The Only Game

by Reginald Hill

  Dog said, ‘Remember when you saw me in hospital after this.’ He touched his cheek.

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘You said then, did I want you to find the man who did it? I said what would be the use of that? It wasn’t a man, it was a madness, and all I wanted was to get as far from it as I could.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘But if I’d said, yes, find him, you could have done?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Endo, his keen brown eyes never leaving Dog’s face. ‘I’d have certainly tried. Not me personally, you understand. I ain’t equipped to be no avenging angel. But I got friends, influence.’

  ‘That’s what I reckoned. Well, I want to find a man now.’

  ‘Hold on, Dog,’ said Endo urgently. ‘I ought to tell you, I put out feelers among my people then, never mind what you said, I was so mad on my own account. Only the word came back, they were sympathetic with me in my grief, but there was no way they could justify starting a vendetta with the Shamrocks over a guy who wasn’t one of their own and wasn’t even dead! I could see their viewpoint. Things won’t have changed. And that trail’s ten years old …’

  ‘Uncle Endo,’ interrupted Dog. ‘It’s not that man. I found him myself. Or rather he found me. Yes, he’s dead. But it wasn’t a vendetta killing. Just a necessity. No, this is another man. And I want to find him for another reason.’

  ‘So tell,’ said Endo.

  As briefly and as unemotionally as he could, Dog told the story. Endo listened without interrupting and when Dog had finished, he poured another two glasses of wine.

  Then he said, ‘This woman had a choice and she went with him?’

  Dog said, ‘Her son had been kidnapped. There were three IRA killers in the cottage. She knew there were plenty more where they came from. What kind of choice was that?’

  ‘It still doesn’t mean she’s not where she wants to be.’

  ‘All I want is the chance to ask her myself,’ said Dog.

  Endo considered, then nodded twice.

  ‘OK. OK.’

  ‘You really think you can find him?’ said Dog, suddenly reacting into scepticism now his uncle had agreed.

  ‘Not him maybe. People are hard to find,’ said Endo. ‘How much do you say he looted from the Shamrocks?’

  ‘Three million, I heard.’

  ‘Dollars?’

  ‘Pounds.’

  Endo whistled. ‘That’s some pot. That’s much easier to find. The days of gumshoes and hound dogs are over. Now it’s all done in bank computer rooms. They’ll find him. But it’ll cost, Dog. This ain’t no favour anyone’s doing me for free.’

  Dog shrugged.

  ‘You find him, he can pay. He’s got the money.’

  Endo laughed so much he almost spilt his wine.

  ‘Dog, you’re a chip off this old block! Wait here.’

  He left the room and Dog leaned his head back in the deep armchair and closed his eyes. He felt a deep sense of relief. Without Endo’s help, he was lost. Nothing that Blake/Beck had said had given him any clue as to where the man was hiding, and he had found himself totally barren of intuitions. Tench had been bidding for a dead hand.

  He opened his eyes and for the first time really took in the ceiling paintings. They filled four panels and were a classical depiction of the four seasons, except that each panel was also a playing card, with spring a diamond, summer a heart, autumn a club, and winter a spade.

  ‘You like it? My own design,’ said Endo. ‘Life’s a gamble, that’s the message, and the only loser is the guy who won’t play. Dog, I can set the wheel spinning, but this thing will take some time. Can’t have you sitting around wasting your life, so I thought, what’s best to do with the boy?’

  ‘And what did you come up with?’ asked Dog.

  Endo went to the window and pressed a button which slowly unfolded the wooden shutter to give a view over the garish Vegas skyline to the shimmering desert.

  ‘You could play cards,’ he said.

  ‘What? Here? In your casino?’ said Dog.

  ‘Hell, no! That’s for the tourists. Besides, I don’t want you robbing me in my own backyard. No, I was thinking, there’s a real high-rolling game goes on downtown, what we call Glitter Gulch. I used to sit in there pretty often, but lately I’ve been losing my edge, not much, but enough not to be on top, and when that’s where you’ve been, that’s what you’re used to. You, though, Dog, you remind me of me twenty years ago when I was still the Man.’

