Brainfire Page 13

  He sat down at the window, opening a copy of the afternoon edition of The Evening Standard. On the inside back page there was a photograph of the Soviet team at practice, together with some prediction of victory by the English team manager in Saturday’s game. Saturday, Andreyev thought. He would have to move before Saturday because after that—after that he wasn’t sure of anything, if the entourage was going back to Russia or traveling elsewhere. He put the newspaper down and stared from the window. When? When would there be the chance? When would there be an opening in this damned wall? He considered the guard in the corridor, flipping the pages of a magazine whose language he presumably couldn’t understand anyhow. Watching, waiting. And then he thought of Mrs. Blum, lying in her room, dreaming of her impossible Palestine, concocting her own Jerusalem from snapshots and letters. What wouldn’t he give to have her power—even for a moment?

  That power: he didn’t want to linger on the memory of it, the way she had slipped, with the efficiency of a surgical device, into his mind, that sense of something sharp touching the furthest recesses of brain, the distant corners of memory, the plunder, the violation, the intrusion—as if what had taken place were a painful defilement of his identity. No, he didn’t want to remember the dark humiliation he had felt, brain cells burning, memories going off like brilliant pinwheels, the sure and terrible knowledge that had she so chosen, she could have killed him—

  Trembling, he took the piece of paper from his pocket. He smoothed it out, studying the address, the telephone number—anxious memory, like some wasted muscle he couldn’t get to respond. Try. Try to get it right. But he couldn’t; the numbers came out confused and mixed up. He folded the slip once, then a second time, so that it was nothing more than a tiny square he shoved into his pocket, burying it under a key and some coins. Saturday, it had to be before Saturday. What if he made it anyway? What if he got away? Would the British offer him the asylum he wanted? Or would they just hand him back …?

  He was scared. He started slightly when he heard the sound of light knocking at his door. Before he could move he saw the handle turn and the door open.

  Katya stepped inside the room—a different Katya, her face made up inexpertly, her dress a bright floral garment, her hair cut and brushed in a new fashion. For a moment he was appalled, disconcerted by the way she looked. The makeup—dear God, the scarlet brightness of the lips, the clownlike touches of rouge on the cheeks, the false eyelashes that created a comic-strip vision, eyeshadow suggesting the appearance of a coal miner. “Well, Victor?” she said, spinning around slowly so that he might have a complete view. “I used up some of my allowance. Does it startle you?”

  His mouth was dry. “Yes,” he said. “It’s very different. I didn’t expect it.”

  She came across the room as if she was dancing, waltzing with a shadow, and she stopped beside him. Even the scent that hung around her was new to him. Sharp, bittersweet, like the juice of an apricot. “When in Rome,” she said. “After all, how many opportunities to travel come up?”

  Andreyev turned away, pretending to look at the newspaper. But she reached forward and took the paper from his hand. She let it fall to the floor, the sheets separating and fluttering. “Don’t you like your Katya, Professor?” The woman, pushing her lower lip forward, was trying to look petulant. He was reminded now of their night in Moscow, their single farcical attempt at lovemaking.

  “It takes getting used to,” he said. He couldn’t look at her. He stared at the window, the darkening sky, the way the sun slipped toward the horizon.

  “You haven’t been paying much attention to me lately,” she said. “I might imagine you were avoiding me, Professor.”

  He shook his head. The dryness in his mouth: he couldn’t swallow. “No,” he said. “It’s this whole situation … it keeps me busy. I don’t seem to have a moment when I’m alone.” Then he was thinking of Domareski, of the dead man in the snow; Katya—Katya, whose face now looked like some hideous cosmetic mishap—how could he even think of trusting her? There was no one now to trust. Only the name on the slip of paper.

  “Don’t you like the way I look?” she asked.

  “I do.”

  She closed her eyes, as if she expected to be kissed. But he had already turned away, pretending he hadn’t noticed the gesture. There was a burnt-out vapor trail in the sky. He wondered what the young American had felt, standing at a window similar to this one; he wondered about the sharp strokes of pain, the demolition of the will. Katya had her hand on his arm. He glanced at her. Pity. That was all he felt. She began to rub his arm.

