Brainfire

by Campbell Armstrong

  There was nothing in the tone of voice, an expressionless thing. How are you feeling? As if it mattered to her in any concerned sense, as if it mattered. She thought of snow, of how the train had gone through the snow, of the blizzard slashing at the windows endlessly white.

  “Well? How are you feeling?”

  Mrs. Blum turned her face, pressing her skin against the glass of the window. She realized the woman wanted to hurt her, wanted her dead; she realized this with a confused mixture of pity and dread, pity for her lack of feeling, dread because she saw her own fate inextricably bound up with that of the woman—a coupling of destiny, something over which there was no control.

  Where are you

  She wouldn’t answer this, she wouldn’t answer. Tomorrow, she thought. He had promised a plane, he had promised the papers, the freedom. I want to believe. Dear God, let me believe.

  Where

  “I feel fine,” she said. “Can’t you tell? Can’t you tell how I feel?”

  Katya said nothing.

  “Tomorrow,” the old woman said. “He has promised tomorrow.”

  A look, an expression, something vague and indistinct crossed Katya’s face and then was gone. The old woman stared at her, puzzled, disturbed, wondering at the look, wanting to go inside her, to tunnel deep into her for an explanation of that look—but she didn’t. There was dread only now; the pity had gone. A lie? Was that it? More lies? Lies heaped on lies, every task the final one? She closed her eyes once more, afraid of her own impulses to hurt this wretched woman, to break her mind as if it were no more than thin ice, to drive her into a madness from which there was no exit. Strength, no strength.

  Please tell me

  “Give me my photographs,” she said to the woman. “I want my pictures.”

  Katya opened a bag, a canvas bag, and took out the snapshots. Painfully, struggling with her own knotted muscles, Mrs. Blum took the pictures and spread them in her lap and thought, as she stared at the colors, the faces, the looks of love: I must think only of these, concentrate only on these, for nothing else matters now. Not when you’re damned anyhow. Not when you’re already damned. It was not even a delicate balance, an even equation: some brief time of love weighed against the blackness of whatever eternity you were destined to enter.

  Where please

  She spread the photographs with her clumsy hands. She would think of nothing else.

  7.

  In the limousine, as it approached Lincoln Park on East Capitol Street, Mallory said, “I don’t think I’d mind this damn game so much if it wasn’t for having to sit down and eat food with that little shit Leontov. Something about that guy makes me lose my appetite.”

  Callaway, who had been peering out across the rainy park, looked at the President. “I know what you mean.”

  “He gives me what you might call the willies,” Mallory said. “There’s something about him.”

  “An oily quality?”

  “Oily. Yeah. That’s a fair word.”

  The President looked at the park. The limousine, following some obscure prearranged route created by the tortuous strategies of the Secret Service—by men who would consider a hundred options only to choose the most perplexing, the most difficult—turned onto Kentucky Avenue. There were times when he longed for simplicity in his life, but complexity, like Lindholm, came with the job.

  “Maybe you can give me a quick rundown on the rules of this game, Callaway,” he said. “I don’t want to look like a total ass.”

  Callaway reached into his coat and produced a small booklet. “You might like to glance at this.”

  “What is it?”

  “The rules of the game, Mr. President.”

  “You think that little shit Leontov understands them?” He took the book from Callaway and flicked the pages. He shrugged and then shut it. “It looks more complex than our income-tax proposals. Maybe I can pick up on it as the game goes along.”

  “I would think so,” Callaway said.

  8.

