“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.