Brainfire (19 page)

Running and running.

He could hear Oblinski calling from behind: “
Domareski! Domareski!
” Andreyev turned a corner, found himself in a dark alley that ran behind the hotel. Ahead, there was a narrow courtyard filled with garbage cans. He crossed it, hoping with a kind of forlorn pessimism that he hadn't boxed himself in. There was a low brick wall and another alley, darker than before. He wiped his forehead with his shirt sleeve, barely feeling the sting of the cold March night around him. Now, beyond the alley, there were strange little streets with closed and shuttered shops—lonely streets that might only have been traveled along by the hunted, the desperate, the despairing. He stopped and took the piece of paper out of his pocket, smoothing it in the pale glow of a shopwindow: absurd soft toys—stuffed bears, pandas, giraffes—were frozen in glass-eyed malignance, heaped in bundles or hanging from colored wires. A telephone number, an address. He put the piece of paper back in his pocket and dragged himself farther along the street where, on the corner, there was a bar. There would be a phone inside, perhaps—but by the same token he could be trapped in such a place if they tracked him there. No, he wouldn't go inside the bar. How could he? He continued to run until he had no strength left. He had to sit down somewhere. A park, a bench, some miserable patch of green. He found himself moving beneath trees now, disturbing two lovers on a bench—a man and a woman in thick winter coats, fumbling at one another with gloved hands. They stared at him as he slipped past. Like a ghost, he thought, like some terrible specter. When he could go no farther he lay on the grass. Flat on his back, arms spread, he gazed up at the starless night sky: a sheet of unbroken blackness that promised nothing and revealed even less.

A little luck, he thought. Just a little more luck.

6.

Ineptitude was to Zubro as a ravenous moth to the wardrobe of a man of high fashion: an irritant whose existence was a matter of some grief. It was bad enough, he thought, that Rayner should discover his surveillance; but what was worse was the very idea of Ernest Dubbs finding and destroying the devices in his flat—for Zubro did not like the idea of Dubbs winning even a minor victory over him. And now this—this dreadful shambles, this calamity. How was it going to look in the thick headlines of those awful London newspapers? “
Red Physician Seeks Asylum in Dramatic Nighttime Escape
.” Red, Zubro thought. The color of his own anger.

He did not know exactly what to say to Oblinski, who, pacing up and down his hotel room like a man on fire, was unsuccessfully trying to work off his rage. A little calm, Zubro thought, goes a long way. He ran an index finger along the sharp crease of his pants and watched Oblinski stop by the window. There were times when words were as useless as damp fuel. Such as now, Zubro thought. One could, of course, ignore the fact that the surveillance of Dubbs and Rayner had turned nothing up. After all, he had acted only out of that curiosity of professional conscientiousness—but the flight of the physician: it was quite another kettle of fish, as the English were so fond of saying. “
Commie Doctor Makes Dash for Freedom.
” Perhaps one could hope for something more sedate from
The Times
.

He silently watched Oblinski, who was leaning against the dark pane of glass and banging one hand into the other. It did seem to Zubro that the KGB official was overreacting—defections were always possibilities. One learned to live with them. At the least, another physician could be brought from the Soviet Union; at the very worst, the soccer tour could be canceled. But why should Oblinski be so overwrought?

Zubro rose from his armchair and moved to the window. He cleared his throat, lightly rubbing his lower lip with a handkerchief.

“How close is he to the woman?”

Oblinski shrugged. “He isn't close to anybody—”

Zubro stepped out into the corridor. He walked to the door of the woman's room and knocked. Inside, she was standing by the bed—dressed, he noticed, in a maroon dressing gown she might have purchased that very day at Marks & Spencer. Seduced, he thought, by the consumer nightmare. He didn't like the look of the woman—a sharpness of feature, a face of potential cruelty, the kind of person who, in her late middle years, would embrace the philosophy of martyrdom.

He observed her awhile, thinking: If all this is a charade, then what the hell does it amount to? She had her hands in her pockets. A little delicacy, he thought. A certain tact. She might have fancied herself to be in love with the errant physician, after all. And love, Zubro understood, was what made the world go round.

“I understand that you and Domareski were … intimate?”

