Brainfire (20 page)

Dubbs opened the kitchen door slightly and, holding the revolver forward, stared up through the darkness at the man. Take no chances, he thought. Wait. Wait for the other fellow to move. But the man stood motionless, his hands hanging at his sides, his whole position curiously purposeless. Come on, Dubbs thought.
If you're coming, come
.

Dubbs opened the kitchen door wider. The lights of a car picked out the man suddenly—a blinding vision, revealing all at once for Dubbs the fear on the man's white face, the open oval of the mouth, one arm rising upward as if he was protecting himself from the lights of the car.

Dubbs leveled his revolver and rushed toward the steps. He looked up. “Andreyev?” he asked.

The car lights dimmed. There was a sound of footsteps hurrying across the concrete. Andreyev moved, balanced on the top step, balanced there a moment as if he were posing for an artist, hands across his face, one leg raised slightly, body turned toward Dubbs.

“Andreyev—”

The footsteps stopped. In the distance, somehow the most incongruous sound in the world, Dubbs heard the whining siren of a police vehicle. Andreyev, reaching for the second step down, appeared to implode all at once. He sat down on the step, holding his hands against his stomach. Dubbs climbed toward him. There was a brilliant flash in the dark, a sharp echo, and Andreyev was rocked against the wall.

“Andreyev,” Dubbs said, taking it step by step, seeing still another flare burn a hole in the dark. Andreyev stood up, clutching the wall, moaning—a sound, Dubbs thought, that was more one of disappointment than of pain. As he stood, there was another shot that struck him in the skull, and he put his hands up feebly to his head. Dubbs, peering between the railings, saw a tan-colored car idling across the street. He aimed his revolver badly, fired, heard his own shot whistle harmlessly off into the distance. The car moved away from the curb, and Dubbs, dropping his revolver, leaned over Andreyev, who was still moaning, still clutching his face with his hands. No, Dubbs thought. No. He helped Andreyev to sit on the step—a useless gesture, an act too late to do any good. The man was dying, bleeding his life away on these flaking concrete steps, his white shirtfront soaked with a massive spreading red stain. Dubbs stood over him. Sick, sickening—The hands dropped from what was left of the face: a nightmare mask, a perverse Halloween conceit, all manner of things except those that suggested the human. Dubbs shut his eyes. He heard the man topple over, slide against the wall, then go slithering down the rest of the steps to stop, impossibly jammed, against the half-open door of the kitchen.

4

1.

A dream? But then she wasn't sure because it had become more and more difficult to differentiate what took place from those shifting images she may have dreamed or imagined. It was morning and the bedroom was filled with a soft white light and the woman Katya was standing over the bed, a tray in her hands, the tiny bottles of medication, the syringe. A picture—a picture of Andreyev: a white slash, like that of some vicious lightning, in a black place. She turned her face to Katya; there was a streak of pain coursing from her neck to her shoulders, as if the muscles were aflame. Her throat was dry, her voice hoarse.

Andreyev? Where is Andreyev
?

Katya filled the syringe, holding it up to the light.

Where is he
?

She saw the needle, cold and perfect, enter her arm. Something in the woman's eyes, something legible: Andreyev—it didn't work out for him, don't you understand,
it didn't quite work out for him
. Mrs. Blum turned her face to the wall, feeling Katya standing over her, watching her.

“Andreyev had to go back to Moscow,” Katya said.

Mrs. Blum shook her head slightly. Reality, those things in the world—such things as walls, rooms, lights, other minds, those things that seemed to some so impenetrable—had never felt quite so flimsy to her before, as if they were all constructed of rice paper through which you could tear a simple hole and see what it was that lay beyond the indifferent surfaces. When had she felt it this strongly before?

“He was recalled,” Katya said.

“Don't lie to me. Don't ever lie to me.” The old woman struggled, pushing herself upward, grasping at her pillows for support. She stared at Katya: behind the coldness, the eyes as fixed as ancient ice, there was fear.
Don't hurt me. Please. I know what you can do
—Mrs. Blum raised one hand, pointing it toward the younger woman, a shriveled, twisted hand from which a single blunted finger emerged accusingly. The younger woman stepped backward. I can do almost anything now. Anything. I can take the tray and send it rushing from her thin hands and dash it through the window. I can take the structure of her mind and break it down until it has the consistency of a gel. Anything, almost anything now.

