The Damnation Game (6 page)

And then, miraculously, he flew.

He was weightless, and the wind had him, and he was ascending the steep side of the cathedral with breath-snatching velocity. He flew, it seemed, not like a bird, but, paradoxically, like some airborne fish. Like a dolphin—yes, that’s what he was—his arms close by his side sometimes, sometimes plowing the blue air as he rose, a smooth, naked thing that skimmed the slates and looped the spires, fingertips grazing the dew on the stonework, flicking raindrops off the gutter pipes. If he’d ever dreamed anything so sweet, he couldn’t remember it. The intensity of his joy was almost too much, and it startled him awake.

He was back, wide-eyed, in the forced heat of the cell, with Feaver on the bunk below, masturbating. The bunk rocked rhythmically, speed increasing, and Feaver climaxed with a stifled grunt. Marty tried to block reality, and concentrate on recapturing his dream. He closed his eyes again, willing the image back to him, saying
come on, come on
to the dark.

For one shattering moment, the dream returned: only this time it wasn’t triumph, it was terror, and he was pitching out of the sky from a hundred miles high, and the cathedral was rushing toward him, its spires sharpening themselves on the wind in preparation for his arrival.

He shook himself awake, canceling the plunge before it could be finished, and lay the rest of the night staring at the ceiling until a wretched gloom, the first light of dawn, spilled through the window to announce the day.

Chapter 9

N
o profligate sky greeted his release. Just a commonplace Friday afternoon, with business as usual on Trinity Road.

Toy had been waiting for him in the reception wing when Marty was brought down from his landing. He had longer yet to wait, while the officers went through a dozen bureaucratic rituals; belongings to be checked and returned, release papers to be signed and countersigned. It took almost an hour of such formalities before they unlocked the doors and let them both out into the open air.

With little more than a handshake of welcome Toy led him across the forecourt of the prison to where a dark red Daimler was parked, the driver’s seat occupied.

“Come on, Marty,” he said, opening the door, “too cold to linger.”

It was cold: the wind was vicious. But the chill couldn’t freeze his joy. He was a free man, for God’s sake; free within carefully prescribed limits perhaps, but it was a beginning. He was at least putting behind him all the paraphernalia of prison: the bucket in the corner of the cell, the keys, the numbers. Now he had to be the equal of the choices and opportunities that would lead from here.

Toy had already taken refuge in the back of the car.

“Marty,” he summoned again, his suede-gloved hand beckoning. “We should hurry, or we’ll get snarled up getting out of the city.”

“Yes. I’m here—”

Marty got in. The interior of the car smelled of polish, stale cigar smoke and leather; luxuriant scents.

“Should I put the case in the boot?” Marty said.

The driver turned from the wheel.

“You got room back there,” he said. A West Indian, dressed not in chauffeur’s livery but in a battered leather flying jacket, looked Marty up and down. He offered no welcoming smile.

“Luther,” said Toy, “this is Marty.”

“Put the case over the front seat,” the driver replied; he leaned across and opened the front passenger door. Marty got out and slid his case and plastic bag of belongings onto the front seat beside a litter of newspapers and a thumbed copy of Playboy, then got into the back with Toy and slammed the door.

“No need to slam,” said Luther, but Marty scarcely heard the remark. Not many cons get picked up from the gates of Wandsworth in a Daimler, he was thinking:
maybe this time I’ve fallen on my feet.

The car purred away from the gates and made a left onto Trinity Road.

“Luther’s been with the estate for two years,” Toy said.

“Three,” the other man corrected him.

“Is it?” Toy replied. “Three then. He drives me around; takes Mr. Whitehead when he goes down to London.”

“Don’t do that no more.”

Marty caught the driver’s eye in the mirror.

“You been in that shit-house long?” the man asked, pouncing without a flicker of hesitation.

“Long enough,” Marty replied.-He wasn’t going to try to hide anything; there was no sense in that. He waited for the next inevitable question: what were you in for? But it didn’t come. Luther turned his attention back to the business of the road, apparently satisfied. Marty was happy to let the conversation drop. All he wanted to do was watch this brave new world go by, and drink it all in. The people, the shop fronts, the advertisements, he had a hunger for all the details, no matter how trivial.

