Brainfire Read online

  “If it means anything, I’m sorry,” he said.

  She looked vacantly at him.

  “I came here because I have reason to believe that somebody has planted bugs in your flat.”

  “Bugs? Here?”

  “I’ll look around, then I’ll leave. Okay?”

  “Bugs—why here?” she asked.

  “It’s a long story, Sally.”

  She put her wineglass down; she laughed, a rather disjointed sound. “Then you are a spook!”

  He said nothing. He continued his search. When he found the devices they were textbook locations. Under the table, applied with some light putty; beneath the sofa; inside a lacquered Oriental box. They were powerful, high-frequency gizmos.

  “Those little things?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Those little things,” he said.

  “But you can’t say any more, correct?”

  “You guessed it.”

  He put them in his pocket and looked at her. For a moment he wished he could hear the tapes that would have been made from the gadgets. Lover after lover after lover, the creak of the sofa, the sound of her orgasmic squeals. What was he left with now? Being realistic, he thought. Or walking out of the mess. Where did this strange morality come from? he wondered. You run into a free spirit and all you can do is back off and pout like some deprived kid on an unhappy Christmas.

  “Bugs,” she said. She shook her head. “Something to do with your brother?”

  Rayner shrugged. He could still feel, like a stain left behind in permanent ink, the presence of the famous hack. Did she screw all her authors? Was it written into the contract? A sexual advance? She turned away, filling her glass again, her movements unsteady. Deeper than I ever believed, Rayner thought. Otherwise—why the hurt that wouldn’t evaporate?

  “So—how do you plan to spend your evening?” he asked.

  The answer was a crunch. “I’m going over to Mark’s,” she said.

  Rayner hesitated a second before moving toward the door. What was left to say? He felt an absence inside him, a dearth of volition: more simply, he thought, something was crumpling.

  “Enjoy,” he said, opening the door, stepping onto the landing, seeing the dim light at the foot of the stairs. He closed the door; as he did so he heard her wineglass break. Put your feelings in a rucksack, he thought, then dump it. Dump it.

  5.

  Andreyev woke in the dark, unaware of time, of how many hours had passed since he had turned away from Katya to sleep—now, reaching across the bedsheets, his hand collided with her naked shoulder. But she didn’t move. Faintly, in outline, he could make out her face, the open mouth, the closed eyelids. He withdrew his hand and lay perfectly still, thinking not now of Stefanoff’s arrest, or of his own immediate predicament, but of what had taken place between himself and the sleeping woman—as if these images were maps of some uncharted region of himself. His quick excitement, his brief elation followed by a sense of his own disgust. Even afterward, she had pressed herself against him, trying to arouse him with her hands and mouth, but all he had experienced then was distance from her, from himself: a tangle of shadows in a dark bedroom, nothing more. Slowly, he sat up. What else could he have done? He couldn’t have turned her away, refused her, because he couldn’t have afforded to have that viciousness come back, like some remorseless pendulum, against him. Lovemaking. It had bought him time at a rather expensive rate of exchange. It had won him some hours of her silence. She might have gone to Oblinski and said, He saw Stefanoff in Moscow—

  Quietly he pushed the white bedsheet away from his body. He stood upright, conscious of his own pale flesh as he fumbled for his clothes. The keys and coins in his pants rattled noisily. His feet became entangled in Katya’s discarded clothing: the nylon underwear, a lavender slip, the crumpled floral dress. He dressed quickly, silently, crossing the room to the window as he fumbled with his shirt buttons. There was no moon in the city sky. The expanse of park was a dark hollow etched in the night. A starless dark, offering at the very least shadows, places in which to hide. He put his hand in his pocket and, as if it were a rabbit’s paw to be stroked for luck, rubbed the piece of paper.

  Katya moaned in her sleep, turning to face the wall. Please God, he thought. Don’t let her wake. He took his jacket from the back of the chair, struggled into it, then went to the door, conscious of his shoelaces flapping untidily at his feet. Don’t wake, Katya. Sleep. Sleep on. At the door his fingers curled around the handle; he paused. The man in the chair by the elevator. This is insanity, he thought. You won’t get anywhere like this. Where is the logical plan? the precise strategy? the feasible scheme? Instead, you succumb finally to desperation and panic. The need simply to run. How far do you expect to get, Victor? How far?

