Brainfire (6 page)

Rayner looked back at Lindholm now. The Vice President, who had been asked to run on the ticket with Mallory because of his apparent appeal to that large section of the American populace who refused to admit that Eisenhower was
really
dead, was speaking to the interpreter; he spoke slowly, more slowly than usual, and Rayner found his attention drifting back, back to Isobel, back to the black dress and the pale skin and the vicissitudes of what, for want of any better word, you might call loving.

“It's my own personal feeling,” Lindholm said, watching the interpreter, waiting, “my own personal feeling that the business of America is America.”

Rayner felt Haffner become more stiff than was normal. Phrases such as “my own personal feeling” caused Haffner to have nightmares; Rayner was convinced of this. He heard the Assistant Secretary quietly clear his throat, a form of warning. But Lindholm was back home, stalking the wheat fields, scanning the prairies, chewing tobacco with his natural constituents. Rayner closed his eyes. He was amused. Lindholm did not have the good sense to know a blunder when he collided with one.

The interpreter spoke to Maksymovich, who smiled, nodded, raised a hand to his glasses. Lindholm apparently took this as a sign of encouragement to continue.

“I don't believe Americans have any business with foreign adventures, or interfering with some godforsaken hole in Africa, or sending troops halfway across the world just so some crackpot dictator can be kept in power.”

Ah, sweet Christ, Rayner thought. Haffner leaned forward, suddenly animated; he took out a handkerchief and blew his nose. Rayner gazed at Lindholm, waiting for the next mistake. But Maksymovich was talking and the interpreter was listening, waiting. A comedy of errors, Rayner thought. Hilarity in high places. It was always possible that the little man from Kansas had imbibed too much vodka, of course.

Haffner said, “The Vice President is talking off the record, of course—”

But the interpreter ignored this. He was already beginning to translate for Lindholm the words of the First Secretary.

“The First Secretary finds it hard to understand your position, Vice President.… He wants to point out that your own views conflict somewhat with … the policy speeches of President Mallory … who does not seem to believe there are limits to American imperialism.”

Rayner stared at Maksymovich. Lindholm, as if needing guidance, as if conscious of having overstepped a line of demarcation, turned to Haffner. American imperialism, Rayner thought. How would Lindholm wriggle out now?

The Vice President stared at his hands. Rayner waited. From somewhere, doubtless, the little man from Emporia would find inspiration. Haffner continued to blow his nose.

Lindholm said, “Please make it clear to your First Secretary that I'm expressing, uh, my own personal views …” And here, oddly, Lindholm laughed. “In my country, a man is free to express his own views.”

So that was it, Rayner thought. He had pulled the old freedom of expression out of his hat; the tired rabbit of democracy. Well, it was worth a shot—even if Rayner could barely keep from smiling. Maksymovich's expression did not change. He listened, was silent for a moment, then said, “President Mallory has been highly critical of Soviet activity … I refer you to his policy statements on Soviet activity in Africa, in Eastern Europe, and in Cuba. He apparently feels that Soviet help, that any aid we offer to those countries trying to establish a revolution—he feels strongly, I understand, that all this is quite immoral. Am I correct?”

Lindholm listened. He looked once again at Haffner, who, sitting with his eyes closed, appeared to have succumbed to a trance of embarrassment.

“President Mallory has made his position plain,” Lindholm said.

“And yet you differ from him?”

Lindholm smiled, as if all at once he felt himself to be on safer ground: the quicksand was behind him now. “Hell, we don't always agree. We don't always agree.”

There was a silence in the room now. Rayner watched the First Secretary—a strange inscrutability, a face of secrets, of knowing what nobody else knew. And for a moment, without quite knowing why, Rayner felt unnerved.

Then Maksymovich pushed his chair back and stood up and smiled. “I think it's time for us to eat.”

3.

He woke, his throat dry, his head aching—the dehydration of vodka. The room was dark, he had no idea of time. He sat up, listening. He could hear sleet hammering on the window and the sound of Isobel breathing and he could see, by what little moonlight fell into the room, her pale outline, her dark hair spread on the pillow.
I think he fancied me. Your old Maksymovich or whatever he calls himself. I think he really took a shine to me
.

