The Damnation Game

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

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, anticipation 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 glass 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 bastard 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 glass 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 buttonholed 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 repetitive? Oh, dear. Oh, Christ in Heaven." He waved Marty away. "Go on then. Piss off; you're not in my class." He staggered back to the crutch of the wall and leaned there. "What the fuck 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 shit. 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, damn 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 shipped 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 God 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 pissed 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 Nazis 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 assume 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 shit 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 scraped 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 anticipation 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 album (she was there repeatedly: as a girl; as a bride; as a middle-aged harridan, diminishing 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 nourishing. Finding nothing, they scattered the torn-up letters down the alley; they dismembered the album, and laughed themselves silly at the photographs, although some superstition 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, passing 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 God 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 Nazis, 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?"

"When was this?"

"When I went to buy my suit. You told me to gamble what was left of the money."

"Mamoulian was at the Academy? And did he play?"

"No. Apparently he never does."

"I tried to get him to play, when he came here last, but he wouldn't."

"But in Warsaw? You played him there?"

"Oh, Yes. That's what he'd been waiting for. I see that now. All these years I pretended I was in charge, you know? That I'd gone to him, that I'd won by my own skills-"

"You won?" Marty exclaimed.

"Certainly I won. But he let me. It was his way of seducing me, and it worked. He made it look difficult, of course, to give some weight to the illusion, but I was so full of myself I never once contemplated the possibility that he'd lost the game deliberately. I mean, there was no reason for him to do that, was there? Not that I could see. Not at the time."

"Why did he let you win?"

"I told you: seduction."

"What, do you mean he wanted you in bed?"

Whitehead made the gentlest of shrugs. "It's possible, yes." The thought seemed to amuse him; vanity bloomed on his face. "Yes, I think I probably was a temptation." Then the smile faded. "But sex is nothing, is it? I mean, as possessions go, to fuck somebody is trite stuff. What he wanted me for went far deeper and was far more permanent than any physical act."

"Did you always win when you played him?"

"I never played against him again, that was the first and only time. I know it sounds unlikely. He was a gambler and so was I. But as I told you, he wasn't interested in cards for the betting."

"It was a test."

"Yes. To see if I was worthy of him. Fit to build an Empire. After the war, when they started rebuilding Europe, he used to say there were no real Europeans left-they'd all been wiped out by one holocaust or another-and he was the last of the line. I believed him. All the talk of Empires and traditions. I was flattered to be lionized by him. He was more cultured, more persuasive, more penetrating than any man I had met or have met since." Whitehead was lost in this reverie, hypnotized by the memory. "All that's left now is a husk, of course. You can't really appreciate what an impression he made. There was nothing he couldn't have been or done if he'd put his mind to it. But when I said to him: why do you bother with the likes of me, why don't you go into politics, some sphere where you can wield power directly, he'd give me this look, and say: it's all been done. At first I thought he meant those lives were predictable. But I think he meant something else. I think he was telling me that he'd been these people, done those things."

"How's that possible? One man."

"I don't know. It's all conjecture. It was from the beginning. And here I am forty years later, still juggling rumors."

He stood up. By the look on his face it was obvious that his sitting position had caused some stiffness in the joints. Once he was upright, he leaned against the wall, and put his head back, staring up at the blank ceiling.

"He had one great love. One all-consuming passion. Chance. It obsessed him. `All life is chance,' he used to say. `The trick is learning how to use it.

"And all this made sense to you?"

"It took time; but I came to share his fascination over a period of years, yes. Not out of intellectual interest. I've never had much of that. But because I knew it could bring power. If you can make Providence work for you"-he glanced down at Marty-"work out its system if you like-the world succumbs to you." The voice soured. "I mean, look at me. See how well I've done for myself..." He let out a short, bitter laugh. "... He cheated," he said, returning to the beginning of their conversation. "He didn't obey the rules."

"This was to be the Last Supper," Marty said. "Am I right? You were going to escape before he came for you."

"In a way."

"How?"

Whitehead didn't reply. Instead he began the story again, where he'd left off.

"He taught me so much. After the war we traveled around for a while, picking up a small fortune. Me with my skills, him with his. Then we came to England, and I went into chemicals."

