The Damnation Game Part 28

He meandered back across the lawn. He could see the lights of the house somewhere ahead. They burned rea.s.suringly, though he knew such rea.s.surance was delusion. Not every house was a refuge. Sometimes it was safer to be out in the world, under the sky, where no one could come knocking and looking for you, where no roof could fall on your trusting head.

Halfway between house and trees a jet growled overhead, high up, its lights twin stars. He stood and watched it pa.s.s over him at his zenith. Perhaps it was one of the monitoring planes that he'd read pa.s.sed perpetually over Europe-one American, one Russian-their electric eyes scanning the sleeping cities; judgmental twins upon whose benevolence the lives of millions depended. The sound of the jet diminished to a murmur, and then to silence. Gone to spy on other heads. The sins of England would not prove fatal tonight, it seemed.

He began to walk toward the house with fresh resolution, taking a route that would lead him around to the front and into the false day of the floodlights. As he crossed the stage toward the front door the European stepped out of the house.

There was no way to avoid being seen. Marty stood, rooted to the spot, while Breer emerged, and the two unlikely companions moved away from the house. Whatever job they'd come to do was clearly completed.

A few steps across the gravel Mamoulian glanced around. His eyes found Marty immediately. For a long moment the European simply stared across the expanse of bright gra.s.s. Then he nodded, a short, sharp nod that was simply acknowledgment. I see you, it said, and look! I do you no harm. Then he turned and walked away, until he and the gravedigger were obscured by the cypresses that lined the drive.

Part Four

THE THIEF'S TALE

Civilisations do not degenerate through fear, but because they forget that fear exists.

-FREYA STARK, Perseus in the Wind

48

Marty stood in the hallway and listened for footsteps or voices. There were neither. The women had obviously gone, as had Ottaway, Curtsinger and the Troll-King. Perhaps the old man too.

Few lights burned in the house. Those that did rendered the place almost two-dimensional. Power had been unleashed here. Its remnants skittered in the metalwork; the air had a bluish tinge. He made his way upstairs. The second floor was in darkness, but he found his way along it by instinct, his feet kicking the porcelain shards-some smashed treasure or other-as he went. There was more than porcelain underfoot. Things damp, things torn. He didn't look down, but made his way toward the white room, antic.i.p.ation mounting with every step.

The door was ajar, and a light, not electric but candle, burned inside. He stepped over the threshold. The single flame offered a panicky illumination-his very presence had it jumping-but he could see that every bottle in the room had been smashed. He stepped into a swamp of broken gla.s.s and spilled wine: the room was pungent with the dregs. The table had been overturned and several of the chairs reduced to match-wood.

Old Man Whitehead was standing in the corner of the room. There were spatters of blood on his face, but it was difficult to be certain if it was his. He looked like a man pictured in the aftermath of an earthquake: shock had bled his features white.

"He came early," he said, disbelief in every hushed syllable. "Imagine that. I thought he believed in covenants. But he came early to catch me out."

"Who is he?"

He wiped tears from his cheeks with the heel of his hand, smearing the blood. "The b.a.s.t.a.r.d lied to me," he said.

"Are you hurt?"

"No." Whitehead said, as if the question were utterly ridiculous. "He wouldn't lay a hand on me. 'He knows better than that. He wants me to go willingly, you see?"

Marty didn't.

"There's a body in the hallway," Whitehead observed matter-of-factly. "I moved her off the stairs."

"Who?"

"Stephanie."

"He killed her?"

"Him? No. His hands are clean. You could drink milk from them."

"I'll call the police."

"No!"

Whitehead took several ill-advised steps through the gla.s.s to catch Marty's arm.

"No! No police."

"But somebody's dead."

"Forget her. You can hide her away later, eh?" His tone was almost ingratiating, his breath, now he was close, toxic. "You'll do that, won't you?"

"After all you've done?"

"A little joke," Whitehead said. He tried a smile; his grip on Marty's arm was blood-stopping. "Come on; a joke, that's all." It was like being b.u.t.tonholed by an alcoholic on a street corner.

Marty loosed his arm. "I've done all I'm going to do for you," he said.

"You want to go back home, is that it?" Whitehead's tone soured on an instant. "Want to go back behind bars where you can hide your head?"

"You've tried that trick."

"Am I getting repet.i.tive? Oh, dear. Oh, Christ in Heaven." He waved Marty away. "Go on then. p.i.s.s off; you're not in my cla.s.s." He staggered back to the crutch of the wall and leaned there. "What the f.u.c.k am I doing, expecting you to take a stand?"