  “Before we left Moscow,” she said, then became silent.

  He could feel it; a pressure against his heart. A sense of his own collapse.

  “Before we left Moscow—why did you visit Stefanoff?”

  Andreyev heard the rush of dark spaces in his head, the turbulent passages of his own blood. Stefanoff. How had she known about Stefanoff?

  “What makes you think I visited him?” he asked. Calm, poise. Believe in your own fabrications.

  “I followed you,” she said.

  He turned to look at her again, angry now. “You had no right to do that. You had no right whatsoever.”

  “It troubles me, Victor. A man in your position contacting a known dissident. And a Jew. Why do you put yourself in such jeopardy?”

  “Stefanoff was a student of mine,” he said, and his voice was feeble, an untuned instrument.

  “Years ago,” Katya said. “Why would you visit an old student, Victor? Why would you run the risk of association? It doesn’t make sense.”

  Andreyev watched the flat sun on the glass. It was a cold orange glow now. “It was a social visit. Am I denied that?” Stefanoff’s one-room flat. The piece of paper. The name of the person who would help.

  “What did you talk about?”

  He looked at her face, noticing now a viciousness, feeling as if he were gazing at the blade of an open razor.

  “We talked about old times.”

  She moved away from him to the window, then turned to face him so that the light fell at her back; suddenly she was anonymous, demonic. He put his hands inside his pockets and wondered how much she really knew, how much of this was guesswork. She couldn’t know about the paper, could she? Unless—

  “You understand that Stefanoff was arrested the day we left Moscow?”

  He stared at her, shaking his head.

  “He was arrested on charges of treason,” she said.

  He couldn’t feel himself now. There was a curious disembodiment, a sense of free-falling: he was no longer in this room, no longer connected with a known reality, but instead floating indiscriminately through alien spaces. Stefanoff arrested. He sat down, his legs weak. Arrested. With all its implications. How much pressure would they put on Stefanoff? What would he tell them? What would he admit to? There were limits, even for someone of Stefanoff’s courage. Would he say he had given certain information to Andreyev? Would he tell them—

  “You mustn’t look so concerned, Victor,” Katya said. “After all, you only visited him for social reasons, didn’t you? Perhaps you drank a little vodka, smoked tobacco, talked about the good old days? Perhaps you even listened to some pleasant music, no?”

  “I didn’t know they had taken him,” Andreyev said. “I wasn’t aware of that.”

  Katya smiled. “One ought to be careful of one’s social behavior, my dear Andreyev.”

  She moved to his chair and stood with her hips close to his face. Stefanoff, he thought. Every man has a breaking point, Stefanoff included. You understand this is going to be dangerous, Victor? I understand, Alexei. Don’t carry this paper, whatever you do. Memorize it and burn it. Yes, of course. Dear God. They would break Stefanoff. They would break him as one might a used matchstick. He closed his eyes, conscious of Katya’s scent, of her hand in his hair. He got up from the chair, passing her.

  Her voice was sharp, hurt. “Don’t you find me attractive?”

 
He stared at her a moment. It was Domareski who came to mind again. Then he thought: But I am Domareski now. He was suddenly very afraid of death and dying: a fear of dark heights, of standing on the edge of some cliff that rose above black water. Dying, he thought. Katya, her mouth tight, was watching him. The painted face, the unreal horror of the floral dress, the plastic clasp of yellow that was bound to her hair: a garden of mad colors. Don’t you find me attractive? He stared at the door, wondering how far he would get if he were to run, dash past the man who sat by the elevator door. Nowhere, he thought. Then you play it differently. You play it with an understanding that the rules have been changed.

  Slowly he went toward the woman. He put his hands gently against her shoulders and, drawing her toward him, feeling the lean hardness of her body, he held her against him.

  “This is better, Victor,” she said. “Isn’t this a better way?”