"And got rich."

"Beyond the dreams of Croesus. It took a few years, but the money came, the power came."

"With his help."

Whitehead frowned at this unwelcome observation. "I applied his principles, yes," he replied. "But he prospered every bit as much as I did. He shared my houses, my friends. Even my wife."

Marty made to speak, but Whitehead cut him off.

"Did I tell you about the lieutenant?" he said.

"You mentioned him. Vasiliev."

"He died, did I tell you that?"

"He didn't pay his debts. His body was dragged out of the sewers of Warsaw."

"Mamoulian killed him?"

"Not personally. But yes, I think-" Whitehead stopped in midflow, almost cocked his head, listening. "Did you hear something?"

"What?"

"No. It's all right. In my head. What was I saying?"

"The lieutenant."

"Oh, yes. This piece of the story... I don't know if it'll mean too much to you... but I have to explain, because without it the rest doesn't quite make sense. You see, the night I found Mamoulian was an incredible evening. Useless to try to describe it really, but you know the way the sun can catch the tops of clouds; they were blush-colored, love-colored. And I was so full of myself, so certain that nothing could ever harm me." He stopped and licked his lips before going on. "I was an imbecile." Self-contempt stung the words from him. "I walked through the ruins-smell of putrefaction everywhere, muck under my feet-and I didn't care, because it wasn't my ruin, my putrefaction. I thought I was above all that: especially that night. I felt like the victor, because I was alive and the dead were dead." The words stopped pressing forward for a moment. When he spoke again, it was so quietly it hurt the ears to catch the words. "What did I know? Nothing at all." He covered his face with his shaking hand, and said, "Oh, Jesus," quietly into it.

In the silence that followed, Marty thought he heard something outside the door: a movement in the hallway. But the sound was too soft for him to be certain, and the atmosphere in the room demanded his absolute fixedness. To move now, to speak, would ruin the confessional, and Marty, like a child hooked by a master storyteller, wanted to hear the end of this narrative. At that moment it seemed to him more important than anything else.

Whitehead's face was concealed behind his hand as he attempted to stem tears. After a moment he took up the tail of the story again-carefully, as if it might strike him dead.

"I've never told anyone this. I thought if I kept my silence-if I let it become another rumor-sooner or later it would disappear."

There was another noise in the hall, a whine like wind through a tiny aperture. And then, a scratching at the door. Whitehead didn't hear it. He was in Warsaw again, in a house with a bonfire and a flight of steps and a room with a table and a guttering flame. Almost like the room they were in now, in fact, but smelling of old fire rather than souring wine.

"I remember," he said, "when the game was over Mamoulian stood up and shook hands with me. Cold hands. Icy hands. Then the door opened behind me. I half-turned to see. It was Vasiliev."

"The lieutenant?"

"Horribly burned."

"He'd survived," Marty breathed.

"No," came the reply. "He was quite dead."

Marty thought maybe he'd missed something in the story that would justify this preposterous statement. But no; the insanity was presented as plain truth. "Mamoulian was responsible," Whitehead went on. He was trembling, but the tears had stopped, boiled away by the glare of the memory. "He'd raised the lieutenant from the dead, you see. Like Lazarus. He needed functionaries, I suppose."

As the words faltered the scratching began again at the door, an unmistakable appeal for entry. This time Whitehead heard it. His moment of weakness had passed, apparently. His head jerked up. "Don't answer it," he commanded.

"Why not?"

"It's him," he said, eyes wild.

"No. The European's gone. I saw him leave."

"Not the European," Whitehead replied. "It's the lieutenant. Vasiliev." Marty looked incredulous. "No," he said.

"You don't know what Mamoulian can do."

"You're being ridiculous!"

Marty stood up, and picked his way through the glass. Behind him, he heard Whitehead say "no" again, "please, Jesus, no," but he turned the handle and opened the door. Meager candlelight found the would-be entrant.

It was Bella, the Madonna of the kennels. She stood uncertainly on the threshold, her eyes, what was left of them, turned balefully up to look at Marty, her tongue a rag of maggoty muscle that hung from her mouth as if she lacked the strength to withdraw it. From somewhere in the pit of her body, she exhaled a thin whistle of air, the whine of a dog seeking human comfort.

