Brainfire (15 page)

“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 revelation.

“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.

“There was pain,” she said. “I'm sorry for that.”

Still, he said nothing.

“I wish you well, Andreyev,” she said. “I hope it works for you.”

He moved very slightly. His hands touched the edge of the bed. London, she thought. Why had they come to London? Now she remembered, as if through a haze, the young men on the plane.

“Please,” Andreyev said. His voice was low, a whisper, hoarse. “I told you I didn't know—why did you have to inflict me with …”

She raised one hand slowly, pressing it upon Andreyev's wrist. This gift, she thought: could a thing in itself be evil? She looked up into the man's eyes. A man without knowledge of any future save that of his own complete desperation. What can
he
tell me? She watched him pull his hand away, as if from a hot iron.

“You didn't have to—” His sentence faded. He pressed the palms of his hands against the sides of his head. He sat on the edge of the mattress now, limp, exhausted, beaten. The last privacy, she thought, is no privacy at all. She wanted badly to sleep.

“I had to know, Andreyev, if you were telling me the truth.”

He said something that she barely heard. She was thinking of Rayner, a dream of broken glass, of dying. If she felt some distant anger now it was directed less at those around her than at herself: she had become the object of her own rage. But rage took strength, and she had none. Her heart was sluggish, each slow beat suggesting the onslaught of pain. She felt Andreyev rise. His words came from a distance.
You mustn't tell anyone. Promise me that
.

When she opened her eyes he had gone from the room. She stared at the dark window, where Andreyev had untidily drawn the draperies back. Outside, in the distance, there was a neon light pulsing. Tiny reflections, like electrified fish, flashed on and off upon the black glass.

6.

It was after midnight when Rayner stepped out of the house in Belsize Park. He paused at the bottom of the steps and turned up the collar of his raincoat. The wind had dragged in its turbulent wake a chilly rain. Sally, he thought. There ought to be a book called
Uses and Abuses of Sex
. His lovemaking, if you could call it that, had been less for her than for himself—an act of anxiety, of self-gratification, a weirdly empty satisfaction. Consider something impossible, he thought: like performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on yourself. It had been as meaningless as that. Quick and cold. And she had known she was being used. Lying in the dark, smoking a cigarette, she had said, “There's something to be said for masturbation, Rayner.” What could he do? Apologize? Rayner, he thought, you have to pull yourself together. You have to apply epoxy to the dismembered parts of yourself—because it's a long fucking way down.

He stared at the streetlamps and at how the branches of wintry trees beat madly against the blurry lights. He was tempted to go back inside and say he was sorry, but sometimes words were just things you fumbled with. Maybe she understood anyhow. You lose somebody you have loved all your life: there had to be a temporary loosening of some essential screw in the old head. Brave fronts and stiff upper lips weren't his style. He felt the wind in his hair and he shivered. He realized that what he really wanted was a form of revenge—the problem being that he had no object in mind.

He crossed the street, thinking of heading down to Swiss Cottage, or to Finchley Road, where he might find a cab. But halfway across he paused, conscious of some faint movement behind—and he remembered the noise on the stairs, the shadow passing the light. Gull: would good old George go to all that trouble? Would George have a specialist somewhere in pressing ears to doors? Not now, surely; after all, Gull had brought it out into the open. So why would he continue surveillance if Rayner knew about it?

He bent down, pretending to tie a lace, wishing that his shoes were not of the slip-on kind. Who? he wondered. He heard the parting of shrubbery, a damp stick breaking slowly, and he turned around to see a man moving quickly against the low white wall that surrounded Sally's house. Along the street a little way the headlights of a car were turned on. The man was going in that direction. Rayner moved after him, walking quickly, while the car edged forward. The man, who wore an old-fashioned soft hat low on his forehead, swung around to look at Rayner. The horn of the car was sounded once. Rayner moved faster. The man, tugging on his hat, holding it down against the ferocious wind, went to the edge of the sidewalk as if he needed to remind the driver of the car where he was, but Rayner caught him just as the car pulled up at the curb. The man was middle-aged, flabby, ghostly in the streetlamps. The door of the car swung open, striking Rayner hard in the thighs. Momentarily he loosened his grip on the man. The hat was tugged away, whipped by the wind. Stupid, stupid, stupid, Rayner thought, rubbing his thighs through the folds of his coat. The hatless man was climbing into the car, exchanging some hurried phrase with the driver, then swinging the door again so that it hammered into Rayner's groin. He slipped to the wet pavement, watching the car—a black Saab of uncertain vintage—pull away from the side. Ah, fuck, Rayner thought, squatting there absurdly on his knees and feeling both dampness and pain spread through him. Turning, he watched the car go; and, as if in some surreal comic strip, he noticed the windblown hat dancing down the street over branches, lamps, and telephone wires, and finally vanishing somewhere above the rooftops of Belsize Park like a misdirected homing pigeon.

He got to his feet, still rubbing his thighs and groin. Goons, he thought. He limped to the nearest wall and leaned against it, struggling for his breath. Goons, nighthawks, the clandestine brigade who shared this propensity for darkness with cockroaches, wood lice, and other furtive pests. But they hadn't come from George Gull: he was sure of that. Unless, of course, George had started to use Russian-speaking shitheads to do his dirty work for him.