Brainfire Page 28

  “What now?” she asked.

  He stared through the trees, trying to see the house.

  Madness, he thought. Please, Mr. Fox, it’s a matter of great national importance that I take your daughter for a car ride. It’s a matter, as they say, of life and death.

  “John.”

  He felt her touch his wrist. He looked at her.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked. “That’s all I want to know.”

  He looked along the street. Thick trees—you could hardly see the houses.

  “I need the kid,” he said. “I need to take her with me.” And he was conscious of a vaguely desperate quality in his voice, as if what he was really saying was Why won’t you fucking believe me? Why?

  “It’s a kidnap now?” Isobel asked.

  “Whatever you want to call it. I ask her to come, I hope she accepts.”

  Isobel was shaking her head. Suddenly he was angry with her for her incredulity, her lack of faith, the strange distances in her.

  “For Christ’s sake,” he said. “You don’t have to come along. I can drop you any goddam place you like—”

  “John—”

  “Say the word. Get out of the car. I don’t give a shit.” It sounded, even to him, absurdly petulant, childish. He slammed his hand against the dash. What right do I have to ask her to believe in my deluded suspicions? Maybe they’re all correct. Maybe I’ve just goddam gone and broken down and need to be tucked away in the funny place. Maybe this is what paranoia is like: shadowy hills and murky valleys in your brain, weird convictions, dizzy suspicions. Why should she believe any of it? Maybe she was just like Sally in her way—seeing Rayner as someone to be comforted, someone to be patronized.

  He opened his door and stepped out. Time, he thought. There just isn’t time for this goddam nonsense now. I need the kid, that’s all there is to it. I need the girl. He watched Isobel shove her door open; she slammed it hard and stared at him across the roof of the small car.

  “John,” she said, “I’ll ask her to come. But I doubt if I’ll get past her father. I doubt that really.”

  He saw her move toward the trees and he followed after her into the shadows and over the lawn. The house looked squat, like something crouching, something ready to jump. He caught her up, holding her wrist, making her turn to face him. How do I look to her now? He wondered. Desperate? Deranged? Gone?

  “I said I’d ask,” she said. “I didn’t promise she would come.”

  “I didn’t ask for a promise,” he answered. “It’s gone past all that. It’s beyond that.”

  “Jesus, John, what do you want me to do? Wrap her up in a goddam bag? Steal her? What do you expect of me?” She pulled her arm away and looked at him defiantly. “If you want my private opinion, I think you’re living in a dream. If you want my help out of it, fine. Fine. But don’t push me, John. Don’t push me.”

  Isobel turned away from him and went toward the house. A door was opened even before she had reached the porch. Fox stood there in shadow. All this sunlight, Rayner thought. How could you subscribe to the belief that all the things that had happened the previous night were true? Sunlight made it ordinary, changed it around, deprived it of its need for darkness. He followed Isobel up onto the porch. Fox was smiling. Why was he looking like that? Rayner wondered. That tight smug little smile—what in the name of God did that mean? Fox stepped out of shadow, his face dappled by patterns of moving leaves. Maybe he expected us, Rayner thought. Maybe the kid told him, through the psychic grapevine, that we were arriving.

  “Isobel,” Fox was saying, holding her hand in a slack handshake. “And Mr. Rayner. Well, well. An early visit. Come in. Come on in.”

  Effusive, oleaginous: it was scum floating on water—all the pretty rainbow colors that were pure poison to drink. Rayner entered the gloom of the house. Uneasy, anxious, hearing the girl play her flute in another room. It stopped. He could hear her footsteps now.

  Fox was asking about coffee. Did they want coffee? Tea? Jasmine tea? Maybe a glass of ginseng liquid? Why the menu? Rayner asked himself. The good host, the charm; the cold eyes made huge by the glasses. Fox rubbed his hands together and smiled in the manner of someone who has won a lottery with a single ticket he has forgotten buying. It’s wrong, Rayner thought. How wrong can it get?

  They were in the front room now. The kid’s footsteps had stopped someplace in the house. The silences were like drafts of wind. Rayner listened: the staircase creaked. He looked toward a doorway. A shadow moved in the space and Fox turned his head in that direction, as if he expected to see someone appear.