Marty took two or three stumbling steps back from the door.

"It isn't him," Whitehead said, smiling.

"Jesus Christ."

"It's all right, Martin. It isn't him."

"Close the door!" Marty said, unable to move and do it himself. Her eyes, her stench, kept him at bay.

"She doesn't mean any harm. She used to come up here sometimes, for tidbits. She was the only one of them I trusted. Vile species."

Whitehead pushed himself away from the wall and walked across to the door, kicking broken bottles ahead of him as he went. Bella shifted her head to look at him, and her tail began to wag. Marty turned away, revolted, his reason thrashing around to find some sane explanation, but there was none to be had. The dog had been dead: he'd parceled her up himself. There was no question of premature burial.

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. Brut 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."

"And you didn't see him again?"

"Oh, no, I saw him. He came back to the house twice, each time unannounced. Things hadn't gone well for him, it seemed. I don't know what it was, but he'd lost the magic touch somehow. The first time he came back he was so decrepit I scarcely recognized him. He looked ill, he smelled foul. If you'd seen him in the street you'd have crossed over the road to avoid him. I could scarcely credit the transformation. He didn't want even to step into the house-not that I would have let him-all he wanted was money, which I gave him, and then he went away."

"And it was genuine?"

"What do you mean, genuine?"

"The beggar performance: it was real, was it? I mean, it wasn't another story... ?"

Whitehead raised his eyebrows. "All these years... I never thought of that. Always assumed..." He stopped, and began again on a different tack. "You know, I'm not a sophisticated man, despite appearances to the contrary. I'm a thief. My father was a thief, and probably his father too. All this culture I surround myself with, it's a facade. Things I've picked up from other people. Received good taste, if you like.

"But after a few years you begin to believe your own publicity; you begin to think you actually are a sophisticate, a man of the world. You start to be ashamed of the instincts that got you where you are, because they're part of an embarrassing history. That's what happened to me. I lost any sense of what I was."

"Well, I think it's time the thief had his say again: time I started to use his eyes, his instinct. You taught me that, though Christ knows you weren't aware of it."

Me?"

"We're the same. Don't you see? Both thieves. Both victims."

The self-pity in Whitehead's pronouncement was too much. "You can't tell me you're a victim," Marty said, "the way you've lived."

"What do you know about my feelings?" Whitehead snapped back. "Don't presume, you hear me? Don't think you understand, because you don't! He took everything away from me; everything! First Evangeline, then Toy, now Carys. Don't tell me whether I've suffered or not!"

"What do you mean, he took Evangeline? I thought she died in an accident?"

Whitehead shook his head. "There's a limit to what I can tell you," he said. "Some things I can't express. Never will." The voice was ashen. Marty let the point go, and moved on.

"You said he came back twice."

"That's right. He came again, a year or two after his first visit. Evangeline wasn't at home that night. It was November. Toy answered the door, I remember, and though I hadn't heard Mamoulian's voice I knew it was him. I went into the hallway. He was standing on the step, in the porch light. It was drizzling. I can see him now, the way his eyes found me. `Am I welcome?' he said. Just stood there and said, `Am I welcome?'"

"I don't know why, but I let him in. He didn't look in bad shape. Maybe I thought he'd come to apologize, I can't remember. Even then I would have been friends with him, if he'd offered. Not on the old basis. As business acquaintances, perhaps. I let my defenses down. We started talking about the past together"-Whitehead chewed the memory over, trying to get a better taste of it-"and then he started to tell me how lonely he was, how he needed my companionship. I told him Warsaw was a long time gone.

I was a married man, a pillar of the community, and I had no intention of changing my ways. He started to get abusive: accused me of ingratitude. Said I'd cheated him. Broken the covenant between us. I told him there'd never been a covenant, I'd just won a game of cards once, in a distant city, and as a result, he'd chosen to help me, for his own reasons. I said I felt I'd acceded to his demands sufficiently to feel that any debt to him had been paid. He'd shared my house, my friends, my life for a decade: everything that I had, had been his to share.

