“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.