  “Where’s Fiona?” Isobel asked.

  “Upstairs, I think,” Fox said. “Do you want to see her?”

  “We’d like to take her with us for a time,” Isobel said.

  “Oh?” Fox didn’t seem unduly surprised. Maybe, Rayner thought, he gets requests like that all the time. We need your daughter to do one of her performances, Mr. Fox. May we borrow her?

  “Where are you going?” Fox asked.

  “A drive.” Isobel shrugged casually.

  “Where?”

  “Oh.” Isobel looked uncomfortable; a terrible liar, Rayner thought. “No place in particular, I guess.”

  “You want her company, is that it?” Fox glanced at Rayner; it was shifty in its way, almost suggestive, as if the man suspected Isobel of procuring the girl for Rayner. Rayner looked at the open doorway again. The shadow was gone.

  “We want her company,” Isobel said. “That’s right.”

  “I’ll call her. See what she feels like.” He went to the open door and disappeared inside another room. Rayner could hear him calling the kid’s name. “Fiona.” It didn’t ring true somehow, as if he were calling for somebody he knew to be absent. It was counterfeit, a bad coin. Rayner looked at Isobel a moment. Paranoia: it grows and it grows like some weed of the mind. Finally you get a jungle. A father calls his daughter and you think it sounds off. Control, he thought. Bloody control.

  He heard the flute again. A single piercing note. Isobel smiled at him in a thin way; she might have been smiling at a stranger, a new acquaintance. And then there was the sound of footsteps rushing down the stairway, and the girl, flute in hand, appeared in the door. Behind her, looming up, shadowy, was another figure that Rayner assumed mistakenly to be Fox. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t Fox.

  “You’re through, John. This time you’re washed up.”

  Rayner saw Chip Alexander in the doorway and, at his back, the young friend, the colleague. The girl ran across the room and stopped, almost skidding to a halt, at Rayner’s side. A trap, and you walk straight into it. He closed his eyes a second, wondering about betrayal, treachery, wondering what prompted it or whether it was something that had always been in the scheme of things, wondering even if Isobel had in some way brought this situation about, betrayed him—

  “All washed up, John.”

  Rayner looked at the girl. What was she trying to tell him? Something. Something, for sure. A message he couldn’t read. He watched Chip Alexander step inside the room.

  “I’ll say this, John. It was convenient of you to stop by because I was sure as hell getting fed up with the dance.”

  Rayner stood motionless. You come this far and it ends like a whisper; but maybe there wasn’t anyplace farther to go, maybe it was meant to be as inconclusive as a dream. What was he meant to do? Tell Chip Alexander that the President was going to be killed—perhaps. Show me a little hard evidence, John. Show me something I can hold in the palm of my hand. But show me.

  There was a sudden fragrance in the air. Jasmine, he thought. The jasmine tea, the charming treacherous host. The girl, still looking up at him, reached out and tugged his sleeve. He gazed at her. He was conscious of Alexander coming across the room, being followed by his young colleague. The kid, he thought. The kid is telling me something. The kid is telling me to do something—

  “Give us a peaceful time, John. It helps,” Alexander said.

>   Isobel moved, moved very slightly, her arm touching Rayner’s side. Then, as in a tableau, as in a badly planned snapshot, there was a stillness in the room, an artificial lack of motion—almost as if something had happened to stop movement. Only the child’s eyes shifted, flashing at Rayner the same message as before, the same unintelligible message. What? What is she telling me?

  Alexander coughed, raising a hand to his lips in what was almost a gesture of apology. The young man, his hands in the pockets of his coat, glanced briefly at Isobel, then looked once more at Rayner—and the illusion of stillness was gone. The girl opened her mouth, maybe whisper, but there was no sound.

  “Ready, John?” Alexander said.

  “Chip, listen—”

  Alexander waved a hand impatiently. “Don’t make it hard this time. Be good to yourself.”

