Brainfire Page 7

  She was sitting upright, watching him oddly. “Are you okay?” she said.

  “What plastic bag?” he asked.

  “Richard—”

  “Did you say a plastic bag?”

  She rose from the bed. “Look. You lie down. I’ll get them for you. Okay? I think maybe you’ve got a bad case of the Red equivalent of Montezuma’s Revenge.”

  He saw her come toward him. She was out of focus, like a picture badly taken. I need to sleep, he thought. More than anything. He felt drained, exhausted, his limbs seemingly incapable of supporting him.

  “Go on. Lie down. I’ll get the aspirin.”

  He saw himself move toward the bed—a strange view, a perspective of himself from a point overhead. Do it. You know what you have to do.

  “What did you say?” he asked.

  “I said I’d fetch the aspirin. Oh, for God’s sake—is something wrong with you?”

  “Wrong?”

  He stared at the darkened window. The night was filled with lights, a city of lights. You know. You know. Don’t you know. He sat on the bed. Now, he thought, concentrate on something, anything, the sound of Isobel in the bathroom, something like that, the sound of the plastic bag being opened, aspirin rattling in a bottle—you can’t hold off forever, you know it. He closed his eyes. And something touched him—a sense of the most profound sadness he had ever felt in all his life. He was tense, his heart ached, he had the sudden belief that no matter what you did, no matter how hard you tried and struggled, life wasn’t worth living.

  “Richard? Richard? Tell me what it is.”

  A woman was walking across the floor toward him. She was carrying a glass of water in one hand. He had never seen her in his life. Who was she? Who was this stranger? He said something to her without knowing what. His language made no sense. Noises, nothing else.

  “Richard, for Christ’s sake!”

  The woman was crying. Her mouth was slack and formless, tears welled up in her eyes—all this grief, and for what purpose? To what end? Concentrate, concentr—

  The woman was holding him by the arm. He swung around, thrusting her aside, seeing the water spill, the glass break. Then he was moving across the room, moving and moving, barely conscious of where he was going or what he intended to do, just moving, his limbs weak, moving toward the darkened window. Isobel, he thought. Isobel!

  There was an upward draft of cold air, the jagged shards of broken glass, a nightmare of dropping and dropping and turning and twisting as he dropped. And from behind him, from somewhere behind him, even as he felt his heart sink like some heavy dead creature through black water, the sound of a woman’s distant screaming.

  7.

  Even though he had not wanted to look at the folder again, even if he felt that he might simply go home, sleep, rise the following morning, and find solutions to all his problems, Maksymovich removed the sheets of paper and held them directly under the glow of his desk lamp. They had been examined. The signature had been scrutinized. And all the experts agreed: these were photocopies of genuine documents. He spread the sheets, rubbed his eyes, sat down. He looked at his watch, an expensive gift that had been brought to him by Lindholm. It was now just after three. When would he ever get to bed? And then there was this Blum woman to think about—and sometimes it seemed that his problems were endless.

  He read the sheets. He walked around the room. He returned to his desk. He read them again.

  CONFIDENTIAL

  In accordance with intelligence reports received over the past several months, it is now an established fact that in certain countries of the Eastern bloc—specifically in the territories formerly known as Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania—there exist highly organized groups of anti-Soviet dissidents. Similar groups are known to exist in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.

  Maksymovich closed his eyes. You grow old—in the old days you had the eyesight of a marksman. Now you can barely read for more than a few minutes at a time without pain in the sockets. He yawned. Groups of highly organized dissidents. That wasn’t what troubled him. There would always be these malcontents, no matter how many of them you could round up.

  It will be the continuing policy of this administration to assist the development and growth of these groups, specifically in the areas of communications and the dissemination of ideas. Accordingly, through the normal channels of the intelligence community, these groups will be given every possible means of technological assistance and cooperation. These will include electronic technology, training in the use of such equipment, the availability of literature, and any other such means that may be advisable in the propagation of anti-Soviet information.

  The use of military assistance, the provision of weapons, is presently not under consideration until such times as the situation may warrant that form of cooperation.

