Brainfire (16 page)

3

1.

A fresh morning, a March sun that had all the suspect vitality of a counterfeit coin newly minted; but somewhere there was spring, a sense of renewal. Of all the English seasons, Dubbs found spring the saddest. What else but rebirth could remind you so forcibly of the running down of your own seasons? He stepped out of the underground station in Chalk Farm, assailed at once by diesel fumes, the roar of hectic traffic, a kind of madness that suggested a headlong rush into various voids. He turned a corner, finding himself on a sleazy street of gray houses and small shops. On the opposite side of the street there was a bar called The Mother Goose, one of those brewery-owned horrors that spend half of their time trying to be discotheques. He shivered and went inside, smelling stale spilled beer, noticing an enormous jukebox standing silent in the corner. Grabowski, whose wardrobe seemingly consisted entirely of soiled raincoats, sat alone at the bar. He acknowledged Dubbs with a slight inclination of his hairless head.

“What will you have, Eric?” Dubbs said. He drew a bunch of coins from his coat.

Grabowski asked for a Vat 69 and a beer chaser. When the order was served, Grabowski threw the Scotch back quickly. Then, with a look of Slavic moodiness, he gazed into his beer glass.

“So,” Dubbs said, and smacked his lips, putting his own glass of Bell's down on the bar, “what brings me out to Chalk Farm on such a fine day, Eric?”

Grabowski lit a cigarette, a Woodbine. Dubbs remembered the circular tins of fifty that used to be so common in wartime.

“You've been busy, Dubbs, is what I hear,” Grabowski said. His English was flat, accents in all the most unlikely places.

“Never a dull moment, Eric,” said Dubbs.

“How I hear it is you've been asking around about a man, a dead man.”

“You do make me sound morbid,” Dubbs said. He stared at the deep-orange nicotine stains on Grabowski's fingers; an unusual pattern there, every finger covered with the stains.

“A dead man. An American. Is that true?”

“It might very well be,” and Dubbs tried to remember his dossier on Grabowski. A Russian of German descent, wasn't that it? Jumped from a trawler in the North Sea. It was somehow disappointing to see the hero so reduced, as if the magnificent flight to freedom and democracy had been undertaken for the sake of booze and Woodbines. I must shield myself, Dubbs thought, from the perils of my own cynicism.

“I have something,” Grabowski said. “Maybe we go over to a table.”

They carried their drinks to the corner table and sat. A pretty girl in uniform was laying out trays of food for the expected lunchtime crowd. Shepherd's pie and Scotch eggs.

Dubbs watched Grabowski a moment. “What do you have, Eric?”

Grabowski looked suspiciously around the empty bar. He clutched his pint of Watneys and drank. Beer slipped over his lips, down his chin. “You'll pay?” he asked.

“Well, old man, that's going to depend rather.”

Grabowski made a face. “I don't have to do this, see. I don't have to help you, Dubbs.”

“Of course you don't.” Dubbs began to rise, but Grabowski, with some measure of desperation that, Dubbs thought, was in direct proportion to his need for beer money, clutched at Dubbs's coat sleeve.

“I have an item. Twenty-five quid.”

“That's somewhat steep,” said Dubbs.

“Hear what I have to say first.”

Dubbs shrugged. Grabowski emptied his glass with a loud
glugg
-ing sound and then gazed into the emptiness of it with a disgruntled look.

“Okay. Listen. Your place is wired.”

“My place is
what
?”

“You heard me, Dubbs. Wired. Tapped.”

“How do you know this?”

Grabowski mysteriously tapped the side of his nose. “Hey, Dubbs, what do you want for your money? That I tell you my sources?”

“It helps,” said Dubbs.

“Let me put it so you understand. You started to ask some questions. Well, frankly, you don't know how to be discreet. A certain party approached … some friends of mine. They are electronical wizards, see?”

Dubbs nodded. “Why would anybody want to bug my place?”

“I'm not the oracle, Dubbs. I only tell you what I know. You go around asking about this American, well, this interests a certain party and so a job is subcontracted. Are you following me?”

“You have a name for this certain party?”

“Are you stupid, Dubbs? I say a certain party and it means only the one thing.”

Dubbs was silent a moment. Then he said, “I understand we're talking about the Embassy of the USSR?”