  ‘Uncle Endo!’ protested Dog. ‘I haven’t played competitive poker in years, and never then for real money. This game, you’d need what? A couple of grand to buy in? I don’t have that sort of money.’

  ‘A hundred grand. And yes, you do. Here, this gets you two hundred k’s worth of credit.’

  He fluttered a piece of paper onto the table in front of Dog.

  ‘I can’t take this, Uncle,’ protested Dog. ‘I don’t have the nerve to play for this kind of money.’

  ‘Man who’s got the nerve to come here asking help to find his fancy woman’s got the nerve for anything,’ observed Endo, smiling to take the edge off his comment.

  ‘But what if I lose it all?’

  ‘In that case,’ said Endo, ‘like you said before, that rich friend of yours can pay, can’t he?’

  Dog shook his head, then began to laugh. There was nothing else to do.

  He tucked the paper into his pocket, picked up the deck from the table, shuffled, made a deliberate mess of it and scattered cards all over the floor.

  ‘OK,’ he said to Endo. ‘You win. Let’s play cards.’

  3

  ‘Life is either comedy or tragedy or soap,’ said Oliver Beck.

  ‘And what’s ours turned out to be?’ asked Jane Maguire.

  ‘I won’t know till I’ve seen the end.’

  ‘You mean this isn’t it? I thought we’d ridden off into the sunset and opted for happiness ever after.’

  She made a gesture which took in the long white villa before which they were sitting, the pool terrace below where Noll played with his Brazilian nursemaid, the steep gardens which cascaded in a gaudy torrent down to a granite balustrade, beyond and far beneath which sighed the long blue swell of the sea.

  Ignoring her irony, Beck said, ‘You’re right. You’ll not find anything more like Paradise this side of Eden.’

  ‘You think so? OK. So we’ve climbed back into the Garden. Question is, can we stick the apple back on the tree?’

  Now he frowned. She thought, he’s lost most of his Peter Pan quality. Perhaps masquerading as a middle-aged priest dowsed the magic. In repose, he now looked his age, in anger a decade more. But his smile still had a rejuvenating charm, and catching her close study of his face, he conjured up a smile and reached out to squeeze her hand.

  ‘Give it time, honey,’ he said. ‘That’s what we agreed.’

  ‘It’s been six months.’

  ‘Six months,’ he laughed. ‘That’s a pig’s fart in a Mick’s memory, you of all people should know that. They’re still working off quarrels that started centuries ago. I mean, give it a year at least, maybe two. Main thing is, Noll’s happy.’

  It was the one button he could always press, the one analgesic he could always pop into her mouth. She knew he was doing it, but was helpless to stop him. She followed his gaze now to where the little boy was chattering away to Maria. Already his speech was laced with Portuguese words. When Jane had bridled at the notion of a ‘nanny’, Oliver had coldly asserted he wanted someone with Noll one hundred per cent of the time. Jane couldn’t be expected to provide that degree of cover, and even if she did, it wouldn’t help Noll if he got smothered by too much maternal attention. As for the Portuguese thing, where was the harm in Noll growing up bilingual? The girl, Maria, had been properly trained in child management and she came from an educated background. What Noll picked up from her would be all for his benefit.

  ‘If we stay here,’ Jane had said.

  ‘Where were
you thinking of going?’ he’d replied.

  That had been shortly after they arrived and her words had been weightless, a feeble counterblow to his heavy reasoning. She was then still bobbing mentally and emotionally in the turbulent afterwash of those dreadful December days back in England, and she had no idea yet what she truly felt about life in this place with this man.

  He had been all patience and consideration, she had to give him that. She had her own room. He came to her one night soon after their arrival and she accepted him because of what they had been to each other, and still were, and also because her body wanted him. Physically it had been as mind-blowingly explosive as ever, but afterwards, when the dust began to settle, she found the same granite doubts and reservations still standing there.

  He had said nothing then. The next night he came again. This time the thoughts were not pushed back so far, but for him the experience must have been indistinguishable from their old ecstasies, for later he said in the voice of a man who expects no opposition, ‘Tomorrow we’ll move you into my room’.

