“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.”