Brainfire (29 page)

“Who are you calling?” she asked.

“My funny little number,” he said.

She came in, sliding the door shut. “Before you make your call, John—”

He paused, looking at her.

“It's too soon,” she said. “Do you know what I'm saying?”

“I know what you're saying,” he answered. He watched her a moment, then dialed his number. The line was busy. He put the receiver down. Isobel was standing motionless, withdrawn, by the table. Too soon, he thought. How could the time ever be right? Could you make love with this woman and not think of Richard? Could you lie in bed with her, hold her, enter her, and not have images of the dead? A morbid maze, he thought. In time—could you find your way through it?

He walked over to the table where Isobel was idly scanning the pages of the newspaper, turning them in a listless, disinterested way. He saw how, when she reached a certain page, she flinched slightly, as if she had seen something she didn't want to see, something she couldn't handle. What? he wondered. What had touched her? He reached over and picked up the paper, noticing that it was open at the sports pages. The sports pages: what could be so terrible there?

She was smiling now, still looking at him in the manner of someone who has posed a difficult question and is waiting for a response. The sports pages, he thought. He glanced across them and saw, buried amongst horse-race results, baseball scores, and an item concerning the heavyweight champion of the world, a simple headline: “Soviets Plan Soccer Victory over US.” He stared at the article for a long time, not really reading, not really seeing, but remembering.

“Stupid,” Isobel said in a hollow way. “I still can't read something about Russia without thinking … thinking in a way I don't much like.”

He looked at her.

“
Soviets Plan Soccer Victory over US
.”

He went to the telephone and tried the number a second time. This time he got through.

2.

At first it was the sense of an impossible victory over her body that kept her trying to rise. Each muscle, each fiber, every part of her rebelled against the notion of movement but when she had thrown the bed-sheet back and touched the floor with the soles of her feet she felt an awareness of triumph that overcame, if only momentarily, her pains. But her weak legs would not support her and she slid to the rug, thinking: The window, if I could get to the window. She began a slow crawl, padding forward in the fashion of an injured animal, toward the rectangle of pale light. From outside, there were sounds of voices—some of them Russian, others speaking what she assumed to be English. She wasn't sure exactly why she had to move now. Only the idea of reaching the window was of any real importance to her. Light filled the glass like sweet clear water and maybe, somewhere at the back of her mind, she had an idea she might immerse herself in this cleanliness, a form of purge, of renewal. Her swollen fingers throbbed from the effort of supporting her own frail weight. Her knuckles, solid blocks of pain, seemed no longer a true part of her. The veins in her pale legs were blue and raised. But it was the window that drew her still, magnetizing her, forcing her across the floor. She felt sweat form on her forehead and tried to lift one hand to wipe it away before it fell on her eyelids and blinded her; but even as she did so, even as she lifted a palm upward, she lost the slight balance she had and sprawled face down on the floor—and found, to her horror, her humiliation, that she could no longer force her body forward.

Youth, she thought. Youth was a bird you could not trap and cage no matter how hard you tried. Her neck slightly twisted, she stared at the distant window—a cross of wood supporting four panes. The wood was fragile, flaking, the glass bright and sparkling. All I wanted was to see, she thought. All I wanted was to make this wasted body move so that these eyes might look down and see.

She moaned slightly. Saliva gathered in white flecks at the corners of her lips. She edged forward very slightly, her eyes fixed still to the window, where the light by now had become a translucent blur, a hallucinatory aura.

Again, she could hear voices from below; she could hear the sound of people running back and forth, the noise of a ball being kicked, someone's name being called.

And then the door of the room was opened and Katya was hurrying across the floor toward her, hurrying, flapping, bending over her and drawing her upright by her armpits.

“The pain,” she said to Katya. “Please—”

The woman was dragging her back toward the bed, dragging her roughly, hauling on her. She could feel her heels scrape the hard fiber of the rug. The window. All she wanted was to look out of the window and now this woman, this terrible woman, was hauling her away.

I can't let it
.

I can't let her
.