  “Chip—”

  The kid was pulling at Rayner’s sleeve again and he looked down at her, down into her eyes, down into some strange cool darkness there—and suddenly he understood what she was suggesting. Suddenly he realized, from the eyes, the tension in her lips, the slight sideways movement of her head, that she was telling him, Use me, use me to get yourself out of this. Just use me.

  Quickly, before there was time for anyone in the room to react, he had caught her by the neck and swung her around so that she created a shield for him. He listened to the sound of her gasping, the small soft sobs that came from her open mouth. And he looked directly at Alexander. Go ahead, challenge me, beat me, Chip. Take this one away from me. It would take only a quick hard snap, the fracture of vertebrae, the dislocation of death.

  Alexander watched him. “You don’t want to do that, John. Come on. You don’t want to fuck with the kid.”

  Rayner looked at Isobel. She was moving away from him now, moving in the direction of the door. The kid was covering both of them.

  “You know what I can do, Chip,” Rayner said. “You learned the same tricks once.”

  “John, John.” Alexander was shaking his head. “This makes it a whole lot worse for you, man. Can’t you see that?”

  “Tell your pal there to put his gun on the table.”

  Alexander sighed. The young guy didn’t move until he was nudged; and then he put the pistol on the table with great reluctance. Rayner reached out and, still holding the girl by the neck, lifted the gun.

  “Think, John. Use your head. What’s the point of this?”

  Rayner backed toward the door. There was a symmetry in things at times, he thought. There was an arrangement that astonished you. He had the girl because she wanted to be taken anyway. He had what he had come for.

  “Okay. You’ve got the gun. Let the kid go,” Alexander said.

  Rayner shook his head. “She comes, Chip.”

  “Deeper and deeper,” Alexander said. “Finally, pal, you reach a place where there’s no way out. No way.”

  “I’ll look into that some other time, Chip. Not now.”

  He had reached the entrance to the porch. He held the kid, but there was no force in his grip; if she had wanted to, she could have slipped free at any time. It was, he thought, quite a nice performance, quite a neat little show of pain.

  “One last chance, John. I can’t tell you the consequences of this.”

  “I know them already,” Rayner said.

  Alexander shrugged in a resigned way. At his back, Fox had appeared in the doorway. He started to rush toward Rayner, then stopped when he saw the gun.

  “Let her go,” Fox said. “Please. Please let her go.”

  “Later,” Rayner said. “I promise you. In one piece.”

  He was backing down the steps of the porch, aware of Isobel rushing toward the car. Fox came out onto the porch with his arms extended on either side of his body, pleading, begging. As he did so, the kid groaned as if Rayner had tightened his hold on her neck.

  “Please,” Fox said.

  Holding the kid, Rayner went back down through the trees to the car. What did he have—a couple of minutes at most? A couple of minutes to get out of the street before the license-plate number could be read and the bulletins issued and all the wires singing his name and number? Isobel was already in the passenger seat. He opened the other door and the kid slipped into the rear of the car. Then he had the engine going, turning the car in a quick ungainly circle and gunning it out of the street. He saw the girl smile in the rearview mirror.

  “It’s tough to get through to you,” she said. “You know that? It takes you a long time to get the point.”

  “I’m not on your level, kid,” Rayner said.

  “Those creeps.” She shuddered. “When he saw you guys coming across the lawn it was like his ship had come home. He put the big guys in the back room to wait. How could I hack that? I mean.”

  Rayner glanced at the girl. She was smiling still, as if what she enjoyed most in the world was pulling a fast one on her father.

  “So where are we going?” she asked.

  Isobel turned around in her seat and looked at the kid. “You better ask John that question. The answer is something he shares between himself and his private demons.”

  Private demons, Rayner thought. He watched for road signs, for Highway 60, Ocean View Avenue, that would take him around Norfolk and toward Newport News. Private demons. In the rearview mirror he noticed the kid was staring at him.

  5

  1.