`It's not enough,' he said, and he began again: the same pleas as before, the same demands that I give up this pretense to respectability and go off somewhere with him, be a wanderer, be his pupil, learn new, terrible lessons about the way of the world. And I have to say he made it sound almost attractive. There were times when I tired of the masquerade; when I smelled war, dirt; when I saw the clouds over Warsaw, and I was homesick for the thief I used to be. But I wasn't going to throw everything away for nostalgia's sake. I told him so. I think he must have known I was immovable, because he became desperate. He started to ramble, started to tell me he was frightened without me, lost. I was the one he'd given years of his life and his energies to, and how could I be so callous and unloving? He laid hands on me, wept, tried to paw my face. I was horrified by the whole thing. He disgusted me with his melodrama; I wanted no part of it, or him. But he wouldn't leave. His demands turned into threats, and I suppose I lost my temper. No suppose about it. I've never been so angry.

I wanted an end to him and all he stood for: my grubby past. I hit him. Not hard at first, but when he wouldn't stop staring at me I lost control. He didn't make any attempt to defend himself, and his passivity only inflamed me more. I hit him and hit him, and he just took it. Kept offering up his face to be beaten-" He took a trembling breath. "-God knows I've done worse things. But nothing I feel so ashamed of. I didn't stop till my knuckles began to split. Then I gave him to Toy, who really worked him over. And all the time not a peep out of him. I go cold to think about it. I can still see him against the wall, with Bill at his throat and his eyes not looking at where the next blow was coming from but at me. Just at me.

"I remember he said: `Do you know what you've done?' Just like that. Very quietly, blood coming out with the words.

"Then something happened. The air got thick. The blood on his face started to crawl around like it was alive. Toy let him go. He slid down the wall; left a smear down it. I thought we'd killed him. It was the worst moment of my life, standing here with Toy, both of us staring down at this bag of bones we'd beaten up. That was our mistake, of course. We should never have backed down. We should have finished it then and there, and killed him."

"Jesus."

"Yes! Stupid, not to have finished it. Bill was loyal: there would have been no comeback. But we didn't have the courage. I didn't have the courage. I just made Toy clean Mamoulian up, then drive him to the middle of the city and dump him."

"You wouldn't have killed him," Marty said.

"Still you insist on reading my mind," Whitehead replied, wearily. "Don't you see that's what he wanted? What he'd come for? He would have let me be his executioner then, if I'd only had the nerve to follow through. He was sick of life. I could have put him out of his misery, and that would have been the end of it."

"You think he's mortal?"

"Everything has its season. His is past. He knows it."

"So all you need do is wait, right? He'll die, given time." Marty was suddenly sick of the story now; of thieves, of chance. The whole sorry tale, true or untrue, repulsed him. "You don't need me anymore," he said. He stood and crossed to the door. The sound of his feet in the glass was too loud in the small room.

"Where are you going?" the old man wanted to know.

"Away. As far as I can get."

"You promised to stay."

"I promised to listen. I have listened. And I don't want any of this bloody place."

Marty began to open the door. Whitehead addressed his back.

"You think the European'll let you be? You've seen him in the flesh, you've seen what he can do. He'll have to silence you sooner or later. Have you thought of that?"

"I'll take the risk."

"You're safe here."

"Safe?" Marty repeated incredulously. "You can't be serious. Safe? You really are pathetic, you know that?"

"If you go-" Whitehead warned.

"What?" Marty turned on him, spitting contempt. "What will you do, old man?"

"I'll have them after you in two minutes flat; you're skipping parole."

"And if they find me, I'll tell them everything. About the heroin, about her out there in the hall. Every dirty thing I can dig up to tell them. I don't give a monkey's toss for your fucking threats, you hear?"

Whitehead nodded. "So. Stalemate."

"Looks like it," Marty replied, and stepped out into the corridor without looking back.

There was a morbid surprise awaiting him: the pups had found Bella. They had not been spared Mamoulian's resurrecting hand, though they could not have served any practical purpose. Too small, too blind. They lay in the shadow of her empty belly, their mouths seeking teats that had long since gone. One of them was missing, he noted. Had it been the sixth child he'd seen move in the grave, either buried too deeply, or too profoundly degenerated, to follow where the rest went?