  He opened the door a little way. The corridor was lit badly—a few weak bulbs covered with clam-shaped shades. The man was still holding the Reader’s Digest, his head tilted sleepily to one side. Andreyev peered through the slit, sweating, exhausted even before he had begun. The man moved his head in the manner of one shaking fatigue away. For a time Andreyev didn’t move. Katya turned restlessly on the bed. It comes down to terror, Andreyev thought—to a place that is miles removed from your neat little world of science, your place of scales and balances and charts. He watched the man take out a briar pipe and stuff the bowl with tobacco. The elevator door opened and a couple, walking arm in arm, stepped out and moved off in the opposite direction from Andreyev’s room. Move, he thought. Act. But he remained still, clutching the edge of the door, watching the couple disappear, watching the man labor with the pipe, a flurry of matches struck and spent. The man moved his chair a couple of inches, as if he were trying to get out of a draft.

  Andreyev waited. Waiting like this, he thought, stuck between Katya and the jailer. How do you solve this? Where are the equations? the formulae? He looked across the darkened room at the indeterminate shape of Katya. How much longer would she sleep? How soon would it be before she reached out for him and found an absence? Do it, he thought. Walk out. Walk out and away. He listened to the noise of the elevator falling in the shaft. He opened the door a little way farther. Then it was as if it mattered no longer, life or death, escape or entrapment; it was as if these opposites had met and merged and there was no difference between them.

  “Andreyev?”

  When he heard her voice he went out into the corridor.

  “Andreyev?”

  He pulled the door quietly behind him. The man in the chair looked up from his magazine. Andreyev hesitated. It’s not too late, he thought, it’s not too late to turn and go back inside the room and forget everything and live the rest of your life with the knowledge that your own nerve let you down and that you were a coward—

  The man closed his magazine and got up from the chair and, as if he was stunned by Andreyev’s sudden appearance, stood motionless awhile; from behind the closed door Andreyev could hear Katya calling his name in a series of worried repetitions. No, he thought. How could he go back inside the room, that room? He stared at the man by the elevator, who had begun, at last, to move toward him. The other way, Andreyev thought: where does the corridor lead? He turned, listening to the man call after him, “Domareski? Where do you think you’re going?”

  Then he was walking, hurrying, his heart hammering and his muscles weak, hurrying, expecting the man to shoot him in the back. The corridor twisted at a right angle. When he turned the corner, Andreyev ran. He passed closed doors, an elevator shaft with a sign that read “OUT OF ORDER.” Then there was a door that opened onto a flight of concrete steps. He rushed through it. His feet echoed on the steps, millions of small fading repetitions. Hurry hurry hurry. He heard the door slam somewhere above him as he went down and then the name was being called again, the dead man’s name, but he didn’t stop, he couldn’t stop and go back now. “Domareski! Domareski! Stop where you are!” Katya, Andreyev thought—if she picked up the telephone in time the hotel could be sealed and then there would be
no way out. Move, he thought. Don’t look back.

  How many stairs? How many flights? The man was running above him, clattering over the concrete. Seventh Floor. He felt weak again, weak and used, urging wasted muscles into action. He was sweating, damp, his white shirt discolored. But nothing mattered except for getting out, finding a call box, unrolling the precious piece of paper and getting through to the man who would help, the man Stefanoff swore by, but poor Stefanoff—what was he suffering now? Torture, deprivation, the labor camp.

  The man was still shouting, still coming down after him. Andreyev paused, stood in motionless indecision. The door ahead of him—or the stairs down? He didn’t think now; there was no time for analysis, ratiocination, all the mental tools he had used for so long. He shoved through the door, finding himself in another corridor. Third Floor. Had he run this far? He saw an elevator ahead, saw the door slam shut, the numbers light and change on the panel above. But the elevator was the worst kind of trap. He ran along the corridor, passing the elevator door, passing a startled housemaid who was coming out of a room with a silver tray. I could throw myself on her, Andreyev thought. The quality of mercy. Help me.

