Brainfire Page 8

  Dubbs lit a cigarette, a cocktail Sobranie. Pink with a gold tip, lit with great flourish from a Dunhill lighter. Dubbs, who seemed to find prolonged silences abhorrent vacuums, said, “Do Americans still say, Spill the beans, kid?”

  Rayner closed his eyes, trying to concentrate.

  “You’ve had too much, my dear,” said Dubbs. “Methinks a further ingestion of usquebaugh would totally upset your already delicate mechanisms.”

  Isobel, Rayner thought. A whispered conversation in the Departures Lounge. But it makes no sense. It made no sense then, even less now. He squinted at Dubbs, who was flicking a flake of ash from his astrakhan collar.

  “Well? Are there beans to be spilled, John?”

  “Don’t you know, Dubbs? Didn’t you hear about it?”

  The little man looked puzzled. “Crosswords and cryptograms and other such puzzles have always struck me as a profound waste of time, my dear. Speak to me.”

  “Richard—”

  Dubbs inclined his head and momentarily Rayner had the feeling that all the superficial theatricality was laid back, that something menacing was barely visible beneath the surface. Richard. Yes, Richard.

  “Your brother?” Dubbs said.

  “Not a suicidal type, not Richard—”

  “Straight, John. I need to hear things straight.”

  “Richard is dead.”

  Dubbs looked into his Scotch a moment, then raised his face and said, “How?”

  “How?” Rayner turned, stared at the barman, watching him polish glasses with a grubby towel. Go home, he thought. Punch a hole through the wall, punch something out of that barman’s face—an exercise in futility, that was the bottom line. How had Richard died? How?

  Dubbs tugged at the sleeve of his raincoat. “Richard,” he said. “You were telling me about Richard.”

  Rayner reached for his glass, spilled it, watched the whiskey soak through the paper napkin.

  “John,” Dubbs said. “Please.”

  “You don’t expect to believe it, Dubbs. You won’t believe it. He killed himself.”

  “How? How did he do that?”

  “He jumped, Dubbs. Out of a fucking window.”

  What else was there to tell? What else was there to say? Moscow, Lindholm’s delegation, suicide, a sadly beautiful widow—what for Christ’s sake was there left to add to that? He looked at Dubbs as if he might find there, in that round red face, in those dark-blue eyes, a consolation, an explanation—but you chase reasons as prospectors become crazed in deserts, wild obsessions in dark places, and you go on digging regardless. That was the way madness lay; that was Whacko Avenue. Dubbs said nothing for a time, smoked another of his strange cigarettes, drained his drink, crumpled a strand of cellophane.

  “You remember Richard, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Dubbs. “I remember him well.”

  “Not the type, Dubbs. Not the type to kill himself. Right? Right?”

  “I don’t know the answer to that, John,” Dubbs said.

  “Career going along at your average pace. Marriage—tolerable, bearable, if not exactly a hothouse of sexual experiment. Now where, you tell me where, Dubbs, in the humdrum bits and pieces of his life is the reason for jumping, jumping, Jesus Christ, out of a fucking window!”

  Dubbs did up the buttons of his coat, shivered as the door of the bar opened and a young couple came in. “John, I’m sorry about your brother. I’m really sorry. Let me drive you home.”

  Rayner felt a sudden weight descend on him, his head intolerably heavy, sleep coming on—sequences of shadows. He laid his face on the surface of the table. Dubbs shook him, helped him to stand, led him outside into the rain, where some strand of awareness came back. And he was remembering Isobel. He looked as if he had never seen me before in his life. He just stared at me and said it wasn’t worth going on. And then, then he went to the window, he opened it, then—But this isn’t Richard, he thought. Other men took their lives; not Richard. You could see Richard sink, slip into depressions, drop over the edge into despair, into the worst of times; and he would have gone to his physician because that was the kind of man he was. He would have gone to a doctor long before writing himself off. No, Rayner thought. None of this is Richard.

  Dubbs was looking up and down the dark street. “Where did I leave my damned car?” he said. And then they were walking through the rain, Rayner’s arm linked through Dubbs’s. The car was a white Mini. Rayner slumped into the passenger seat, conscious of motion, of Dubbs changing gears.

  Somewhere along the way, somewhere halfway up Baker Street, Dubbs said, “If he didn’t take his own life, John, then you have to admit that something very curious is going on.”