“You shouldn't have tried to get out of bed—”

I can't stop myself now
—

In faint spidery lines the windowpanes cracked, cracked slowly and audibly, cracked in fibrous whorls of split glass; the wood frame snapped loosely and hung inward; and the woman, Katya, as if she had been stung, spun backward against the bed and lay there motionless, her arms limp, her legs useless.

No, she thought. What have I done? The broken glass. The woman. What have I done? They warned me. What have I done? She strained, dragging herself upward onto the mattress, and looked at Katya's face, white, sightless, the mouth a damp open hole.
What have I done
?

She crawled, aching, on top of the woman. She put the palms of her hands upon the sides of Katya's face, feeling the cold skin.
A witch? Is that what you are? Aaron, love, O my love, why did you

Katya blinked, the whites of her eyes showing, then slowly the irises appearing, like someone brought back from a trance, from a minor death. She stared at Mrs. Blum and then, as if she was horrified by the sight of the old woman alongside her on the bed, she pushed her away.

“
What did you do? What did you do to me
?”

Cracked glass and broken wood and the enraged woman. I should have done nothing, nothing, I should have spared myself any of this, now the pain begins and grows and then it reaches a crescendo I cannot tolerate every nerve end aflame every muscle cord snapping every heartbeat a hammer against the ribs I shouldn't have done this the cracked glass and the broken wood and the enraged woman.

Katya was standing by the bed, looking down at her.

“Please,” Mrs. Blum said. Please. Hear me beg.
Hear my pain
. “The medication. Please. Help me.”

“
Help you
?”

Katya went to the bedside table and took the small plastic tray of medication to the sink in the corner of the room, where she opened the bottles and poured the precious liquid away. “Help you? Help
you
?”

The old woman sat up. She wanted to bring the hurt back into the other woman again but now she hadn't the strength for it, now she had nothing left. She lay back down against the pillows, unable to catch her breath, gasping, holding her hands to her throat.
What have I done
? Light, fractured, altered as if it fell now through stained glass, was no longer a pure clean thing upon the window, but a series of broken lines, ruptures, suggesting that what had passed this way was a terrible storm.

“Help
you
?”

“Please—”

Katya turned on the faucet and broke the glass syringe upon the porcelain side of the basin.

“Suffer,” she said. “Suffer the way you make other people suffer.”

3.

“You mean I have to kick my heels in this goddam room?”

“For you,” Rayner had said. “For your own safety.”

Rayner had called Chip Alexander in Langley and then gone downstairs to the coffee shop of the Ramada Inn. Three hours, he thought. It would take Chip at least three hours. He sat where he could watch the doorway. A few early diners were scattered throughout the room, picking disconsolately at their food in the fashion of those who regret having taken premature vacations. He turned the newspaper to the sports pages, read the brief article, read it again, then a third time, as if it might be made to yield some deeper meaning. There was a photograph of two Soviet players rising, in some awkward defiance of gravity, to head a ball. But it was Dubbs he kept seeing, Dubbs slipping on the steps, Dubbs bleeding, leaning against the iron rail, Dubbs trying to joke as if death were simply the final theatrical merriment or some atrocious last pun. He ordered coffee, sipped it, tried to think his way around the series of puzzles. “The Soviets, according to their trainer, expect to win by at least a two-goal margin.” He folded the paper flat, his brain seeming now to race, to fly, as though somewhere in this tangle of vague threads there was a core, a center, a meaning. A parapsychologist. The markings of a deck of ESP cards. Make parapsychology work for you.… And someone in this seaside town with a stainless-steel automatic pistol is looking for you.

He had gone through a pot of coffee and half of a sandwich before he saw Chip Alexander come in by the front door. He raised his hand, noticed how Chip hesitated, then how his step quickened as he walked across the floor and took the vacant seat at the table. Momentarily Rayner felt a surge of deep relief. There was a comfort in the sight of Alexander—old colleague, friend, a man of solid weight and even more solid emotions, Chip Alexander was never convinced of anything unless he could hold it up to the light and shake it and be sure of what it contained. The reddish hair, the gingery eyebrows, the light moustache—there was in all of this, for Rayner, the pleasure of confidence. Alexander undid the buttons of his coat and smiled at Rayner; and for the first time Rayner detected an uncertainty in the other man, a vague unease.

