Brainfire (12 page)

“Bertorelli's at one?” she said.

He felt a sudden indecision, some sense of purpose lacking; and he knew it came down to his own powerlessness, as if Richard's death had upon it some final imprimatur, an official seal, a solitary malign word:
suicide
. And that was how it was to be left.

“Bertorelli's,” he said. “At one.”

When he had hung up he knew she wouldn't be there on time; she was never anywhere on time. Unpunctuality was as natural to Sally as photosynthesis to a plant; and just as thoughtless too.

5.

It occurred to Zubro that of all London railroad stations Euston was the least pleasurable—something, of course, to do with the dirt, the grime, the droppings of pigeons; but more than that, as if he could feel pressing upon him a whole sense of district, of the miserable little streets that crisscrossed the area—the cheap hotels, the sleazy magazine shops, the drab warehouses. Sunlight, such as today's unseasonable brightness, bared the threads of the place even more so than usual. He paused in front of the Departures Board, looking at the strange names, the queer destinations. All around him people rushed to make connections and he thought: How oddly organized the English are—lives submitted to the dictates of timetables, of standing in orderly lines. The irony of this amused him: underlying the rush of these people, their apparent sense of purpose, there was something chaotic—buses that never arrived, trains that failed to come on time, cafeterias that served lukewarm milky tea. Even when they complained of their failing system, the English still maintained that odd sense of order: it was as if passion were alien to their nature. They made the most dignified drunks in the world.

He listened to the echo of an incomprehensible voice over the loudspeaker system.
The train now standing at Platform Two is the twelve-ten to Aberdeen, calling at Grantham, Doncaster, York, Darlington, Newcastle
.… The rest, mercifully, was lost to him—a babble of some distant thunder, the whistle of a train rolling down one of the local lines. He looked at his watch, then moved in the direction of the snack bar. He wore a black coat and carried a rolled umbrella. His suit was pinstriped, sedate, and he walked in a leisurely manner; and he considered the fact that one of the few things that distinguished him from the hustle around him was the measure of his pace. Otherwise, what else did he look like but some City type, some stockbroker, or solicitor, some chartered accountant whose weekends might be spent clipping rosebushes or trimming a privet hedge?

Outside the snack bar he paused. He saw Otto Kranz rushing toward him, the fat man reflected in the window. Zubro turned, began to walk back in the direction of the Departures Board.
The train now standing
, said the voice. A train with legs, Zubro thought: the peculiarities of the English language.
Edinburgh, Dundee, Arbroath, Montrose, Stonehaven, and Aberdeen
. He could sense Otto Kranz still hurrying, puffing, his fat cheeks exploding only to implode. Zubro liked this sense of the dance, of making it hard for Otto Kranz to catch up with him; it was some curious arrangement, a waltz they shared.

Zubro moved away from the board, went past the escalator that carried crowds into the underground system, and paused at a newsstand to buy a copy of
The Guardian
. Only then did Otto Kranz catch him. Out of breath, panting, his broad moon face blood-red, Kranz gave the impression of someone coming apart at every seam, of someone who has been put hastily, and temporarily, together. Buttons undone, coat flapping, necktie askew: why did Zubro allow Kranz to
disgust
him so?

They went out of the station together, crossing Euston Square. Kranz had his plump hand on Zubro's sleeve, drawing him toward a bench. The wood was covered with pigeon dirt. Rolling his
Guardian
, Zubro wiped the surface of the bench before finally sitting down. Kranz took a dirty handkerchief from his coat and mopped his forehead. It would be some time before he could find the wind to speak, Zubro thought. A flock of gray pigeons scattered overhead suddenly, startled by the outburst of a pneumatic drill nearby. Plump, heavy, they settled some distance away.

Kranz rolled the handkerchief into a ball in his fist. “I have some information for you,” he said.

Waiting, waiting, Zubro saw a crazy old woman crawling around amongst the pigeons, scattering bread crumbs, speaking to the birds:
My darlings, my darlings
.

“I have an item,” Kranz said. His massive face was dripping sweat.

“And?”

“I think it will maybe be of some interest.”

“And?”

