Brainfire

by Campbell Armstrong

  Zubro sat upright in his chair. There was a change in him now, a rise in his temperature. He felt a faint film of sweat across his forehead. There was a sudden pulse at the side of his skull. Stefanoff, he thought.

  “Alexei Stefanoff?” Zubro asked.

  The woman nodded slowly. “I told him he shouldn’t associate with dissidents like Stefanoff—”

  Zubro got to his feet. “Why did he go to see Stefanoff?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Didn’t he understand the risk?”

  “I don’t know—”

  Stefanoff, Zubro thought, and smiled to himself: ah, there were still those moments of sheer pleasure in which suddenly you could see the shape of the game board. It was a time in which clouds, those same damned clouds that had hung all day long, cleared as if by divine intervention. Stefanoff: of course. He rubbed his hands together. How could it be so easy?

  He went to the door, turning once to say he was glad of her help, then walked down the corridor to the elevator, pressed the call button, and waited with an impatience he could hardly restrain.

  7.

  Ernest Dubbs went down the steps to his basement flat, unlocked the door, and stepped inside the darkened room—but he was too late to answer the telephone. He fumbled across the floor and reached the receiver just as the ringing stopped. Damn, he thought. He turned on a lamp, opened a box of parrot food, and stuffed some through the bars of the cage in which the dreaded Rasputin sat, eyeing Dubbs with profound avian contempt. Dubbs, though, was rather fond of his parrot, a bad-tempered old thing who had only ever been able to master the phrase “Piss off.”

  He opened the kitchen door, surveyed the mess, lamented the impossibility of finding a reliable charlady, then shut the door again as if the sight were too much to behold. He listened to the parrot knock its beak against a tiny mirror—deluded, poor old bastard, imagines it has company, Dubbs thought—then he lay down on the sofa and closed his eyes.

  He belched slightly. The parrot fluttered. A single feather, falling from a wing, floated to the rug. He thought of Anatoly Zubro a moment. A worried man, no doubt—going to all the trouble of wiring an apartment and sending his men around after young John Rayner. The problem, Dubbs thought, lay in the fact that people like Zubro couldn’t believe the Cold War wasn’t quite the permafrost affair it had once been. Now you had a rather hapless detente; and the war boiled down to a series of rather pathetic skirmishes. But Anatoly, dodging around the back streets of London, planting his bugs, sending his thugs off on fruitless errands—well, Anatoly could only be disappointed by the politics of the time. They had deprived him of his function, in a manner of speaking. The pulse of things was weaker nowadays, and far less interesting when you managed to find it.

  The mysteries, too, weren’t quite the fun things they had been once. I wax boringly nostalgic, Dubbs thought, scolding himself. What were the old days anyhow but a bunch of cloak-and-dagger nonsense? The tinderbox of Berlin. Corpses in frogmen suits washed up in harbors where Russian subs had lately been anchored. He turned on his side, feeling fatigued. The only mystery now was that of Richard Rayner—

  His telephone rang. He picked it up and said his number.

  There was a brief silence at the other end.

  “Am I speaking with Mr. Rasputin?”

  Dubbs swung around on the sofa. Dear God, he thought. How long since I heard that form of address?

  “Who wants to know?” he said quietly.

  “We are mutual friends of Stefanoff, yes?”

  Dubbs watched the parrot cling fiercely to the bars of the cage. Stefanoff. Dear old Stefanoff.

  “Mutual friends, of course,” Dubbs said. “Have we met?”

  “No. My name is Andreyev. Victor Andreyev.”

  Dubbs curled the telephone cord around his wrist. “How can I help?”

  A further silence. A truck, something heavy, could be heard roaring over the line.

  “It is essential that I see you, Mr. Rasputin.”

  “Did Stefanoff tell you how?”

  “He gave me the information.”

  “Very well,” said Dubbs. “When will you be arriving?”

  “I think soon. A matter of some minutes.”

  “I’ll be here,” Dubbs said.