  He felt her hand pull at the buckle of his belt and he realized, with a start of self-contempt, that he was already aroused by her.

  “This is so much better, so much better,” she said, sighing in a way he found dreadful.

  4.

  It was after seven and dark when Rayner reached Belsize Park. A search of his own flat in St. John’s Wood had turned up nothing in the way of listening devices. He had poked and prodded in both obscure and obvious places; but nothing. Now, climbing the dimly lit stair to Sally’s apartment, he paused halfway up to catch his breath. The problem of Richard, he thought: it wouldn’t dissolve. If the Russians were that interested, there had to be some good reason behind it—but good reasons were the very things that continually eluded him. What he kept coming back to was Isobel’s testimony, her eyewitness account, something he could only explain away as false if he postulated bizarre circumstances. She had been drugged while Richard had been killed: some psychedelic hallucination she now firmly believed to be reality. Hypnotic suggestion was another: look into my eyes and relax and you won’t remember anything except the fact that your husband took his own life. But these were farfetched for him. There was also the possibility that it hadn’t been Isobel who had been drugged/ hypnotized, but Richard himself. Rayner shrugged, climbed upward, smelling the darkness around him. Some exotic spice was simmering behind a closed door.

  He reached the door of Sally’s flat and knocked. For a time there wasn’t an answer—only a whispered sound from inside, a noise of something being scraped. He waited, then knocked again, and the door was immediately opened. Sally stood there with a glass of red wine in her hand. She looked at him with a dizzy smile, her face flushed. I come in a surprise package, Rayner thought, knowing that there was somebody else inside the flat. Beyond Sally he saw a shadow move.

  “This is unexpected,” she said.

  He wondered if he felt hurt or just disappointed. He looked at her a moment, the familiar housecoat, the untidy hair, large earrings in the shape of hoops swaying against the sides of her neck. What the fuck do you say? he wondered. God knows, I haven’t been much of a lover lately.

  “I guess I should have called,” he said.

  “It would have been thoughtful of you, John.” She swung the edge of the door back and forth nervously.

  “I didn’t have time,” he said.

  “The point is, dear, I’m rather occupied—”

  He heard low music from inside. Something Eastern, atonal, the music of the gurus: it was as if Sally had missed the Sixties and was doing her damnedest to catch up with them. He could smell incense and, behind it, the perfume of marijuana. The point is, dear, don’t you know, blah blah blah. He wondered if you graduated from Roedean with callused hands, the hazards of hockey; or if the calluses were inside, deep inside.

  “I don’t exactly want to disturb anything,” he said. “But I need to come in.”

  “I feel a scene coming on,” she said.

  “Not from me you don’t.”

  Rayner went inside the flat. The man who sat sheepishly on the sofa—the sofa, Rayner thought, where last night’s awkward sex had been engineered—was middle-aged, plump, and somehow faintly familiar. He felt Sally skirt around the room, hearing her make the offer of a glass of wine. Rayner declined.

  “John, this is Mark Wellington,” she said. “He’s one of our authors.”

  “Nice,” Rayner said. Civilized introductions all round. What was he supposed to do? Shake hands? I could try to imagine that I haven’t exactly been betrayed. Wellington, of course: the face was familiar from dust jackets of best-selling adventure stories concerning men in submarines, hidden Nazi treasures, cardboard people scaling the sides of impossible mountains. Rayner had read one once. Rugged language, words like thrust and rough and jagged. Sexual passages as explicit, as interesting, as blueprints for turbines.

  “Pleasure to meet you,” Wellington said awkwardly, half rising.

  “Mark and I were sort of discussing his new book,” Sally said.

  “Yeah? What’s it called? The Matterhorn Connection? The Lost Treasure of the Sahara?” Rayner hated himself for the adolescent outbreak. You’re hurt, he thought. This is a pain.

  “You’re being silly, darling,” she said.

  Rayner wondered: Maybe she’s an author’s groupie, maybe she gets her jollies blowing off masters of basic prose style. Don’t let it touch you, he thought. Don’t start thinking you’re into this a whole lot deeper than you should be. Fuck it. But he couldn’t put the pain down. It stuck to him.