The dinner, Rayner thought. Something had happened at the dinner. He sat upright on the edge of the mattress. His muscles ached. He went into the bathroom and ran his head under the faucet, splashed his face, soaked his wrists.

Asked me all kinds of questions, old Maksy did
.

Rayner raised his face from the basin, looking at himself in the mirror. A squandered look, a pallid expression: he had seen better days. What kinds of questions, Isobel? Did you give him your telephone number back in D.C.? Stuff like that?

He leaned in the bathroom doorway. She slept on her back, her head tilted slightly to one side.
Some were personal, some were impersonal
. You jealous fucker, Rayner thought. Grow up. Wise up. You're not a kid skulking around. Good old Maksy. He was just being palsy, no? A new chum, a pretty American lady. No more than that, right?

He asked, Did we have any kids? What kind of house did we have? Things like that
.

No, Rayner thought. This wasn't the thing troubling him. Something else. Kimball Lindholm: but that was a darker area, he had mapped that territory already. Kimball getting downright drunk and trying to look dignified; but he had seemed more like a statue cut out of granite that way, something that would disgrace a public park in Emporia, a landing pad for pigeons. No, it wasn't Lindholm, it wasn't anything to do with how Lindholm had launched into another of his set speeches—how he would have stayed out of WW II, how he wouldn't have sent any of his boys off to fight any goddamn foreign war: your standard red-neck, cracker-barrel nonsense. Kimball's party piece, that was all.

Something else, Rayner.

He asked me if I'd ever met Mallory
.

Did he now?

He wondered what the American people thought of Kimball Lindholm
.

Rayner lay down. He placed his hand flat against Isobel's thigh. All at once he wanted her, cold or otherwise, he wanted her very badly. Drunk, the great alcoholic cancellation. Way too drunk. He remembered how, during the dinner, Maksymovich had caught his eye—something in the look, a quality of sudden hardness, a glint: like old Maksy was saying to him,
I am perhaps the most powerful man in the world, and if I choose to flirt with your wife
—
what can you do about it
? Drunk drunk drunk. He stared at the dark ceiling.

It came to him, as it always did in bad moments.

She has a lover, he thought. Somewhere, tucked away, she has a man. It was a suspicion he had tracked down through the strata of his own jealousies. A man, a shadow, someone she loved. Grow up, he thought. Won't you ever grow up? That old green malignant deity again. She has the opportunities, doesn't she? You're not always around to see what she's doing; even when you take her on trips like this, you can't be expected to watch her every moment of the day, goddam—a lover, someone she meets, someone she gives herself to, someone she
screws
. Dark rooms. Furtive little phone calls. Obscure restaurants. Inscrutable motel rooms—

Drunk. A drunken uneven sleep, a dream of his brother John, a vague dream that eluded him on waking—and yet he felt exhausted, as if at some point the dream had become nightmare, a nightmare he couldn't remember in the gray light of morning.

4

1.

Prints and illustrations hung against the walls of the large office. They suggested a continuum of Soviet history, a line linking past with present, tradition with technology, the indomitable Russian spirit sanitized of its occasional blood-lettings. The Eve of Revolution Day gathering in the Mayakovsky subway station, November 6, 1941: Stalin had been strategically omitted and the photograph showed only Party dignitaries and Trade Union leaders; a group of antique Abkhasian peasants seated around a table, dipping pieces of
abusta
into various sauces; a gruesome picture, made the more awful by its grainy authenticity, of several dead German soldiers lying in the Moscow snow; Yuri Gagarin, smiling, dressed for his orbital trip in 1961.

Andreyev was depressed by the collection: it bludgeoned him with something he had no urge to feel. But time and again, irritated by the droning voices in the room, he found his attention drawn to the gallery of illustrations—Mother Russia. Was he supposed to
believe
that Domareski had somehow contrived to fall from a moving train? That the Physician had by chance opened a door and—given the treachery of ice—lost his footing? Andreyev shook his head, watching Sememko play with a bunch of papers. The ugly Politician, constantly patting his moustache or tugging at the lower extremities of his vest, was talking about the Ussuri experiment to a room filled with those members of the Presidium whose function it was to plan the future strategies of science and scientific discoveries. His voice droned, and Andreyev, looking up at the blurred grin of the cosmonaut Gagarin, caught only a few words and phrases:
naturally too early to say if there's any useful potential here … experiment seemed successful
.… There was a reference to acorns and oak trees, something clichéd and banal. Andreyev looked out of the window. Sleet lashed the city; the day was gray, the sky sullen with a sense of repressed violence.