  He rushed past the woman, turned as the corridor twisted at another severe right angle, found his way back to a flight of stairs where a sign read “FIRE ESCAPE.” Down, he thought. There’s no other way. Down and down and down. Still he was being pursued by footsteps, massive ringing footsteps that seemed to him like monstrous nails being driven into a hardwood box. And then there were no more stairs.

  No more stairs.

  He went through a swinging doorway and saw, to his horror, that he was in the lounge of the hotel. Two desk clerks watched him. A woman in a feathery hat, her feet surrounded by luggage and trunks, glanced distastefully at him. A man in a tweed suit, sipping a Bloody Mary, raised his face from a copy of The Times. Slow, Andreyev thought. Slow. You just pass the desk slowly.

  He heard the swing door open and close at his back.

  What do I look like? he wondered. A madman in a white shirt, laces flapping; someone on the edge of coming undone? He crossed the lounge.

  Oblinski was coming out of the cocktail bar as if he anticipated the sight of Andreyev. He was smiling. “Domareski,” he said. The word was quiet, subdued, as if what Oblinski wanted more than anything else was to convince the various spectators that they were witnessing a lunatic. A sick man. You have to have patience.

  Ahead, Andreyev saw the glass revolving doors that led to the street. One final rush, he thought. One last dash through the door—and outside there’s darkness, shadows, blind streets. Oblinski was still smiling, walking in an oblique angle to cut him off from the doorway. The other man, panting audibly, was at his back. Andreyev paused and then, lowering his head in the fashion of a sprinter, raced toward the revolving door. Oblinski moved more quickly now, trying at the last moment to cut him off—but he was through the door and out into the street and running.

  Running and running.

  He could hear Oblinski calling from behind: “Domareski! Domareski!” Andreyev turned a corner, found himself in a dark alley that ran behind the hotel. Ahead, there was a narrow courtyard filled with garbage cans. He crossed it, hoping with a kind of forlorn pessimism that he hadn’t boxed himself in. There was a low brick wall and another alley, darker than before. He wiped his forehead with his shirt sleeve, barely feeling the sting of the cold March night around him. Now, beyond the alley, there were strange little streets with closed and shuttered shops—lonely streets that might only have been traveled along by the hunted, the desperate, the despairing. He stopped and took the piece of paper out of his pocket, smoothing it in the pale glow of a shopwindow: absurd soft toys—stuffed bears, pandas, giraffes—were frozen in glass-eyed malignance, heaped in bundles or hanging from colored wires. A telephone number, an address. He put the piece of paper back in his pocket and dragged himself farther along the street where, on the corner, there was a bar. There would be a phone inside, perhaps—but by the same token he could be trapped in such a place if they tracked him there. No, he wouldn’t go inside the bar. How could he? He continued to run until he had no strength left. He had to sit down somewhere. A park, a bench, some miserable patch of green. He found himself moving beneath trees now, disturbing two lovers on a bench—a man and a woman in thick winter coats, fumbling at one another with gloved hands. They stared at him as he slipped past. Like a ghost, he thought, like some terrible specter. When he could go no farther he lay on the grass. Flat on his back, arms spread, he gazed up at the starless night sky: a sheet of unbroken blackness that promised nothing and revealed even less.

  A little luck, he thought. Just a little more luck.

  6.

  Ineptitude was to Zubro as a ravenous moth to the wardrobe of a man of high fashion: an irritant whose existence was a matter of some grief. It was bad enough, he thought, that Rayner should discover his surveillance; but what was worse was the very idea of Ernest Dubbs finding and destroying the devices in his flat—for Zubro did not like the idea of Dubbs winning even a minor victory over him. And now this—this dreadful shambles, this calamity. How was it going to look in the thick headlines of those awful London newspapers? “Red Physician Seeks Asylum in Dramatic Nighttime Escape.” Red, Zubro thought. The color of his own anger.

