Brainfire Page 10

  He moved forward. The athletes were going toward the terminal. They moved easily, with a confidence that was close to arrogance. Winners, Andreyev thought. Men who would be surprised at nothing. They talked and joked like kids treated to a special outing. Did they ever wonder about the woman in the wheelchair? Or had wonderment been processed out of them? From the shadow of the terminal a couple of flashbulbs popped. Now Oblinski was abreast of him. There was a faint smell of garlic about the man, garlic and tobacco and old sweat.

  “London,” Oblinski said. “Land of hope and glory.”

  Andreyev turned a moment to look at the broad face of Oblinski. His pervasive anonymity had changed to something akin to ugliness.

  “Doesn’t it stir you, Andreyev? Or should I say Dr. Domareski?”

  The false name Andreyev had been given was a sick joke. He wondered who had come up with the idea that he should travel abroad under the name of the dead man. He looked away from Oblinski, who was smiling in a thin manner.

  “London,” Oblinski said again. “Does it give you ideas, Andreyev? Does it give you strange notions?”

  “Should it?”

  Oblinski shrugged. “People are free here, as I understand.”

  “Free?” Andreyev wondered why Oblinski should goad him this way. Did he know? Did he know about the piece of paper? Andreyev took his hands from his pockets and stared at the silver fuselages of planes that sat in the dark like sad grounded moths.

  “Free,” Oblinski said. He clapped his gloved hands together and whistled in a tuneless way a moment. “They don’t understand, Andreyev, the only freedom is death.”

  There were more flashbulbs sizzling up ahead. The only freedom, Andreyev thought: when you were accustomed to seeing reflections in broken mirrors, you didn’t know which fragment was a true image, or if any of them were. Was Oblinski warning him? Was Oblinski saying: Don’t get any ideas, Andreyev. Remember Domareski, whose name you now have. Remember. Andreyev watched Kazemayov, the team’s striker, the star, raise his arms upright for the benefit of the press photographers. It was his characteristic gesture whenever he scored a goal. A simian face, the body like a barrel, massive thighs.

  The door of the terminal was opened. The athletes streamed through, followed by Katya and Mrs. Blum. Again, Andreyev paused. Oblinski laid a hand on his shoulder and made a slight gesture with his head. Andreyev went inside the terminal building, hearing the automatic door slide shut behind him. It was stuffy and overheated. The only freedom, Andreyev thought. Did Oblinski know about the piece of paper? He wanted to touch it again, he wanted to take one more look at it and memorize the telephone number, the address—but when he had tried before he hadn’t been able to commit it to memory. Fear, anxiety, whatever. Now he understood the stupidity of words on paper, of the tangibility of something physical, something detectable.

  Please, he thought. There might be a chance. One slim chance.

  Oblinski was pushing his way through toward Immigration, where he took a clutch of passports from his briefcase and laid them down on the official’s desk. Behind a barricade there were photographers and reporters from the English sporting press. Kazemayov, in his element, was pretending to balance a ball on the tip of his shoe: a mute performance, a perfect mime, flicking the nonexistent ball up in the air and catching it with his forehead.

  Andreyev stared at Mrs. Blum: her eyes, dark slits against a face made puffy and swollen by drugs, saw nothing. He was sweating now, wiping his brow with his sleeve, wondering how Mrs. Blum was to be used on this trip. He glanced at Katya, though not for long. Did she know? Had she been told? Did Oblinski understand the purpose behind it all? Or were they all waiting for the order that would come down, like some crazy babble, from a high place? He encountered a dark corridor of ignorance here and it made him uncomfortable.

  The Immigration official was stamping the passports. Kazemayov, smiling, held three fingers up to the newspapermen, predicting the three goals he intended to score against the English team. Clowning, basking in the sharp, quick lights of flashbulbs, he balanced his canvas bag on the tip of his foot and circled around his laughing teammates. The trainer, Charek, a slightly crumpled man in his late fifties, chewed on the butt of an unlit cigarette and watched his star with quiet disapproval. The old school, Andreyev thought. The school of discipline and order. Charek would never ask why a sick old woman would be traveling with his party; Andreyev doubted that he even noticed her.

