Brainfire

by Campbell Armstrong

  “So what do you do in a situation like this, darling?” Sally asked.

  Dahling. Rayner listened to the word. He wandered over to the manuscript and looked at it. Dahling. He flipped the pages and read: “When I first joined the SS, nobody suspected my Jewishness. It was a bitterly cold day in February 1936.” He shut the typescript, smiling to himself.

  “Don’t mock it,” Sally said, rising, approaching him, putting her arms loosely against his shoulders. “If we didn’t publish those books, how could we ever afford to do anything with literary merit? The schlock pays for the books we pin medals on.”

  “Yes, dahling,” he said.

  “I keep saying, Rayner, you don’t have the breeding to get it right. You have to drag it out. A long vowel.”

  He held her against him. She was skinny, long, provocative. He wondered if this was all he had come for—this sense of burying himself against her, of losing the rough edges of loss.

  She drew her face back from him and smiled. “How did you get to be a spook?”

  “I told you, Sally. Assistant Consul. That’s me.”

  “Seriously. I was wondering if you simply enrolled or if you filled out a form, or if they came and sort of sought you out—”

  He put his index finger against her lips. “Consular service runs in my family like a congenital disease. Didn’t I ever tell you that? My grandfather was the American Consul in Venezuela. My late father served for years in the Embassy in Rome. Remind me to give you the whole family backdrop sometime.”

  The sudden sound of the telephone was shrill. She stepped away from him to answer it. The conversation was low, whispered, protracted. He moved around the room, touching things, looking into the manic eyes of Kitchener, staring at a British Rail platform sign that said DORCHESTER. He wondered if you could spend your life grinding East Germans through the security mill—a situation, an occupation, that was caught and fixed in some hopeless place between Immigration and the Central Intelligence Agency. Assistant Consul. But it wasn’t quite that either. If the job had a name, nobody had ever told him what it was.

  Sally put the telephone down, sighing as she did so. She turned to watch Rayner and he thought of her many lovers, faceless men and indeterminate couplings, as if he were viewing them through frosted glass.

  “Assistant Consul,” she said. “I’m disappointed, Rayner. I imagined you were one of those deeper sorts. Still waters and all that.”

  She put her cigarette out. He wanted to know who had been on the telephone, but he didn’t ask; even if she had answered it would have been something impossibly vague. An old friend, haven’t seen him in ages, really.… A dictionary of old friends, he thought. An encyclopedia of former partners. She came across the room toward him and, as if she had intuited some small jealousy in him, some vague resentment, put her arms around him. It was more a gesture of comfort and companionship than of desire.

  “Are you going to stay?” she asked.

  “If you want me to.”

  “It’s what you want, Rayner.”

  He looked at her face, seeing not the thirty-year-old woman but the schoolgirl, dreaming of her as a child, of her school perched on the cliffs above the English Channel. She moved back from him and dimmed the lamp. Then she lit a candle, which she placed on the mantelpiece. He stared at the flame, a violent yellow flicker shivering in an imperceptible draft. She undid the belt of her housecoat.

  He stepped toward her, conscious all at once of a slight sound, like that of a foot moving on wood, from beyond the door. He stopped, turned to the door, put his hand on the knob, hesitated.

  “What is it?” Sally asked.

  He pulled the door open and looked across the dark landing. Some way down the stairs there was a pale light. A shadow passed silently in front of it. Wood creaked. And then there was silence. Rayner went back inside the flat. He closed the door and drew the bolt, thinking of George Gull’s goons, of how they came and went in the darkness like clandestine lovers on brief, illicit trysts.

  “Was somebody out there?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “I thought I heard a noise.”

  “The house is full of noise, John,” she said.

  He watched her slip the housecoat from her shoulders and toss it, with an amazingly casual gesture, to the floor. There are ways down, he thought, narrow avenues that could lead you to destinations beyond puzzlement and bewilderment—exit hatches out of darkness. He went toward her, his hands extended in front of him.

  4.