  Anti-Soviet information, Maksymovich thought. Meaning, of course, democratic propaganda. All the world’s a battlefield of ideologies. The use of military assistance, the provision of weapons—well, naturally, all that would be quite without point. A crateful of M-16s to a group of Bulgar madmen would hardly make a dent. No, weapons did not worry Maksymovich. What troubled him was something he always had problems in convincing other members of the Supreme Soviet to accept—that there were times when no amount of artillery could halt the movement of ideas; and by ideas Maksymovich meant dissidence. You had only to point to Soviet history itself to emphasize the fact: an idea strong enough can overcome any amount of weaponry.

  His telephone was ringing. For a moment he hesitated to pick it up. The sheets of photocopies still held his attention. Could they really be genuine? He reached for the receiver. It was Koprow.

  It had gone well. It had gone without a hitch. Maksymovich hung up the telephone. He picked up a pencil and began doodling his characteristic interlocking circles. Ideas, he thought. Was there anything more terrifying, more threatening, than an idea that flamed the imagination, that spread in a fashion suggestive of wildfire through human minds? that brought in its destructive path foolish notions of liberty, of freedom, of justice? His friends in the Supreme Soviet should be less afraid of ballistic missiles, warheads, nuclear submarines than of democratic notions.

  He stood now, staring at a wall map of Eastern Europe. The problem with ideologies was how they proliferated: the more they promised, the quicker the proliferation. And what did all these Western ideals add up to? Dreams, dreams in which flashy objects glittered and beckoned, dreams of gadgets, of clothing, of art: and that was where the danger lay—in that illusion, so brilliantly fostered in the West, of freedom of choice. He looked at the map and thought of how only a month ago a group of so-called freedom fighters—riffraff—had been captured in the countryside around Vilna; radio transmitters, pamphlets, a handful of Czech guns. But the equipment had been American. Three weeks before that a renegade radio station, broadcasting out of Kuusamo, in Finland, had been seized and shut down. And during the past autumn no less than twenty different radical groups, ranging in size from a dozen to a hundred or more, had been arrested in places as far apart as Riga and Odessa and Brest. Ideas—a warfare of ideas.

  He turned from the map, sat at his desk, picked up his pencil again. The absentmindedly drawn circles became tighter, denser. He thought of Kimball Lindholm: now there was one man with some very safe ideas.

  Kimball Lindholm.

  Mrs. Blum.

  The circles grew smaller on the sheet of paper. He gazed at the photocopies in front of him. That signature—that strong, dark signature created by a hand of considerable force and willpower. Patrick J. Mallory, President of the United States of America.

  So, Maksymovich thought. Patrick J. Mallory was supporting a guerrilla warfare of ideologies with all the technological assistance, all the avenues of intelligence operations he could muster. So. Maksymovich closed the folder, locked it in his desk, switched off the lamp, and stood for a moment in the darkened office. A guerrilla warfare designed to undermine the moveme
nt of revolution. So. But what Patrick J. Mallory did not have was Mrs. Blum.

  PART II

  February–March

  All things cut an umbilical cord only to clutch a breast.

  —CHARLES FORT, The Book of the Damned

  1

  1.

  It was raining in Grosvenor Square as John Rayner stepped out of the taxi and went up the Embassy steps, passing the uniformed Marine guard, passing the lines of people waiting to the left of the entrance for temporary visas, ignoring those who sat, with what seemed endless patience compounded out of hope and desperation, to the right, in that area where applications for permanent residency were processed. He undid the buttons of his wet raincoat and went inside the elevator, impatiently tapping his fingers against the wall, impatiently watching the numbers light and change. He got out on the third floor and went quickly along the corridor to Gull’s office, barely glancing at the girl who sat behind the IBM. He went through to the inner office without waiting, without knocking.

  Gull rose from behind his desk at once, his small white hand extended. Rayner took it, surprised by its warmth, for somehow he had expected the clasp to be cold. Gull watched him for a time with the kind of look reserved for convalescents. Concern, a mild anxiety, a wariness perhaps. Rayner took off his raincoat and dropped it across the back of a chair. The office was stuffy, overheated: those double-glazed windows trapped everything. After a moment, Gull sat down, took a pack of Players from his drawer, opened it, and then apparently changed his mind about smoking.