  Curious? Rayner thought. Curiouser and curiouser: small lacquered Chinese boxes. What could be more curious than Richard falling?

  Dubbs stopped at a red light and glanced at him. “His wife said he jumped, didn’t she? Then either he really did take his own life or his wife is lying. And if you are quite unprepared to accept the former, what do you propose to do with the latter?”

  No, Rayner thought. The brain couldn’t cope. The terminals and the connections had been blitzed. He couldn’t absorb Dubbs now, couldn’t think his way clearly through Dubbs’s logic. He blinked, staring out through the window. They had passed Lord’s, heading for St. John’s Wood. White houses in the rain. White houses and dark gardens.

  Dubbs parked the Mini outside a Victorian house that had been butchered into a series of small apartments.

  “Do you want me to come in with you, John? Would that help?”

  “Tired,” Rayner said. “Dead tired.”

  Dubbs patted the rim of the steering wheel. “Believe me when I say how sorry I am, John. Believe me.” For a moment he was silent. Rayner could hear the rain on the roof of the small car. Dubbs appeared to rummage around for a cigarette, sighing when he failed to find one. “If you doubt this suicide, John, let me see what I can turn up tomorrow. Can I call you?”

  Rayner looked toward the house, the dark windows. What could Dubbs turn up? What could Dubbs—grubbing around the undersides of groups of expatriate Poles, insane Latvians, Czech malcontents who cried into their beers—what could Dubbs turn up out of that collection of the disenchanted, the homeless, the betrayed?

  Rayner fumbled with the handle, stepped out, then leaned back into the car and smiled at Dubbs. “Call me. Call me tomorrow. And thanks.”

  “Sleep, my dear,” Dubbs said.

  Rayner watched the white car drift down the street, then turned toward the house. He took his keys from his coat, dropped them in the shrubbery, padded around on hands and knees before he located them again. He opened the front door, stepped into the hallway. Goddam house, he thought. Dark little flats. Dreary cooking. He turned on the light switch and moved toward the stairs. He paused beside the table at the foot of the stairs. Mail. Letters, bills. He saw how the landlady had arranged them in tidy piles, one pile to each tenant. He picked up his own. Blearily, he flipped through it. Telephone company. Overdue library books. And a letter, in an airmail envelope, addressed to him in the handwriting of his dead brother.

  3.

  Ernest Dubbs, who lived in a basement flat in Fulham with a rather vicious parrot he had christened Rasputin, did not go immediately home after dropping Rayner off. Instead, he drove back by way of Lord’s—thinking how glad he was that the wretched cricket season was months away, that one would not have to put up with the obnoxious English penchant for that slow and silly game in the meantime—and down Baker Street. He found a parking space in Manchester Square and sat for a moment in his silenced car, wondering if he should have put young Rayner to bed after all. Tucked him up tight, as it were: you could not predict the directions of grief with any accuracy. Sighing, he got out of his car and crossed the square, hurrying against the rain with his head slightly bent. Damnable weather. Ducks and drakes might find this to their liking, but not Dubbs, who was often beset by the notion that he had been bor
n in quite the wrong country—that at heart he was a Mediterranean person: parasols on a white terrace, ice in the old Campari glass, a wedge of lemon, a slow sea falling on some stunning beach. So be it: he was stuck with a vengeant season and an accident of birth.

  He took a key from his coat pocket and unlocked the door of a building, an old house stuck between a couple of the new plate-glass monstrosities. He stared absently at the brass plaque that bore the words THE MARLBOROUGH TITLE & TRUST COMPANY—all perfectly meaningless, of course. He entered, shut the door behind him, pretended he did not notice the smell of carbolic that hung in the air with the density of a heavy drapery. In the distance he could hear the rattle of metal—the janitor, Malcolm, mopping the tiled floors, dragging his old bucket behind him. Let us not have discussions with Malcolm this night, Dubbs thought. How are you? How’s your cat? How’s your parrot?

  Dubbs moved to the stairs. He climbed, paused on the first landing, and saw Malcolm’s shadow along the corridor. He went in the other direction, opening the door of his own office, turning on the lamp, seeing the giant shadows of his ferns loom suddenly upward against the pale-green walls. Dubbs did not care for this room. Too impersonal, too officious—but, God knows, you did what you could with what the Government gave you. He gazed at the ferns a moment. In good health, considering—and he went to his desk, unlocked it, removed a file, opened the file; no sooner had he begun to read than there was a light knock on his door and he thought: Malcolm, fucking Malcolm.

