The Damnation Game Read Free

who’d occupied this fortress before his fall from sanity.
    “The laws of chance are nothing to him. Don’t you see? He isn’t like you or me. How could a man always win without having some power over the cards?”
    “You believe that?”
    Vasiliev shrugged, and slumped again. “To him,” he said, almost contemplative in his utter dismay, “winning is beauty. It is like life itself.”
    The vacant eyes returned to tracing the rough grain of the floorboards as the thief somersaulted the words over in his head: “Winning is beauty. It is like life itself.” It was strange talk, and made him uneasy. Before he could work his way into its meaning, however, Vasiliev was leaning closer to him, his breath fearful, his vast hand catching hold of the thief’s sleeve as he spoke.
    “I’ve put in for a transfer, did they tell you that? I’ll be away from here in a few days, and nobody’ll be any the wiser. I’m getting medals when I get home. That’s why they’re transferring me: because I’m a hero, and heroes get what they ask for. Then I’ll be gone, and he’ll never find me.”
    “Why would he want to?”
    The hand on the sleeve fisted; Vasiliev pulled the thief in toward him. “I owe him the shirt off my back,” he said. “If I stay, he’ll have me killed. He’s killed others, him and his comrades.”
    “He’s not alone?” said the thief. He had pictured the card-player as being a man without associates; made him, in fact, in his own image.
    Vasiliev blew his nose into his hand, and leaned back in the chair. It creaked under his bulk.
    “Who knows what’s true or false in this place, eh?” he said, eyes swimming. “I mean, if I told you he had dead men with him, would you believe me?” He answered his own question with a shake of his head. “No. You’d think I was mad …”
    Once, the thief thought, this man had been capable of certainty; of action; perhaps even of heroism. Now all that noble stuff had been siphoned off: the champion was reduced to a sniveling rag, blabbering nonsense. He inwardly applauded the brilliance of Mamoulian’s victory. He had always hated heroes.
    “One last question—” he began.
    “You want to know where you can find him.”
    “Yes.”
    The Russian stared at the ball of his thumb, sighing deeply. This was all so wearisome.
    “What do you gain if you play him?” he asked, and again returned his own answer. “Only humiliation. Perhaps death.”
    The thief stood up. “Then you don’t know where he is?” he said, making to pocket the half-empty packet of cigarettes that lay on the table between them.
    “Wait.” Vasiliev reached for the pack before it slid out of sight. “Wait.”
    The thief placed the cigarettes back on the table, and Vasiliev covered them with one proprietorial hand. He looked up at his interrogator as he spoke.
    “The last time I heard, he was north of here. Up by Muranowski Square. You know it?”
    The thief nodded. It was not a region he relished visiting, but he knew it. “And how do I find him, once I get there?” he asked.
    The Russian looked perplexed by the question.
    “I don’t even know what he looks like,” the thief said, trying to make Vasiliev understand.
    “You won’t need to find him,” Vasiliev replied, understanding all too well. “If he wants you to play, he’ll find you.”
     

Chapter 3
     
    T he next night, the first of many such nights, the thief had gone looking for the card-player. Though it was by now April, the weather was still bitter that year. He’d come back to his room in the partially demolished hotel he occupied numb with cold, frustration and—though he scarcely admitted it even to himself—fear. The region around Muranowski Square was a hell within a hell. Many of the bomb craters here let on to the sewers; the stench out of them was unmistakable. Others, used as fire pits to cremate executed citizens, still flared intermittently when a flame found a belly swollen with gas, or a pool of