Brainfire (24 page)

“Bloody Woodsy,” said the man in the checkered cap. He took a bottle of light ale from his pocket and opened it, offering it to Rayner. “That bloody Woodsy—he don't know his arse from a hole in the ground.”

Rayner sipped some of the ale, which was warm and almost flat, then passed the bottle back. The action had become concentrated in midfield in a series of untidy skirmishes, players colliding with players, the ball rising and falling on the wind.

Dubbs, turning, said, “Whatever our old friend Andreyev was supposed to do with this team, he obviously didn't manage to improve their reading of a game. I haven't seen so many misdirected passes for ages.”

Below, the referee was blowing up for an infringement that the crowd didn't like. A free kick was awarded to the Soviets a few feet from the English eighteen-yard line. White-shirted defenders formed a wall as the Russians moved into some prearranged pattern of play. The free kick was taken, lofted over the defenders, and Kazemayov—flashing, hair blown, arms held wide for balance—rose up, entangled with the leaping English goalkeeper, and somehow managed to glide the ball with his forehead into the back of the net.

“Fuck me,” said the man in the checkered cap. “You see that? Did you bloody see that? Pushed the fuckin' goalie clear as a bloody bell.”

The jubilant Soviets crowded around Kazemayov, who raised his arms upward in triumph. The man beside Rayner took off his cap and scratched his head. He was shaking his face from side to side with disbelief. Rayner mumbled something sympathetic, noticing that Dubbs—even Ernest Dubbs—looked dispirited.

At half time, the score remained 1–0 for the Soviets. The players ran off the field toward the dressing rooms. The man in the checkered cap drifted away.

Dubbs blew his nose with an outsize handkerchief and surveyed the empty field. “What you see before you, my dear, is the culmination of English culture. Wordsworth, Constable, Pope, Milton—the very essence is distilled in a game of football. Have you seen enough?”

There was a touch of rain buried in the wind now. Rayner looked up at the gray sky. “You want to leave?”

Dubbs shrugged. “Might as well. I doubt that we're going to find any explanation of friend Andreyev by hanging around here. Besides, it's a poor game. The second half will be one long struggle by the English forwards against a team that has absolutely no desire to adventure out of their own half of the field. Let's go.”

Following the little man, Rayner began to climb the steps to the top of the terracing. Dubbs moved quickly, pushing his way through. Here and there groups of men drank from metal flasks or balanced cardboard cups of hot Bovril. There was martial music, shredded by the wind, coming across the loudspeaker system. At the top, Dubbs stopped. He turned to make sure Rayner was immediately behind him, then continued down the stairways that led to the exit. Crowds milled around the entrances to toilets; mounted policemen sat on gigantic brown horses; brigades of officials from the St. John's ambulance service stood beside piles of empty stretchers. It was all odd somehow, Rayner thought: the whole ritual that, played out in a vast bowl, had something almost gladiatorial about it.

Halfway down the steps, Dubbs paused. For a moment, Rayner thought the little man had suffered a heart attack or that some savage twist of indigestion had caused him to double over, hands pressed to his midriff, moaning. Rayner reached down and caught him as he began to fall. Slippery, a sense of wetness, his own hands covered with blood, an awareness of the crowd roaring in the stadium as the teams ran out once more to resume play—these impressions surged against Rayner as he tried to keep Dubbs from slipping, as he held him against himself, forced him to sit with his back to an iron rail. And then he understood, with a comprehension that was distant from him, with a recognition that blinded him, that Dubbs had been shot.

He opened Dubbs's shirt collar. The little man's eyes were blank. Through the crowd now a mounted policeman was forcing his horse.

“Dubbs. Dubbs.”

Dubbs opened his mouth a little way. “A rough sport, John. I've always thought it a rough sport.”

“Dubbs, keep your eyes open, don't move—” Rayner shouted toward the mounted policeman, aware too of several men running with stretchers through the crowd.

Dubbs smiled. “Damn funny how there's no pain, my dear. I always imagined it would be terribly sore, but …”

“Please, Dubbs. Please don't speak.” Rayner felt a horrible panic: it was as if he were hauling someone out of a rough sea with a rope frayed to breaking point. “Don't say another thing,
please
.”