She said nothing. It was a mean mouth; he couldn't imagine kissing it. Perhaps poor Domareski had felt the same way; perhaps it wasn't anything so profound as a defection, but simply a rather desperate effort to get away from the clutches of this ax of a woman.

“You were in bed in his room when he …”

She nodded her head.

Zubro walked up and down the room. He noticed various boxes of clothing, stuffed in bags that carried the labels of Oxford Street stores. C & A Modes. Bourne & Hollingsworth. Selfridges. Doing the town, he thought. A little foreign exchange had burned the proverbial holes in her pockets.

“Why do you think he ran?”

The woman said nothing. She took her hands from her dressing gown and gazed at them. He repeated his question.

“I don't know the answer,” she said. “Why did he run? Where did he run to? I've already told Oblinski what I know.”

“Tell me again,” Zubro said.

She mumbled in a voice so low he had to concentrate to hear it. Shocked, poor thing. Her lover upped and vanished. “
Red Medic Seeks Asylum.
” He closed his eyes, inclined his head, listened. They had made love, then they had slept, and when she had awakened he was leaving the room … she had called, but he hadn't answered. Silence. Zubro watched her sit on the bed, her knees jammed somewhat primly together. A virginal gesture, he thought.

“It doesn't surprise me,” she said suddenly.

“No? You expected it?” Zubro watched the thin face, the movement of some faint contortion cross the tight surface. What the hell is going on anyhow? They send a physician, someone
suspect
, a security basket case—and now this woman says she isn't surprised. It would make sense if, say, there was a
reason
for Domareski to defect, part of a scheme to plant him in the United Kingdom—but why was everybody so damned upset now that he had managed to get away? Twists and turns, Zubro thought rather bitterly; somebody should have told him. Somebody should have told him the truth. After all, didn't he
need
to know?

“I had the feeling he was up to something,” she said quietly.

“Why?”

“Well, he was behaving strangely—”

“Like how?”

Now she appeared embarrassed. “We hadn't been lovers for a long time … and I was a little surprised when he became so passionate—”

Ah, Zubro thought. The worm turns. The ordinary little physician becomes a sexual fiend. “Is that all?” he asked.

“That—and the fact he visited Stefanoff before we left Moscow.”

Zubro sat upright in his chair. There was a change in him now, a rise in his temperature. He felt a faint film of sweat across his forehead. There was a sudden pulse at the side of his skull. Stefanoff, he thought.

“
Alexei
Stefanoff?” Zubro asked.

The woman nodded slowly. “I told him he shouldn't associate with dissidents like Stefanoff—”

Zubro got to his feet. “Why did he go to see Stefanoff?”

“I don't know.”

“Didn't he understand the risk?”

“I don't know—”

Stefanoff, Zubro thought, and smiled to himself: ah, there were still those moments of sheer pleasure in which suddenly you could see the shape of the game board. It was a time in which clouds, those same damned clouds that had hung all day long, cleared as if by divine intervention. Stefanoff: of course. He rubbed his hands together. How could it be so easy?

He went to the door, turning once to say he was glad of her help, then walked down the corridor to the elevator, pressed the call button, and waited with an impatience he could hardly restrain.

7.

Ernest Dubbs went down the steps to his basement flat, unlocked the door, and stepped inside the darkened room—but he was too late to answer the telephone. He fumbled across the floor and reached the receiver just as the ringing stopped. Damn, he thought. He turned on a lamp, opened a box of parrot food, and stuffed some through the bars of the cage in which the dreaded Rasputin sat, eyeing Dubbs with profound avian contempt. Dubbs, though, was rather fond of his parrot, a bad-tempered old thing who had only ever been able to master the phrase “Piss off.”

He opened the kitchen door, surveyed the mess, lamented the impossibility of finding a reliable charlady, then shut the door again as if the sight were too much to behold. He listened to the parrot knock its beak against a tiny mirror—deluded, poor old bastard, imagines it has company, Dubbs thought—then he lay down on the sofa and closed his eyes.