  They had to stop in a rest area because the kid was sick. Isobel took her inside the bathroom while Rayner, sheltering beneath a stone arch that housed a detailed map of Washington, watched the traffic heading toward the capital. She had become sick quite suddenly, her face white, her movements limp and uncoordinated. He waited with increasing impatience. He looked along the row of parked campers, trucks, cars with tourists: a whole catalog of out-of-state plates. So far, he thought, so far so good; at least he hadn’t run into a roadblock or been hauled over by an unmarked car carrying Alexander and friend. These were pluses in a situation where any break was a kind of joy. He stared at the illuminated map, raising his finger and pinpointing D.C. Stadium. A short hop, he noticed, from Congressional Cemetery—and a sudden memory of Richard, of coming down to Washington for the first time to visit with Richard when he was, as he phrased it, “a lackey in State,” the old days before he met and married Isobel. They had done the tour bit, seen all the monuments and statues and all the places wherein the country’s business was conducted, finishing the day at Congressional Cemetery, where Richard had fantasized being buried alongside John Philip Sousa. Quaint, ain’t it? They had stood in front of the bizarre grave of one Marion Ooletia Kahlert, Washington’s first traffic victim, crushed under the wheels of an automobile in 1904 at the age often. “Imagine,” Richard had said, “imagine being planted here. Your claim to immortality is something so simple as falling under a goddam car, for Christ’s sake.” Poor Richard—a mixture of the mordant and the morbid. Remembering, Rayner felt extremely cold, damp, unhappy.

  Now, as he watched the banality of traffic streaming through the rain, saw tourists flip map pages inside wet cars, watched some nut trying to get a Coleman stove stoked up in the open doorway of his camper, it was hard to think of places beyond the normal, hard to think of the supranormal, call it what you like. You had to keep convincing yourself over and over and over—yeah, it’s a possibility. It’s a chance. It could be. Too many connections, too many openings, too many of those dots you could join with straight lines.

  A cop car came into the rest area just as Isobel, her arm around the kid, ran through the rain to the shelter of the arch. Rayner watched the car slide slowly along the line of parked vehicles.

  Isobel shook her wet hair. “She’s feeling rough, John. I don’t know what it is. I couldn’t get her to throw up. She just keeps saying she feels bad.”

  Rayner looked at the kid, who was staring at him in a way that might have been accusatory: You kidnap me for this? He knelt in front of her and took her hands in his own; they were cold.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Tell me what it is. What you feel.”

  “Like sick,” she said.

  “How?”

  “Ever had flu? You know how it is before it starts? Well, that’s how I feel. Hot and cold. An ucky feeling in my head.”

  “I don’t have much time,” Rayner said, trying to sound patient and rational. Isobel started to say something, then stopped. “Fiona, I don’t have time. You don’t have time either because getting sick now is like some kind of luxury. Do you understand me?”

  The kid nodded. She leaned against the stone wall. She stuck her hands in the pockets of her jeans and there was something stubborn in the gesture.

  “Please,” Rayner said. “If I didn’t think it was important, I wouldn’t ask.”

  He glanced at Isobel. He could see it written on her face: give it up, we’ve humored you long enough, and now all you’re doing is making this child sick. How much more destruction are you going to drag us through?

  He looked at the kid again. “What’s making you sick? Do you know?”

  She shrugged. “I guess it’s something to do with her.”

  “The woman?”

  “I guess.”

  “How? Try and explain.”

  “I’ve been trying, I’ve really been trying, and I know she’s near, I mean I feel that, but it’s like she’s closing me out, do you know what I m
ean?”

  “No, I don’t know exactly. I’m trying like hell to understand it. Is it making you ill? The effort or what? Is that it?”

  “I guess. I don’t know.”

  Rayner stood upright. His damp clothes adhered to him uncomfortably; he wanted to sleep. Something—a slight despair, a sense of uselessness—assailed him.

  I haven’t been schooled in heroics, he thought. I haven’t had on-the-job training. Up the Amazon in a canoe, over Niagara Falls in a barrel, planting the U.S. flag on Everest, or even something simple like smuggling a Bulgarian dissident in the trunk of your car across the Greek border. It was a desk job, rummaging through the lives of the helpless and the unhappy, that’s all it was. Now you’re thinking in terms of saving Patrick J. Mallory from—

  “I think the game’s over, John,” Isobel said all at once.

  He followed the line of her eyes to where the Pinto was parked. The cop car had stopped alongside it; the patrolman was getting out, walking around the Pinto, staring at the license-plate number. Fuck, Rayner thought.

  “I think we’ve reached the end of a very odd line,” she said.