  ‘No,’ she said, without hesitation. ‘I want a room of my own.’

  Then, because she didn’t want to leave it to him to choose whether this was the time or the place for confrontation, she got out of bed and put on the light and, wrapping her robe around her long beautiful torso still reverberating from the pleasure of his caresses, she said, ‘In case there’s still any doubt, Oliver, I wasn’t following your plan. I ran away, and if you’d simply made contact with me in England, I’d have told you to go to hell.’

  ‘Yes. I’d worked that out,’ he said.

  ‘So you know I’m here because I needed a safe place for Noll and there was nowhere else to go.’

  ‘I hope that’s an over-simplification, but I understand what you’re saying,’ he replied calmly. ‘You think I deceived you.’

  ‘I know it!’ she said fiercely. ‘You left me ignorant. Exposed.’

  ‘I left you innocent and safe,’ he snapped back. ‘At least so I thought. I wanted you to believe it was all about money I owed, not money I had, so anyone close-questioning you would pretty soon realize you were in the clear. And I left pointers to a Swiss account that no one was going to prise open in a hurry. They’d all reckon the three mill was safely stowed in there, and Swiss bankers have a religious objection to giving up money which, in the absence of any legitimate claimant, they’ve come to regard as their own!’

  ‘So what went wrong?’ she asked.

  ‘God knows,’ he said. ‘For some reason, Dublin didn’t buy the drowning story. I knew they’d be suspicious but I really thought I’d got it tamper proof. Look, I’m not doing any accusing, but maybe something you said …’

  ‘So it’s going to be my fault after all,’ she exclaimed. ‘Noll being kidnapped and terrorized and nearly killed …’

  ‘I didn’t say that!’ he said harshly. ‘But it can’t have been easy doing that acting job. You’re no Bridie Heighway!’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ she said. ‘But I was convincing. Oh yes, I was surely convincing! They had to sedate me after I identified your body, did you know that? And I genuinely needed it, that’s how convincing I was!’

  ‘Janey, hon, I’m sorry,’ he said, starting to get out of bed.

  ‘No! Don’t come near me,’ she protested. ‘Let me tell you why I needed sedating. It wasn’t the state of that poor man’s corpse, though Christ knows, that was bad enough. It was when they mentioned his dental records. I nearly fainted then. We hadn’t thought of that, I told myself. The game’s up! Then they went on to say that they’d checked your record and the drowned man’s teeth matched. That’s when I really flaked out.’

  ‘But why? I told you I’d fixed everything,’ said Beck.

  ‘You told me that this poor guy died by accident and you’d got the idea of substitution only when his body washed up on our beach. A lucky break that he was your height and build, you said. But there was no way you could have faked his dental record and substituted it for your own in the time you had, Oliver. No way!’

  He nodded as if approving her logic.

  ‘So you decided I was probably a murderer. Then later you found out I’d been working for the IRA. And you ran. Is that it?’

  ‘Do you blame me?’ she said dully.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘What puzzles me is, feeling like that, why didn’t you tell the cops the whole story?’

  ‘Because you’re Noll’s father,’ she said slowly. ‘Because that entitled you to a chance to defend yourself.’

  ‘Which you were going to give me by never setting eyes on me again? That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Hardly logical, Janey.’

  ‘Logic’s for computers,’ she said. ‘I’m a human being, a mother with a child to bring up, a daughter with a father killed in a crossfire between the people whose money you stole and the people who wanted to stop them getting that money and any like it. Show me the space to fit logic into that lot.’

  Now he got out of bed, but not to approach her. Instead he made for the door.

  ‘You’ve changed,’ he said speculatively, pausing on the threshold. ‘You’ve changed a lot, Janey. Remember that when you pass your verdict on me. It’s too soon now to talk this thing out. I deny nothing, admit nothing. But when you think of condemning me, remember the change in yourself.’

  He smiled then, so that his face matched his young, fit body. Then he left.

