The Game

John D. MacDonald The Game

The three British Other Banks were eating quietly in a corner of the New China Hotel dining room when the little round chocolate man who called himself Jayasuria sat down in the vacant chair with his welcome bottle of surreptitious scotch. From then on the conversation became increasingly maudlin. Freed of the necessity of giving up the table due to the dwindling of late patrons, the corner grew noisier as the scotch, liberally splashed into coffee cups, began to make its effect.

Buck, the pimply private with the Africa ribbon, made little effort to conceal his distaste for their self-appointed host, but Lance Corporal Henry Marlow suspected that each jibe bit a little more deeply than the cheerful little man world have admitted. Peter, the other private, became increasingly oblivious of the little group as the liquor stimulated his mental and vocal research into the charms of the latest batch of British girls, members of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, who had arrived in Ceylon to join their detachment. He provided a fairly constant muttering background to the conversation which was being carried on almost entirely by Buck and Jayasuria.

Jayasuria took each coffee cup in turn and evenly divided the last of the Imperial quart. Then lifting his cup high in the air, he exercised his too exact and urbane English, “Making this a toast to our friend Corporal, who all night drinks and saying nothing but Thank You”.

Buck started to down his drink, and then sudden mirth sprayed some scotch on the weatherbeaten table cloth. When he could get his breath he said, “We considered it practically, miraculous that we were able to entice Henry out of the grim mess tonight and bring him, down here. He rarely speaks to anyone. One of the FANYs that friend Peter is mumbling about over there, shot Henry down last week in favor of one of our bright young officers. Old Henry is even more speechless than usual now. There have been a few wagers made as to whether he would commit murder or just get drunk.” Once again Buck lost himself to loud chattering laughter and the little brown man joined in, dutifully, and more agreeably, now that the scotch was gone.

As Henry Warlow stared at the trio they seemed to waver and become indistinct before his eyes and a low drumming sound began to well up to a crescendo in his ears. He leaned over the table and slapped with his open palm at the shadowy figure which had so recently been Buck. A sharp stinging satisfaction cleared his vision as he pushed backward, upsetting his chair. He saw the still muttering Peter, the shocked face of Buck and the little brown man still grinning merrily before he turned and walked heavily out of the New China.

By the time he realized where he was and slowed his pell-mell pace, he had passed the clock tower and was well on his way up the Galle Road heading out of down-town Colombo. The cool night air blowing from the sea was quickly drying the drench of perspiration on his bush coat; the bicycle bells on the rickshaws played counterpoint to a string melody which drifted out of the Galle Face Hotel; the chug of charcoal taxis was almost lost in the murmur of the surf. Quietly he went over and over in his mind the exact wording of his apology to Buck until it satisfied him; he felt sure he could keep Buck's slightly add friendship. Peter would not remember exactly what had happened. It was unlikely that he would run into the little brown man again, and even if he did, no apology would be owing.

The creation of an apology soothed his mind to the extent that he began to toy with the mental game he had been playing for the past week, a game that had shortened the hours of drudgery and had enlivened the dull midnights in bed when insufficient breeze came through the mosquito net to make sleeping possible. The game called how to kill Lieutenant Robert Wythe-Campbell. Maybe the remaining three miles of walking plus the gentle stimulation of the scotch would provide the perfect answer which he had not yet found after devising innumerable plans. Always he kept the vision of Shelagh in the farthest corner of his mind to prevent her very vividness from clouding his thoughts and preventing the birth of the perfect scheme, the scheme which he knew in his heart he could never carry out once it had been conceived.

The pungent smell of a string of native bazaars went unnoticed as Henry knelt to cut the pilot chute line in the Lieutenant's chute pack before an operational mission. The clack of steel shod heels sounded far along the quiet reaches of Bambalipitua Avenue as Henry watched the Lieutenant's dwindling figure spinning down toward the crushed velvet jungle far below.

Inadvertantly his thoughts turned to Shelagh, turned to her crisp black hair and shadowed eyes and body too lush for her eighteen years — Shelagh too far from home and school, too emotionally transfixed by the slow sweet smell of Ceylon and the charm of the tanned uniformed men around her. In Shelagh he had found, beyond the warmth of her lips, a pixie humor and a tenderness which had made him feel less alone than at any time since his foreign tour had started three years before. Though he sensed the eagerness and the readiness in her, he had purposely kept their relationship on the basis of an occasional casual kiss — until suddenly she had fallen for the Wythe-Campbell spell and become forever lost to him, forever immune to the future he had daydreamed out of their togetherness. He sensed that Wythe-Campbell had realized and exploited the urgency in her. Warlow had been robbed of a treasure no part of which had been spent. Thus there was born a game called how to kill the Lieutenant.

Saturday, Sunday and Monday passed in somber sequence for Henry. He had become so accustomed to sending out the meaningless five letter code groups hour after hour that his mind could wander freely. He would set a great mental wheel turning which would stop either at the game, or at Shelagh. Each stop of the great wheel would use up another hour in his mind, while his hard and his eye were occupied in clicking the code groups out across the hundreds of miles of tropic air. Since apologizing to Buck he had made only the most necessary conversation — requests for food at the mess table, verbal reports to the head of his section on work accomplished. And he had slept very little, August in Ceylon is not conductive to sleep, nor is a wheelin the mind.