  There was no good-bye. The line was dead. Dubbs held the receiver a moment, then set it down. Stefanoff. It had been a long time since Stefanoff had used the Rasputin connection. Years—not since 1970, when a man called Nankovitch had defected during some trades conference. Dubbs rose, went inside his bedroom, opened the drawer in the bedside table, and from beneath a pile of laundered handkerchiefs took out a discolored .38 revolver. He checked the chamber, then snapped it shut. He walked through to the living room—suddenly nervous now, nervous in a way he hadn’t felt in years. He turned off the lamp and sat in the darkness. He held the revolver in his lap, listening, waiting, hearing the damned parrot repeat, “Piss off, piss off, piss off,” like a drunk trapped in a repetitive groove of memory.

  “Shut up,” said Dubbs. “When I want to hear from you, my dear, I’ll ask.”

  The great bird flapped and fluttered and made a noise like an asthmatic old man. Dubbs stood up and wandered over to the cage. In the dark, he put his hands up and the bird swiped at him with a claw.

  “Vindictive old fart,” Dubbs said. “When you need to be fed tomorrow, you can jolly well beg.”

  Dubbs opened the kitchen door and went to the window, which afforded him a view of the steps that led upward from the basement to the street. There were peeling iron railings glinting dully in the light of a distant streetlamp. Squalid place, Dubbs thought. He stood motionless, fingering the gun, feeling strange to be armed after all this time. He thought about Stefanoff: how had that Jewish madman survived so long? A wild man of the old school: integrity and dignity and a sizable slice of lunacy. Stefanoff didn’t know the meaning of the word risk.

  Dubbs waited. A tap dripped in the sink, splashing on the pile of soiled dishes. Outside, a car passed in the street, lighting the iron railings. Then there was darkness and silence again. Mr. Rasputin, he thought. Just as one is pondering the changes in one’s world, along comes a whisper from the past.

  Now somebody was moving above, a shadow drifting along the edge of the railings. Dubbs saw the flash of some white clothing, a shirt, a jacket, whatever. At the top of the steps, as if he was beset by indecision, by fear, the man stopped. He seemed to be peering down into the darkness, wondering perhaps if he had come to the right address, or if this entire thing was a terrible mistake. Come on, Dubbs thought. Move yourself.

  Dubbs opened the kitchen door slightly and, holding the revolver forward, stared up through the darkness at the man. Take no chances, he thought. Wait. Wait for the other fellow to move. But the man stood motionless, his hands hanging at his sides, his whole position curiously purposeless. Come on, Dubbs thought. If you’re coming, come.

  Dubbs opened the kitchen door wider. The lights of a car picked out the man suddenly—a blinding vision, revealing all at once for Dubbs the fear on the man’s white face, the open oval of the mouth, one arm rising upward as if he was protecting himself from the lights of the car.

  Dubbs leveled his revolver and rushed toward the steps. He looked up. “Andreyev?” he asked.

  The car lights dimmed. There was a sound of footsteps hurrying across the concrete. Andreyev moved, balanced on the top step, balanced there a moment as if he were posing for an artist, hands across his face, one leg raised slightly, body turned toward Dubbs.

  “Andreyev—”

  The footsteps stopped. In the distance, somehow the most incongruous sound in the world, Dubbs heard the whining siren of a police vehicle. Andreyev, reaching for the second step down, appeared to implode all at once. He sat down on the step, holding his hands against his stomach. Dubbs climbed toward him. There was a brilliant flash in the dark, a sharp echo, and Andreyev was rocked against the wall.

  “Andreyev,” Dubbs sai
d, taking it step by step, seeing still another flare burn a hole in the dark. Andreyev stood up, clutching the wall, moaning—a sound, Dubbs thought, that was more one of disappointment than of pain. As he stood, there was another shot that struck him in the skull, and he put his hands up feebly to his head. Dubbs, peering between the railings, saw a tan-colored car idling across the street. He aimed his revolver badly, fired, heard his own shot whistle harmlessly off into the distance. The car moved away from the curb, and Dubbs, dropping his revolver, leaned over Andreyev, who was still moaning, still clutching his face with his hands. No, Dubbs thought. No. He helped Andreyev to sit on the step—a useless gesture, an act too late to do any good. The man was dying, bleeding his life away on these flaking concrete steps, his white shirtfront soaked with a massive spreading red stain. Dubbs stood over him. Sick, sickening—The hands dropped from what was left of the face: a nightmare mask, a perverse Halloween conceit, all manner of things except those that suggested the human. Dubbs shut his eyes. He heard the man topple over, slide against the wall, then go slithering down the rest of the steps to stop, impossibly jammed, against the half-open door of the kitchen.

