By the time they got back, the rain was beginning to come on more heavily. A welcome hush had descended on the house. Apparently Pearl, unable to bear the barbarians in her kitchen any longer, had thrown a fit and left. Though she’d gone, the offending parties seemed well chastened. Their babble was reduced to a murmur, and few of them made any approach to Whitehead as he entered. Those few that did were quickly slapped down. “Are you still here, Munrow?” he said to one devotee; to another, who made the error of thrusting a sheaf of papers at him, he quietly suggested the man “choke on them.” They reached the study with the minimum of interruptions. Whitehead unlocked the wall safe.
“You would prefer cash, I’m sure.”
Marty studied the carpet. Though he’d won the bet fairly, he was embarrassed by the payoff.
“Cash is fine,” he murmured.
Whitehead counted out a wad of twenty-pound notes and handed them across.
“Enjoy,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me,” Whitehead said. “It was a straight bet. I lost.”
An awkward silence fell while Marty pocketed the money.
“Our talk . . .” the old man said, “. . . is in the strictest confidence, you understand?”
“Of course. I wouldn’t-”
Whitehead raised his hand to ward off his protestations.
“-The strictest confidence. My enemies have agents.”
Marty nodded as though he understood. In a way, of course, he did. Perhaps Whitehead suspected Luther or Pearl. Maybe even Toy, who was so abruptly persona non grata.
“These people are responsible for the present fall in my fortunes. It’s all meticulously engineered.” He shrugged, eyes like slits. God, Marty thought, I’d never want to be on the wrong side of this man. “I don’t fret about these things. If they want to plan my ruin, let them. But I wouldn’t like to think that my most intimate feelings were available to them. Do you see?”
“They won’t be.”
“No.” He pursed his lips; a cold kiss of satisfaction.
“You’ve seen something of Carys, I gather? Pearl says you spend time together, is that right?”
“Yes.”
Whitehead came back with a tone of detachment that was patently fake.
“She seems stable much of the time, but essentially that’s a performance. I’m afraid she’s not well, and hasn’t been for several years. Of course she’s seen the best psychiatrists money can buy but I’m afraid it’s done no good. Her mother went the same way in the end.”
“Are you telling me not to see her?”
Whitehead looked genuinely surprised.
“No, not at all. The companionship may be good for her. But please, bear in mind she’s a highly disturbed girl. Don’t take her pronouncements too seriously. Half the time she doesn’t know what she’s saying. Well, I think that’s it. You’d better go and pay off your fox.”
He laughed, gently.
“Clever fox,” he said.
In the two and a half months Marty had been at the Sanctuary Whitehead had been an iceberg. Now he had to think about revising that description. Today he’d glimpsed another man altogether: inarticulate, alone; talking of God and prayer. Not just God. There had been that final question, the one he’d thrown away so carelessly:
“And the Devil? Did you ever pray to him?”
Marty felt he’d been handed a pile of jigsaw pieces, none of which seemed to belong to the same portrait. Fragments of a dozen scenes: Whitehead resplendent among his acolytes, or sitting at a window watching the night; Whitehead the potentate, lord of all he surveyed, or betting like a drunken porter on the way a fox might run.
This last fragment puzzled Marty the most. In it, he sensed, was a clue that could unite these disparate images. He had the strangest feeling that the bet on the fox had been fixed. Impossible, of course, and yet, and yet . . . Suppose Whitehead could put his finger on the wheel anytime he wanted to, so that even the petty chance of a fox running to the right or left was available to him? Could he know the future before it happened-as that why the chips tingled, and fingers too?-or was he shaping it?