"You set me up," Marty snarled in reply, "all along!"

"I told you . . . a joke."

"Not just tonight. All along. Lying to me . . . bribing me. You said you needed someone to trust, and then you treat me like s.h.i.+t. No wonder they all run out on you in the end!"

Whitehead wheeled on him. "All right," he shouted back, "what do you want?"

"The truth."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, d.a.m.n you, yes!"

The old man sucked at his lip, debating with himself. When he spoke again, the voice had quietened. "All right, boy. All right." The old glitter flared in his eyes, and momentarily the defeat was burned away by a new enthusiasm. "If you're so eager to hear, I'll tell you." He pointed a shaky finger at Marty. "Close the door."

Marty kicked a smashed bottle out of the way, and pushed the door shut. It was bizarre to be closing the door on murder simply to listen to a story. But this tale had waited so long to be told; it could be delayed no longer.

"When were you born, Marty?"

"In 1948. December."

"The war was over."

"Yes."

"You don't know what you missed.

It was an odd beginning for a confession.

"Such times."

"You had a good war?"

Whitehead reached for one of the less damaged chairs and righted it; then he sat down. For several seconds he didn't say anything.

"I was a thief, Marty," he said at last. "Well . . . black marketeer has a more impressive ring, I suppose, but it amounts to the same thing. I was able to speak three or four languages adequately, and I was always quick-witted. Things fell my way very easily."

"You were lucky."

"Luck had no bearing on it. Luck's out for people with no control. I had control; though I didn't know it at the time. I made my own luck, if you like." He paused. "You must understand, war isn't like you see in the cinema; or at least my war wasn't. Europe was falling apart. Everything was in flux. Borders were changing, people were being s.h.i.+pped into oblivion: the world was up for grabs." He shook his head. "You can't conceive of it. You've always lived in a period of relative stability. But war changes the rules you live by. Suddenly it's good to hate, it's good to applaud destruction. People are allowed to show their true selves-"

Marty wondered where this introduction was taking them, but Whitehead was just getting into the rhythm of his telling. This was no time to divert him.

"-and when there's so much uncertainty all around, the man who can shape his own destiny can be king of the world. Forgive the hyperbole, but it's how I felt. King of the World. I was clever, you see. Not educated, that came later, but clever. Streetwise, you'd call it now. And I was determined to make the most of this wonderful war G.o.d had sent me. I spent two or three months in Paris, just before the Occupation, then got out while the going was good. Later on, I went south. Enjoyed Italy; the Mediterranean. I wanted for nothing. The worse the war became the better it was for me. Other people's desperation made me into a rich man.

"Of course I frittered the money away. Never really held onto my earnings for more than a few months. When I think of the paintings I had through my hands, the objets d'art, the sheer loot. Not that I knew that when I p.i.s.sed in the bucket I splashed a Raphael. I bought and sold these things by the jeepload."

"Towards the end of the European war I took off north, into Poland. The Germans were in a bad way: they knew the game was coming to an end, and I thought I could strike a few deals. Eventually-it was an error really-I wound up in Warsaw. There was practically nothing left by the time I got there. What the Russians hadn't flattened, the n.a.z.is had. It was one wasteland from end to end." He sighed, and pulled a face, making an effort to find the words. "You can't imagine it," he said. "This had been a great city. But now? How can I make you understand? You have to see through my eyes, or none of this makes sense."

"I'm trying," Marty said.

"You live in yourself," Whitehead went on. "As I live in myself. We have very strong ideas of what we are. That's why we value ourselves; by what's unique in us. Do you follow what I'm saying?"

Marty was too involved to lie. He shook his head.

"No; not really."

"The isness of things: that's my point. The fact that everything of any value in the world is very specifically itself. We celebrate the individuality of appearance, of being, and I suppose we a.s.sume that some part of that individuality goes on forever, if only in the memories of the people who experienced it. That's why I valued Evangeline's collection, because I delight in the special thing. The vase that was unlike any other, the carpet woven with special artistry."

Then suddenly, they were back in Warsaw- "There'd been such glories there, you know. Fine houses; beautiful churches; great collections of paintings. So much. But by the time I arrived it was all gone, pounded to dust.

"Everywhere you walked it was the same. Underfoot there was muck. Gray muck. It caked your boots, its dust hung in the air, it coated the back of your throat. When you sneezed, your snot was gray; your s.h.i.+t the same. And if you looked closely at that filth you could see it wasn't just dirt, it was flesh, it was rubble, it was porcelain fragments, newspapers. All of Warsaw was in that mud. Its houses, its citizens, its art, its history: all ground down to something that you sc.r.a.ped off your boots."