  4

  1.

  A dream? But then she wasn’t sure because it had become more and more difficult to differentiate what took place from those shifting images she may have dreamed or imagined. It was morning and the bedroom was filled with a soft white light and the woman Katya was standing over the bed, a tray in her hands, the tiny bottles of medication, the syringe. A picture—a picture of Andreyev: a white slash, like that of some vicious lightning, in a black place. She turned her face to Katya; there was a streak of pain coursing from her neck to her shoulders, as if the muscles were aflame. Her throat was dry, her voice hoarse.

  Andreyev? Where is Andreyev?

  Katya filled the syringe, holding it up to the light.

  Where is he?

  She saw the needle, cold and perfect, enter her arm. Something in the woman’s eyes, something legible: Andreyev—it didn’t work out for him, don’t you understand, it didn’t quite work out for him. Mrs. Blum turned her face to the wall, feeling Katya standing over her, watching her.

  “Andreyev had to go back to Moscow,” Katya said.

  Mrs. Blum shook her head slightly. Reality, those things in the world—such things as walls, rooms, lights, other minds, those things that seemed to some so impenetrable—had never felt quite so flimsy to her before, as if they were all constructed of rice paper through which you could tear a simple hole and see what it was that lay beyond the indifferent surfaces. When had she felt it this strongly before?

  “He was recalled,” Katya said.

  “Don’t lie to me. Don’t ever lie to me.” The old woman struggled, pushing herself upward, grasping at her pillows for support. She stared at Katya: behind the coldness, the eyes as fixed as ancient ice, there was fear. Don’t hurt me. Please. I know what you can do—Mrs. Blum raised one hand, pointing it toward the younger woman, a shriveled, twisted hand from which a single blunted finger emerged accusingly. The younger woman stepped backward. I can do almost anything now. Anything. I can take the tray and send it rushing from her thin hands and dash it through the window. I can take the structure of her mind and break it down until it has the consistency of a gel. Anything, almost anything now.

  Andreyev is dead.

  Poor, pitiful fool.

  The weakling.

  She closed her eyes. If only he had asked, she might have tried to help him. If only he had asked—but it was, as always, too late.

  “Look,” the woman was saying. “I brought these to you.”

  Now Mrs. Blum could hardly open her eyes. Squinting, she saw some glossy colored squares pressed alongside her face on the pillow.

  “They were sent on from Moscow. They arrived only this morning.”

  Silence. The soft glow of the room, the color of some distant pearl. Photographs, the old woman thought. She lifted a hand to touch them and then she was beset by a curious feeling of her own unworthiness: I don’t deserve them, these beautiful people, these little children; I don’t deserve to see them or to love them or to have their love in return. She pushed the snapshots away from the pillow, barely seeing them slip off the edge of the bed to the floor. Katya, a shadow, a pale shadow, bent down to pick them up.

  “Don’t you want to see them? Don’t you want to look at your family, Mrs. Blum?”

  No, Mrs. Blum thought. It was always too late. There was always a point of dark regret where, despite what you desired, despite what you most wanted in this world, you realized you were running out of time. She heard the woman’s fingers flick the edges of the photographs as if they were a pack of cards and everything associated with them some hideous gamble.

  “Soon, Mrs. Blum,” the woman said. “Very soon now, I’m sure.”

  A meadow, from a high place the persistent sound of an invisible lark, a small boy stirring in his fitful sleep, a meadow filled with wild flowers. You are walking across it. The air is sweet. Between the trees, suddenly—like a new construction hurriedly erected in the night—a dark barn, the door an open mouth, an expression of surprise. You go toward it. Seeking—seeking what? Repetition? The replay of the same old horror? The sight of the man hanging—

  “I’ll come back later,” Katya was saying.

  The door was closed. But there were other doors.

  Old pains, old hurts: even this love you tried to keep alive was an old and wasted thing. She tried to open her eyes but her eyelids were weights that drew her back down into the dreaming.

  2.