He glued his eyes to the window. There was so much to see, and yet he had the distinct impression that it was all artificial, as though the people in the street, in the other cars, were actors, all cast to type and playing their parts immaculately. His mind, struggling to accommodate the welter of information—on every side a new vista, at every corner a different parade passing—simply rejected their reality. It was all stage-managed, his brain told him, all a fiction. Because look, these people behaved as though they’d lived without him, as though the world had gone on while he’d been locked away, and some childlike part of him—the part that, hiding its eyes, believes itself hidden—could not conceive of a life for anyone without him to see it.

His common sense told him otherwise, of course. Whatever his confused senses might suspect, the world was older, and more weary probably, since he and it had last met. He would have to renew his acquaintance with it: learn how its nature had changed; learn again its etiquette, its touchiness, its potential for pleasure.

They crossed the river via the Wandsworth Bridge and drove through Earl’s Court and Shepherd’s Bush onto Westway. It was the middle of a Friday afternoon, and the traffic was heavy; commuters eager to be home for the weekend. He stared blatantly at the faces of the drivers in the cars they overtook, guessing occupations, or trying to catch the eyes of the women.

Mile by mile, the strangeness he’d felt initially began to wear off, and by the time they reached the M40 he was starting to tire of the spectacle. Toy had nodded off in his corner of the back seat, his hands in his lap. Luther was occupied with leapfrogging down the highway.

Only one event slowed their progress. Twenty miles short of Oxford blue lights flashed on the road up ahead, and the sound of a siren speeding toward them from behind announced an accident. The procession of cars slowed, like a line of mourners pausing to glance into a coffin.

A car had slewed across the eastbound lanes, crossed the divide, and met, head-on, a van coming in the opposite direction. All of the westbound lanes were blocked, either by wreckage or by police cars, and the travelers were obliged to use the shoulder to skirt the scattered wreckage.

“What’s happened; can you see?” Luther asked, his attention too occupied by navigating past the signaling policeman for him to see for himself. Marty described the scene as best he could.

A man, with blood streaming down his face as if somebody had cracked a blood-yolked egg on his head, was standing in the middle of the chaos, hypnotized by shock. Behind him a group-police and rescued passengers alike-gathered around the concertinaed front section of the car to speak to somebody trapped in the driver’s seat. The figure was slumped, motionless. As they crept past, one of these comforters, her coat soaked either with her own blood or that of the driver, turned away from the vehicle and began to applaud. At least that was how Marty interpreted the slapping together of her hands: as applause. It was as if she were suffering the same delusion he’d tasted so recently—that this was all some meticulous but distasteful illusion—and at any moment it would all come to a welcome end. He wanted to lean out of the car window and tell her that she was wrong; that this was the real world—long-legged women, crystal sky and all. But she’d know that tomorrow, wouldn’t she? Plenty of time for grief then. But for now she clapped, and she was still clapping when the accident slid out of sight behind them.

II

The Fox

Chapter 10

A
sylum, Whitehead knew, was a traitorous word. In one breath it meant a sanctuary, a place of refuge, of safety. In another, its meaning twisted on itself: asylum came to mean a madhouse, a hole for broken minds to bury themselves in. It was, he reminded himself, a semantic trick, no more. Why then did the ambiguity run in his head so often?

He sat in that too-comfortable chair beside the window where he had sat now for a season of evenings watching the night begin to skulk across the lawn and thinking, without much shape to his ruminations, about how one thing became another; about how difficult it was to hold on to anything.

Life was a random business. Whitehead had learned that lesson years ago, at the hands of a master, and he had never forgotten it. Whether you were rewarded for your good works or skinned alive, it was all down to chance.

No use to cleave to some system of numbers or divinities; they all crumbled in the end. Fortune belonged to the man who was willing to risk everything on a single throw. He’d done that. Not once, but many times at the beginning of his career, when he was still laying the foundations of his empire. And thanks to that extraordinary sixth sense he possessed, the ability to preempt the roll of the dice, the risks had almost always paid off. Other corporations had their virtuosi: computers that calculated the odds to the tenth place, advisers who kept their ears pressed to the stock markets of Tokyo, London and New York, but they were all overshadowed by Whitehead’s instinct. When it came to knowing the moment, for sensing the collision of time and opportunity that made a good decision into a great one, a commonplace takeover into a coup, nobody was Old Man Whitehead’s superior, and all the smart young men in the corporation’s boardrooms knew that. Joe’s oracular advice still had to be sought before any significant expansion was undertaken or contract signed.

