Brainfire (41 page)

He turned around, smoothing one hand over the surface of his bald skull, and looked at the woman. “Very well. After all,
you're
the expert.”

Their whispered conversation lapsed into silence. He wondered what he might do to ruin this awful woman when they returned home. Something altogether simple could be arranged, such as the placing of Western propagandist documents in her flat and having them discovered. Then she would see. Then she would truly see.

There was suddenly a faint noise from the other room, the scratch of a wheel on the floor, the sound of someone sighing, he wasn't sure which. He watched Katya move to the door and open it, and he saw a flood of fluorescent light fall on the empty wheelchair.

13.

Mallory observed that the seating arrangements isolated the Presidential party from the rest of the crowd. A rope had been placed around a block of seats, perhaps about a hundred in all—many of which were unoccupied—and outside the rope there were as many as twenty Secret Service men. He sat with Leontov on one side, Macmillan on the other, and gazed down toward the field. Fresh white lines, obscuring a baseball diamond, had been drawn on the turf.

Now, as he stared down at the strange markings, rectangles and circles, he barely listened to MacMillan, who seemed intent on explaining the rules of the game to him. He looked at his watch. It was twenty minutes to three. Twenty minutes of watching the field, peering at the rain, listening to MacMillan drone. Strange, incomprehensible terms—offside, throw-in, corner kick, indirect free kick. Old Kimball, he reflected, was much better at this kind of thing—absorbing, listening, nodding his head; at least, he was better at
pretending
to be interested.

He watched rain fall through the goal nets. Twenty minutes of this. Various photographers on the other side of the rope clicked their cameras. Curious onlookers elsewhere strained to get a glimpse of him. The President as object, he thought; would he ever become accustomed to it? Would he ever adjust to the fact that he was as much a part of the Washington sight-seeing tour as the Lincoln Memorial? He looked across the stadium, noticing great spaces of empty seats.

Politely he asked MacMillan the expected size of the crowd.

“On a good day we would have drawn, oh, maybe forty-five thousand,” MacMillan said. “In this rain—it's so hard to tell.”

MacMillan nervously rubbed his hands together. On Mallory's other side, Leontov was lighting a cigarette: a distant Leontov, preoccupied with something, brooding, pondering. It could be the prospect of losing a dollar, the President thought. It could easily be that.

6

1.

Rayner parked the camper in the parking lot at D.C. General Hospital. He sat for a moment and watched an ambulance whine through the rain in the direction of Nineteenth Street—somewhere somebody is dying, he thought. The quick occlusion, the diastolic catastrophe, the avalanche in the heart. He turned to Isobel, who was still holding the kid. Fiona, her eyes open, was gazing toward the hospital—mindless, Rayner thought, mindless and empty; what in the name of God have I done? Isobel sat with her eyes shut, rocking the girl slightly. He looked at her wrist-watch; it was ten minutes before three. Ten fucking minutes. What if it had happened already? What if he was altogether wrong? You nurture alternatives like seedlings in a nursery. You erect opaque greenhouses in which to plant possibilities—

It wasn't far to the stadium, a matter of some blocks. Isobel opened her eyes and looked toward the hospital, as if she wanted to say, You've come to the right place, John. You've come at last to the right place—both for the child and for yourself. She licked her lips, which appeared cracked and dry, but she said nothing. It was all in her look, in her eyes. The stadium, he thought. The impossible stadium. He touched the mascot that hung from the rearview mirror of the cab, a dangling plastic spider. Webs, he thought. The struggle of the fly.

He reached out and took the kid's cold hands and rubbed them briskly. I must make her warm, he told himself. I must rub the life back into her. That coldness, that chill—it was like running your hands over the surface of frost. She moved her head slightly to the side, and momentarily it seemed to him that she was about to say something, but she didn't speak. He raised his hands to her face, turning her around to look at him. If the eyes are mirrors, he thought, these eyes have no images to reflect. Please, kid. Is she there in the stadium? Can you take me to her? Can you?
Please
.

He watched her. Slowly, stiffly, she lifted her arm and touched the inner glass of the windshield with her fingertips, and it was clear to him that it took an immense effort of will for her to move even that much; it was almost as if the arm had been cranked up by a taut rope.