Grabowski fiddled with his empty glass; a conspicuous gesture.

“How many devices, do you know?”

“I understand three,” Grabowski said. “My friends, the electronical wizards, they are not exactly pleased to be working for this certain party on any kind of basis. They don't do their
best
work, do you follow?”

“I'll find them, is that what you're saying?”

Grabowski got up, hands in the pockets of his soiled coat. Dubbs wondered how one could accumulate so many disparate stains, unless you were lying under a leaky car, devouring a hamburger smothered in tomato sauce, and simultaneously dropping cigarette ash all over yourself.

“I'm going to the lavatory now,” Grabowski said.

“I'll accompany you.” Dubbs got up, feeling in an inner pocket for his wallet. He followed Grabowski through into a cavernous room of stained urinals. There was the sound of water dripping from a cistern somewhere.

“Your money,” Dubbs said.

“Very fine,” Grabowski said. “Can I buy you a drink?”

“I think not,” Dubbs said. “Some other time.”

2.

Dubbs met Rayner in the late afternoon in Marylebone High Street. Dubbs carried a string bag that contained a box of parrot food, two onions, and a piece of porterhouse steak already leaking blood through its paper wrapping. They went inside a Salisbury's supermarket, where Dubbs purchased a couple of green apples, which he slung inside the bag. Then they walked in silence for a while, cutting down a side street away from the noise of traffic. Eventually, in a small square area between blocks of flats, they came to a park—a couple of spindly trees, kids on a slide, a sandpile, mothers looking lonely on benches. They sat down on a bench and Dubbs surveyed the park disapprovingly.

“A veritable oasis,” he said. “Courtesy of some benign municipal power. I can just
picture
some idiotic clerk putting his signature to a requisition.
A park? Good Lord, what do they need a park for
? We are overrun with civil servants, my dear. They have bad teeth, poor eyesight, and they take their vacations, under sufferance, in such places as Torquay and Torremolinos. They have white sticks for legs and they suffer dreadfully in the hot sun. Ah, well.”

Dubbs bit into an apple, his jaw revolving. He watched a gang of kids come tumbling down the slide. The easy spring of youth, he thought. Bravery and broken bones. Then he turned to look quickly at Rayner.

“I was telling you about the eavesdropping devices,” he said. “The first was under the sink. Really, an eavesdropping device in the
kitchen
? The second was more stupid—inside a clock that offers the listener Westminster chimes on the quarter hour. The third, at least, was in my bedroom. Not that I indulge in any great activity in that particular room, John—but it was a better shot than the others.”

“The Russians?” Rayner asked.

“As I understand it,” said Dubbs, putting the core of his green apple back inside the string bag. He surveyed the bloodied package of meat with some distaste. “The Russians, of course. Which presents us with something of an enigma, my dear. The Russians who savaged you last night—”

“It was hardly that,” Rayner said.

“In my book, John, all violence is savage.” Dubbs looked brightly toward the sandpile, where a worried mother was removing fistfuls of municipal sand from the open mouth of her infant. “We must assume, I think, that our interest in Richard has intrigued the people at the Embassy. Otherwise, why go to the trouble of tapping my homestead? Why bother with sending their shadows after you? What, one might ask, are they concerned about?”

Dubbs was silent, taking a Sobranie from a box, lighting it. Rayner undid the buttons of his coat in the manner of one taking a calculated risk with the weather.

“Now why would they be so interested in knowing about Richard?” Dubbs said, more to himself than to Rayner. “The man killed himself—are they afraid we might find out something to the contrary?”

“Like what?”

“There's the rub, laddie,” Dubbs said. “Like what exactly.”

Dubbs gathered up his string bag and began to walk. Rayner followed him.

“Consider what we've got, and God knows it's little enough,” Dubbs said. “Your brother jumped from a window. Eyewitness, your brother's wife. A perfect suicide. I trust this isn't painful, my dear? The thing's clear-cut, obvious, no crime to be solved. Because you aren't
exactly
convinced by the situation, we do a little probing, a word here, a question there. And my people are such awful gossips—and frankly some of them are quite untrustworthy—that word gets back to the Russians. Next thing, they're after us. Why? Because there's something we're not supposed to find out? Or because my dear friend Mr. Zubro is himself perplexed?”

