Brainfire

by Campbell Armstrong

  He saw the wheelchair first. Then he made out, through the dimness, the shape of the woman—and he realized he had never seen anyone so close to dying, anyone who looked so utterly close to death. An old woman, sparse white hair, body covered over with a blanket. The old woman, he thought. How could you, in all your most disorganized dreams, ascribe terror to this woman who sat, sighing, sifting mindlessly through a little pile of colored snapshots? How could you do that? He approached her and, kneeling, looked at her. She stared at him and he was momentarily afraid, but the feeling passed: an intuition, a way of knowing, that something had ended here. That she intended no harm to him. He reached out and touched her arthritic hands. Raising her face, she looked toward the doorway, then back at Rayner.

  “Mall-ory,” she said.

  The tone of voice—Mallory, he thought. Mallory is safe. How did he know that? The smell of burnt flesh came to him again. Mall-ory. She watched him a moment in a curious way and he experienced a faint passing headache, as if something had brushed briefly against his brain.

  “Rayner,” she said.

  That tone—what was that one now? Some kind of … sadness? Some kind of apology? He looked away from her. Richard, she was speaking about Richard, she was trying to explain her sorrow. She held out the snapshots to him and he glanced at them quickly. He saw unrecognizable faces in a sunlit place. What did they mean to her? She smiled at him and he thought: This is the woman who killed my brother. This is her. This is the woman I’ve been chasing through my own dreams of insanity, pursuing through my obsessions, my fears. But now he felt nothing. No sense of achievement, no desire for vengeance, nothing. You come to a point and after that there’s nothing but a dying old woman dreamily sifting through her snapshots. Go to any old house in America where a widow would sit behind her lace curtains, listening to the clocks of her own loneliness, and you would find the same pitiful scene.

  He stood upright.

  “Rayner,” she said again, and her voice was hoarse.

  The woman who killed Richard. This is her.

  And then there was confusion, the room suddenly filled with men, raincoated men, men who had expected to trap and corner a free-running madman—but not this, nothing like this. The crackle of their little radios, the noise of their feet, the sounds of their voices. There was silence. I mean nothing to them now, Rayner thought. I mean nothing. Nothing compared to what they have found in the doorway.

  He looked at the old woman one more time, then slipped out of the room toward the corridor, listening to the babble of voices behind him. Let them find their own explanations, he thought. The way I found mine.

  12.

  The whistle blew for half time. The players ran through the rain toward the locker rooms. The American team had finally managed to score just before the interval, a goal that MacMillan described as spectacular—coming, as it had, from thirty yards out from the Russian goal. “A thunderbolt,” MacMillan said.

  Mallory sat back in his seat. What had happened to him? He felt weak, but everything else had gone now—the panic, the pains, the sense of dying. He would have to see about a checkup as soon as possible or spend the rest of his life wondering if the lunch had been poisoned.

  Leontov turned to him and asked, “How are you feeling now?”

  Mallory nodded. “Fine,” he said. “Just fine.”

  MacMillan looked happy. “I don’t care what wonder drugs they discover, Mr. President. Common aspirin is a miracle in itself.”

  “Indeed,” Mallory said.

  Leontov rose, excused himself, and slipped along the row of seats. Mallory wondered about that dollar. Was the little shit afraid of an American revival in the second half of the game?

  “Do we stand a chance, MacMillan?” he asked.

  “That goal has put a different perspective on things,” said MacMillan.

  13.

  Rayner left the stadium and went across the parking lot in the rain. Overhead, in the dismal sky, there was the white shadow of a watery sun. He looked up a moment and then he thought: I’ll walk to D.C. General. Get Isobel and the kid. Make sure they’re okay. He felt a strain of some deep fatigue as he passed among the rows of parked cars. Sleep, he thought. And then what? Do you return to London? Pick up the pieces? Look into the situation with Isobel? Or were the ghosts still too strong for that? The cars gleamed in the rain, row after row after row. He paused, shaking his head, trying to get rid of his tiredness—and with it the memory of what he had just seen. Priorities, he thought. You need some semblance of order first of all. Later, you can sit down and try to figure your way through it all. Coffee. Maybe at the hospital. The first thing.