  Lord Warsdale—Old Warsy, as Dubbs called him—was a relic of that time when the only efficient diplomacy was the kind you conducted with a gunboat. He had liver spots all over the backs of his hands and suffered from an odd skin disease that caused his flesh to flake and scale like a universal dandruff. When Old Warsy moved, he invariably left behind tiny white particles of himself. His office overlooked the Houses of Parliament; a large picture window framed his pointed bald skull.

  “This damned Steperoff business,” Old Warsy said.

  It seemed to Dubbs futile to make the necessary corrections in Warsy’s speech. Stefanoff was Steperoff and nothing on this earth could ever alter the fact.

  “You think this fella Zubro rumbled your game, Dubbs?”

  Dubbs nodded. “He must have learned, I fear, of my connection with Steperoff, of course. I can’t think, my lord, of any other explanation.”

  My lord, Dubbs thought with disgust. He gazed over at the Houses of Parliament and wondered why Old Warsy wasn’t sitting dozing over in Lords instead of concerning himself with matters of international intrigue.

  Warsdale tried to stand. He reached for his pearl-handled cane, missed, and slumped back, puffing, into his leather swivel chair. Gloomily he stared at a few specks of his own dry flesh that had fallen to the polished surface of his desk.

  “I sometimes wish the Russkis had the decency to stay in their own Embassy grounds, don’t you know? Instead, they keep popping in and out and causing bloody mayhem. Messy bloody business anyway. One has to keep the local constabulary from plodding all about the place with their infernal notebooks. And the chaps from Special Branch—well, Lord knows, they don’t take kindly to dead Commies turning up in bloody Chiswick.”

  “Fulham,” Dubbs said.

  “Quite, quite. It’s damned untidy, Dubbs. I mean to say, I warned you before about your association with this Steperoff bod, didn’t I? Said it would bring about a damn calamity one day.”

  Although Dubbs nodded, he couldn’t recall any such conversation. Old Warsy, whether from guile or senility, had the habit of inventing past conversations to suit himself. Now, grabbing for his cane again, reaching it successfully, he struggled into a standing position and his bones creaked audibly. He looked out at the Houses of Parliament, his eyes narrow and thunderous, as if he suspected all manner of socialist manipulations going on behind the hallowed walls.

&nbs
p; “It’s damned unsporting and unreasonable,” Lord Warsdale said. “Send over a soccer team like that, pretending this chap is Domareski or what d’you call it, only for him to turn up dead on your blessed doorstep under another name. Soccer—it brings out the worst in a fella, I’ve always said that.”

  Dubbs considered the list he had received from the Home Office of the visas issued to the Soviet team and its entourage. The photograph of Victor Andreyev was clearly labeled Fyodor Domareski. It was a small puzzle in its way—even in circumstances where one should not be surprised by deceit—but what troubled Dubbs more was the fact that he had no information in his own dossiers on Andreyev.

  Lord Warsdale poked his cane into the thick blue rug. He stared at Dubbs as if he were trying to remember the man’s name and purpose. A telephone rang unanswered on his desk. He stared at it awkwardly, then looked once more at Dubbs.

  “You say our chaps don’t know anything about this Andreyev?”

  Dubbs nodded. The poor old dear, he thought, has to be told everything twice.

  “I mentioned I was getting assistance from another source, sir,” said Dubbs.

  Lord Warsdale sighed and went back to his seat. “The Yanks. Well, good Lord, I daresay official policy needn’t be too scrupulously …” His voice, as it had a habit of doing, faded out. He thumped his cane cantankerously against the side of his desk. “But for that bloody stupid German king, we might still have had a rather nice colony there, Dubbs. Makes you think rather, doesn’t it? Instead of a country house in bloody Dorset, I might have had a ranch in Montana.” Old Warsy laughed, his face turning lavender. When the fit had passed, he turned once more to look at the Houses of Parliament, as if the real enemy were ensconced therein. “Work it out as best you can, Dubbs. Keep me posted, eh? If I’m not here in the office, you can find me down in the countryside.”

  Dubbs rose, seized by the ridiculous urge to kiss the back of the old boy’s hand: serf to prince. He wondered how Warsy would have reacted—if, indeed, he would have noticed anything at all.