Andreyev is dead
.

Poor, pitiful fool.

The weakling.

She closed her eyes. If only he had asked, she might have tried to help him. If only he had asked—but it was, as always, too late.

“Look,” the woman was saying. “I brought these to you.”

Now Mrs. Blum could hardly open her eyes. Squinting, she saw some glossy colored squares pressed alongside her face on the pillow.

“They were sent on from Moscow. They arrived only this morning.”

Silence. The soft glow of the room, the color of some distant pearl. Photographs, the old woman thought. She lifted a hand to touch them and then she was beset by a curious feeling of her own unworthiness: I don't deserve them, these beautiful people, these little children; I don't deserve to see them or to love them or to have their love in return. She pushed the snapshots away from the pillow, barely seeing them slip off the edge of the bed to the floor. Katya, a shadow, a pale shadow, bent down to pick them up.

“Don't you want to see them? Don't you want to look at your family, Mrs. Blum?”

No, Mrs. Blum thought. It was always too late. There was always a point of dark regret where, despite what you desired, despite what you most wanted in this world, you realized you were running out of time. She heard the woman's fingers flick the edges of the photographs as if they were a pack of cards and everything associated with them some hideous gamble.

“Soon, Mrs. Blum,” the woman said. “Very soon now, I'm sure.”

A meadow, from a high place the persistent sound of an invisible lark, a small boy stirring in his fitful sleep, a meadow filled with wild flowers. You are walking across it. The air is sweet. Between the trees, suddenly—like a new construction hurriedly erected in the night—a dark barn, the door an open mouth, an expression of surprise. You go toward it. Seeking—seeking what? Repetition? The replay of the same old horror? The sight of the man hanging—

“I'll come back later,” Katya was saying.

The door was closed. But there were other doors.

Old pains, old hurts: even this love you tried to keep alive was an old and wasted thing. She tried to open her eyes but her eyelids were weights that drew her back down into the dreaming.

2.

Lord Warsdale—Old Warsy, as Dubbs called him—was a relic of that time when the only efficient diplomacy was the kind you conducted with a gunboat. He had liver spots all over the backs of his hands and suffered from an odd skin disease that caused his flesh to flake and scale like a universal dandruff. When Old Warsy moved, he invariably left behind tiny white particles of himself. His office overlooked the Houses of Parliament; a large picture window framed his pointed bald skull.

“This damned Steperoff business,” Old Warsy said.

It seemed to Dubbs futile to make the necessary corrections in Warsy's speech. Stefanoff was Steperoff and nothing on this earth could ever alter the fact.

“You think this fella Zubro rumbled your game, Dubbs?”

Dubbs nodded. “He must have learned, I fear, of my connection with Steperoff, of course. I can't think, my lord, of any other explanation.”

My lord, Dubbs thought with disgust. He gazed over at the Houses of Parliament and wondered why Old Warsy wasn't sitting dozing over in Lords instead of concerning himself with matters of international intrigue.

Warsdale tried to stand. He reached for his pearl-handled cane, missed, and slumped back, puffing, into his leather swivel chair. Gloomily he stared at a few specks of his own dry flesh that had fallen to the polished surface of his desk.

“I sometimes wish the Russkis had the decency to stay in their own Embassy grounds, don't you know? Instead, they keep popping in and out and causing bloody mayhem. Messy bloody business anyway. One has to keep the local constabulary from plodding all about the place with their infernal notebooks. And the chaps from Special Branch—well, Lord knows, they don't take kindly to dead Commies turning up in bloody Chiswick.”

“Fulham,” Dubbs said.

“Quite, quite. It's damned untidy, Dubbs. I mean to say, I warned you before about your association with this Steperoff bod, didn't I? Said it would bring about a damn calamity one day.”