  “John?”

  It surprised him to hear his name being called in that familiar voice; it was like a voice in some shallow dream. He turned around and saw George Gull standing some yards behind him. George Gull, he thought. You could have picked a better time. He watched Gull come toward him and all at once he was conscious of the vast emptiness of the parking lot, the silence from the stadium, the soft sound of the rain. Gull was smiling—and for a moment, a fleeting time of small hope, Rayner wondered if he had attributed all the wrong things to Gull, if wires had been crossed somewhere along the way and mistakes made. But Gull had in his hand a silenced pistol, and Rayner thought: You come all this way, cover all this distance, you cross the barricades of your own incredulity—and for what? To die in the fucking rain? He looked at the muzzle of the silencer. To die quietly in the fucking rain.

  “Close, John. But no cigar,” Gull said.

  Rayner said, “I hope they made it worth your while. Or was it a question of ideology, George?”

  Gull laughed. “You can’t put ideology in a Zurich numbered account, can you now?”

  The finances of treachery, Rayner thought. He stared at the gun. To end like this. To find it wasn’t worth shit. Immortality in a parking lot. In the rain. Worthless.

  “You knew about this nutty plan all along,” Rayner said.

  Gull was still smiling. “You can’t bitch, John. I tried to warn you off. You can’t say I didn’t try. I warned you off Dubbs. I didn’t want you drifting into the Andreyev business.”

  “It didn’t work,” Rayner said. “Your little old lady turned around, Gull.”

  “I can’t take the blame for that,” Gull said. “It wasn’t my scheme. I only pulled a few necessary strings, John. Who do you think arranged their fucking visas, no questions asked? They’re not uncharitable. A piece of paper here, a piece of info there—I was an impeccable source. Isn’t that the phrase?”

  “Words to that effect,” Rayner said. Fatigue and death. Maybe it’s better to take your leave when you’re not wide awake; maybe you don’t feel it quite as much. “What about my brother? Did you know about him?”

  “After the fact, John. It was the big mistake in my book. Working the old woman on your brother when they could have chosen anybody, and you’d never have been involved. I’m sorry about that.”

  “Sorry,” Rayner said flatly. He could smell it still in his nostrils: burning meat over cinders. The old woman. The goddam rain. The silence in the rain. “Killing Mallory—did you ever think about the consequences, George?”

  “Consequences? Look, I’m eligible for retirement next year. I intend to take it. I’ve done my time, John. So I retire—then what? A trailer park in New Jersey? Living on a Government pension? A pittance? Maybe a job like a broken-down store detective? Fuck that. I’ve lived on my nerves long enough. Sure, I thought about consequences—but only in terms of my own well-being.” Gull paused. He raised a hand to wipe a slick of rain from his forehead. “Anyway, is there a difference between one man in the White House or another? Is there any goddam difference? Right now, John, I’m only interested in saving my own ass.”

  Rayner looked once more at the gun. Gull’s pathetic little speech—was it some desperate plea for sympathy, for a belated understanding? Sorry, John, but now you know why I have to kill you.

  “
It doesn’t hang together, Gull,” he said. Useless words now. “You sent Chip Alexander after me—how could you have been so damn sure I wouldn’t tell him about Mallory? How did you know he would swallow that shit about me having a breakdown and stealing classified material? It doesn’t jell for me, George.”

  Gull looked pale. “I took a calculated risk. I thought the Soviets would get to you first. Anyway, I wasn’t sure then that you had put the Mallory pieces together, John. I just figured you wouldn’t, it was too far-out, unlikely. But when I knew you had the pieces, when I knew that for sure, it became a different game.… But none of this matters much, does it?”

  “How did you know, George? How did you know for sure?” Rayner asked. A different game. It didn’t work, it didn’t have rules, an internal logic.

