“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.