could he know the future before it happened—was that why the chips tingled, and fingers too?
—or was he
shaping
it?

An earlier self would have rejected these subtleties out of hand. But Marty had changed. Being in the Sanctuary had changed him, Carys’ ellipses had changed him. In a hundred ways he was more complex than he’d been, and part of him longed for a return to the clarity of black and white. But he knew damn well that such simplicity was a lie. Experience was made up of endless ambiguities—of motive, of feeling, of cause and effect—and if he was to win under such circumstances, he had to understand how those ambiguities worked.

No; not
win
. There was no winning and losing here: not in the way that he’d understood before. The fox had run to the left, and he had a thousand pounds folded in his pocket, but he felt none of the exhilaration he had when he’d won on the horses, or at the casino. Just black bleeding into white, and vice versa, until he scarcely knew right from wrong.

Chapter 30

T
oy had rung the estate in the middle of the afternoon, spoken to an irate Pearl, who was just about to make her exit, and left a message for Marty to call him at the Pimlico number. But Marty hadn’t rung back. Toy wondered if Pearl had failed to pass the message along, or if Whitehead had somehow intercepted it, and prevented a return call being made. Whatever the reason, he hadn’t spoken to Marty, and he felt guilty about it. He’d promised to warn Strauss if events started to go badly awry. Now they were. Nothing observable perhaps; the anxieties Toy was experiencing were born out of instinct rather than fact. But Yvonne had taught him to trust his heart, not his head. Things were going to fall down after all; and he hadn’t warned Marty. Perhaps that was why he was having such bad dreams, and waking with memories of ugliness flitting in his head.

Not everyone survived being young. Some died early, victims of their own hunger for life. Toy hadn’t been such a victim, though he’d come perilously close. Not that he’d known it at the time. He’d been too dazzled by the new pools he was introduced into by Whitehead to see how lethal those waters could be. And he’d obeyed the great man’s wishes with such unquestioning zeal, hadn’t he? Never once had he balked at his duty, however criminal it might have seemed. Why should he be surprised then if, after all these years these same crimes, so casually committed, were in silent pursuit of him? That was why he lay now in a clammy sweat, with Yvonne sleeping beside him, and one phrase circling his skull: Mamoulian will come.

That was the only clear notion he had. The rest—thoughts of Marty, and Whitehead—was a potpourri of shames and accusations. But that plain phrase—Mamoulian will come—stood out in the dross of uncertainty as a fixed point to which all his terrors adhered. No apology would suffice. No humiliation would curb the Last European’s anger. Because Toy had been young, and a brute, and he’d had a wicked way with him. Once upon a time, when he’d been too young to know better, he’d made Mamoulian suffer, and the remorse he felt now came too late—twenty, thirty years too late—and after all, hadn’t he lived on the profits of his brutality all these years?
Oh, Jesus
, he said in the unsteady rhythm of his breath,
Jesus help me
.

Afraid, and ready to admit to being afraid if it meant she’d comfort him, he turned over and reached for Yvonne. She wasn’t there. Her side of the bed was cold.

He sat up, momentarily disorientated.

“Yvonne?”

The bedroom door was ajar, and the dimmest of lights from downstairs described the room. It was chaos. They had been packing all evening, and the task had still not been finished when, at one in the morning, they’d retired. Clothes were heaped on the chest of drawers; an open case yawned in the corner; his ties hung over the back of a chair like parched snakes, tongues to the floor.

He heard a noise on the landing. He knew Yvonne’s padding step well. She’d gone for a glass of apple juice, or a biscuit, the way she so often did. She appeared at the door, in silhouette.

“Are you all right?” he asked her.

She murmured something like yes. He put his head back on the pillow.

“Hungry again,” he said, letting his eyes close. “Always hungry.”

Cold air seeped into the bed as she raised the sheet to slip in beside him.

“You left the light on downstairs,” he chided, as sleep started to slide over him again. She didn’t reply. Asleep already, probably: she was blessed with a facility for instant unconsciousness. He turned to look at her in the semidarkness. She wasn’t snoring yet, but nor was she entirely silent. He listened more carefully, his coiled innards jittery. It was a liquid sound she was making: as though breathing through mud.

“Yvonne … are you all right?”

She didn’t answer.

From her face, which was inches from his, the slushing sound went on. He reached for the switch of the lamp above the bed, keeping his eyes on the black mass of Yvonne’s head as he did so. Best to do this fast, he reasoned, before my imagination gets the better of me. His fingers located the switch, fumbled with it, then pressed the light on.

What was facing him on the pillow was not recognizably Yvonne.

He jabbered her name as he scrambled backward out of bed, eyes fixed on the abomination beside him. How was it possible that she was alive enough to climb the stairs and get into bed, to murmur yes to him as she had? The profundity of her wounding had killed her, surely. Nobody could live skinned and boned like that.

She half-turned in the bed, eyes closed, as if rolling over in her sleep. Then-horribly-she said his name. Her mouth didn’t work as it had; blood greased the word on its way. He couldn’t bear to look anymore, or he’d scream, and that would bring them—whoever did this—bring them howling at him with their scalpels already wet. They were probably outside the door already; but nothing could induce him to stay in the same room. Not with her performing slow gyrations on the bed, still saying his name as she pulled up her nightdress.