Buck came to the sending station early on Tuesday morning and stood next to Henry's table until Henry came to the end of a message and looked up. “Tonight is the officer’s dance in the compound, Henry. I have a bottle of Carew’s Gin in case you want to get out and eat in the city with me?”

Henry smiled for the first time in days as he realized that Buck had completely forgiven him and was trying to help out the Shelagh situation. “No, thank you very much. I think I am pretty well cauterized at this point and I might just as well stay here and see how the better classes manage.”

As Buck left and he turned back to the sending key, he noticed that when the big wheel spun again in his mind, it spun faster and more viciously than ever before — the game or Shelagh, game or Shelagh, game, Shelagh.

Henry lay looking up at his mosquito netting in the slight moonglow which came through the basha window. From close at hand came the tinny thump of the Ceylonese band grinding out American dance music in the officers’ bungalow. Across the basha sounded the rattling snore of the Corporal with the unpronounceable name, just as rhythmic as the music, but out of tempo. And underneath the music and the snore and the insect whine was the brushing of surf on the rocks.

Neither the game nor thoughts of Shelagh would work. The wheel had stopped. From afar, like figures seen through a reversed telescope, he could see the Lieutenant and Shelagh, circling to the music, his arm tight around her soft waist, her body close to his.

He pushed the netting aside and fumbled into his clothes. Once out in the compound he headed for the far gate and, after returning the salute of the misguided Indian guard, headed down the railroad tracks which followed the rocky beach, walking fast to get out of the sound of the music, scuffing the cinders against the rails. Finally the sea absorbed the music, and he began to walk more slowly. Ahead appeared the bright swooping eye of a train and he stepped carefully away from the tracks, avoiding the skeins of rusted barbed wire which had been set out back in the days when the Japanese were devouring islands. As the headlight swept closer he saw a figure stumbling along the ties directly in the path of the engine. As he watched, the figure fell sidewards — off the roadbed before the train hit it. As soon as the train crashed by he hurried up the tracks and came upon the figure of a man on his hands and knees in the cinders struggling to stand up. He grabbed the man by one arm and standing him up saw in the vague moonlight that he was supporting the slender drunken figure of Lieutenant Robert Wythe-Campbell. It was mumbling something about fresh air, and was too far gone to even be considered as a person, much less reasoned with.

As Henry held the Lieutenant upright, avoiding the stains of recent illness on his tunic, he felt again the peculiar fading of vision he had experienced in the New China Hotel. Gently saying, “Come along, Old Man, come along!” he half carried the Lieutenant down the grassy slope between the rolls of barbed wire toward the rocks and surf. Getting him down the rocks was more difficult. It was a jumble of hard boulders the size of bushel baskets extending for about twenty feet down a forty-five degree slope. The lower half of the slope was slimy from the seaweed deposited at high tide. At the foot of the slope the surf scrambled among the rocks. Just above the surf line he lowered the limp form to the rocks and, locating a sharp edge of rock, partially by sense of touch and partially with the aid of the dim moonlight, shifted the sodden form so that the back of its head was just above the sharp edge. Then, gently holding the Lieutenant's face between his two hands he thrust sharply downward, hearing the solid chunk of bone on rock above the surf. He rolled the body toward a crevice between two of the rocks, pushed it between and then stepped heavily, onto the small of the Lieutenant’s back to make certain that the body would stay there until covered by the incoming tide.

It took only a few seconds to return to the tracks and then only a matter of minutes to arrive back at the compound. The same Indian guard performed the same improper salute, and Henry headed obliquely toward the officer's bungalow until the shadows were deep enough for him to circle around toward his own basha. The same music was still thumping at the night air, and the same snores were still rolling across the basha.

As he lay in the darkness he relived the past forty-five minutes again and again, attempting to find a weakness in the crime, trying to find any particle of evidence which would cause the investigating officer to suspicion that a murder had been committed. No, from every point of view the Lieutenant had stumbled out onto the rocks and struck his head when he fell. The rising tide would take care of any falseness in the attitude of the body. Ho one had seen Henry leave or return except the guard who had thought him to be an officer. With the impetus of a falling weight Henry dropped into a deep untroubled sleep.

The clang of the early mess triangle awakened Henry. As he opened his eyes he sensed an ominous significance in all of the usual early morning noises in the compound. His roommate had left, but the sense of being carefully watched persisted. He grew rapidly more frightened. As he looked up through the mosquito net he could see a round dark hole in the thick woven cajan roof. He knew with a sudden horrifying clarity that a camera must be hidden there to record his every move. He began to stealthily examine the woven walls to find out where the essential dictaphone must have been hidden. His breathing became more shallow and more rapid as he began to realize that the entire detachment had been established for the sole purpose of spying on and intimidating Lance Corporal Henry Warlow. It amazed him to think that he previously had no suspicion that the plot even existed. Every mode of escape was blocked. With growing despair he tried to think of some manner of escape, someone with whom he could communicate. Someone to whom he could relate the facts of his persecution. Shelagh! She would help, but how to get word to her. Being a cryptographer, she knew code, but how to get the code to her. Knots in string, or in thread. Thread could come from the mosquito net...

When the medical corps major came at noon, he was accompanied by two husky attendants, and by an ill-looking lieutenant named Wythe-Campbell, who walked with difficulty. They stood in a group close to the cot, and for a time they watched the fumbling fingers of Warlow unraveling the mosquito net, adding to the pile of thread, heaped high at his side.