  Anatoly Zubro had no great regard for people like Oblinski. He considered such men—unimaginative, mere hacks, toilers in the field—to have no class, no élan. Just the same, as he sat facing Oblinski in the lounge of the Royal Kensington Hotel, where the soccer entourage was billeted, he had the irksome sensation that Oblinski knew more than he was able to tell. Something, maybe the smug little quirk in the expression, the muted mirth in the eyes, suggested to Zubro that Oblinski had a huge secret he would never share. It was a damned unsettling feeling, whatever prompted it, and Zubro felt an unaccustomed uneasiness.

  Zubro looked across the lounge to the far corner, where there was a bar at which sat several elderly men—old colonial types, he thought, looking as if they had just had their rubber plantations repossessed. Sometimes, when he didn’t want the hack to know he was paying attention, he would listen to snatches of the conversation from the bar. There was an amusing bitterness being bandied around: part regret part nostalgia. “It was in Lumpur, I remember it awfully well.…” “No, old man, you’re barking up quite the wrong tree. Fella’s name was Sayid, and it was Ceylon, bloody Ceylon.…” Zubro crossed his legs, conscious of the sharp crease in his pinstripe pants, aware of the shapelessness of Oblinski’s heavy flannels.

  Oblinski leaned forward, tapping Zubro lightly on the knee.

  “Naturally, one does not anticipate any problems,” Oblinski said. “But precautions are precautions, after all.”

  “Indeed,” said Zubro. He gazed at the old men and wondered what it would feel like to be a disenfranchised imperialist. Sad, he supposed. The bottom dropping out of your jolly old world.

  “In the list of names you’ve been given, there are only two I would consider as special security cases,” Oblinski said. He raised one hand and picked at the tip of his index finger. “Vassily Kazemayov, for one.”

  “Why Kazemayov?”

  “Simple. The rewards for his particular talents could be considerable here or anywhere in Europe. Something like that might easily enter his mind, after all.”

  Zubro nodded. This soccer charade, he thought—why had it been nagging at him ever since the meeting with Stepanek? This wasn’t entirely a sporting occasion, he was sure of that. But beyond that—well, one resigned oneself at times to the certitudes of ignorance. Now he was thinking of the woman in the wheelchair he had seen at Heathrow. Trainer Charek’s wife. It had occurred to him that there was a rather marked age difference between the woman and the trainer; more, that Charek was apparently quite indifferent to the woman—no words, no touches, no ostensible relationship. Still, he thought, who was he to ask questions?

  “The second risk factor involves the physician, Domareski,” Oblinski said.

  Zubro shifted in the uncomfortable armchair. The old boys at the bar, much the worse for drink, were tunelessly singing selections from The Pirates of Penzance. One of them, a short, bald man with a weathered face, was slipping from his stool. “Whoopsa-daisy,” he kept saying.

  “Why should Domareski present a special problem?” Zubro asked.

  “He is ideologically unsound.” Oblinski sat back, his eyes narrow now.

  Zubro reached forward and picked up his gin and tonic from the table; the ice in the glass was melting, changing from cubes to opaque, misshapen slivers. Unsound, Zubro thought. “If that’s the case, Oblinski, then why has he been sent here?”

  Oblinski had produced a ball-point pen from his pocket. On the side of the cylinder were the words “A
Souvenir of London.” Inside the clear plastic could be seen a miniature figure of a yeoman. Oblinski bit the end of the pen a moment. “I can only tell you that his presence here is necessary,” he said, taking the pen from his lips, perusing it slowly. “That comes from the highest authority, Zubro.”

  Zubro looked at the other man. “Why is the old woman here?”

  Oblinski shrugged. “Don’t ask me to fathom that one, Zubro.”

  There was something fabricated in the shrug, something false in the tone of voice. Oblinski leaned closer again, his fingers flat on the surface of the table. “The woman isn’t anything you should concern yourself with. I want you simply to keep close in on Kazemayov—but even more, I want the physician locked. Completely locked.”

