Brainfire (18 page)

“What the hell are you fumbling for, anyway?” she asked. She was standing over him, her wineglass tilted to one side, red drops slicking onto the mattress, where they spread like menstrual stains.

“I'll tell you when I find it,” he said. “Why don't you go and sit in Mr. Wellington's lap meantime, okay?”

He heard her go out of the room and slam the door. He sat motionless for a while in silence. Then the outer door was shut. After a while, Sally came back into the bedroom. She watched him, her back to the wall, her wineglass held at the same precarious angle.

“He's gone,” she said. “I sent him away.”

“Bully for you, dahling.”

“All right,” she said. “Let's clear the air.”

“Let's,” he said.

“Fidelity isn't my stock-in-trade, Rayner. And I don't exactly enjoy being made to feel that I'm doing something behind your back. Because I'm not. I sent Mark away because I wanted to speak to you.”

“Speak, speak,” he said.

“I like him. All right? I like lots of men. I simply refuse to be tied down like some bloody slave—”

Rayner stood up, watching her. “How many, Sally? How many?”

“Oh, Christ, don't be so childish. I don't keep a scorecard beside my bed. I don't keep a diary.”

The
Guinness Book of World Records
, he thought. All the old lovers, he realized, were not so old after all. They were still nibbling at the same bait. Maybe she kept a regular reserve team, men she could call on when the first selections were playing elsewhere.

“Forget it,” he said. “It doesn't matter.”

“Of course it matters. I simply think you're reacting foolishly, that's all. You come in here, you start rummaging around—what the hell
are
you looking for anyway?”

“Hidden lovers,” he said. “I'm interested in where you keep them, kid.”

“Why don't you check inside the oven? Or look in the pantry? Perhaps you should start with the freezer compartment of the fridge.”

She went out of the bedroom. He could hear her cross the living-room floor: angry footsteps. Mad little noises. It calls for that activity known as “being realistic,” Rayner thought. Facing facts squarely. She screws around. Why didn't you suspect it before? Even now, now when you know, does it matter? Ah, shit.
Why does it matter
?

He went into the sitting room. He looked at her for a time. She was lighting a cigarette with one hand, pouring more wine with the other. On the table, beside an unlit candle, he saw rolling papers, charred tapers, a plastic bag of dope. Stoned, he thought. What the hell.

“If it means anything, I'm sorry,” he said.

She looked vacantly at him.

“I came here because I have reason to believe that somebody has planted bugs in your flat.”

“Bugs? Here?”

“I'll look around, then I'll leave. Okay?”

“Bugs—why here?” she asked.

“It's a long story, Sally.”

She put her wineglass down; she laughed, a rather disjointed sound. “Then you
are
a spook!”

He said nothing. He continued his search. When he found the devices they were textbook locations. Under the table, applied with some light putty; beneath the sofa; inside a lacquered Oriental box. They were powerful, high-frequency gizmos.

“Those little things?” she asked.

“Yeah. Those little things,” he said.

“But you can't say any more, correct?”

“You guessed it.”

He put them in his pocket and looked at her. For a moment he wished he could hear the tapes that would have been made from the gadgets. Lover after lover after lover, the creak of the sofa, the sound of her orgasmic squeals. What was he left with now?
Being realistic
, he thought. Or walking out of the mess. Where did this strange morality come from? he wondered. You run into a free spirit and all you can do is back off and pout like some deprived kid on an unhappy Christmas.

“Bugs,” she said. She shook her head. “Something to do with your brother?”

Rayner shrugged. He could still feel, like a stain left behind in permanent ink, the presence of the famous hack. Did she screw all her authors? Was it written into the contract? A sexual advance? She turned away, filling her glass again, her movements unsteady. Deeper than I ever believed, Rayner thought. Otherwise—why the hurt that wouldn't evaporate?

“So—how do you plan to spend your evening?” he asked.

The answer was a crunch. “I'm going over to Mark's,” she said.

Rayner hesitated a second before moving toward the door. What was left to say? He felt an absence inside him, a dearth of volition: more simply, he thought, something was crumpling.

