The Damnation Game (3 page)

As evening began to fall he went north toward the square, scarcely thinking of where he was going, the route was so familiar to him. He walked through two checkpoints without being challenged, the confidence in his step password enough. Tonight he was inevitable. His place here, breathing the scented, lilac air, stars glimmering at his zenith, was unassailable.

He felt static run in the hairs on the back of his hand, and smiled. He saw a man, something unrecognizable in his arms, screaming at a window, and smiled. Not far away, the Vistula, gross with rain and melt-water, roared toward the sea. He was no less irresistible.

The gold went out of the cumulus; the lucid blue darkened toward night.

As he was about to come into Muranowski Square something flickered in front of him, a twist of wind scooted past him, and the air was suddenly full of white confetti. Impossible, surely, that there was a wedding taking place here? One of the whirling fragments lodged on his eyelash, and he plucked it off. It wasn’t confetti at all: it was a petal. He pressed it between thumb and forefinger. Its scented oil spilled from the fractured tissue.

In search of the source, he walked on a little way, and rounding the corner into the square itself discovered the ghost of a tree, prodigious with blossom, hanging in the air. It seemed unrooted, its snow-head lit by starlight, its trunk shadowy. He held his breath, shocked by this beauty, and walked toward it as he might have approached a wild animal, cautious in case it took fright. Something turned his stomach over.

It wasn’t awe of the blossom, or even the remnants of the joy he’d felt walking here. That was slipping away. A different sensation gripped him here in the square.

He was a man so used to atrocities that he had long counted himself unblanchable. So why did he stand now a few feet away from the tree, his fingernails, meticulously kept, pressed into his palms with anxiety, defying the umbrella of flowers to unveil its worst? There was nothing to fear here. Just petals in the air, shadow on the ground. And still he breathed shallowly, hoping against hope that his fright was baseless.

Come on,
he thought,
if you’ve got something to show me, I’m waiting.

At his silent invitation two things happened. Behind him a guttural voice asked: “Who are you?” in Polish. Distracted for the merest heartbeat by surprise, his eyes lost focus on the tree, and in that instant a figure dislodged itself from beneath the blossom-weighed branches and slouched, momentarily, into the starlight. In the cheating murk the thief wasn’t certain what he saw: a discarded face looking blankly in his direction perhaps, hair seared off. A scabby carcass, wide as a bull’s. Vasiliev’s vast hands.

All or nothing of this; and already the figure was retiring into hiding beyond the tree, its wounded head brushing the branches as it went. A drizzle of petals fluttered onto its charcoal shoulders.

“Did you hear me?” said the voice at his back. The thief didn’t turn. He went on staring at the tree, narrowing his eyes, attempting to separate substance from illusion. But the man, whoever he was, had gone. It could not have been the Russian, of course; reason proclaimed against it. Vasiliev was dead, found with his face down in the filth of a sewer. His body was probably already on its way to some far-flung outpost of the Russian empire. He wasn’t here; he couldn’t be here. But the thief felt an urgent need to pursue the stranger nevertheless, just to tap his shoulder, to have him turn round, to look into his face and verify that it was not Konstantin. Too late already; the questioner behind him had taken fierce hold of his arm, and was demanding an answer. The branches of the tree had stopped shaking, the petals had stopped falling, the man was away.

Sighing, the thief turned to his interrogator.

The figure in front of him was smiling a welcome. It was a woman, despite the rasp of the voice, dressed in oversized trousers, tied with a rope, but otherwise naked. Her head was shaved; her toenails lacquered. All this he took in with senses heightened from the shock of the tree, and from the pleasure of her nudity. The sheened globes of her breasts were perfect. He felt his fists opening, the palms tingling to touch them. But perhaps his appraisal of the body was too frank. He glanced back up at her face to see if she was still smiling. She was; but his gaze lingered on her face this time, and he realized that what he’d taken to be a smile was a permanent fixture. Her lips had been sliced off, exposing gums and teeth. There were ghastly scars on her cheeks, the remains of wounds that had severed the tendons and induced a rictus that teased her mouth open. Her look appalled him.