He guessed this authority, which remained absolute, was resented in some circles. No doubt there were those who thought he should let go his hold completely and leave the university men and their computers to get on with business. But Whitehead had won these skills, these unique powers of second-guessing, at some hazard; foolish then that they lie forgotten when they could be used to lay a finger on the wheel. Besides, the old man had an argument the young turks could never gainsay: his methods worked. He’d never been properly schooled; his life before fame was—much to the journalists’ dismay—a blank, but he had made the Whitehead Corporation out of nothing. Its fate, for better or worse, was still his passionate concern.

There was no room for passion tonight, however, sitting in that chair (a chair to die in, he’d sometimes thought) beside the window.

Tonight there was only unease: that old man’s complaint.

How he loathed age! It was hardly bearable to be so reduced. Not that he was infirm; just that a dozen minor ailments conspired against his comfort so that seldom a day passed without some irritation—an ulcerous mouth, or a chafing between the buttocks that itched furiously—fixing his attentions in the body when the urge to self-preservation called them elsewhere. The curse of age, he’d decided, was distraction, and he couldn’t afford the luxury of negligent thinking. There was danger in contemplating itch and ulcer. As soon as his mind was turned, something would take out his throat. That was what the unease was telling him. Don’t look away for a moment; don’t think you’re safe because, old man, I’ve a message for you: the worst is yet to come.

Toy knocked once before entering the study.

“Bill …”

Whitehead momentarily forgot the lawn and the advancing darkness as he turned to face his friend.

“… you got here.”

“Of course we got here, Joe. Are we late?”

“No, no. No problems?”

“Things are fine.”

“Good.”

“Strauss is downstairs.”

In the diminishing light Whitehead crossed to the table and poured himself a sparing glass of vodka. He had been holding off from drinking until now; a shot to celebrate Toy’s safe arrival.

“You want one?”

It was a ritual question, with a ritual response: “No thanks.”

“You’re going back to town, then?”

“When you’ve seen Strauss.”

“It’s too late for the theater. Why don’t you stay, Bill? Go back tomorrow morning when it’s light.”

“I’ve got business,” Toy said, allowing himself the gentlest of smiles on the final word. This was another ritual, one of many between the two men. Toy’s business in London, which the old man knew had nothing to do with the corporation, went unquestioned; it always had.

“And what’s your impression?”

“Of Strauss? Much as I thought at the interview. I think he’ll be fine. And if he isn’t, there’s plenty more where he came from.”

“I need someone who isn’t going to scare easily. Things could get very unpleasant.”

Toy offered a noncommittal grunt and hoped that the talk on this matter wouldn’t go any further. He was tired after a day of waiting and traveling, and he wanted to look forward to the evening; this was no time to talk over that business again.

Whitehead had put down his drained glass on the tray and gone back to the window. It was darkening in the room quite rapidly now, and when the old man stood with his back to Toy he was welded by shadow into something monolithic. After thirty years in Whitehead’s employ—three decades with scarcely a cross word spoken between them—Toy was still as much in awe of Whitehead as of some potentate with the power of life and death over him. He still took a pause to find his equilibrium before entering into Whitehead’s presence; he still found traces of the stammer he’d had when they’d met returning on occasion. It was a legitimate response, he felt. The man was
power
: more power than he could ever hope, or indeed would ever want, to possess: and it sat with deceptive lightness on Joe Whitehead’s substantial shoulders. In all their years of association, in conference or boardroom, he had never seen Whitehead want for the appropriate gesture or remark. He was simply the most confident man Toy had ever met: certain to his marrow of his own supreme worth, his skills honed to such an edge that a man could be undone by a word, gutted for life, his self-esteem drained and his career tattered. Toy had seen it done countless times, and often to men he considered his betters. Which begged the question (he asked it even now, staring at Whitehead’s back): why did the great man pass the time of day with him? Perhaps it was simply history. Was that it? History and sentiment.