“Enjoy,” he said, opening the door, stepping onto the landing, seeing the dim light at the foot of the stairs. He closed the door; as he did so he heard her wineglass break. Put your feelings in a rucksack, he thought, then dump it. Dump it.

5.

Andreyev woke in the dark, unaware of time, of how many hours had passed since he had turned away from Katya to sleep—now, reaching across the bedsheets, his hand collided with her naked shoulder. But she didn't move. Faintly, in outline, he could make out her face, the open mouth, the closed eyelids. He withdrew his hand and lay perfectly still, thinking not now of Stefanoff's arrest, or of his own immediate predicament, but of what had taken place between himself and the sleeping woman—as if these images were maps of some uncharted region of himself. His quick excitement, his brief elation followed by a sense of his own disgust. Even afterward, she had pressed herself against him, trying to arouse him with her hands and mouth, but all he had experienced then was distance from her, from himself: a tangle of shadows in a dark bedroom, nothing more. Slowly, he sat up. What else could he have done? He couldn't have turned her away, refused her, because he couldn't have afforded to have that viciousness come back, like some remorseless pendulum, against him. Lovemaking. It had bought him time at a rather expensive rate of exchange. It had won him some hours of her silence. She might have gone to Oblinski and said,
He saw Stefanoff in Moscow
—

Quietly he pushed the white bedsheet away from his body. He stood upright, conscious of his own pale flesh as he fumbled for his clothes. The keys and coins in his pants rattled noisily. His feet became entangled in Katya's discarded clothing: the nylon underwear, a lavender slip, the crumpled floral dress. He dressed quickly, silently, crossing the room to the window as he fumbled with his shirt buttons. There was no moon in the city sky. The expanse of park was a dark hollow etched in the night. A starless dark, offering at the very least shadows, places in which to hide. He put his hand in his pocket and, as if it were a rabbit's paw to be stroked for luck, rubbed the piece of paper.

Katya moaned in her sleep, turning to face the wall. Please God, he thought. Don't let her wake. He took his jacket from the back of the chair, struggled into it, then went to the door, conscious of his shoelaces flapping untidily at his feet.
Don't wake, Katya. Sleep. Sleep on
. At the door his fingers curled around the handle; he paused. The man in the chair by the elevator. This is insanity, he thought. You won't get anywhere like this. Where is the logical plan? the precise strategy? the feasible scheme? Instead, you succumb finally to desperation and panic. The need simply to run. How far do you expect to get, Victor? How far?

He opened the door a little way. The corridor was lit badly—a few weak bulbs covered with clam-shaped shades. The man was still holding the
Reader's Digest
, his head tilted sleepily to one side. Andreyev peered through the slit, sweating, exhausted even before he had begun. The man moved his head in the manner of one shaking fatigue away. For a time Andreyev didn't move. Katya turned restlessly on the bed. It comes down to terror, Andreyev thought—to a place that is miles removed from your neat little world of science, your place of scales and balances and charts. He watched the man take out a briar pipe and stuff the bowl with tobacco. The elevator door opened and a couple, walking arm in arm, stepped out and moved off in the opposite direction from Andreyev's room. Move, he thought. Act. But he remained still, clutching the edge of the door, watching the couple disappear, watching the man labor with the pipe, a flurry of matches struck and spent. The man moved his chair a couple of inches, as if he were trying to get out of a draft.

Andreyev waited. Waiting like this, he thought, stuck between Katya and the jailer. How do you solve this? Where are the equations? the formulae? He looked across the darkened room at the indeterminate shape of Katya. How much longer would she sleep? How soon would it be before she reached out for him and found an absence? Do it, he thought. Walk out. Walk out and away. He listened to the noise of the elevator falling in the shaft. He opened the door a little way farther. Then it was as if it mattered no longer, life or death, escape or entrapment; it was as if these opposites had met and merged and there was no difference between them.

“Andreyev?”

When he heard her voice he went out into the corridor.

“Andreyev?”