Whitehead was hunched up. He looked his seventy years; an old man lost in remembering. His face was knotted up, his hands were fists. He was older than Marty's father would have been had he survived his lousy heart: except that his father would never have been able to speak this way. He'd lacked the power of articulation, and, Marty thought, the depth of pain. Whitehead was in agonies. The memory of muck. More than that: the antic.i.p.ation of it.

Thinking of his father, of the past, Marty alighted upon a memory that made some sense of Whitehead's reminiscences. He'd been a boy of five or six when a woman who'd lived three doors down the terrace died. She'd had no relatives apparently, or none that cared sufficiently to remove what few possessions she'd had from the house. The council had reclaimed the property and summarily emptied it, carting off her furniture to be auctioned. The day after, Marty and his playmates had found some of the dead woman's belongings dumped in the alley behind the row of houses. The council workmen, pressed for time, had simply emptied all the drawers of worthless personal effects into a pile, and left them there. Bundles of ancient letters roughly tied up with faded ribbon; a photograph alb.u.m (she was there repeatedly: as a girl; as a bride; as a middle-aged harridan, diminis.h.i.+ng in size as she dried up); much valueless bric-a-brac; sealing wax, inkless pens, a letter opener. The boys had fallen on these leavings like hyenas in search of something nouris.h.i.+ng. Finding nothing, they scattered the torn-up letters down the alley; they dismembered the alb.u.m, and laughed themselves silly at the photographs, although some superst.i.tion in them prevented them tearing those. They had no need to do so.The elements soon vandalized them more efficiently than their best efforts could have done. In a week of rain and night-frost the faces on the photographs had been spoiled, dirtied arid finally eroded entirely. Perhaps the last existing portraits of people now dead went to mush in that alley, and Marty, pa.s.sing down it daily, had watched the gradual extinction; seen the ink on the scattered letters rained off until the old woman's memorial was gone away utterly, just as her body had gone. If you'd upended the tray that held her ashes onto the trampled remains of her belongings they would have been virtually indistinguishable: both gray dirt, their significance irretrievably lost. Muck held the whip hand.

All this Marty recalled mistily. It wasn't quite that he saw the letters, the rain, the boys-as much as retouching the feelings the events had aroused: the buried sense that what had happened in that alley was unbearably poignant. Now his memory meshed with Whitehead's. All the old man had said about muck, about the isness of things, made some sense.

"I see," he murmured.

Whitehead looked up at Marty.

"Perhaps," he said.

"I was a gambling man in those days; far more than I am now. War brings it out in you, I think. You hear stories all the time, about how some lucky man escaped death because he sneezed, or died for the same reason. Tales of benign providence, or fatal bad fortune. And after a while you get to look at the world a little differently: you begin to see chance at work everywhere. You become alive to its mysteries. And of course to its flip side; to determinism. Because take it from me there are men who make their own luck. Men who can mold chance like putty. You talked yourself of feeling a tingle in your hands. As though today, whatever you did, you couldn't lose."

"Yes . . ." That conversation seemed an age away; ancient history.

"Well, while I was in Warsaw, I heard about a man who never once lost a game. A card-player."

"Never lost?" Marty was incredulous.

"Yes, I was as cynical as you. I treated the stories I heard as fable, at least for a while. But wherever I went, people told me about him. I got to be curious. In fact I decided to stay in the city, though G.o.d knows there was precious little to keep me there, and find this miracle worker for myself."

"Who did he play against?"

"All comers, apparently. Some said he'd been there in the last days before the Russian advance, playing against n.a.z.is, and then when the Red Army entered the city he stayed on."

"Why play in the middle of nowhere? There can't have been much money around."

"Practically none. The Russians were betting their rations, their boots."

"So again: why?"

"That's what fascinated me. I couldn't understand it either. Nor did I believe he won every game, however good a player he was."

"I don't see how he kept finding people to play him."

"Because there's always somebody who thinks he can bring the champion down. I was one. I went searching for him to prove the stories wrong. They offended my sense of reality, if you like. I spent every waking hour of every day searching the city for him. Eventually I found a soldier who'd played against him, and of course lost. Lieutenant Konstantin Vasiliev."

"And the card-player . . . what was his name?"

"I think you know . . ." Whitehead said.

"Yes," Marty replied, after a moment. "Yes, you know I saw him. At Bill's club?"