“You want…?” she began.

Want? he thought, his eyes flicking back to the breasts. Her casual nudity aroused him, despite the mutilation of her face. He was disgusted with the idea of taking her—to kiss that lipless mouth was more than orgasm was worth—and yet if she offered he’d accept, and damn the disgust.

“You want …?” she began again, in that slurred hybrid of a voice, neither male nor female. It was difficult for her to shape and expel words without the aid of lips. She got the rest of the question out, however. “You want the cards?”

He’d missed the point entirely. She had no interest in him, sexual or otherwise. She was simply a messenger.
Mamoulian was here
. Within spitting distance, probably. Perhaps watching him even now.

But the confusion of emotions in him blurred the elation he should have felt at this moment. Instead of triumph, he grappled with a headful of contrary images: blossom, breasts, darkness; the burned man’s face, turning too briefly toward him; lust, fear; a single star appearing from a flank of cloud. Hardly thinking of what he was saying, he replied:

“Yes. I want the cards.”

She nodded, turned away from him, and started past the tree, its branches still rocking where the man who was not Vasiliev had touched them, and crossed the square. He followed. It was possible to forget this go-between’s face while looking at the grace of her barefooted steps. She didn’t seem to care what she trod on. Not once did she falter, despite the glass, brick and shrapnel underfoot.

She led him across to the remains of a large house on the opposite side of the square. Its ravaged exterior, once impressive, still stood; there was even a doorway in it, though no door. Through it, the light of a bonfire flickered. Rubble from the interior spilled through the doorway and blocked the lower half, obliging both woman and thief to duck down and scramble up into the house itself. In the gloom the sleeve of his coat snagged on something; the cloth tore. She didn’t turn to see if he was hurt, though he cursed audibly. She simply led on over the mounds of brick and fallen roof timbers while he stumbled after her, feeling ridiculously clumsy. By the light of the bonfire he could see the size of the interior; this had once been a fine house. There was little time for study, however.

The woman was past the fire now, and climbing toward a staircase. He followed, sweating. The fire spat; he glanced around at it, and glimpsed somebody on the far side, keeping out of sight behind the flames. Even as he watched, the fire keeper threw more tinder down, and a constellation of livid specks was thrown up against the sky.

The woman was climbing the stairs. He hurried after her, his shadow-thrown by the fire—huge on the wall. She was at the top of the stairs when he was halfway up, and now she was slipping through a second doorway and gone. He followed on as quickly as he could, and turned through the doorway after her.

The firelight only found its way fitfully into the room he’d stepped into, and he could scarcely make anything out at first.

“Close the door,” somebody asked. It took him a few beats to realize that the request was being made of him. He half-turned, fumbled for the handle, found that there was none, and pushed the door closed on aching hinges.

That done, he looked back into the room. The woman was standing two or three yards in front of him, her perpetually amused face looking at him, the smile a gray sickle.

“Your coat,” she said, and stretched out her hands to help him shoulder it off. Once done, she stepped out of his eyeline, and the object of his long search came into view.

It was not Mamoulian, however, that took his eye at first. It was the carved wooden altar piece set against the wall behind him, a Gothic masterwork which blazed, even in the gloom, with gold and scarlet and blue. Spoils of war, the thief thought; so that’s what the bastard does with his fortune. Now he looked at the figure in front of the triptych. A single wick, immersed in oil, guttered smokily on the table at which he sat. The illumination it threw up on to the card-player’s face was bright but unstable.

“So, Pilgrim,” the man said, “you found me. Finally.”

“You found me, surely,” the thief replied; it had been as Vasiliev had predicted.

“You fancy a game or two, I hear. Is that right?”

“Why not?” He tried to sound as nonchalant as possible, though his heart was beating a double tattoo in his chest. Coming into the card player’s presence, he felt pitifully unprepared. Sweat glued his hair to his forehead; there was brick dust on his hands and muck under his nails:
I must look
, he squirmed,
like the thief I am
.