  He hadn’t been back to her room since. They had slipped into a routine which had most of the appearance and some of the reality of domesticity. Sometimes politeness merged into affection, occasionally comfort almost became content. And in their shared love of Noll they found common cause which would have made a much harder existence bearable.

  Together they watched their son now. He saw their interest, called, ‘Watch me!’ and turning, flung himself fearlessly into the deep end. He vanished completely, and for a moment Jane’s skies went dark also. Then his head burst back into the sunlight and he waved triumphantly. Now Maria rose with unhurried grace and moved to the edge of the pool. She did not need to shout, ‘Watch me!’ Her body did it for her, its unblemished olive brown rippling sensuously beneath the token restraints of the three scraps of white bikini. Her voracious appetite for all things sweet was already causing her waistline to thicken, Jane assured herself. Another ten years would see her plump as a pigeon. But now she dived into the water with scarcely a cormorant’s splash and came up alongside Noll who greeted her with a joyous laugh.

  ‘Time for my swim, I think,’ said Oliver, rising.

  She watched as he ran down the steps to the pool terrace and plunged in. He surfaced between Noll and Maria, splashing them both and sparking off some three-cornered horseplay. As Maria tried to duck him, Jane wondered how often before those slim brown arms had twined round his muscular shoulders. She had no firm evidence, had sought none. But when she found herself lying awake at night feeling the temptation to go to his room, she knew how strongly he too must feel the same urges. Yet when they were together during the day he showed very little sign of frustration. That, plus a change in Maria’s attitude, a shift from the status of employee to something more equal … she broke the chain of thought. It led to jealousy, and jealousy implied assertion of rights, and that implied commitment.

  She was still far from ready to contemplate renewing that. She looked at him and saw a dead man on a slab, she saw Jonty Thrale and the other filth he had tracked into their lives. But, being honest, she knew she saw them less clearly than once she had done …

  Meanwhile, she would bear her frustrations and, if he couldn’t bear his, he was welcome to seek relief in that lithe brown body.

  ‘Senhora.’

  It was Antonio, the gardener. At least that was his official designation, but his role was to guard as much as to garden.

  ‘Car coming,’ he said. ‘Taxi.’

  Jane stood up.

  ‘Thanks, Antonio,’ she said. She looked down at the pool. The wate
r fight was still going on. She pulled on a light wrap to protect herself both from the sun and Antonio’s assessing gaze, which was almost as disturbing as open lust, and walked round the terrace to the side of the villa. From here you could look all the way down the long track which led to the road spiralling into the mountains from the town below.

  The taxi was moving fast, hotly pursued by a cloud of dust. A telescope was fitted onto the terrace wall and she stooped to peer through it. The driver’s face leapt up towards her, anonymous behind the inevitable sun spectacles, and she could make out only a shadowy figure in the rear seat. The vehicle reached the gate. The driver got out, rattled the iron bars, got back in and spoke over his shoulder.

  ‘Who is it?’ asked Oliver behind her.

  ‘I don’t know. A taxi. Were you expecting anyone?’

  ‘No one I want to see,’ he said grimly.

  The taxi door opened. A man got out, walked to the gates and stood there, very still, looking up towards them as if he could see them as clearly with his naked gaze as they could him through the telescope.

  Strangely she felt as little surprise as if she had issued a formal invitation and her guest had turned up dead on time.

  ‘It’s Dog Cicero,’ she said, without emotion.

  He pushed her aside and looked for himself.

  Then he straightened up and looked at her.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.

  ‘Do?’ he said, turning to the mechanism which opened the gate. ‘A man doesn’t come such a hell of a distance without a very good reason. We’d better let him in.’

  4

  They drank tea on the terrace. It was poured from a silver tea pot into bone china cups. There were toasted teacakes and petits fours. It was Oliver Beck’s attempt at a scornful mockery of things English but it fell sadly flat. Dog Cicero examined the teacakes with the polite curiosity of an Italian prelate shown a pagan sacrifice and shook his head. Jane echoed the gesture more freely so that her flowing hair rippled redly in the sunlight like the tresses of the Celtic princess whose toilette in the evening and in the morning caused the sunset and the dawn.