“Zubro?”

“Ah, John,” Dubbs said. “We work in a hall of mirrors. A Zubro here, a Zubro there. You need to cut your eyeteeth on Friend Zubro, John. He has all the externals of an Englishman, and all the curiosity of a Cheshire cat. One day you must meet Anatoly. To his credit, he knows that the game has its rules.”

“And he's behind the bugging, the surveillance?”

Dubbs nodded. “Nobody else, John.”

They left the park and walked back in the direction of Marylebone High Street. A cloud pattern passed, like the slender hand of a conjurer, across the March sun.

“What next?” Rayner asked.

Dubbs, shrugging, switched his string bag from one hand to the other. “I suggest you check your own flat for foreign objects. And perhaps even this gal's place in Belsize Park. How can she
stand
it over there?” Dubbs wrinkled his nose, as if a particularly noxious stench had passed just in front of him. They paused at a traffic signal. Cabs and buses roared past: destination hell, Dubbs thought. He glanced at Rayner—young, still wet behind the ears, and out of his depth in the perplexities of the game. What could one do but lend a helping hand when it was needed? Passing that curve of forty-five on life's wretched graph, Dubbs thought, perhaps you started to see something of your former self in younger men. Besides, Rayner didn't look especially well, healthy: he had developed an uncomfortable expression, a look that one might see on the faces of those who expected something to happen from behind. Jumpy, nervy, a chalky pallor to the skin. Young men, Dubbs thought, ought to appear
vital
. He reached out, touching Rayner on the elbow.

“Can I invite you for tea?”

Rayner hesitated before declining. “My own embassy beckons, Dubbs. But thanks. Thanks for everything.”

Dubbs clapped him lightly on the shoulder. “Keep in touch,” he said. He watched Rayner turn and lose himself in the throng that moved along the pavement. There were some thoughts Dubbs did not like to entertain—such as those that concerned his own sexuality. For a long time now, ever since a prim little suburban girl called Rita, domiciled in the redbrick jungle of Harrow, had rebuffed his advances, spurned his offer of marriage and respectability, he had considered himself one of those who deserve to be called asexual. But there were times, times in the depths of night, or on rainy empty mornings, when he wondered if he had mislabeled himself.

Ah, well, he thought. And went off in search of a bus.

3.

The man sat in the corridor, reading, Andreyev noticed, a copy of the
Reader's Digest
, whose front cover had the provocative question “
What Are the Reds Up to in Ethiopia
?” He glanced up from the magazine as Andreyev passed in the direction of his room. Andreyev unlocked his door and stepped inside the room, going to the window. Late afternoon: a hazy view of an expanse of park, a small body of water, a kite being flown haphazardly in the failing sunlight. London, he thought. Freedom. And all it would take was some simple cunning, some extra surge of courage. He looked at the bedside telephone. Pointless. The line would be listened to—if not by Oblinski then by one of the others, perhaps even directly patched into the Embassy itself.

He sat down at the window, opening a copy of the afternoon edition of
The Evening Standard
. On the inside back page there was a photograph of the Soviet team at practice, together with some prediction of victory by the English team manager in Saturday's game. Saturday, Andreyev thought. He would have to move before Saturday because after that—after that he wasn't sure of anything, if the entourage was going back to Russia or traveling elsewhere. He put the newspaper down and stared from the window. When? When would there be the chance? When would there be an opening in this damned wall? He considered the guard in the corridor, flipping the pages of a magazine whose language he presumably couldn't understand anyhow. Watching, waiting. And then he thought of Mrs. Blum, lying in her room, dreaming of her impossible Palestine, concocting her own Jerusalem from snapshots and letters. What wouldn't he give to have her power—even for a moment?

That power: he didn't want to linger on the memory of it, the way she had slipped, with the efficiency of a surgical device, into his mind, that sense of something sharp touching the furthest recesses of brain, the distant corners of memory, the plunder, the violation, the intrusion—as if what had taken place were a painful defilement of his identity. No, he didn't want to remember the dark humiliation he had felt, brain cells burning, memories going off like brilliant pinwheels, the sure and terrible knowledge that had she so chosen, she could have killed him—