By contrast, Mamoulian was a picture of propriety. There was nothing in the sober clothes—the black tie, the gray suit—that suggested a profiteer: he appeared, this legend, like a stockbroker. His face, like his dress, was unrepentantly plain, its taut and finely etched skin waxen by the charmless oil flame. He looked sixty or thereabouts, cheeks slightly hollowed, nose large, aristocratic; brow wide and high. His hair had receded to the back of his skull; what remained was feathery and white. But there was neither frailty nor fatigue in his posture. He sat upright in his chair, and his agile hands fanned and gathered a pack of cards with loving familiarity. Only his eyes belonged to the thief’s dream of him. No stockbroker ever had such naked eyes. Such glacial, unforgiving eyes.

“I hoped you’d come, Pilgrim. Sooner or later,” he said. His English was without inflection.

“Am I late?” the thief asked, half-joking.

Mamoulian laid the cards down. He seemed to take the inquiry quite seriously. “We’ll see.” He paused before saying, “You know, of course, that I play for very high stakes.”

“I heard.”

“If you wish to withdraw now, before we go any further, I would perfectly understand.” The little speech was made without a trace of irony.

“Don’t you want me to play?”

Mamoulian pressed his thin, dry lips together and frowned. “On the contrary,” he said, “I very much want you to play.”

There was a flicker—was there not? —of pathos there. The thief wasn’t sure if it was a slip of the tongue, or the subtlest of theatrics.

“But I am not sympathetic …” he went on, “to those who do not pay their debts.”

“You mean the lieutenant,” the thief chanced.

Mamoulian stared at him. “I know no lieutenant,” he said flatly. “I know only gamblers, like myself. A few are good, most are not. They all come here to test their mettle, as you have.”

He had picked up the pack again, and it was moving in his hands as if the cards were alive. Fifty-two moths fluttering in the queasy light, each one marked a little differently from the last. They were almost indecently beautiful; their glossy faces the most unflawed thing the thief had set eyes on in months.

“I want to play,” he said, defying the hypnotic passage of cards.

“Then sit down, Pilgrim,” Mamoulian said, as though the question had never been at issue.

Almost soundlessly the woman had set a chair behind him. As he sat down, the thief met Mamoulian’s gaze. Was there anything in those joyless eyes that intended him harm? No, nothing. There was nothing there to fear.

Murmuring his thanks for the invitation, he unbuttoned the cuffs of his shirt and folded the sleeves back in preparation for play.

After a time, the game began.

Part Two

ASYLUM

The Devil is by no means the worst that there is; I would rather have dealings with him than with many a human being. He honours his agreements much more promptly than many a swindler on Earth. To be true, when payment is due he comes on the dot; just as twelve strikes, fetches his soul and goes off home to Hell like a good Devil. He’s just a businessman as is right and proper.

—-J.N. NESTROY,
Hollenangst

I

Providence

Chapter 5

A
fter serving six years of his sentence at Wandsworth, Marty Strauss was used to waiting. He waited to wash and shave himself every morning; he waited to eat, he waited to defecate; he waited for freedom. So much waiting. It was all part of the punishment, of course; as was the interview he’d been summoned to this dreary afternoon. But while the waiting had come to seem easy, the interviews never had. He loathed the bureaucratic spotlight: the Parole File bulging with the Discipline Reports, the Home Circumstance Reports, the Psychiatric Evaluations; the way every few months you stood stripped in front of some uncivil servant while he told you what a foul thing you were. It hurt him so much he knew he’d never be healed of it; never forget the hot rooms filled with insinuation and dashed hopes. He’d dream them forever.

“Come in, Strauss.”

The room hadn’t changed since he’d last been here; only become staler. The man on the opposite side of the table hadn’t changed either. His name was Somervale, and there were any number of prisoners in Wandsworth who nightly said prayers for his pulverization. Today he was not alone behind the plastic-topped table.

“Sit down, Strauss.”

Marty glanced across at Somervale’s associate. He was no prison officer. His suit was too tasteful, his fingernails too well-manicured. He looked to be in late middle-age, solidly built, and his nose was slightly crooked, as if it had once been broken and then imperfectly reset. Somervale offered the introduction: