The Damnation Game (36 page)

Whitehead was staring at Bella across the threshold.

“No, you can’t come in,” he told her, as if she were a living thing.

“Send it away,” Marty groaned.

“She’s lonely,” the old man replied, chiding him for his lack of compassion.

It crossed Marty’s mind that Whitehead had lost his wits. “I don’t believe this is happening,” he said.

“Dogs are nothing to him, believe me.”

Marty remembered watching Mamoulian standing in the woods, staring down at the earth. He had seen no gravedigger because there’d been none. They’d exhumed themselves; squirming out of their plastic shrouds and pawing their way to the air.

“It’s easy with dogs,” Whitehead said. “Isn’t it, Bella? You’re trained to obey.”

She was sniffing at herself, content now that she’d seen Whitehead. Her God was still in his Heaven, and all was well with the world. The old man left the door ajar, and turned back to Marty.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said. “She’s not going to do us any harm.”

“He brought them to the house?”

“Yes; to break up my party. Pure spite. It was his way of reminding me what he’s capable of.”

Marty stooped and righted another chair. He was shaking so violently, he feared if he didn’t sit down he’d fall down.

“The lieutenant was worse,” the old man said, “because he didn’t obey like Bella. He knew what had been done to him was an abomination. That made him angry.”

Bella had woken with an appetite. That was why she’d made her way up to the room she remembered most fondly; a place where a man who knew the best spot to scratch behind her ear would coo soft words to her and feed her morsels off his plate. But tonight she’d come up to find things changed. The man was odd with her, his voice jangling, and there was someone else in the room, one she vaguely knew the scent of, but couldn’t place. She was still hungry, such deep hunger, and there was an appetizing smell very close to her. Of meat left in the earth, the way she liked it, still on the bone and half gone to putrescence. She sniffed, almost blind, looking for the source of the smell, and having found it, began to eat.

“Not a pretty sight.”

She was devouring her own body, taking gray, greasy bites from the decayed muscle of her haunch. Whitehead watched as she pulled at herself. His passivity in the face of this new horror broke Marty.

“Don’t let her!” he pushed the old man aside.

“But she’s hungry,” he responded, as though this horror were the most natural sight in the world.

Marty picked up the chair he’d been sitting on and slammed it against the wall. It was heavy, but his muscles were brimming, and the violence was a welcome release. The chair broke.

The dog looked up from her meal; the meat she was swallowing fell from her cut throat.

“Too much,” Marty said, picking up a leg of the chair and crossing the room to the door before Bella could register what he intended. At the last moment she seemed to understand that he meant her harm, and tried to get to her feet. One of her back legs, the haunch almost chewed through, would no longer support her, and she staggered, teeth bared, as Marty swung his makeshift weapon down on her. The force of his blow shattered her skull. The snarling stopped. The body backed off, dragging the ruined head on a rope of a neck, the tail tucked between its back legs in fear. Two or three trembling steps of retreat and it could go no further.

Marty waited, hoping to God he wouldn’t have to strike a second time. As he watched the body seemed to deflate. The swell of its chest, the remnants of its head, the organs hanging in the vault of its torso all collapsed into an abstraction, one part indistinguishable from the next. He closed the door on it, and dropped the blooded weapon at his side.

Whitehead had taken refuge across the room. His face was as gray as Bella’s body.

“How did he do this?” Marty said. “How is it possible?”

“He has power,” Whitehead stated. It was as simple as that, apparently. “He can steal life, and he can give it.”

Marty dug in his pocket for the linen handkerchief he’d bought specially for this night of dining and conversation. Shaking it out, its edges pristine, he wiped his face. The handkerchief came away dirtied with specks of rot. He felt as empty as the sac in the hall outside.

“You asked me once if I believed in Hell,” he said. “Do you remember?”

“Yes.”

“Is that what you think Mamoulian is? Something”—he wanted to laugh—“something from Hell?”

“I’ve considered the possibility. But I’m not by nature a supernaturalist. Heaven and Hell. All that paraphernalia. My system revolts at it.”

“If not devils, what?”

“Is it so important?”

Marty wiped his sweaty palms on his trousers. He felt contaminated by this obscenity. It would take a long time to wash the horror out, if he ever could. He’d made the error of digging too deep, and the story he’d heard—that and the dog at the door—were the consequence.

“You look sick,” Whitehead said.

“I never thought …”

“What? That the dead can get up and walk? Oh, Marty, I took you for a Christian, despite your protestations.”

“I’m getting out,” Marty said. “Both of us.”

“Both?”

“Carys and me. We’ll go away. From him. From you.”

“Poor Marty. You’re more bovine than I thought you were. You won’t see her again.”

“Why not?”

“She’s with him, damn you! Didn’t it occur to you? She went with him!” So that had been the unthinkable solution to her abrupt vanishing trick. “Willingly, of course.”

“No.”

“Oh, yes, Marty. He had a claim on her from the beginning. He rocked her in his arms when she was barely born. Who knows what kind of influence he has. I won her back, of course, for a while.” He sighed. “I made her love me.”

“She wanted to be away from you.”

“Never. She’s my daughter, Strauss. She’s as manipulative as I am. Anything between you and her was purely a marriage of her convenience.”

“You’re a fucking bastard.”

“That’s a given, Marty. I’m a monster; I concede the point.” He threw up his hands, palms out, innocent of everything but guilt.

“I thought you said she loved you. Still she went.”

“I told you: she’s my daughter. She thinks the way I do. She went with him to learn how to use her powers. I did the same, remember?”

This line of argument, even from vermin like Whitehead, made a kind of sense. Beneath her strange conversation hadn’t there always lurked a contempt for Marty and the old man alike, contempt earned by their inability to sum her up? Given the opportunity, wouldn’t Carys go dance with the Devil if she felt she’d understand more of herself by doing so?

“Don’t concern yourself with her,” Whitehead said. “Forget her; she’s gone.”

Marty tried to hold on to the image of her face, but it was deteriorating. He was suddenly very tired, exhausted to his bones.

“Get some rest, Marty. Tomorrow we can bury the whore together.”

“I’m not getting involved in this.”

“I told you once, didn’t I, if you stayed with me, there was nowhere I couldn’t take you. It’s more true now than ever. You know Toy’s dead.”

“When? How?”

“I didn’t ask the details. The point is, he’s gone. There’s only you and I now.”

“You made a fool out of me.”

Whitehead’s face was a portrait of persuasion. “An error of taste,” he said. “Forgive me.”

“Too late.”

“I don’t want you to leave me, Marty. I won’t let you leave me! You hear?” His finger jabbed the air. “You came here to help me! What have you done? Nothing! Nothing!”

Blandishment had turned into accusations of betrayal in mere seconds. One moment tears, the next curses, and behind it all, the same terror of being left alone. Marty watched the old man’s trembling hands fist and unfist.

“Please …” he appealed, “… don’t leave me.”

“I want you to finish the story.”

“Good boy.”

“Everything, you understand me.
Everything
.”

“What more is there to tell?” Whitehead said. “I became rich. I had entered one of the fastest-growing postwar markets: pharmaceuticals. Within half a decade I was up there with the world leaders.” He smiled to himself.

“What’s more, there was very little illegality in the way I made my fortune. Unlike many, I played by the rules.”

“And Mamoulian? Did he help you?”

“He taught me not to agonize over the moral issues.”

“And what did he want in return?”

Whitehead narrowed his eyes. “You’re not so stupid, are you?” he said appreciatively. “You manage to get right to the hurt when it suits you.”

“It’s an obvious question. You’d made a deal with him.”

“No!” Whitehead interrupted, face set. “I made no deal, not in the way you mean it anyway. There was, perhaps, a gentleman’s agreement, but that’s long past. He’s had all he’s getting from me.”

“Which was?”

“To live through me,” Whitehead replied.

“Explain,” Marty said, “I don’t understand.”

“He wanted life, like any other man. He had appetites. And he satisfied them through me. Don’t ask me how. I don’t understand myself. But sometimes I could feel him at the back of my eyes …”

“And you let him?”

“At first I didn’t even know what he was doing: I had other calls on my attention. I was getting richer by the hour, it seemed. I had houses, land, art, women. It was easy to forget that he was always there, watching; living by proxy.

“Then in 1959 I married Evangeline. We had a wedding that would have shamed royalty: it was written up in newspapers from here to Hong Kong. Wealth and Influence marries Intelligence and Beauty: it was the ideal match. It crowned my happiness, it really did.”

“You were in love.”

“It was impossible not to love Evangeline. I think”-he sounded surprised as he spoke—“I think she even loved me.”

“What did she make of Mamoulian?”

“Ah, there’s the rub,” he said. “She loathed him from the start.

She said he was too puritanical; that his presence made her feel perpetually guilty. And she was right. He loathed the body; its functions disgusted him. But he couldn’t be free of it, or its appetites. That was a torment to him. And as time went by that streak of self-hatred worsened.”

“Because of her?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps. Now I think back, he probably wanted her, the way he’d wanted beauties in the past. And of course she despised him, right from the beginning. Once she was mistress of the house this war of nerves just escalated. Eventually she told me to get rid of him. This was just after Carys was born. She said she didn’t like him handling the baby—which he seemed to like to do. She just didn’t want him in the house. I’d known him two decades by now—he’d lived in my house, he’d shared my life—and I realized I knew nothing about him. He was still the mythical card-player I’d met in Warsaw.”

“Did you ever ask him?”

“Ask him what?”

“Who he was? Where he came from? How he got his skills?”

“Oh, yes, I asked him. On each occasion the answer was a little different from the time before.”

“So he was lying to you?”

“Quite blatantly. It was a sort of joke, I think: his idea of a party piece, never to be the same person twice. As if he didn’t quite exist. As if this man called Mamoulian was a construction, covering something else altogether.”

“What?”

Whitehead shrugged. “I don’t know. Evangeline used to say: he’s empty. That was what she found foul about him. It wasn’t his presence in the house that distressed her, it was his absence, the nullity of him. And I began to think maybe I’d be better getting rid of him, for Evangeline’s sake. All the lessons he had to teach me I’d learned. I didn’t need him anymore.

“Besides, he’d become a social embarrassment. God, when I think back I wonder—I really wonder—how we let him rule us for so long. He’d sit at the dinner table and you could feel the spell of depression he’d cast on the guests. And the older he got the more his talk was all futility.

“Not that he visibly aged; he didn’t. He doesn’t look a year older now than when I first met him.”

“No change at all?”

“Not physically. There’s something altered maybe. He’s got an air of defeat about him now.”

“He didn’t seem defeated to me.”

“You should have seen him in his prime. He was terrifying then, believe me. People would fall silent when he stepped through the door: he seemed to soak up the joy in anyone; kill it on the spot. It got to the point where Evangeline couldn’t bear to be in the same room with him. She got paranoid about him plotting to kill her and the child. She had somebody sit with Carys every night, to make certain that he didn’t touch her. Come to think of it, it was Evangeline who first coaxed me into buying the dogs. She knew he had an abhorrence of them.”

“But you didn’t do as she asked? I mean, you didn’t throw him out.”

“Oh, I knew I’d have to act sooner or later; I just lacked the balls to do it. Then he started petty power games, just to prove I still needed him. It was a tactical error. The novelty value of an in-house puritan had worn very thin. I told him so. Told him he’d have to change his whole demeanor or go. He refused, of course. I knew he would. All I wanted was an excuse to break our association off, and he gave it to me on a plate. Looking back, of course, I realize he knew damn well what I was doing. Anyway, the upshot was-I threw him out. Well, not me personally. Toy did the deed.”

“Toy worked for you personally?”

“Oh, yes. Again, it was Evangeline’s idea: she was always so protective of me. She suggested I hire a bodyguard. I chose Toy. He’d been a boxer, and he was as honest as the day’s long. He was always unimpressed by Mamoulian. Never had the least qualm about speaking his mind. So when I told him to get rid of the man, he did just that. I came home one day and the card-player had gone.

“I breathed easy that day. It was as though I’d been wearing a stone around my neck and not known it. Suddenly it was gone: I was lightheaded.

“Any fears I’d had about the consequences proved utterly groundless. My fortune didn’t evaporate. I was as successful as ever without him. More so, perhaps. I found new confidence.”