  But when the door opened it was Evans who stood there.

  “Burning the midnight oil?” Evans said.

  What does it look like to you, my dear? Dubbs thought.

  When they had been handing out cloaks and daggers, someone had quite forgotten to give Evans his cloak. He stood in the doorway, grinning stupidly. He gave Dubbs the odd feeling that he was not of this world, that he had simply dropped in from outer space to pass the time of day. What could you hope for anyway from somebody who chose to live in Esher? Dubbs shuddered: Evans had actually elected to buy a house out there. There was a good argument against free will.

  “I’m on nights this month,” said Evans, by way of explanation. “Manning the old wires.”

  “Ah,” Dubbs said.

  “Not much happening. Ha ha.” Sometimes, as if it were a form of punctuation, Evans would drop “Ha ha,” quite without mirth, at the end of sentences.

  Dubbs stared at the file in front of him.

  “What’s happening with you?” Evans asked.

  Dubbs flapped a hand limply in the air, a gesture he knew would irritate Evans. Later, in his little house in Esher, Evans would say to his little wife, I’m sure he’s queer, you know. Quite the poove.

  “Oh,” Evans said. “I just remembered.”

  “Remembered?” Dubbs stared at the other man. Those clothes—shapeless Burton suits that began to shine in the seat of the trousers before you could say Jack Straw. If Evans was an argument against freedom of the will, he was also a portable display of the banalities, the inadequacies, of English taste. Dubbs longed for sunlight all at once. Portofino. Sobranie cigarettes and a couple of fast Negronis. But here he was, stuck in a world of mild-and-bitters, chain-store clothing, little houses out in Esher.

  Evans stepped farther into the room, his hands hanging at his sides as if he had forgotten them, left them behind in some other place. “I just remembered about Richard Rayner,” he said. “It came over this afternoon.”

  Dubbs shut his eyes briefly.

  “Isn’t John Rayner your man over in Grosvenor Square?” Evans said.

  Dubbs imagined he could hear glass breaking, things splintering, bulls rampant in china shops. He wished he had wings and could fly from the window out over Manchester Square; but where would you go in the rain?

  “And Richard’s the brother?” said Evans. He raised both eyebrows, waiting, still smiling.

  Sometimes, Dubbs thought, bad news is the only pleasure in a person’s life. Now Evans could say, Sorry, I meant to say was the brother. Dead, don’t you know? “I heard,” Dubbs said.

  “Oh.”

  “I heard he took his own life,” Dubbs said. Took his own life. What an odd phrase that was. Took his own photograph. Took his own pulse. People were forever taking things that were their own.

  “Ye-es,” said Evans, fingering his necktie. It was Ardingly, Dubbs remembered. Those minor-public-school types still dreamed of Empire: it was something to do with education, he was sure. “Day before yesterday. Did you know that?”

  “You know the time of death too?” Dubbs said, whistling in false surprise. He stared at the file in front of him, wishing Evans would disappear. The strange thing about Evans, though, was how he managed to linger without purpose—until eventually you forgot he was in the room. Dubbs flipped the pages of his file.

  “Our man confirmed suicide,” Evans said. “I daresay the Americans will ship the body out. They’re awfully good at that kind of thing.”

  Sensitivity, Dubbs realized, was a gift. It was something you got at birth, something the Old Architect injected into your genes. Evans clearly had a severe want in that department. Ship the body back. What was it? Luggage? Bric-a-brac? Sign here, Mr. Customs Man: one dead item of flesh, formerly human? Irritated, Dubbs saw Evans prowl around the room.

  Evans looked at the collar of the black coat. “I say, is that astrakhan?”

  “And no mistake, my love,” said Dubbs. “I use it when I haunt Shaftesbury Avenue. Draws attention to me, dear. You know how it is.”

  Evans smiled uncertainly. He lingered a few more moments, apparently embarrassed. Then he turned and went back to the door. He made a little wave of his hand. “Back to the grind,” he said.

  Dubbs, stretching the palm of his hand out in front of him, blew a kiss across the room. “Sweet dreams, old chap,” he said.