He pulled the door quietly behind him. The man in the chair looked up from his magazine. Andreyev hesitated. It's not too late, he thought, it's not too late to turn and go back inside the room and forget everything and live the rest of your life with the knowledge that your own nerve let you down and that you were a coward—

The man closed his magazine and got up from the chair and, as if he was stunned by Andreyev's sudden appearance, stood motionless awhile; from behind the closed door Andreyev could hear Katya calling his name in a series of worried repetitions. No, he thought. How could he go back inside the room,
that
room? He stared at the man by the elevator, who had begun, at last, to move toward him. The other way, Andreyev thought: where does the corridor lead? He turned, listening to the man call after him, “
Domareski? Where do you think you're going
?”

Then he was walking, hurrying, his heart hammering and his muscles weak, hurrying, expecting the man to shoot him in the back. The corridor twisted at a right angle. When he turned the corner, Andreyev ran. He passed closed doors, an elevator shaft with a sign that read “O
UT OF
O
RDER
.” Then there was a door that opened onto a flight of concrete steps. He rushed through it. His feet echoed on the steps, millions of small fading repetitions. Hurry hurry hurry. He heard the door slam somewhere above him as he went down and then the name was being called again, the dead man's name, but he didn't stop, he couldn't stop and go back now. “
Domareski! Domareski! Stop where you are!
” Katya, Andreyev thought—if she picked up the telephone in time the hotel could be sealed and then there would be no way out. Move, he thought. Don't look back.

How many stairs? How many flights? The man was running above him, clattering over the concrete.
Seventh Floor
. He felt weak again, weak and used, urging wasted muscles into action. He was sweating, damp, his white shirt discolored. But nothing mattered except for getting out, finding a call box, unrolling the precious piece of paper and getting through to the man who would help, the man Stefanoff swore by, but poor Stefanoff—what was he suffering now? Torture, deprivation, the labor camp.

The man was still shouting, still coming down after him. Andreyev paused, stood in motionless indecision. The door ahead of him—or the stairs down? He didn't think now; there was no time for analysis, ratiocination, all the mental tools he had used for so long. He shoved through the door, finding himself in another corridor.
Third Floor
. Had he run this far? He saw an elevator ahead, saw the door slam shut, the numbers light and change on the panel above. But the elevator was the worst kind of trap. He ran along the corridor, passing the elevator door, passing a startled housemaid who was coming out of a room with a silver tray. I could throw myself on her, Andreyev thought. The quality of mercy. Help me.

He rushed past the woman, turned as the corridor twisted at another severe right angle, found his way back to a flight of stairs where a sign read “F
IRE
E
SCAPE
.” Down, he thought. There's no other way. Down and down and down. Still he was being pursued by footsteps, massive ringing footsteps that seemed to him like monstrous nails being driven into a hardwood box. And then there were no more stairs.

No more stairs.

He went through a swinging doorway and saw, to his horror, that he was in the lounge of the hotel. Two desk clerks watched him. A woman in a feathery hat, her feet surrounded by luggage and trunks, glanced distastefully at him. A man in a tweed suit, sipping a Bloody Mary, raised his face from a copy of
The Times
. Slow, Andreyev thought. Slow. You just pass the desk slowly.

He heard the swing door open and close at his back.

What do I look like? he wondered. A madman in a white shirt, laces flapping; someone on the edge of coming undone? He crossed the lounge.

Oblinski was coming out of the cocktail bar as if he anticipated the sight of Andreyev. He was smiling. “Domareski,” he said. The word was quiet, subdued, as if what Oblinski wanted more than anything else was to convince the various spectators that they were witnessing a lunatic. A sick man. You have to have patience.

Ahead, Andreyev saw the glass revolving doors that led to the street. One final rush, he thought. One last dash through the door—and outside there's darkness, shadows, blind streets. Oblinski was still smiling, walking in an oblique angle to cut him off from the doorway. The other man, panting audibly, was at his back. Andreyev paused and then, lowering his head in the fashion of a sprinter, raced toward the revolving door. Oblinski moved more quickly now, trying at the last moment to cut him off—but he was through the door and out into the street and running.