“Twice,” Dubbs said. “I felt the damn thing twice.”

Transfixed, Rayner stared at the blood soaking through the dark overcoat, at the streaks running across the astrakhan collar.

“Two shots,” Dubbs said. “And the funny feeling I have, John, is that the second one … wasn't … meant for me.”

Rayner watched the ambulance men come up the steps with a stretcher. He looked up. The wind, the flags flapping, furling, unfurling, as if what they signaled were a coronation of death. He clenched his hands so tight that the nails brought blood to the palms.

The ambulance men raised Dubbs, with strange gentleness, onto the canvas stretcher. One, skinny and bespectacled, with a face Rayner realized he would never forget as long as he lived, said, “You know this fellow, sir?”

Rayner tried to speak. Shock. What did shock do to you? Numbness. A weird indifference. The defensive system of the emotions. He nodded his head vacantly.

The ambulance man said, “It doesn't look good, sir. It doesn't look good at all.”

11.

Sometimes, Rayner thought, there is a perversity in nature that maliciously fails to take into account the feelings of men. Funerals in the sunshine, weddings in the rain, the final parting of lovers in a heat wave, babies born in blizzards. It was as if whoever had been the architect of the system had built into it a magnificent indifference. This Sunday, for one thing—the sweet sense of spring in Grosvenor Square, the warmth in the breezes that rushed across Hyde Park and flowed through the narrow streets of Mayfair. A beautiful morning: if you weren't dead. If you weren't in that place where Ernest Dubbs was. If you were alive and breathing and holding your own against whatever forces, natural or otherwise, conspired against you. He could not believe in Ernest Dubbs's death. A magician might have fabricated a rabbit or an eagle out of thin air and claimed the act as a direct result of spiritual materialization, and he would have believed in that before giving credence to the little man's death. It was more than a sense of absence, of some hollow in experience: it was the feeling he entertained that Dubbs was
not
dead—that he was alive somewhere, standing in his favorite bar, drinking his Scotch, smoking one of his ridiculous cigarettes. Explain it to me, Rayner thought. Explain it to me, somebody.

The second one wasn't meant for me
…

He went up the Embassy steps. The Marine guard, unaccustomed to Sunday duty, fresh from some impossible place like Des Moines, smiled; a gesture Rayner didn't return. He rode in the elevator, newspaper tucked under his arm, and went directly to his office. Inside, he closed the door, crossed the room, threw
The Sunday Telegraph
down on his desk. Why had he come here anyhow? Hour after hour he had spent at the hospital in Wembley. Transfusion followed transfusion; but all the plasma in the world wouldn't have restored Dubbs.

Two shots. Two direct hits. One had passed through a lung. The other had blown a kidney away.
The second one wasn't meant for me
… Rayner sat down, tired, his eyes shut. He had waited for the announcement of death, then had gone to his flat in St. John's Wood and slept, a deep sleep, dreamlessly still on an ocean floor. He opened out the newspaper. The dark newsprint angered him. Even the feel of the paper. They reminded him of the continuum of things, of how little a life mattered, how little even a death mattered; there was news to print, there was a world running on like some fucking great machine. But not for Ernest Dubbs. There wasn't even a mention of the little man by name—the bizarre protocol of security. Boxed, a couple of sentences, a couple of flat phrases: “An unidentified man was shot yesterday during the football game between the Soviet Union and England at Wembley. His assailant is unknown. The identity of the man is being kept secret until close relatives are informed.”

Like Dubbs himself, the story would die there. Period. No more. Who fucking cared? Rayner gazed at the paper … “man was shot yesterday …” On the bottom line of the story, an added extra, there was the phrase: “The game ended in a 2–2 draw (for a full match report turn to page 24).” Rayner slung the paper down and got up and turned to the window. What did it come down to? Somebody meant to kill both Dubbs and him, the common denominator being Victor Andreyev. Victor Fucking Andreyev. I should count my lucky stars, he thought. A poor marksman: he could pick off only one of us. Back to target practice, motherfucker.