  The door was closed quickly. Dubbs, sighing, gazed at his file, flicking the pages, wondering why they always seemed to have such impossible names—these people who somehow or other had contrived to find their way from the wilder shores of Europe to the sinking ship of Old Blighty. Bembenek. Bzoski. Dworakowski. Gaalaas. Four a’s, for God’s sake. What did you do with four a’s? Hochhalter, Hrbhar. How did one pronounce that?

  He felt weary, closing the file, closing his eyes. They came, and they continued to come, swimming rivers, zigzagging through minefields, ducking gun towers, crawling under barbed wire. Driven by some notion of freedom, of human dignity, they kept on coming. The driftwood of Eastern Europe, the dross of humanity, the poor suffering souls who saw the nature of the risk and were prepared to take the chance anyhow—and they became his responsibility. He was the one who had to keep track of them, who had to listen to them; and who had to find if, beneath their enraged stories, their insane relief, their bitterness, there lay anything of value to what, for want of any better expression, was called the intelligence community.

  He opened the file. He skipped the Czechs, the Poles, the Hungarians. Begin with the Soviets, he thought. Where else? He lifted the receiver, dialed a number, waited. After a time he heard a dense European accent answer angrily.

  “Paul? Paul, my dear fellow. This is Dubbs.”

  “Dubbs, you crazy? You know what is the time of day?”

  “Better a polite little call, my dear fellow, than someone hammering your door down in the middle of the night, no?”

  “Crazy. You’re crazy, Dubbs.”

  “The day before yesterday a man, an American, died in Moscow,” Dubbs said.

  “So? What you want that I should know? American? I don’t know no American. Let me sleep, you crazy bastard.”

  “It seems to have been a suicide.”

  “Hey. Moscow’s a depressing town, Dubbs. It sometimes has that effect on a man’s head.”

  Dubbs, sighing, reached out to stroke a fern. It was feathery, lovely; an amazing thing—something growing in this rotten little place. “I understand Moscow is not absolutely delightful, Paul.
This I can comprehend. However, it’s important—”

  “Important? I know nothing. I know damn nothing.”

  “The American was called Richard Rayner,” Dubbs said. Best to press on, ignore their interruptions. Best simply to glide over things. “Richard Rayner. You understand? Now I want you to mention the name amongst the members of your little group—”

  “Group? What group? Dubbs, you sound like a dog that goes on barking up wrong trees. I don’t know no group.”

  “My dear fellow, your little group that calls itself The Estonian Alliance, and which pretends to be a social club, and which, incidentally, meets every Thursday night at Number Eighty-five Roper Place in some sleazy part of Kilburn. I want you, Paul, to mention the name of this man—Richard Rayner—to the nice chums you have in this group. Savvy?”

  “You’re dreaming, Dubbs—”

  “I am not dreaming, Paul. I am most certainly not dreaming about the fact that it is quite against the law of the United Kingdom to store hand grenades in a garage behind Number Eighty-five Roper Place, Kilburn. Am I coming through, my dear?”

  There was a silence on the line. Dubbs could hear a woman’s voice whining in the background, a Cockney accent. ’Ere, what time o’ night’s ’e call this?

  “How you spell Rayner?” the man asked finally.

  Dubbs hung up. The Estonian Alliance. It was pathetic. The little groups, the so-called social clubs, the clandestine gatherings: as if it might ever amount to anything. They belonged in caves hidden high up in mountains, fighting a war that no longer existed. Dead and sorry men. The Estonian Alliance. How many more of them existed? How many more with those strangely innocuous names? He gazed at his papers, blinked. Weary again. The Friends of Tallinn. The Kalmuck Club. The Vilna Brigade Brotherhood. And the amusing ones—The Southwest London Polka and Dance Society. The Lovers of Accordion Music. The Hungarian Sunday Football League—madmen exorcising their patriotic rage with a leather football under dreary skies on Hackney Marshes. Pathetic, sad, Dubbs thought. The meetings in the back rooms of pubs, the front parlors of small suburban houses; here and there—like souvenirs, mementos of other incarnations—a handful of old guns, a rifle or two, a six-pack of grenades; perhaps some sporadic pamphleteering, or irregularly produced newspapers, perhaps some restless gathering at Speaker’s Corner, where you could not separate the nuts from the zealots, the truth from the madness.