  Was there relief in her voice? Why wouldn’t there be? She could go home and put the nightmare away, stick it in the soil with seeds and disperse it and listen to the tide at nights and get her act back together. No, goddammit. I won’t come this far for this. I won’t let it slip now. The cop was returning to his patrol car now; he got inside, leaving the door open. He was using his radio. Okay, Rayner thought. Why couldn’t the kid do something with the cop’s brain? Blow his mind away? Put him into bottom gear—like a temporary state of amnesia? But if she had that talent she hadn’t used it when Alexander was on the scene—ergo, she didn’t have it. Something else, then. One of your less spiritual techniques.

  He looked at the guy in the doorway of the camper who was still intent on the dumb task of lighting a Coleman stove, hands pumping, matches burning, rain running over his baseball cap. Saving the life of the President isn’t the job it used to be, he thought. It’s irregular hours, discomfort, dampness, and downright inconvenience all along the line.

  He took the kid’s hand. It was still chilly, fingers of ice. Kidnap, theft of classified documents—what was simple vehicular theft by comparison?

  “That camper over there,” he said.

  “No,” Isobel answered quickly. “You can’t.”

  “When you’re crazy, kid, you might as well go all out.”

  “John, no.”

  He stared at Isobel. What would it be like to leave her beneath this stone arch, this piece of architectural camp, and run with the kid?

  “Look. Either you’re in this thing or you’re not. What the fuck do you think you can do? Go back to your goddam pillows and your plants? No way, love. No way. When you’ve been this long in my company, you’re an equal partner—and that makes you a nifty candidate for the headhunters as well.”

  He moved toward the camper. There was a rush of wind, a squall, through the rain. The child, limp, seemed to have no will left of her own. She didn’t resist when he moved. He heard Isobel come up behind.

  “Okay,” she was saying. “If it’s madness you’re after then you’re going to need some company.”

  Good girl, he thought, it makes a change from your little crystal dinner parties in Georgetown; and what good is a life without extremes? From hostess to drop-out to fugitive: the needle of some existential compass gone berserk.

  He stopped by the camper. The guy—bearded, slight, wearing damp lederhosen—looked as if he had come out of the wilderness.

  “Having problems?”

  The bearded man groaned. “Damn stove,” he said.

  “They can be real pains,” Rayner said sympathetically.

  “I been pumping and pumping—”

  “Maybe it’s out of fuel?”

  “Naw,” the guy said, staring at the stove. “I checked that already.”

  Rayner looked at the license plates. South Carolina. There was a dealer’s logo attached to the plate: Dorfman’s Rec Vee, Orangeburg, S.C.

  “I know a thing or two about those stoves,” Rayner said. “You want me to take a look-see?”

  The bearded man smiled. “I sure as hell wish somebody would. Getting a flame going in that thing’s like getting a goddam genie out of a lamp.” He laughed at his own simile and looked at Rayner for response. Rayner dutifully laughed. Keys, he was thinking. You better hope this turkey’s left his keys in the dash. It was fifty-fifty. You step out of the cab and come around the shell of the camper to the back door—did you pocket your keys for so short a trip? He tried to look through the camper, the interior gloom, to see if the keys were inside, but it wasn’t one of those vehicles with a connecting door. Camper and cab were sealed off from each other. Damn. He pretended to examine the Coleman. He made a series of pontifical noises, like an expert, an archaeologist dating a skull fragment, a physician humming over an X-ray.

  “Simple,” Rayner said. “Goddam thing’s wet.”

  “Wet?”

  “Sure. Look.” Rayner pointed vaguely. “Stands to reason you won’t get it stoked if it’s wet. You want to dry it off. Paper towels.”

  “I guess.” The guy scratched his scalp, pushing the baseball cap back. He picked up the stove and closed it so that it looked like a briefcase of green metal.