…
being kept secret
—

Somebody buries the story. Somebody buries Dubbs.

He watched the gorgeous sun aflame on a redbrick building. Then he turned back to the paper, idly turning pages. You keep running into questions, he thought. Never the sight of a plain old answer. Richard Rayner. Andreyev. Dubbs. Were they parts of some illogical whole? Or simply splinters? Take any old kaleidoscope and give it a shake and you never get the same pattern twice. It was easy when you were innocent and unsullied—two plus two always came out the same. But not now, not in a world in which mathematics and death were conjoined in a terrible mismatch.

He listened to the great silence of the building. Then he heard the whining noise of the elevator moving in the shaft. It stopped. Faintly he could hear the door slide open. And then the silence came in once again. He looked back at the newspaper where, momentarily, a headline caught his eye: “
Police Puzzled by Murders
”—

He had begun to read it, drawn not by the headline but by the curious suspicion, the uneasy presentiment, that something in this story was familiar to him—as if he had noticed, without really seeing it, a name he knew, a person he knew—he had begun to read it when the door of his office opened and he looked up to see Ambassador Quarterman standing there. Sunday suit, fresh flower in the buttonhole, the face of an old charmer, a faded film actor, perhaps, who has bought himself into a nice diplomatic situation.

“I heard you were here, John,” the Ambassador said. He slid across the room, a man on wheels. You couldn't imagine Himself in his underwear, or making love, or defecating: he was not of this world.

Rayner, torn between the Ambassador and the newspaper article, stood up.

Schoolboy time, he thought. Quarterman, picking at his carnation, always reminded Rayner of a face in a credit-card commercial, but he wasn't sure which one.

“I don't normally drop in on you people,” Quarterman said. “The business of the Embassy isn't always on a par with what you people do. More often it's a collision course.”

Tell me, Rayner thought. Tell me more.

The Ambassador frowned now: a piece of playacting. He might have been faced with a lunch of jellied eel during a goodwill visit to the London docks.

“This terrible business with the Englishman yesterday,” Quarterman said. “It must have been a great shock to you, John. I can understand it.”

Speech, Rayner thought. You stand
that
close to death, you're bound to get a little upset. He glanced down at the newspaper again, seeing, not seeing, her name.
Her name
. He couldn't get it into focus, as if there were two realities running, like a pair of amok battleships, into one another.
Her name
.

“I've been having a word with George,” said the Ambassador. “Naturally, this isn't my business, I'm not officially a part of George's team, after all … but we think, George and I, that after all you've been through—your poor brother, now this awful incident yesterday …”

Sally Macnamara.
Leave would be in order for a month or so
. Sally, Sally. Spend it where you like, John. George suggests Europe. But it's up to you, of course.

Rayner saw his own hand fall across the newspaper article.

Puzzled by the apparent lack of motive, police officials

He saw how white his knuckles

Quarterman was laughing at something. Some goddam story. Some fucking pointless reminiscence about a cycling tour of the Camargue—

Wellington, 47, was the author of several well-known

Flat tires all the way from here to the Bay of Biscay, I swear it.

Ms. Macnamara was employed in an editorial capacity at

Rayner, unable to see clearly, looked up at the Ambassador and heard himself say, “I'm sorry, sir. I'm sorry. I don't know what to say except I'm sorry.”

“Sorry?”

Quarterman, who looked as if death and disease were as much occasions for speeches as the launching of ships, opened his mouth and, with a tone of dismay, repeated his question.

Sorry
?

apparently entered by the front door while the couple were in the bedroom

“I'm sorry,” Rayner said again. “Really sorry. I mean, about everything. Really.”

“John, John.” The Ambassador stood by the desk and put his hand on Rayner's sleeve. “The shock, the shock must have been terrible.”

“The shock?”

“Look. Sit down. I'll get you some water or something. Better still, I'll call my physician.”

Physician. Parapsychologist. Nerve pills. Voices from the Great Beyond.

Rayner sat down, his eyes shut, conscious of Quarterman fussing with the telephone, shouting down the line at somebody—
get your ass over here, I don't care a damn if you're having breakfast
—