He belched slightly. The parrot fluttered. A single feather, falling from a wing, floated to the rug. He thought of Anatoly Zubro a moment. A worried man, no doubt—going to all the trouble of wiring an apartment and sending his men around after young John Rayner. The problem, Dubbs thought, lay in the fact that people like Zubro couldn't believe the Cold War wasn't quite the permafrost affair it had once been. Now you had a rather hapless
detente;
and the war boiled down to a series of rather pathetic skirmishes. But Anatoly, dodging around the back streets of London, planting his bugs, sending his thugs off on fruitless errands—well, Anatoly could only be disappointed by the politics of the time. They had deprived him of his function, in a manner of speaking. The pulse of things was weaker nowadays, and far less interesting when you managed to find it.

The mysteries, too, weren't quite the fun things they had been once. I wax boringly nostalgic, Dubbs thought, scolding himself. What were the old days anyhow but a bunch of cloak-and-dagger nonsense? The tinderbox of Berlin. Corpses in frogmen suits washed up in harbors where Russian subs had lately been anchored. He turned on his side, feeling fatigued. The only mystery now was that of Richard Rayner—

His telephone rang. He picked it up and said his number.

There was a brief silence at the other end.

“Am I speaking with Mr. Rasputin?”

Dubbs swung around on the sofa. Dear God, he thought. How long since I heard that form of address?

“Who wants to know?” he said quietly.

“We are mutual friends of Stefanoff, yes?”

Dubbs watched the parrot cling fiercely to the bars of the cage. Stefanoff. Dear old Stefanoff.

“Mutual friends, of course,” Dubbs said. “Have we met?”

“No. My name is Andreyev. Victor Andreyev.”

Dubbs curled the telephone cord around his wrist. “How can I help?”

A further silence. A truck, something heavy, could be heard roaring over the line.

“It is essential that I see you, Mr. Rasputin.”

“Did Stefanoff tell you how?”

“He gave me the information.”

“Very well,” said Dubbs. “When will you be arriving?”

“I think soon. A matter of some minutes.”

“I'll be here,” Dubbs said.

There was no good-bye. The line was dead. Dubbs held the receiver a moment, then set it down. Stefanoff. It had been a long time since Stefanoff had used the Rasputin connection. Years—not since 1970, when a man called Nankovitch had defected during some trades conference. Dubbs rose, went inside his bedroom, opened the drawer in the bedside table, and from beneath a pile of laundered handkerchiefs took out a discolored .38 revolver. He checked the chamber, then snapped it shut. He walked through to the living room—suddenly nervous now, nervous in a way he hadn't felt in years. He turned off the lamp and sat in the darkness. He held the revolver in his lap, listening, waiting, hearing the damned parrot repeat, “Piss off, piss off, piss off,” like a drunk trapped in a repetitive groove of memory.

“Shut up,” said Dubbs. “When I want to hear from you, my dear, I'll ask.”

The great bird flapped and fluttered and made a noise like an asthmatic old man. Dubbs stood up and wandered over to the cage. In the dark, he put his hands up and the bird swiped at him with a claw.

“Vindictive old fart,” Dubbs said. “When you need to be fed tomorrow, you can jolly well
beg.
”

Dubbs opened the kitchen door and went to the window, which afforded him a view of the steps that led upward from the basement to the street. There were peeling iron railings glinting dully in the light of a distant streetlamp. Squalid place, Dubbs thought. He stood motionless, fingering the gun, feeling strange to be armed after all this time. He thought about Stefanoff: how had that Jewish madman survived so long? A wild man of the old school: integrity and dignity and a sizable slice of lunacy. Stefanoff didn't know the meaning of the word
risk
.

Dubbs waited. A tap dripped in the sink, splashing on the pile of soiled dishes. Outside, a car passed in the street, lighting the iron railings. Then there was darkness and silence again.
Mr. Rasputin
, he thought. Just as one is pondering the changes in one's world, along comes a whisper from the past.

Now somebody was moving above, a shadow drifting along the edge of the railings. Dubbs saw the flash of some white clothing, a shirt, a jacket, whatever. At the top of the steps, as if he was beset by indecision, by fear, the man stopped. He seemed to be peering down into the darkness, wondering perhaps if he had come to the right address, or if this entire thing was a terrible mistake. Come on, Dubbs thought. Move yourself.