  Gull shook his head. He appeared to be in some pain. “It doesn’t matter now.”

  Rayner looked at the gun. What would it feel like?

  Maybe nothing. Maybe nothing at all. He stared across the rain toward the stadium; the Stars and Stripes fluttered in a restless way. Something, he thought. It still doesn’t fit. Something he didn’t want to think about. He saw George Gull lift the gun.

  “How did you know, George? How did you know I had figured out the Mallory thing? How did you know I’d be here?”

  George Gull was sweating.

  It doesn’t add, Rayner thought. It doesn’t add and it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t add, that the equation is screwed up all over again. He wondered desperately about running, just turning and running, taking whatever his chances might be. Where was that goddam instinct for survival you read so much about? Where was it when you needed it?

  “How, George? Tell me.”

  Gull looked as though he was trying to speak. He opened his mouth soundlessly. Rayner stared at the gun. Why was he having so much trouble firing it? Has some great god of luck jammed the trigger for you? No, you’ve used up all your luck, Rayner. This is the place where the well of good fortune finally runs dry on you. This is the place. He saw how Gull was straining with the gun, holding it now as though it was an object over which he had no control, straining as his arm rose. There was a look of panic on his face.

  Christ, Christ, he was saying. Over and over and over.

  Christ, Christ, Christ.

  Rayner didn’t move. He saw Gull’s arm continue to rise, he saw the nerve moving in the jaw, the streaks of sweat on the forehead, he saw the gun come up.

  And Gull’s hand turned inward toward himself.

  Inward. The gun an inch from his own face.

  Rayner turned away and waited, waited for what he knew was going to happen, listening for the sound of the gun going off. Again and again and again he heard the silenced violence of the weapon and when it had stopped, when it seemed to him that there was no other sound in the world save that of the rain drumming on the roofs of cars, he turned to look. Gull—what was left of Gull—lay some feet away. Rayner slumped against the hood of the nearest car. He could still hear the echo of Gull’s voice, Christ, Christ, a useless litany. He felt the rain falling on his face. He couldn’t look at Gull again. He couldn’t bring himself to look. He thought of the old woman now, wondering what debt she felt she owed him—a death for a death: George Gull for Richard Rayner. A savage repayment. A sequence of events that began with a broken window in Moscow and ended here, here in the goddam rain, outside a sports stadium in Washington.

  But it isn’t ended, he thought.

  It isn’t finished.

  A canceled debt, a check written in too much blood. My brother’s life: my own survival. What was that power? What exactly? He walked away from George Gull, realizing he was back in that territory where nothing had any proper definition, a place beyond language and sense. The old woman. Repaid with interest. Repaid with more blood than he wanted to think about. He turned and looked back at the stadium.

  It isn’t over, he thought.

  You’re left with a piece that doesn’t fit.

  Maybe a piece you can never make fit.

  But it isn’t over.

  14.

  The cop in the white overcoat said, “I wouldn’t want to put any money on what happened in here.”

  An agent of the FBI, dressed as an anachronistic hippie, beads and leather vest and flowery shirt, stared across the room. “The smell’s doing bad things to my stomach,” he said.

  The cop stood over the body in the doorway. “Poor fucker looks like he stepped into a furnace.”

  The room was filled with law officers, guardians of an inscrutable peace. Cameras, lights, fingerprint men, agents from various state and federal agencies; confusion and disorder and bewilderment.

  A uniformed officer said, “The woman in the bathroom might be able to tell us something.”

  “Yeah, if we’re lucky,” said the cop in the white coat. He stopped in front of a wheelchair where a police physician, an open black bag between his legs, was bent over the shape of an old woman. He had his stethoscope out, pressing it here and there against her chest.

  “What’s the story?” the cop asked.

  The physician took the stethoscope from his ears and folded it. He had been holding the old woman’s wrist, trying to find a pulse. He rolled up the stethoscope and dropped it into his bag. “We’ve lost this one,” he said.