  Zubro shut his eyes for a second. Sometimes these little self-imposed darknesses were welcome respites from the pressures of a world of secrets and sealed envelopes. His mind drifted back, and he found himself thinking again of Dubbs, of the connection between Dubbs and the young man Rayner in Grosvenor Square. He had had Dubbs’s little flat bugged for the past three days—but the tapes had revealed nothing. As for John Rayner, the dead man’s brother, the occasional random surveillance had turned up nothing more sinister than a girl friend in Swiss Cottage or whatever the place was called. It had been a simple matter to wire her apartment also but so far all he had listened to were several incoherent telephone calls, some of them peculiarly maudlin. Rayner went there sometimes and they made love, this much was evident. She had other callers too. A noisy girl, Zubro thought, and wondered if Rayner knew he had rivals for her bed. Or did people still think in terms of rivals in these days of free-for-all copulation? Oblinski was asking him something. He opened his eyes.

  “How many men can you put on the physician?”

  “I don’t exactly have a limitless number at my disposal, Oblinski.”

  Oblinski looked oddly self-satisfied as he said, “Then you’ll have to find them from somewhere, Comrade.”

  Zubro, touched by a momentary anger that this hack should order him to do something, smiled grimly. “I take it you have the written backup authority for that demand.”

  “Yes,” Oblinski said. “Do you want to see it?”

  Zubro shook his head. He was sorry to see the old colonials going out of the lounge. They were huddled together, singing “Good-bye.” The revolving door whisked them out into the dark, windy street.

  Yawning, Oblinski stood up. He stretched his arms. He paused, smiled thinly, then went across the lounge. Zubro did not watch him go. He picked up his weak drink and stared into it until the ice had totally gone. If one could only melt the mysteries away so easily, he thought: if it were simply a matter of chemistry. A woman in a wheelchair, a suspect physician, a temperamental soccer star; and behind them, like darker shadows forming beyond lighter ones, the snooping Dubbs, the grief-stricken Rayner. Quite a little catalog of woes, Zubro thought.

  He went to the bar with his empty glass and ordered a refill. The barman, his red nose suggesting that he did more than merely dispense drinks, mixed the gin and tonic. He smiled at the fifty-pence tip Zubro gave him.

  “I understand we’ve got the Russian football team here,” the barman said.

  “Indeed,” said Zubro.

  “Game’s on Saturday. You going, sir?”

  “I may.”

  The barman leaned forward in a confidential way. “They haven’t got a chance of beating us, between you and me. They haven’t got the firepower up front. Where it really matters.”

  Zubro smiled. Us, he thought.

  “Anyway, they don’t play an individual’s game, do they? They’re all sort of like robots, if you see my meaning, sir.”

  Zubro finished his drink quickly.

  “Too bloody predictable,” said the barman.

  “As you say,” Zubro said. “Too bloody predictable.”

  5.

  She woke in a dark, unfamiliar room, remembering only the airplane flight, remembering Sememko’s face in the blizzard at Moscow and how he had pulled his scarf from his mouth and smiled at her as if he wanted to be encouraging. But now, seized by some sudden small panic, she forced herself to sit upright and fumble, with her stiff, thickened hands, for a lamp. They told me, she thought. Israel. You are going. You are going to Israel. And there had been a moment of exultancy when she had been wheeled onto the airplane, a moment of enormous inner peace when the plane rose above the dense banks of gray clouds—but then it had begun to unravel; it had lost any sense. Why would Andreyev and Katya be going to Israel with her? Why would they be going to Tel Aviv? And then she had understood—more lies and obfuscations. Truth: they didn’t understand what truth was. And now, having been wheeled through an airport whose signs were unintelligible to her, she understood she was alone in a strange dark room. There wasn’t a lamp beside her bed. Struggling, she lay back down and clasped her hands together, feeling a vague numbness between her palms. Why were they continually lying to her? Why couldn’t they simply say what they had to say? She could make out the line of a vague light from the curtained window, and more than anything else she wished she could get up and cross the floor and draw the curtain back and look down into whatever street lay below.