  “Trying to kick it. Cold turkey,” Gull said.

  Making small talk, Rayner thought. Nobody knows how to deal with The Thing—like a plague, like something that might once quaintly have been called a social disease. It was present; but nobody wanted it around. Momentarily, Rayner stared at Gull. He had the face of a superannuated astronaut, all crisp bone and tight smooth skin, the hair cut close into the skull.

  “It’s tough,” Gull said.

  What was he referring to? Rayner wondered. Cigarettes or The Thing? The drawer was slammed, nervously opened, then slammed again. Christ, Rayner thought. Let him say he’s sorry, sad, let him say, If there’s anything I can do, and get it over with. Rayner looked at the window, at the rain, at how the wind blew the rain in zigzagging lines across the back streets of Mayfair: Little America. He shut his eyes a moment, remembering Isobel’s face, remembering standing beside her in that awful chilling silence at Heathrow. For the first time in his life, Rayner had thought: She’s human, she’s burning up inside, she’s being eaten away. They had talked. She had caught the Pan Am flight. Home to Washington, home to the empty house, the silences that would not be alleviated by a Government pension. Goddam—he was angry, an anger he didn’t know how to spend, like having useless currency in a foreign country. Go home, he thought. Punch a hole through the wall or something.

  “I could arrange leave, John,” Gull said.

  Rayner undid the stifling knot of his tie, opened the top button of his shirt. He would choke if he had to sit here for too long.

  “No sweat,” Gull said. “Just say the word and I’ll push the old paper work through today. I know Himself will be only too glad to sign. Compassionate leave.”

  Compassionate? Himself, the Ambassador, what the fuck did he care? There was that anger again and it wasn’t something he was accustomed to—because he liked to think he was fairly easygoing, didn’t yield to stresses, that he wasn’t one of your coronary eclipse types. Slow and nice and easy—but, Christ, this wasted sense of rage.

  “Easy to do. Say the word.” Gull picked up his pen, a fat and ridiculously expensive Meisterstuck, and tapped it on the surface of the empty blotter.

  I make him uneasy, Rayner thought. I drag my dead brother around with me. I bring my anger and unhappiness into the lives of other people. Jesus, I should go home and swallow Mandrax and wake when all this grief and rage is gone and the system has found its own balance.

  “I don’t think I want any leave just yet,” Rayner said. Why not? Work. Bury yourself in an avalanche of work. Let the whole goddam landslide cover you.

  George Gull shrugged. “I understand, John.”

  “What do you understand?” Rayner heard himself ask. But it wasn’t a question, it was a dog barking—and poor old Gull was put in a bad spot.

  “I understand, well, you know, life goes on.” Gull smiled in a funereal way. It was meant to be sympathetic, a way of saying, Look, John, I’ve been there, I’ve been through this; instead, it struck Rayner as ghoulish, the wax grin of the undertaker, the false solace of those entrepreneurs who, with their embalming fluids and mahogany caskets, profit from death. Poor Gull: there wasn’t anything to say.

  “What’s your casework like right now?” Gull’s voice, becoming suddenly brisk, seemed to reach Rayner from a far distance.

  “Routine,” Rayner said.

  Gull got up. He stepped around the desk and laid his hand on Rayner’s shoulder. “Look, John. What the fuck can I say?”

  Rayner stared down at the floor, at the royal-blue rug that looked as if it had never been stepped upon. His eyes watered. Goddam. Sitting here in front of Gull and crying like a moron. What was this—this falling apart? He shut his eyes, fumbled around for a handkerchief in his jacket, blew his nose.

  “Okay,” Gull was saying. “It’s okay.”

  Yeah, Rayner thought. It’s okay, everything is okay. He reached for his damp raincoat and pulled it toward him.

  “Go home, John. Come in tomorrow if it feels comfortable. But go home.”