“What are you trying to tell me?” he asked. “
What are you trying to say
?”

She didn't move. She blinked her eyes, and the arm that had been raised fell suddenly into her lap. He thought: I need some psychic infusion for myself now; I need something of that gift, that curse, from the gods who dole these things out at random.

“Fiona, what are you trying to tell me? Is it the stadium? Is she in the stadium? Is that it? She's in there somewhere?” The girl's empty eyes looked at him, seeing nothing. In the stadium,
somewhere
, somewhere in the vastness of that bowl, the moving ramps, the crowds, the tunnels, the press box, the parking lots—where, for Christ's sake? Where? He switched the ignition on, looking a moment at Isobel; Isobel, who seemed now no longer a part of this venture but someone simply swept along on a tide over which there was no possible control. Not the Isobel he had felt some desire for, the Isobel who had said it was “too soon,” but an absence of that person. Somebody else.

He swung the camper out onto Nineteenth Street, possessed by the feeling that he had nothing left to lose, that whatever had been lost was gone forever, carried away in a crazy rush—and now all that was important was to get to the stadium in time to do something, something he had not recognized yet, a misty act lying in the immediate future like an object obscured by a veil.

2.

“Help me,” Koprow said. “Help me get her back in the chair.”

They lifted Mrs. Blum, who had been trying to gather her photographs together, and lowered her into the wheelchair. She sat with her head slumped back while Katya, bending here and there in the room, picked up the fallen snapshots.

“My pictures,” the old woman said.

Koprow knelt in front of her. He put his hand on the side of her wrist, feeling a skin that had the texture of old newspaper; a touch that appalled him somehow. He smiled reassuringly. “You can have your pictures back when your work is done,” he said. “You frighten us, my dear. You know you shouldn't try to get out of the chair like that.”

The old woman didn't seem to be listening to him. She was watching the photographs in the other woman's hands. Katya played with them, shuffling them, flicking the edges of them.

“Please,” the old woman said. “Please. I want my pictures.”

“Later,” Koprow said. “If you behave yourself.”

There was silence. In the corridor a door was opened and there was the sound of feet moving past outside, the players going toward the tunnel that would take them out onto the field. Koprow listened for a moment. He was thinking of the TV cameras that would be recording the game. How could they fail to capture the sudden death of Patrick J. Mallory? On videotape for all the world to see—and not a single gunshot to be heard, not a wound to be found, nothing that all the autopsies in the world could possibly reveal with any degree of accuracy. A rupture of the brain—and they would have words of explanation for that: a blood clot, a cerebral hemorrhage; they would have forensic explanations—and like all such explanations, they would come after the fact.

He took the little pile of pictures from Katya and glanced at them briefly. These small icons of color—was that all she had to live for? He tried to imagine the emptiness of such a life, that it could be reduced to a series of celluloid fantasies—fantasies that could never be translated into any kind of reality.

“He is here in the stadium, my dear,” he said.

The old woman was nervously watching the snapshots. “Please,” she said. “I would like my pictures.”

“I know you would,” Koprow said. “I understand only too well. But the subject—the man we discussed, the picture I showed you—he is here now in the stadium, not far from this very room. Remember? Remember what we talked of? What you've got to do? The last task?”

He stuffed the photographs into the pocket of his coat and smiled at the old woman.

“You see how safe they are, Mrs. Blum? You don't need to worry about them coming to any harm.” He stood upright. There was silence now from the corridor. The players would have reached the entrance to the field by this time. He patted his pocket. “I just want you to think about Mallory now. That's all. Just like you thought about the Chinese soldier, remember? The American, remember? I want you to think about Mallory now.”

The old woman continued to watch him. What was that expression on her face? Loathing? Of course, he had seen it before in one of its various forms—overt, disguised, he knew it intimately. But there was an intensity to the old woman that frightened him suddenly.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “You haven't forgotten tomorrow?”

“I haven't forgotten,” she said.

“Then think of Mallory,” he said sharply. “That's all you have to do now. Think of Mallory. It will be quick. Easy. A moment of pain for him and it will be finished. All over.”

She watched him a moment longer, then closed her eyes.

3.