Bella raised her neck as he sidled past. What was left of her head swung in his general direction. Marty looked away, disgusted; but a rhythmical thumping made him glance back.

She had forgiven him his previous violence, apparently. Content now, with her adoring litter in her lap, she stared, eyeless, at him, while her wretched tail beat gently on the carpet.

In the room where Marty had left him Whitehead sat slumped with exhaustion.

Though it had been difficult to tell the story at first, it had become easier with the telling, and he was glad to have unburdened it. So many times he'd wanted to tell Evangeline. But she had signaled, in her elegant, subtle way, that if there were indeed secrets he had from her, she didn't want to know them. All those years, living with Mamoulian in the home, she had never directly asked Whitehead why, as though she'd known the answer would be no answer at all, merely another question.

Thinking about her brought many sorrows to his throat; they brimmed in him. The European had killed her, he had no doubt of that. He or his agents had been on the road with her; her death had not been chance. Had it been chance he would have known. His unfailing instinct would have sensed its rightness, however terrible his grief. But there had been no such sense, only the recognition of his oblique complicity in her death. She had been killed as revenge upon him. One of many such acts, but easily the worst.

And had the European taken her, after death? Had he slipped into the mausoleum and touched her into life, the way he had the dogs? The thought was repugnant, but Whitehead entertained it nevertheless, determined to think the worst for fear that if he didn't Mamoulian might still find terrors to shake him with.

"You won't," he said aloud to the room of glass. Won't: frighten me, intimidate me, destroy me. There were ways and means. He could escape still, and hide at the ends of the earth. Find a place where he could forget the story of his life.

There was something he hadn't told; a fraction of the Tale, scarcely pivotal but of more than passing interest, that he'd withheld from Strauss as he would withhold it from any interrogator. Perhaps it was unspeakable. Or perhaps it touched so centrally, so profoundly, upon the ambiguities that had pursued him through the wastelands of his life that to speak it was to reveal the color of his soul.

He pondered this last secret now, and in a strange way the thought of it warmed him:

He had left the game, that first and only game with the European, and scrambled through the half-choked door into Muranowski Square. No stars were burning; only the bonfire at his back.

As he'd stood in the gloom, reorienting himself, the chill creeping up through the soles of his boots, the lipless woman had appeared in front of him. She'd beckoned. He assumed she intended to lead him back the way he'd come, and so followed. She'd had other intentions, however. She'd led him away from the square to a house with barricaded windows, and-ever curious, he'd pursued her into it, certain that tonight of all nights no harm could possibly come to him.

In the entrails of the house was a tiny room whose walls were draped with pirated swaths of cloth, some rags, others dusty lengths of velvet that had once framed majestic windows. Here, in this makeshift boudoir, there was one piece of furniture only. A bed, upon which the dead Lieutenant Vasiliev-whom he had so recently seen in Mamoulian's gaming room-was making love. And as the thief stepped through the door, and the lipless woman stood aside, Konstantin had looked up from his labors, his body continuing to press into the woman who lay beneath him on a mattress strewn with Russian and German and Polish flags.

The thief stood, disbelieving, wanting to tell Vasiliev that he was performing the act incorrectly, that he'd mistaken one hole for another, and it was no natural orifice he was using so brutally, but a wound.

The lieutenant wouldn't have listened, of course. He grinned as he worked, the red pole rooting and dislodging, rooting and dislodging. The corpse he was pleasuring rocked beneath him, unimpressed by her paramour's attentions.

How long had the thief watched? The act showed no sign of consummation. At last the lipless woman had murmured "Enough?" in his ear, and he had turned a little way to her while she had put her hand on the front of his trousers. She seemed not at all surprised that he was aroused, though in all the years since he had never understood how such a thing was possible. He had long ago accepted that the dead could be woken. But that he had felt heat in their presence-that was another crime altogether, more terrible to him than the first.

There is no Hell, the old man thought, putting the boudoir and its charred Casanova out of his mind. Or else Hell is a room and a bed and appetite everlasting, and I've been there and seen its rapture and, if the worst comes to the worst, I will endure it.