  Now Oblinski was gathering up the passports and hustling his charges in the direction of customs. Andreyev followed slowly, pushing his hands back inside his coat pockets. The piece of paper, like some reminder of an appointment already past, was sticky against the sweat of his fingers. It might have been any old used bus ticket, an ancient receipt, a theater stub, something dog-eared and stuck away for no real reason. And then he caught Mrs. Blum’s eyes again, thinking of how little she had responded to him in the three weeks since the young American’s death, how withdrawn she had become—three weeks of silence, of an aloofness that suggested some inner vacuum. Dear God, what did I expect anyway? Friendship? Good cheer? He drew his hand away from his precious piece of paper and he wondered if, when it came down to it, he would have the courage to do what he felt he had to. Fragile, flammable—a piece of flimsy, sweaty paper.

  He turned his face away from her, feeling some small shame, as if he were stripped and standing naked in a well-lit room. And he wondered if those about to be executed were ever able to look into the eyes of their executioners.

  2.

  The wind that sloughed through Mayfair, that carried scraps and shards and echoed down the entranceways to underground stations, slapped like a fist against the panes of George Gull’s window. Rayner finished reading the sheets Gull had given him; he laid them on the desk, where, caught in the oblique angle of the reading lamp, they appeared blank and glossy. Tired, Rayner closed his eyes and lightly rubbed his eyelids.

  The report was a piece of bureaucratic trash, compiled by some fastidious investigator at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. The precise phrases, the cold little placebos of language, irritated Rayner enormously. It is the conclusion of … We are of the opinion that … What it came down to, if you could separate the shit from the blades of the fan, was an official verdict of suicide. But it was a flaky, whitewash job; and Rayner, who had contrived to relegate the memory of his dead brother to a nebulous zone of the mind, was angered. A dead man distilled in a series of impersonal platitudes.

  Gull picked up the report and straightened the sheets. Without looking at Rayner he said, “It’s official, John. It’s sealed and signed and delivered.”

  Rayner said nothing. This pursuit of the dead was a chilling business. You tried to put the building blocks together but all you ever created was a jumbled alphabet. Even Dubbs, who had rummaged for days through what he called his “hapless little flock,” had turned up nothing. Now it boiled down to a smug report, written up in Moscow by some Embassy flunky called Strachan.

  Gull made a gesture with his hands, suggesting finality. He gazed at his broken cigarette in the ashtray with an expression that might have been one of deep regret. “The point is, John, you have to put it behind you. You have to.”

  He stared at Gull, who clearly had something else on his mind, if you were to deduce anything from the hesitancy of his manner. He got up rather awkwardly and walked to the window, the wind howling against the glass. With his back to Rayner he said, “I don’t exactly like to bring this up, but your work’s been suffering, John. What I’m getting at is—well, shit, there’s a time when you have to quit farting around and get back down to it.”

  Gull turned. He appeared apologetic, his face slightly red. Rayner thought: He’s embarrassed. Gull looked at the palms of his hands. Then he moved toward the desk and opened a folder, shuffling some sheets that lay inside.

  “Like this stuff,” Gull said. “It’s been almost a week since I asked you to process this Folweiler material. You haven’t done i
t yet.”

  Rayner sighed, considering the limits of his official duties, the reason why he was in London in the first place. Folweiler, an East German refugee, had applied for permanent residency in the United States, and it was Rayner’s task to run such applications from Eastern European fugitives through the intelligence screen: a matter of cables, telex inquiries, sifting the items from the various stations. The idea was that you might turn up a potential security threat to the USA; alternatively, the applicant might be useful for propagandist purposes—if he had been, say, a nuclear physicist, a great violinist, a sports star. What you usually got was small fry, sad and bitter little people who looked across the Atlantic with an unwarranted optimism. Folweiler was a stonemason from Dresden.

  Gull tapped a finger on the surface of his desk. “I gather you’ve been spending time with Dubbs. Maybe that’s what keeps you so goddam busy, huh?”