Mallory saw the American team run out into the rain. They wore a rather colorful uniform of red shirt, blue shorts, and white socks. They lined up in the center of the field, where they were joined by the Russians, dressed entirely in white with small hammer-and-sickle insignia woven on their shirts. Both teams shook hands, then dispersed; and there was a general period of what Mallory assumed was practice, several balls being kicked back and forth around the field.

“Warming up,” MacMillan explained. “Then the referee will blow his whistle and call the team captains together for the toss.”

“The toss?” Mallory asked.

“The coin, Mr. President. The one who chooses correctly can then elect which goal his team will defend in the first half of play.”

“There's some advantage in that?”

MacMillan laughed quietly. “At times, Mr. President. A team may choose to play the first half with the wind behind them, for example, then hope that the wind drops before the second half.”

Mallory watched the field for a time. “A team should have either a resident meteorologist then or else a witch doctor.”

“Certain African teams,” said MacMillan, with great seriousness, “make use of witch doctors.”

What was the response to that one? Mallory clasped his hands together in his lap and watched the black-clad referee move to the center of the field, where he blew a whistle. After a few confusing moments during which the extra practice balls were removed from the field, the teams lined up—haphazardly, to Mallory's eyes.

“The greatest danger to our side is if Kazemayov, their number nine, is allowed any freedom,” said MacMillan. “He'll have to be watched carefully by our defense.”

“Mmm,” Mallory said, nodding his head. He watched the Russian defense pass the ball from man to man in a somewhat systematic manner. There were several lunges made by American players, who appeared overanxious in the early stages. But the Soviets moved the ball over the center line, where it was picked up by Kazemayov, who began to twist and turn, leaving a couple of stranded American defenders behind him.

“That's the one,” said MacMillan, leaning forward with great interest. “Look at the balance. Look at the control.”

Mallory watched the Russian dash toward the American goal seemingly at will. “Why doesn't somebody tackle him?” he asked. It bothered him to see a look of triumph on Leontov's face.

MacMillan shrugged. “A tackle would be appropriate, sir. But you'll notice that our defense is falling back to defend the goal. See that?”

Kazemayov had the ball directly in front of the American goal, where, rather arrogantly, he paused as if he were waiting for somebody to tackle him. Between him and the U.S. goalkeeper there were perhaps four or five defenders. Kazemayov waited, feigned to move in one direction, then shimmied in quite the opposite, leaving the American defense off balance. Mallory heard MacMillan groan as the goalkeeper came rushing out, and Kazemayov, delicately, accurately, and with all the grace of confidence, flicked the ball over the keeper's head and into the net. Scrambling U.S. defenders, trying to prevent the goal, tangled together clumsily between the goalposts.

“Well, well,” MacMillan said, and looked at his watch. “I didn't expect a goal in the first minute.”

Mallory stared glumly at the American team, some of whose members appeared to be involved in an argument, a series of recriminations with one another.

“Defense's fault,” MacMillan said. “They shouldn't have allowed that fellow so much space because he's a tricky devil.”

The ball was kicked toward the center of the field for play to be restarted. The scoreboard flashed the goal, the scorer, and the time of the goal: “1 minute.”

If it goes on like this, Mallory thought, there will be some kind of massacre.

4.

At first she let her mind wander freely as if it were something liberated from a cage; let it roam through a series of pictures of her own making, imagining a sea crashing down on a shore, dreaming of snow, dreaming of peace; but then she began to pick up on the man Koprow had called Mallory, pick up on him with a dreadful ease because he was at the center of some mass of energy and attention: it was the blind instinct of the homing bird, the flight of a random projectile toward the center of gravity. She picked up on it in a sequence of feelings at first, emotions that began in a shadowy way, then became more and more precise until they might have been her own. Boredom, discomfort, a lack of concentration. She might have been eavesdropping outside the open door of a room, hearing everything that went on within—every whisper, every move, from the loudest sound down to the faintest, from the sound of water being poured into a glass to the stirring of a vague breeze through muslin. Fragments, at first indiscernible, became large and clear and unmistakable. But even as she moved toward it she felt a strange hard pain at the center of her chest and, opening her eyes, saw Koprow watching her, Katya standing beyond him—and she had the dislocating experience of being trapped between two worlds, neither of which was remotely real to her.