Kranz paused, blew his nose, perused his own effluence a moment, as if it were the most interesting thing in all the world. Zubro preferred to look at the mad old woman. He wondered why Kranz, after all his years in London, had never completely mastered the English language.

“A man committed suicide in Moscow,” Kranz said.

“And?”

“It doesn't interest you, this fact?”

“Should it?” Zubro turned his face back to the fat man. The young American, of course. What next?

“You knew, naturally,” said Kranz.

Zubro shrugged. One did not give fat Otto any insight into one's own knowledge; that would have been an altogether different game. The pneumatic drill started up again. A machine gun.

“I never know,” Kranz said. “I tell you something. You look at me like I'm stupid or something.”

Zubro stared at his watch. He had a meeting at three. He tapped his rolled-up newspaper impatiently against his knee.

The fat man sat in a sullen silence a moment. The drill stopped. He licked his lips, which were wide and purple, reminding Zubro of two squashed grapes, and then he said, “Mr. Dubbs is very interested. Did you know that?”

Zubro said nothing but he felt a slight change in himself, a rise in temperature, the quickening of a pulse.

“Mr. Dubbs is putting out the word,” the fat man said.

“And?”

“And what? This doesn't interest you? A young American kills himself in Moscow and Mr. Dubbs begins to dig like a crazy person? This doesn't interest you?”

Zubro rubbed the tip of his nose. He thought of Dubbs a moment, trying to see connections, threads. There had been a suicide, a tragedy—but why was Dubbs intrigued by this? He looked at Otto with a lack of interest.

“He has been calling every group,” Kranz said, a note of some desperation in his voice. “All the night long, damn, calling here, calling there. And you tell me this doesn't interest you?”

“It doesn't interest me,” Zubro said. He took out his wallet, removed three pound notes, gave them to the fat man.

“This is a damn insult,” Kranz said.

“Think of it as charity,” Zubro said, and rose from the bench.

“Stick your charity up your arse,” Kranz said.

Zubro paused, looking down at the fat man. “I am glad to see that you are at last showing some mastery, however small, of colloquial English.”

He walked away from the bench, listening to Kranz mutter. The crazy lady was still talking with her pigeons. Zubro watched her a moment, then moved toward the taxi ranks.

6.

The meeting Zubro had to attend at the Embassy of the Soviet Union was being chaired by the Assistant Minister for Soviet Sports, Stepanek—who had just arrived from Moscow—which made it somehow important, of course, but his mind was still with Dubbs. Why would that little queer be nosing around with his questions about Richard Rayner? Why was that so important? And something else, something else was troubling him too—the name Rayner, which lay at the back of his mind in the manner of a frail spark. Rayner. Familiar, yet not. So many names—how could one keep track of everybody? And what was the link between Dubbs and a dead American?

He gazed at the Minister, who was embarked on a course of rhetoric concerning the progress of Soviet sport. Such words as
prestige
and
achievement
drifted around the room. Stepanek had a nervous, agitated manner, as if he were being bothered by imaginary flies around his head. Dubbs, Zubro thought. He was able to keep abreast of Dubbs most of the time because of his informants within the expatriate groups—all of whom were, anyhow, harmless and crazy. But why was Dubbs intrigued by a dead American diplomat?

Stepanek had paused in his speech to drink a glass of water. His hand shook visibly. Zubro wondered about the pressures involved in the Ministry of Sports; a matter of getting the best results, of course. At least it was tangible; at least there was a score at the end of the contest, an outcome, winners and losers. But there were other worlds wherein one might be less certain of the victors and the vanquished. My world, he thought. He looked at the faces around the table—the press attaché, the Second Secretary, a couple of clerks. How vacuously they hung on Stepanek's sentences! One would think sport the most important thing in the world.

“Our soccer team has made considerable progress in recent years,” Stepanek said. Zubro noticed a slick of water on the man's chin. “And, it goes without saying, the forthcoming tour is intended to demonstrate how … how far along this progress has been pushed.”

Soccer, Zubro thought. Nothing bored him more than the prospect of having to attend to the security arrangements surrounding a group of athletes. The hotel accommodations, the sexual escapades, the constant menace of defection. He was going to have headaches.