  But she couldn’t move now. It was this, this awful sense of being trapped inside herself, harnessed to her own flesh, that scared her. She closed her eyes and listened, hearing the faint sound of street traffic from far below the room. Other sounds. A hot breeze in an air duct. An elevator rising somewhere with an insistent buzz. There were tiny lights behind her eyes: they were like flies impressed by a lamp. I must get up, she thought. I must get up and leave this place—

  A young girl, she thought.

  A young girl could throw these sheets aside and just—

  What more do they want of me?

  What more can I give them?

  She opened her eyes. The dark was unyielding. It pressed against her like some terrible fabric, shapeless and rough and uncut. What more? She tried to concentrate, as if by bringing random images into her mind she might contrive to forget the young man called Rayner, whose life—

  The door of her room opened. An overhead light was turned on. She squinted, half-blinded, toward the figure of Andreyev, who had stepped into the room. He moved toward the bed as though his whole existence were an apology for some indescribable sin. Blessed are the meek, she thought. But not the cowardly. Slowly, quietly, he approached, in the manner of one who doesn’t want to disturb the sleep of a terminal case. She caught his eye, moved her hands, surprising him by her wakefulness. He stopped. He was trembling visibly, staring at his own shaking hands. He sat on the edge of the bed. He can’t look at me, she thought. He can’t bring himself to see me.

  Andreyev was gazing at the curtains, his tongue moving against his dry lips. Then, in an unsteady voice, he asked, “Did the trip tire you?”

  “It was the wrong trip, Andreyev. The wrong destination.”

  Andreyev looked up at the ceiling in a gesture of some hopelessness. For a moment she could see him as if he were a transparency, a slight, filmy thing held up against bright light. He wants to speak and he’s afraid to, she thought. He wants to tell me something, but he can’t. It was the first time she had ever felt anything other than loathing for him—a kind of pity, of sorrow. She saw his hands clench the edge of the quilt.

  “I know,” he said very quietly.

  She tried to sit upright. Andreyev adjusted her pillow, helping her. She felt pain in her chest. When she spoke, her breathing was shallow and difficult. “I sometimes wonder if they ever mean to let me leave. And when I start thinking like that I realize …”

  “What do you realize?”

  She didn’t want to say. She stared into Andreyev’s face. She saw a strange, flinty sense of purpose in the eyes all at once—a flash, a flare, then it was gone. He is going to do something, she thought. He is planning something. But he cannot tell me because he is afraid of speech, of being open, of re
velation.

  “What are they going to ask me to do this time, Andreyev?” she said. “What are they going to want from me now?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered.

  She concentrated, searching him, closing her eyes and feeling herself fall through the scattered clusters of his thoughts, the indistinct flickers of his mind. It exhausted her.

  “No,” he said, holding the side of his head. He got up from the edge of the bed and walked around the room, reaching the window, drawing the curtains back. “No, no,” he was saying again. She shut her eyes and she could feel something slip inside herself, a force draining away. Andreyev stood at the window. She knew without looking. His thoughts, his pains: it was as if his mind were a monstrous edifice supported by a solitary column of fear. Getting away … Running … London … Escape …

  What about me, Andreyev?

  What do they plan for me?

  He had his palms pressed flat against the sides of his head. He was moving in painful, quick circles by the window.

  What do they plan for me?

  But there was nothing else now, nothing save the silence of some inner scream. She lay back against the pillows, watching Andreyev slump into an armchair at the window. His hands hung loose at his sides. He was sweating profusely, his face white. When he turned his face to look at her, he opened his mouth but said nothing. He means to run, she thought. That’s all he knows. He knows nothing of any plans, nothing.

  She turned her face away from him, conscious of his labored breathing, of her own unfathomable fatigue. Then she heard him rise, the armchair creak, the sound of his footsteps on the carpet.

  He was standing over the bed. He didn’t speak.