  Rayner rose from his chair. How did Gull know about Dubbs? What was it? Raincoated shadows in Regent’s Park, faint silhouettes on the platform of Holborn Underground Station? Watched, spied on, followed—had it come down to that kind of crap?

  “I didn’t know you had your goons on me, George,” Rayner said.

  “What the fuck do you expect from me? Days you don’t show—how am I supposed to know where you are?”

  Rayner gazed at the Moscow report. What did this character Strachan know, anyhow? “We can conclude that Richard Rayner might have been concerned with his career, depressed by his marriage, and that a combination of these factors contributed to his suicide.” It was pure unadulterated bull. An amateur shrink in a cold gray city—somebody who hadn’t even met Richard, presumably. No, Rayner thought. You had a mystery here, like a sunken ship lying in mud at some unfathomable depth. You had a mystery that couldn’t be unraveled by a distant peasant called Strachan.

  “Officially,” Gull said, staring at Rayner, “officially, I have to warn you, John. Off the record, I just wish you’d get your ass in gear before everything cracks open and you find yourself drummed back to the States—”

  “I hear you,” Rayner said. “I hear you.”

  He reached for his raincoat and went toward the door. A grief, he thought: it subsides, yielding to some other feeling—like a consciousness of waste, of pointlessness. He opened the door and turned once to look at Gull, but he couldn’t think of anything to say that would alleviate the leaden weight that lay between him and his superior. He stepped out into the corridor and walked to the elevator.

  Outside, on the Embassy steps, he turned up the collar of his raincoat. The wind that sliced across Grosvenor Square was a thing of invisible ice. He went down the steps and moved across the square in the direction of Oxford Street.

  3.

  Rayner took a cab to Belsize Park, where Sally Macnamara lived in a three-room flat in a house that had seen better days: a white-fronted monstrosity, chipped and peeling and scavenged by the vicissitudes of British weather. The district, jammed alongside Hampstead like an impoverished relative seated beside a rich cousin at some unlikely wedding, had become rundown, but Sally took great pleasure in the ethnic mix of the neighborhood. She lived at the top of the house, and Rayner, as he climbed the stairs, was assailed by a curious assembly of smells and scents—curry, fried onions, the suggestion of a gas leak, a stick of incense burning somewhere. He was out of breath when he reached the uppermost landing, where he paused, listening, wondering if someone were climbing through the shadows beneath him, one of George Gull’s gumshoes, perhaps; but the only noises were those of a muffled radio playing chamber music and the desultory sound of a sitar being plucked. He rang her doorbell and waited. The distant sound of the sitar grew more wild, a melancholy kind of abandon.

  She came to the door with her hair wrapped in a moist towel, a housecoat thrown loosely around her shoulders and belted at her waist. Rayner stepped inside, trying to catch his breath. It was a strange room, a jumble of odd things purchased in secondhand stores, in thrift shops, in bargain basements. Rayner had a quick impression of peacock feathers, a tailor’s dummy covered by an old fox fur, a poster of Lord Kitchener beckoning young men to early graves, Chinese paper lanterns, silks and linens spilling from a large sandalwood chest.

  “What brings you out on a foul night like this?” Sally said. She took the towel from her head and began to rub the strands of her wet hair.

  “Would you believe I was passing through the neighborhood?” Rayner asked.

  “Nope.” She threw the towel across a chair and looked at him. She wiped the palms of her hands on her housecoat. Then she stood motionless for a time, watching him, and it seemed to Rayner that in her disheveled state she was as much a part of the room as any of the inanimate objects it contained.

  “You’re right. I wasn’t just passing through.” He scratched his head. “I came from the Embassy. I thought: What the hell do I do on a night like this? Here I am.”

  “I’ve got a dish of cold won ton in the refrigerator if you fancy that,” she said. “I think there’s a single bottle of Heineken, if you want it.”

  He smiled at her. Culinary disorganization, he thought. He looked around the room. On a small cluttered desk there lay a thick manuscript whose pages were interspersed with rough strips of torn paper.

  “What’s the book?” he asked.