“And this soccer team is particularly special,” said Stepanek. “It is expected to win its games. Again, it goes without saying.”

Why say it? Zubro wondered.

“The first game will be here in England,” Stepanek was saying now. He paused, stared around the room, his gaze momentarily meeting Zubro's. Fear, Zubro thought—fear in those pale eyes. This soccer team of Stepanek's simply had to win: there was no other course.

Now Stepanek looked down at his hands and Zubro noticed for the first time the absence of the right index finger. “And the second game,” Stepanek said, “the second game will be the first encounter at international level between our country and the United States of America.”

There was a curious smirk from the press attaché. “You mean we're sending our soccer team to
America
?”

Sacrilege and disbelief, Zubro thought. He looked at the press attaché, a cousin of one Sememko of the Politburo. Nepotism was an unreliable narcotic but presumably the attaché thought he might live in its sweet fumes forever. “I didn't think the Americans knew what to do with a soccer ball,” he said.

“Their game has improved considerably,” said Stepanek.

“By importing foreign players?”

“In this instance, their team will consist entirely of native-born players,” Stepanek said.

But the press attaché, who was young, an upstart with dubious connections of blood, was not to be stalled. “I assume that we're not sending our
strongest
team over there?”

Stepanek reached for his water again. “At the express wish of Comrade Maksymovich, we are sending the strongest squad we can muster.”

Stepanek stood up and looked at Zubro, and Zubro was all at once conscious of undercurrents in the room, as if this was a facade, as if all this talk of soccer was a masquerade, a game of shadows and charades. The meeting finished but Stepanek indicated with a gesture of his hand that he wanted to detain Zubro a moment—something of a private nature. As the others left the room, the press attaché laughing to himself, Zubro found himself looking out into the street, watching a black taxi cruise past in the white afternoon. Rayner, he thought. Rayner and Dubbs—there was an association, something that lay on the tip of his tongue.

Stepanek came around the table, carrying a clutch of papers. A scent of some kind came from the man, a pungent cologne.

“Security arrangements for the squad are to be as tight as they can be made,” he said. “Again, this is the express wish of the First Secretary.”

Zubro did not question this. He glanced at Stepanek. Fear again, fear came out to touch him, more tangible than the cologne.

“You will make the necessary arrangements for a party of thirty,” Stepanek said. “Here. The list of the names.”

Zubro took the paper but did not look at it.

“Twenty players,” Stepanek said. “Two security agents. Four assistant trainers. The trainer himself. A doctor and a physiotherapist.”

Zubro had it: it came quickly to him. There was a young man called Rayner who worked over in Grosvenor Square—James? John? A young man whose field of activity might lie aligned with that of the precious Dubbs. Then the dead diplomat was a relation? And Dubbs—what was Dubbs digging for?

He looked at Stepanek. “You said thirty. You mentioned only twenty-nine, I think.”

“Ah, yes,” Stepanek said, turning away, moving as if he had suddenly remembered some other urgent business. “I forgot to mention the trainer's wife. An elderly lady, by all accounts, and quite infirm.”

In the doorway Stepanek stopped and looked across the room at Zubro. “Don't ask me why she's making this trip, Zubro. I don't know the answer anyhow.”

And then Stepanek was gone and Zubro was alone in the large silent room.

2

1.

Andreyev shivered in the cold night wind that seared the tarmac at Heathrow. Ahead of him, Katya pushed the wheelchair in which Mrs. Blum sat. He noticed how the old woman's white hair gleamed in the reflected light of the terminal building. He paused, somewhat in the manner of one who has left something behind on the plane; then he was conscious again of Oblinski at his back—Oblinski, the KGB official who had been at the Ussuri. He watches me, Andreyev thought. He does nothing but watch me. He shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his overcoat, his right hand fingering the slip of crumpled paper he had carried all the way from Moscow. Why couldn't he stop himself from touching it? It was irresistible, like a cavity into which you keep pushing your tongue. He folded his fingers around it. He looked in the direction of the terminal, feeling the wind again, the way his overcoat flapped.