Acorns and oak trees.

Andreyev clasped his hands together. He looked around the room, wondering at how the occupants managed to affect a physical resemblance to one another, as if there were some family relationship shared by each of them. Blunted faces, dark suits, white shirts, those thick necks that seemed to have been shaved as close into the skin as was humanly possible without bloodshed.

Sememko, looking self-satisfied, had stopped talking. He was sitting back in his chair, content with himself. Now Koprow had risen to his feet. Koprow the Hatchet, Andreyev thought—a thickset man, his head shaved bald and shaped like a bullet: you could imagine Koprow in other incarnations—a treacherous Renaissance monk, a strong-arm man in a circus, the assassin who emerged from a darkened doorway. It was Koprow who secretly liaised between the KGB and the Ministry of Science.

Andreyev realized that Koprow was looking directly at him. The stare was both cold and definitive; Andreyev could hear something buzz in his own head—the edge of some alarm, a quickened fear.

“I've read the reports, of course,” Koprow said. The sudden fast smile that appeared on his face and then abruptly faded reminded Andreyev of a flawed neon.

“It's my understanding,” said Koprow, pausing, gazing across the faces in the room in the fashion of one taking a roll call. “It's my understanding that to all intents and purposes the Chinese infantryman was dead on arrival. I refer, of course, to brain death. I also understand that certain tests were made and that these showed a total absence of reflex, coordination, an absence of any of the normal responses one associates with life.”

Andreyev caught Koprow's eyes, then looked away, coughed, studied his papers.

“The question in my mind,” Koprow said, smiling again, a leprous expression, “is simple. If the woman has such a destructive capacity, if her ability is such that she can, quite literally,
destroy
a mind, how are we to make use of this particular talent?”

Andreyev said nothing. He glanced at Sememko; the square fat hand was working the strands of the reddish moustache. Andreyev longed all at once to be out of this room: the trapped heat was suffocating him.

“Perhaps Professor Andreyev …” Koprow inclined his head toward Andreyev, then sat down.

There was a silence in the room; the awful silence of a clock suddenly stopped. Andreyev realized that he should stand, deliver his prepared speech, his explanation, but he felt oddly numb. I am paralyzed, he thought. Why had Domareski disappeared? Fool, he thought. You don't need the gift of clairvoyance for that one. He remembered Katya standing in her compartment, her reflection in the window; in his imagination he saw a coiled snake and heard the vicious rattle in the tail of the creature. Slowly, fumbling his papers, he stood up. The faces concentrated on him.

His own voice was flat, dry, his mouth opening and closing slowly. Someone was riffling papers. A fan blew warm air. Sleet rattled the window suddenly.

“I might begin with some background,” he said. Why did his own voice fade in and out like the signal on a faulty piece of radio equipment? “Mrs. Blum was brought to my attention by a researcher in the town of Sokol, which happens to be her home. The researcher—all this, of course, is contained in my files—was pursuing the kind of work being done by Professor Sergeyev at the Uktomskii Physiological Laboratory in Leningrad … again, I refer you to my files.”

He paused. The room was still, perfect as a photograph, nothing stirring: even the hot-air fan had thermostatically switched itself off. He hated it: the center of attention, everyone looking at him, everyone waiting. He hated this messianic sensation. He wanted to say:
I have answers to nothing, nothing
.

“The specific field I refer to is psychokinesis, or PK, which as you know”—he stared around at their faces: how blank they were, how insipid all at once, awaiting his definitions, his explanations—“is the ability to move objects by mental means. There has been considerable research done in this area. You are doubtless already familiar with Wolf Messing and with …” He dried up; his memory blanked, the roof of his mouth had become dry. “… Nelya Mikhailova. And you are no doubt acquainted with the research that has been done in that direction.”