  He did not know exactly what to say to Oblinski, who, pacing up and down his hotel room like a man on fire, was unsuccessfully trying to work off his rage. A little calm, Zubro thought, goes a long way. He ran an index finger along the sharp crease of his pants and watched Oblinski stop by the window. There were times when words were as useless as damp fuel. Such as now, Zubro thought. One could, of course, ignore the fact that the surveillance of Dubbs and Rayner had turned nothing up. After all, he had acted only out of that curiosity of professional conscientiousness—but the flight of the physician: it was quite another kettle of fish, as the English were so fond of saying. “Commie Doctor Makes Dash for Freedom.” Perhaps one could hope for something more sedate from The Times.

  He silently watched Oblinski, who was leaning against the dark pane of glass and banging one hand into the other. It did seem to Zubro that the KGB official was overreacting—defections were always possibilities. One learned to live with them. At the least, another physician could be brought from the Soviet Union; at the very worst, the soccer tour could be canceled. But why should Oblinski be so overwrought?

  Zubro rose from his armchair and moved to the window. He cleared his throat, lightly rubbing his lower lip with a handkerchief.

  “How close is he to the woman?”

  Oblinski shrugged. “He isn’t close to anybody—”

  Zubro stepped out into the corridor. He walked to the door of the woman’s room and knocked. Inside, she was standing by the bed—dressed, he noticed, in a maroon dressing gown she might have purchased that very day at Marks & Spencer. Seduced, he thought, by the consumer nightmare. He didn’t like the look of the woman—a sharpness of feature, a face of potential cruelty, the kind of person who, in her late middle years, would embrace the philosophy of martyrdom.

  He observed her awhile, thinking: If all this is a charade, then what the hell does it amount to? She had her hands in her pockets. A little delicacy, he thought. A certain tact. She might have fancied herself to be in love with the errant physician, after all. And love, Zubro understood, was what made the world go round.

  “I understand that you and Domareski were … intimate?”

  She said nothing. It was a mean mouth; he couldn’t imagine kissing it. Perhaps poor Domareski had felt the same way; perhaps it wasn’t anything so profound as a defection, but simply a rather desperate effort to get away from the clutches of this ax of a woman.

  “You were in bed in his room when he …”

  She nodded her head.

  Zubro walked up and down the room. He noticed various boxes of clothing, stuffed in bags that carried the labels of Oxford Street stores. C & A Modes. Bourne & Hollingswort
h. Selfridges. Doing the town, he thought. A little foreign exchange had burned the proverbial holes in her pockets.

  “Why do you think he ran?”

  The woman said nothing. She took her hands from her dressing gown and gazed at them. He repeated his question.

  “I don’t know the answer,” she said. “Why did he run? Where did he run to? I’ve already told Oblinski what I know.”

  “Tell me again,” Zubro said.

  She mumbled in a voice so low he had to concentrate to hear it. Shocked, poor thing. Her lover upped and vanished. “Red Medic Seeks Asylum.” He closed his eyes, inclined his head, listened. They had made love, then they had slept, and when she had awakened he was leaving the room … she had called, but he hadn’t answered. Silence. Zubro watched her sit on the bed, her knees jammed somewhat primly together. A virginal gesture, he thought.

  “It doesn’t surprise me,” she said suddenly.

  “No? You expected it?” Zubro watched the thin face, the movement of some faint contortion cross the tight surface. What the hell is going on anyhow? They send a physician, someone suspect, a security basket case—and now this woman says she isn’t surprised. It would make sense if, say, there was a reason for Domareski to defect, part of a scheme to plant him in the United Kingdom—but why was everybody so damned upset now that he had managed to get away? Twists and turns, Zubro thought rather bitterly; somebody should have told him. Somebody should have told him the truth. After all, didn’t he need to know?

  “I had the feeling he was up to something,” she said quietly.

  “Why?”

  “Well, he was behaving strangely—”

  “Like how?”

  Now she appeared embarrassed. “We hadn’t been lovers for a long time … and I was a little surprised when he became so passionate—”

  Ah, Zubro thought. The worm turns. The ordinary little physician becomes a sexual fiend. “Is that all?” he asked.

  “That—and the fact he visited Stefanoff before we left Moscow.”