  “Well. Thanks a lot. Mighty nice of you folks to take the time. Trouble nowadays is nobody gives a hoot about others. Makes a real fine change when you run into people that care.” He touched the peak of his cap and began to move toward the bathrooms. Go, Rayner thought, grinning foolishly in the rain. Go. Forget your keys, if there are keys. He watched the guy go under the stone arch, where he paused as if he had recollected something. But Rayner was already ushering the kid toward the cab. He opened the door that lay on the guy’s blind side and saw—shining, wonderful, attached to a sham turquoise key ring—the keys hanging from the ignition. He stood back and let Isobel climb in after the girl, let them slide across the bench seat, then he got in and started the motor. The owner would raise hell, but even raising hell took a few minutes, and by the time he had noticed the cop in the rest area, by the time he had supplied the data the cop would need, by the time he had finished bitching about the breakdown of American civilization, Rayner would have a five- or six-minute start. Maybe. Just maybe, he thought.

  “If you want my advice, John, you ought to get off the highway as soon as you can,” Isobel said.

  “My very thoughts,” Rayner said.

  Between them, the girl leaned forward suddenly, clutching her stomach, her body stiff and rigid, her hands twisted, her mouth open and slack—and for a moment Rayner wondered if she was dying.

  9.

  In the executive dining room at D.C. Stadium, which had been sealed off by Secret Service men, Mallory shook hands with Ambassador Leontov. It was an infirm handshake, slack and loose, like a dead fish in your palm. Mallory understood that because of the seating arrangements he was obliged to sit next to Leontov, both during lunch and throughout the game itself. He shook a great many hands in the dining room: representatives of the American Soccer Federation, the Soviet trainer, the trainer’s interpreter, executives of the stadium organization, the entire Soviet team, the entire American team—neither of which would be sitting down to lunch; a matter of dietary strategy before a game, he was told—and even the hands of the waiters and waitresses who would be serving the meal.

  He sat down with Leontov on his right and a man called MacMillan, the president of the American Soccer Federation, on his left. The doorways were blocked by the Secret Service men. The whole stadium would be policed, crawling with agents, plain-clothes cops, security guards. It was, he reflected in a bemused way, a strange feeling to sit down to a meal that had been prepared in such stringent conditions. He looked across the table at Callaway; on a chair by the door sat the reaper with his black case. One could imagine, Mallory thought, how the Pharaohs must have felt; the pro
blem was that of keeping at bay the insidious intoxication of power.

  MacMillan, who spoke in a subdued Scottish accent, was a tidy man with a small white moustache and a layer of white hair neatly combed flat. “I understand, Mr. President, that this will be your first experience of our game?” he asked.

  “I’m looking forward to it,” Mallory said. A plate of vegetable soup was pushed in front of him. “I expect to have it explained to me.”

  “It’s not difficult, sir,” said MacMillan, spooning some soup with a hand that trembled slightly.

  The Presidential aura, Mallory thought. It sends out vibrations. He sipped some soup, which was watery, laid his spoon down, and turned to Leontov. “You want to predict the outcome, Mr. Ambassador?” he asked.

  “Only a fool would predict,” Leontov said. He smiled in a quick way.

  “You expect your side to win?”

  The Ambassador nodded. “Of course. But I think the game has made such enormous strides here in America that the result will be a close one.”

  Mallory looked down into his soup, perceiving a piece of floating carrot that had collided with limp parsley. What was it about the little shit? he wondered. What was it? Something more than the usual scumminess of his personality. A nervous quality, perhaps. Maybe he was a soccer nut and the result was of some real—rather than diplomatic—import to him.

  “I think it will be very close,” Leontov said.

  “But fair.”

  “As you say, Mr. President. One trusts that violence will not be allowed to interfere with the proceedings.” Leontov nodded his head slightly.

  Poached fish of some kind was brought. Tasteless and flaky. Mallory picked at it in a halfhearted way, wondering if he might ascribe his unease to the hypocrisy of sitting down to lunch with a representative of Maksymovich’s regime.

  Leontov said, “A moment ago you asked me for a prediction. I’ve been turning that question over in my mind.”

  “I thought you said only fools make forecasts,” Mallory said.

  “On certain occasions, perhaps there’s a fine line between recklessness and foolishness. It’s only a game, after all. I think the Soviet team will win. But only by a single goal.”