  Inland it was raining, a dreary gray rain that began over Williamsburg in dense banks of cloud. The sunlight that had come with the dawn was gone, suggesting ghosts of itself only in watery moments. Around Richmond the traffic became slow: on Interstate 95 a rig had blown a tire and slashed sideways across the shoulder, surrounded now by the flashing lights of the highway patrol. A cop in a raincoat was directing traffic into the fast lane. Impatiently Rayner waited to get through the narrow gap. He was thinking of the pistol, knowing that he couldn’t get it past the security guards at D.C. Stadium, understanding that if the game was to be played at all it would have to be by ear or by whatever miraculous means the kid could provide. Miraculous, he thought, beset again by a sense of stupidity; maybe those private demons Isobel had mentioned were going public now. Perhaps, like dark bats driven out of a cave by dynamite, they were about to be set free in some final conflagration of madness.

  He drove the Pinto slowly past the accident spot, but it was miles before the highway was clear again. He wanted to ask Isobel the time but he didn’t; slumped in her seat, she was staring bleakly out into the rain. She must be pondering the Rayner family, he thought. The brother who is going crazy, the husband who already went. Quite a tribe, she must be thinking: some weird inbreeding from far back that had elected to appear now in the form of assassination plots and inexplicable suicides. In the back seat the kid was turning this way and that like an excited sightseer. Sightseer, he thought, there had to be double meanings in that one.

  WASHINGTON 90.

  Ninety miles.

  Isobel looked at her watch and said, “It’s just past eleven, John.”

  Four hours, Rayner thought. Four hours to what? The revelation that will tell you how badly mistaken you’ve been, how far off the mark you’ve gone? Or something else? He massaged his eyelids with one hand. Tired, weary—it was an ache doing the Boy Scout bit, like rubbing two damp sticks together in the hope of a spark, a flame. It was a pain to be a hero. He looked in the rearview mirror time and again as if what he most expected to see was Chip Alexander immediately behind him—but Alexander didn’t even know what kind of car he was driving, or where he had rented it, or even where he was going. One of these problems could be solved simply by calling the car rental companies in the area. Mr. Rayner, ah, yes. A Ford Pinto. 1978. White. License-plate Number ADO 692. No trouble at all, sir. And then Alexander would issue a single message, make a single telephone call, and before you could break open a cyanide capsule the heat would be running around like enraged bees. It takes time, Rayner thought. Time for Alexander to make his calls. Ti
me for me to get to Washington. Time time time—

  The kid leaned forward and slipped a stick of pink gum into her mouth. The kid, Rayner thought. How could it all boil down to this adolescent, this gum-chewing little number who played the flute and dreamed of boys and went to drive-ins and who, as it just so happened, had some odd gift?

  “Washington. Right?” she said.

  “Right,” Rayner said.

  “It’s about last night, I guess.”

  “Something like that.”

  “I thought so.” She sat well back in her seat. She chewed her gum noisily for a time. “It’s a funny thing, you know. But when people want to take me places it’s always got something to do with all that stuff. It’s never for any other reason.”

  Some little refrain of loneliness in there, he thought. A melancholic strain. We want you for your parlor tricks. Can you read my hand? Can you tell me my future? What lies in store for me, Fiona? Have some more Coke.

  “John has the idea, Fiona, that you can help him exorcise his strange notions,” Isobel said.

  “Exorcise?”

  “As in ‘drive out.’”

  The girl chewed silently for a time. “Like how?”

  “The old woman,” Rayner said, and looked at her quickly in the mirror. For a moment he had the feeling she was going to say, Hey, man, that was all a joke, you know? I was putting you on. It was nothing. But she was frowning now, frowning and sinking deeper into her seat.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “I want you to find her for me. Can you do that?”

  The girl shrugged. “I don’t know. It depends.”

  “Depends on what?”

  “I don’t know what it depends on,” she answered, rather too quickly, too defensively—as if she had quietly pondered the mysteries herself and had been unable to fathom them.

  “You’re being vague, Fiona,” he said. “Depends on what?”

  “I said I didn’t know,” she said.

  “John,” Isobel said. “She doesn’t know. Leave it alone. Let it go.”

  He watched the kid’s expression in the mirror. She was serious now, withdrawn, her mouth distended slightly as if she was afraid of the whole prospect. I can’t put you through it, Rayner thought, remembering, even when he least needed it, how the girl had acted last night. You ask a great deal, Rayner. You have to, he thought. You can’t ask anything less.