Although Dubbs nodded, he couldn't recall any such conversation. Old Warsy, whether from guile or senility, had the habit of inventing past conversations to suit himself. Now, grabbing for his cane again, reaching it successfully, he struggled into a standing position and his bones creaked audibly. He looked out at the Houses of Parliament, his eyes narrow and thunderous, as if he suspected all manner of socialist manipulations going on behind the hallowed walls.

“It's damned unsporting and unreasonable,” Lord Warsdale said. “Send over a soccer team like that, pretending this chap is Domareski or what d'you call it, only for him to turn up dead on your blessed doorstep under another name. Soccer—it brings out the worst in a fella, I've always said that.”

Dubbs considered the list he had received from the Home Office of the visas issued to the Soviet team and its entourage. The photograph of Victor Andreyev was clearly labeled Fyodor Domareski. It was a small puzzle in its way—even in circumstances where one should not be surprised by deceit—but what troubled Dubbs more was the fact that he had no information in his own dossiers on Andreyev.

Lord Warsdale poked his cane into the thick blue rug. He stared at Dubbs as if he were trying to remember the man's name and purpose. A telephone rang unanswered on his desk. He stared at it awkwardly, then looked once more at Dubbs.

“You say our chaps don't know anything about this Andreyev?”

Dubbs nodded. The poor old dear, he thought, has to be told everything twice.

“I mentioned I was getting assistance from another source, sir,” said Dubbs.

Lord Warsdale sighed and went back to his seat. “The Yanks. Well, good Lord, I daresay official policy needn't be too scrupulously …” His voice, as it had a habit of doing, faded out. He thumped his cane cantankerously against the side of his desk. “But for that bloody stupid German king, we might still have had a rather nice colony there, Dubbs. Makes you think rather, doesn't it? Instead of a country house in bloody Dorset, I might have had a ranch in Montana.” Old Warsy laughed, his face turning lavender. When the fit had passed, he turned once more to look at the Houses of Parliament, as if the real enemy were ensconced therein. “Work it out as best you can, Dubbs. Keep me posted, eh? If I'm not here in the office, you can find me down in the countryside.”

Dubbs rose, seized by the ridiculous urge to kiss the back of the old boy's hand: serf to prince. He wondered how Warsy would have reacted—if, indeed, he would have noticed anything at all.

“Good-bye, Lord Warsdale,” said Dubbs, going to the door.

“Quite,” Old Warsy said. “Quite, quite.”

3.

It was, Rayner thought, a pointless lunch—an uneasy lingering over fettucine that neither of them wanted particularly to eat but at which they picked for the sake of good form. Besides, the upstairs dining room at Bianchi's was Sally's territory and not his own and he felt an acute disadvantage. When she had come in, some ten minutes late, it had taken her several more minutes to reach the table at which Rayner sat—she seemed to know everybody in the place, literary agents and authors, other editors like herself: she would flit here and there to make a joke or exchange a greeting in a manner Rayner found exceptionally irritating. He was reminded of a queen bee acquainting herself with the denizens of the hive. The outsize broad-brimmed hat, the loose flowing scarf, the short fur jacket that might have been rescued from mothballs, the shoulder satchel overflowing with tissues, bits and pieces of paper, a thin typescript in a purple folder—and he wondered: What could he
ever
have expected from this crazy disorganized lady?

“Pardon my lateness,” she said when finally she sat down. A Campari came, even though he hadn't seen her order one. He watched her a moment, wondering in spite of himself how many of the other diners had been her lovers. Impossible games, he thought. You promised yourself to stop. It was all he could do to keep from saying that there was no beef Wellington on the menu. A kick in the heart—well, that separated the men from the boys.

He sipped his Scotch and surveyed the menu. Why had he even bothered to call and make this date? Was it for an amicable farewell? a form of apology? She lit one of her colored cigarettes and tasted her drink. Irritatingly, she was wearing dark glasses; he wanted to reach across the table and slip them off.

“Here we are then,” he said.

“Cheers,” Sally said. She raised her glass and knocked it against his.

“About last night—”

“Forget it, Rayner.
C'est fini.
”

“The incident or the whole affair?”

Sally shrugged. “It's a matter of definition, darling. For you, maybe, it
was
an affair.”

“What was it for you?” That goddam past tense, Rayner thought.