“The message I got is that somebody has your number, John,” Alexander said. He fiddled with the menu but nothing he saw there appeared to appeal to his appetite. “Who is it, John? Who has your number?”

Rayner lifted his half-empty coffee cup. “You heard about Ernest Dubbs?”

“John, look, I hardly know your London pals. I saw a bit that came over the wire, that's all. The guy got it at some sports thing. And you were there. The rest—I don't know the rest.”

“Look at this.” Rayner handed the paper, sports page folded over, to Alexander.

The other man barely glanced at it. “I see a few race results, something about a baseball trade—”

“The Soviet thing,” Rayner said. He could hear the irritation in his own voice.

“The Russian soccer team. Yeah. I got it.” Alexander placed his hands flat on the table and stared at his knuckles. Faintly reddish hairs, barely visible, grew along the backs of his fingers. “Okay. Okay. Now start explaining.”

Rayner said nothing. There was something wrong here, an edge he couldn't exactly fathom; it was almost as if this were not Chip Alexander but an impostor, a lookalike—and he had the unsettling feeling that if he were to reach for the other man's face and pull at the skin some dreadful mask would come away between his fingers.

Alexander said, “Look. I get a message. You've got some trouble. A guy with a gun? So I drive down here, breaking various federal laws concerning behavior on the freeway, and you start in with the puzzles. You mention Ernest Dubbs. Then you show me a picture of some Russian jocks. I mean, John—for Christ's sake.”

A babble, Rayner thought. A madness. He looked into the other man's eyes, seeing there an expression of helplessness. “Did you run a security check on the Russians?”

Alexander smiled grimly. “No, we let them in the country without visas or passports, John. What the fuck do you think?”

Exasperated, Rayner leaned across the table, one hand going out to touch the lapel of Alexander's coat. “Did the check turn anything up?”

“I didn't do it personally. There's one KGB goon, so far as I know, but that's par for the course. They don't let their jocks come and go, you know? The guy's down as an assistant at the Ministry of Sports, which is the usual ploy. He's only a security buff. Ob- somebody or other. I don't know. If there'd been anything unusual, John, it would have come across my desk.”

Silence. Rayner tapped his fingertips on the surface of the table. It wasn't making sense. It wasn't adding. And this oblique quality to Alexander, this edge that was almost abrasive—how was he supposed to explain that?

“You know why Dubbs was killed?” he asked.

Alexander impatiently shut his eyes. “Yeah. What I hear is some Czech malcontent took a potshot at him. A loony. It was on the wire. I didn't pay much attention—”

Rayner shook his head. “Then you didn't hear about Andreyev? Victor Andreyev?”

Alexander shrugged. “Means nothing.”

Rayner pushed his chair back. It occurred to him suddenly that he couldn't trust Alexander, that the safety he thought he could turn to was nonexistent, a detour leading to some false place on a highway, nothing—

“John, I don't know what you're getting at. I knocked my ass off getting down here to
help
you—and, Jesus Christ, you come up with some double-talk.”

Rayner paused. He could get up. He could walk away. He could go back upstairs to Isobel, to the room, sit on the balcony, watch battleships—but he understood that beneath his feet the wind was blowing sand in all the wrong kinds of patterns.

“Andreyev was with the soccer party in London,” he said. “He tried to defect through Dubbs. It's the old Stefanoff card. He was shot. Because Dubbs knew the real identity of Andreyev—that was the end of the line for him. Because I also know—”

Alexander interrupted. “Stefanoff card? This is double Dutch, baby. Okay. So who was Andreyev supposed to be?”

“An eminent parapsychologist.”

Alexander took a moment over this before he smiled. It was a cheerless smile. He scratched his head, gazed at the menu, folded it, and put it back in its little metal slot. “John, we've been friends for a time. Right? I mean, we go back a few years together. And that's a problem. That's a real damn problem.”