  Rayner stood up—and what he was thinking of again was how Isobel had looked in the Departures Lounge at Heathrow, how that pale beauty, which had so besotted Richard and which Rayner had always thought of as being as lifeless as immaculate china, how that beauty had become a wasted thing, a ruin. And none of it, none of what she had said, made any goddam sense. It was gibberish, irrational. A man complains of a headache one moment, then the next—

  He let George Gull help him into the raincoat. They shook hands again.

  “Call me in the morning,” Gull said. “If it feels right.”

  Outside, crossing Grosvenor Square, walking quickly toward Hill Street in the rain, Rayner thought: If it feels right. If it feels right. He imagined Isobel in the clouds, jet streams across the Atlantic, her white face pressed to the window. Go home, he thought. But that was the last place he needed right at this moment in his life.

  2.

  By the time the early darkness had come he had found his way into Soho. The night was sodden, ripping apart all around him like wet paper. Being faintly drunk was no antidote. Along the black pavements lay the reflected lights of bars, strip joints, restaurants. He walked down Brewer Street, crossed Greek Street, moved in the direction of Soho Square. A drunk wandered in front of him, mumbled something unintelligible, then hurried on. Somewhere around here, Rayner thought—somewhere around here; and he found himself crossing Oxford Street against the traffic. Somewhere around here there was a bar where he might find Dubbs, if there was any point in finding Dubbs right now. He looked at his wrist and realized he must have left his watch someplace. Christ—how had he passed the afternoon? There was a memory of glistening tiles, a cistern flushing, some inebriated Scotsman trying to impress upon him the fact that there was some virtue in being a Celt—but it was disjointed, pointless. He had withdrawn into a vague alcoholic blur.

  Now he wanted to see Dubbs, if only he could find the place. Tottenham Court Road. He walked until he came to the corner of Goodge Street, where he paused, imagining he could feel the reverberations of an underground train rolling beneath him. Goodge Street, darkness. Dubbs would be fine consolation. He went inside the first bar he came to, passing unsteadily through the door, crossing the floor, conscious of men throwing darts, of two young guys dressed like rock stars slumming, of a clutch of secretaries laughing in a corner booth. He reached the bar and was about to order a drink, anything, when he felt Dubbs alongsid
e him and he turned, turned a little too quickly, colliding with the Scotch that Dubbs held in his hand.

  “My dear Rayner,” Dubbs said. “I had an intuition, call it what you will, that I would be seeing you this very night. This very wet and miserable night.”

  Rayner had to work to bring Dubbs into focus. A rotund little man with the face of a red cherub. Black coat, astrakhan collar, three-piece suit—only the vest; the waistcoat, was a different color. Camel’s hair. Black suit. There had been times when Dubbs reminded Rayner of something that had been ejected from heaven, a tiny angel evicted after an altercation with whoever manned the pearly gates. But Dubbs—Dubbs would not last long in heaven. There would be a clash of some egotistical kind between himself and God.

  Dubbs put his hand on Rayner’s sleeve. “You’re terribly wet, John. I had a friend once who fell asleep on a park bench, slept through a rainstorm, and woke up with awful pneumonia. Have you been lying on park benches?”

  Rayner turned to look at the barman, making a gesture with his hand that was either ignored or overlooked. And he was angry again, angry with everything: a feeling that focused on the manner of the barman.

  “How the fuck do you get a drink round here?” he said.

  Smiling, raising one eyebrow as if to scrutinize a specimen, Dubbs said, “Annoyance gets you nothing with a fellow like that. Uncouth type. Works better if you wave a fistful of money around. Here. Let me do it.”

  Dubbs pressed himself against the bar, ordered two Scotches, gathered up his change slowly. He looked around the room and nodded in the direction of an empty table. “Shall we?”

  Something in the way Dubbs walked. How did you get to move like that? He appeared to glide, as if he were propelled forward on casters. Rayner followed him, conscious of his own clumsiness, his own awkward physical self. Drunk, he thought. And he tried to remember why, why he had needed to find Dubbs, what it was that had driven him through the rainy night. He sat down facing the other man, conscious of Dubbs waiting, waiting for something to be said. The silence all at once unnerved him; and it seemed to him that his memory, his recall, had gone off the rails somewhere along the way.