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” she said. She was lighting a cigarette, a pastel-colored thing that reminded him of the cigarettes Dubbs smoked. She blew a stream of smoke, watched it spiral upward, then said, “It’s a book we’re going to publish called I Was a Jew in the SS.”

  “You’re putting me on,” Rayner said.

  “I wish I was.” She went to the desk and looked at the typescript. “But it’s serious.”

  Rayner was silent for a time, looking around the room, noticing nothing in particular, yet conscious of some uneasiness in himself—as if he were seeking a refuge in this crazy apartment but failing to find one. He replayed the scene with Gull, turning the Moscow report over and over in his mind: maybe if you repeated the official verdict often enough to yourself you could believe it. Maybe you could just swallow the shit and then go on with your life—

  “I’ve never quite understood what you do at your Embassy,” Sally said.

  “I’m a serf,” Rayner said. “Low on the ladder.”

  “For example?”

  “Well, if you were to come in and apply for residence in the United States, your papers would pass across my desk.”

  “And what would you do with them?”

  “Process them.”

  She watched him a moment. “What’s your exact title?”

  “Assistant Consul.”

  “You’re a bad liar, Rayner. Something in your eyes.”

  A bad liar, he thought. “What do you think I do?”

  “You’re some kind of spook.”

  “Spook?”

  “CIA or whatever it is. Central Idiots Agency,” she said. “We did a book on them last year. All the spooks have friendly faces, little smiling masks.”

  Little smiling masks, he thought. He watched her close the pages of the typescript with a shudder. She sat down, the cigarette hanging from her mouth, her legs splayed apart—and he felt a rush of affection for her, a feeling he understood could easily grow to that point where love was supposed to begin: giddiness, folly, all the rest of it. The way she walks through her life, he thought—not giving a damn what other people think, that wonderful lack of self-consciousness, an independence he liked. He remembered how they had first met—at the opening of an art gallery that apparently specialized in sculptures created out of scraps of old locomotives. They had talked, then left together. “So bloody pretentious,” she had said. “Have you ever seen anything like it?” Her past, he found out, was checkered with old lovers turned friends, men who would call her at the most irregular hours for consultation in matters of the heart. He wondered what kind of talent it took for a person to defuse a relationship in such
a way that all the old lovers became close buddies—and sometimes, rather despairingly, he speculated on whether he would be similarly demoted in the near future. Still another voice on the telephone in the dead of night. Am I growing jealous? he wondered. Is that how it starts?

  He watched her move cautiously around the cluttered room. She was looking for an ashtray; failing to find one, she dropped her cigarette end in a coffee cup. When she sat down again the housecoat hung open, her small breasts visible. She made no move to cover herself.

  “Is there anything new on your brother?”

  “Nothing,” Rayner said. “An official suicide.”

  Sally closed her eyes. “You still don’t buy it?”

  “I don’t buy it,” Rayner said.

  “Then your brother’s wife is a liar?”

  “No. I don’t think so—”

  Sally shrugged and looked at him. He turned his face upward to the ceiling, gazing at the expanse of yellowing plaster from which there hung odd, spidery mobiles—frail things that moved and shifted in the thinnest of drafts. Light, rising through a lampshade of stained glass, cast various tints. Trippy, Rayner thought. The rich girl from Roedean goes slumming through the detritus of the psychedelic age.

  “Explain,” Sally said.

  “Look, I don’t have the answers—”

  “Philosophy. Introductory course. Are there unanswerable questions?”

  I don’t even have the questions, Rayner thought. Then what are you trusting? Disquieting feelings? Tiny jabs of uneasiness? Memories of Richard were snapshot albums in which you caught his face in a certain light: a boy with a fishing pole, grimacing in the sunlight one autumn day on Lake Oneida, the glories of some lost fall; a young man, filled with life and promise and hope, pictured climbing into his first automobile, a preposterous 1955 Packard that had once been a hearse; the university graduate heading for Washington. Even Dubbs, Rayner thought, even the little angelic Dubbs had urged him to accept the death as self-imposed. How could he?