  “Actually, it’s called The Black Alphabet,” Wellington said, being awfully nice.

  “Hope it sells a million,” said Rayner, turning away from the guy, avoiding Sally’s expression too. He went into the bedroom, a converted attic with a sloping roof. A room of character, he thought. Screw it. He heard her come after him, closing the door behind her.

  “You should have called first,” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter, Sally. I swear it doesn’t make an inch of difference who you fuck.” He was opening drawers, uncovering piles of crumpled underwear.

  “It’s one thing to barge in, it’s quite another, darling, to work your way through my knickers. If you need a souvenir of our rather ham-fisted copulations, you only have to ask.”

  Rayner stared at her. He wanted to hit her; the urge came out of him in a way he couldn’t entirely understand. He clenched his hands and looked down into the open drawers. She’s a slob, he thought. Who needs it? He began dropping her clothes to the floor.

  Panties. Slips. Panty hose. A schoolboy’s box of delights.

  “You don’t own me, Rayner. Did you imagine that you did?”

  “Look, baby, I recognize the fact I’ve been relegated to the second division, where all the old lovers play these melancholy tunes. Okay? If you need the fat man in there, good luck.”

  “You’re absurd, Rayner,” she said. “You must live in some strange old-fashioned reality if you think I sit round here waiting for you to call. I think I’ll just shove on over to Sally’s and dip my wick. Well, fuck you, Rayner.”

  He tried not to hear her. He was feeling underneath the mattress that lay on the floor. There’s a place, he thought, a place where no such thing as hurt exists. That’s where I should be headed.

  “What the hell are you fumbling for, anyway?” she asked. She was standing over him, her wineglass tilted to one side, red drops slicking onto the mattress, where they spread like menstrual stains.

  “I’ll tell you when I find it,” he said. “Why don’t you go and sit in Mr. Wellington’s lap meantime, okay?”

  He heard her go out of the room and slam the door. He sat motionless for a while in silence. Then the outer door was shut. After a while, Sally came back into the bedroom. She watched him, her back to the wall, her wineglass held at the same precarious angle.

  “He’s gone,” she said. “I sent him away.”

  “Bully for you, dahling.”

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s clear the air.”

  “Let’s,” he said.

&nbs
p; “Fidelity isn’t my stock-in-trade, Rayner. And I don’t exactly enjoy being made to feel that I’m doing something behind your back. Because I’m not. I sent Mark away because I wanted to speak to you.”

  “Speak, speak,” he said.

  “I like him. All right? I like lots of men. I simply refuse to be tied down like some bloody slave—”

  Rayner stood up, watching her. “How many, Sally? How many?”

  “Oh, Christ, don’t be so childish. I don’t keep a scorecard beside my bed. I don’t keep a diary.”

  The Guinness Book of World Records, he thought. All the old lovers, he realized, were not so old after all. They were still nibbling at the same bait. Maybe she kept a regular reserve team, men she could call on when the first selections were playing elsewhere.

  “Forget it,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Of course it matters. I simply think you’re reacting foolishly, that’s all. You come in here, you start rummaging around—what the hell are you looking for anyway?”

  “Hidden lovers,” he said. “I’m interested in where you keep them, kid.”

  “Why don’t you check inside the oven? Or look in the pantry? Perhaps you should start with the freezer compartment of the fridge.”

  She went out of the bedroom. He could hear her cross the living-room floor: angry footsteps. Mad little noises. It calls for that activity known as “being realistic,” Rayner thought. Facing facts squarely. She screws around. Why didn’t you suspect it before? Even now, now when you know, does it matter? Ah, shit. Why does it matter?

  He went into the sitting room. He looked at her for a time. She was lighting a cigarette with one hand, pouring more wine with the other. On the table, beside an unlit candle, he saw rolling papers, charred tapers, a plastic bag of dope. Stoned, he thought. What the hell.