  The cop shrugged. “I didn’t think she’d pull it off.” He stared at the doctor a moment. “What a hellova thing to happen—especially with Mallory upstairs. What a hellova thing.”

  He turned to the uniformed cop and said, “Where did that other guy go? The one that slipped down here?”

  “Vanished,” the uniformed man said. “In all the confusion—”

  “Yeah. Confusion is the word. Confusion is the only word.” He saw the thin middle-aged woman being laid on a stretcher. She was being carried out. As she was taken past him, he turned his face away. Some things, he thought, you can’t look at. He turned once more to the uniformed cop and said, “See if you can put together a description of the guy from the guard he belted. Maybe we can find him.”

  He walked back toward the wheelchair and bent down and looked at the expressionless face of the old woman. There was a little pile of colored snapshots, like pieces of a puzzle, lying under her feet. He picked them up and sifted slowly through them.

  Epilogue

  He waited in the reception area of the hospital, remembering how much he hated these places: that sense of the sick and the dying shut in rooms you couldn’t see. Flowers in vases, intravenous drips, people hooked up to machines that kept them barely alive. Tired, he slumped in his chair and watched two nurses—white, even their shoes gleamed like frost—pass the reception desk. Voices over speakers: Will Dr. Morris report to Emergency? Dr. Sandman is requested in Maternity.

  A place, he thought, where you don’t have to think anymore. Where you can let it all wash off. A shower room of the brain. Where the shock of suspicion might be alleviated by lobotomy. He shut his eyes.

  Who told George Gull? he wondered. A conundrum of an impossible kind. Who killed Cock Robin? Who? He shifted in his chair and, opening his eyes, looked along a corridor at a window at the far end where a white rainy light fell on glass.

  Nobody told him. He just knew. Something psychic in the air, after all. Leave it that way. George Gull just happened to know.

  Come this far, Rayner. Cover the whole distance. You might as well. There’s nothing left to hold back. The whole way.

  He stared down the corridor. Nurses and orderlies moved back and forth. Physicians with little clipboards. Nobody else knew, he thought. Nobody. Nobody else.

  Goddam. He wanted to get up and walk out and stroll through the rain and make believe he was somebody else in another place, that the time was different, that the season was not the same. Another place on a map: Shawnee, Oklahoma. Council Bluffs, Iowa. Names spotted on the great freeways of America. Nothing places where you might contrive to become another person.

  He saw her now.r />
  She was standing by the distant window, talking with a nurse. Their heads were close together: collusion, he thought. She’s going to be okay, Mrs. Rayner. The girl’s going to be all right. He felt both angry and weary, a combination he couldn’t handle. Sleep would defuse both sensations. A long sleep.

  Nobody else knew, he thought.

  She was walking toward him. He got up from his chair and waited. What was that expression on her face now? Disbelief? Shock? You weren’t exactly expected, he thought. You’re the uninvited guest at a private dinner. The one they haven’t laid a place for. No knife, no fork, no wineglass, nothing. And then she was smiling. She was smiling and moving more quickly. When she reached him, she put her hand on his arm. The smile. The smile. She was saying something, speaking quickly, speaking with the rapidity of nerves: Overnight for observation but she’s going to be okay she’s okay it’s a great relief.

  She put her arm through his and they went outside, back into the rain. She was still speaking—a flow of noise, of nonsense. He didn’t listen. Nobody else told Gull, he thought. Nobody else could have known.

  He waited for her silence.

  And then he wondered: What do I say? What is there to say? You open the door to a room, you expect to find everything as you left it, but something is altered, something has been taken away, you just can’t think what it is—

  She was looking at him, asking him something now. Well? Well? What happened?

  He could feel his own heart stop. His mouth was dry, unbearably so. It was the rough cutting edge of things, a serrated surface, an uneven slicing. You don’t need to say it, he thought. You don’t need it. Leave everything as it stands. Put up your hand and bring the whole goddam world to a halt and stop everything exactly now, exactly where it is now, with questions unasked and therefore unanswered.