Brainfire (14 page)

“You're putting me on,” Rayner said.

“I wish I was.” She went to the desk and looked at the typescript. “But it's serious.”

Rayner was silent for a time, looking around the room, noticing nothing in particular, yet conscious of some uneasiness in himself—as if he were seeking a refuge in this crazy apartment but failing to find one. He replayed the scene with Gull, turning the Moscow report over and over in his mind: maybe if you repeated the official verdict often enough to yourself you could believe it. Maybe you could just swallow the shit and then go on with your life—

“I've never quite understood what you do at your Embassy,” Sally said.

“I'm a serf,” Rayner said. “Low on the ladder.”

“For example?”

“Well, if you were to come in and apply for residence in the United States, your papers would pass across my desk.”

“And what would you do with them?”

“Process them.”

She watched him a moment. “What's your exact title?”

“Assistant Consul.”

“You're a bad liar, Rayner. Something in your eyes.”

A bad liar, he thought. “What do you think I do?”

“You're some kind of spook.”

“Spook?”

“CIA or whatever it is. Central Idiots Agency,” she said. “We did a book on them last year. All the spooks have friendly faces, little smiling masks.”

Little smiling masks, he thought. He watched her close the pages of the typescript with a shudder. She sat down, the cigarette hanging from her mouth, her legs splayed apart—and he felt a rush of affection for her, a feeling he understood could easily grow to that point where love was supposed to begin: giddiness, folly, all the rest of it. The way she walks through her life, he thought—not giving a damn what other people think, that wonderful lack of self-consciousness, an independence he liked. He remembered how they had first met—at the opening of an art gallery that apparently specialized in sculptures created out of scraps of old locomotives. They had talked, then left together. “So bloody pretentious,” she had said. “Have you ever seen anything like it?” Her past, he found out, was checkered with old lovers turned friends, men who would call her at the most irregular hours for consultation in matters of the heart. He wondered what kind of talent it took for a person to defuse a relationship in such a way that all the old lovers became close buddies—and sometimes, rather despairingly, he speculated on whether he would be similarly demoted in the near future. Still another voice on the telephone in the dead of night. Am I growing
jealous
? he wondered. Is that how it starts?

He watched her move cautiously around the cluttered room. She was looking for an ashtray; failing to find one, she dropped her cigarette end in a coffee cup. When she sat down again the housecoat hung open, her small breasts visible. She made no move to cover herself.

“Is there anything new on your brother?”

“Nothing,” Rayner said. “An official suicide.”

Sally closed her eyes. “You still don't buy it?”

“I don't buy it,” Rayner said.

“Then your brother's wife is a liar?”

“No. I don't think so—”

Sally shrugged and looked at him. He turned his face upward to the ceiling, gazing at the expanse of yellowing plaster from which there hung odd, spidery mobiles—frail things that moved and shifted in the thinnest of drafts. Light, rising through a lampshade of stained glass, cast various tints. Trippy, Rayner thought. The rich girl from Roedean goes slumming through the detritus of the psychedelic age.

“Explain,” Sally said.

“Look, I don't have the answers—”

“Philosophy. Introductory course. Are there unanswerable questions?”

I don't even have the questions, Rayner thought. Then what are you trusting? Disquieting feelings? Tiny jabs of uneasiness? Memories of Richard were snapshot albums in which you caught his face in a certain light: a boy with a fishing pole, grimacing in the sunlight one autumn day on Lake Oneida, the glories of some lost fall; a young man, filled with life and promise and hope, pictured climbing into his first automobile, a preposterous 1955 Packard that had once been a hearse; the university graduate heading for Washington. Even Dubbs, Rayner thought, even the little angelic Dubbs had urged him to accept the death as self-imposed. How could he?

“So what do you do in a situation like this, darling?” Sally asked.

Dahling
. Rayner listened to the word. He wandered over to the manuscript and looked at it. Dahling. He flipped the pages and read: “When I first joined the SS, nobody suspected my Jewishness. It was a bitterly cold day in February 1936.” He shut the typescript, smiling to himself.

“Don't mock it,” Sally said, rising, approaching him, putting her arms loosely against his shoulders. “If we didn't publish those books, how could we ever afford to do anything with literary merit? The schlock pays for the books we pin medals on.”

“Yes, dahling,” he said.

“I keep saying, Rayner, you don't have the breeding to get it right. You have to drag it out. A long vowel.”

He held her against him. She was skinny, long, provocative. He wondered if this was all he had come for—this sense of burying himself against her, of losing the rough edges of loss.

She drew her face back from him and smiled. “How did you get to be a spook?”

“I told you, Sally. Assistant Consul. That's me.”

“Seriously. I was wondering if you simply enrolled or if you filled out a form, or if they came and sort of sought you out—”

He put his index finger against her lips. “Consular service runs in my family like a congenital disease. Didn't I ever tell you that? My grandfather was the American Consul in Venezuela. My late father served for years in the Embassy in Rome. Remind me to give you the whole family backdrop sometime.”

The sudden sound of the telephone was shrill. She stepped away from him to answer it. The conversation was low, whispered, protracted. He moved around the room, touching things, looking into the manic eyes of Kitchener, staring at a British Rail platform sign that said D
ORCHESTER
. He wondered if you could spend your life grinding East Germans through the security mill—a situation, an occupation, that was caught and fixed in some hopeless place between Immigration and the Central Intelligence Agency. Assistant Consul. But it wasn't quite that either. If the job had a name, nobody had ever told him what it was.

Sally put the telephone down, sighing as she did so. She turned to watch Rayner and he thought of her many lovers, faceless men and indeterminate couplings, as if he were viewing them through frosted glass.

“Assistant Consul,” she said. “I'm disappointed, Rayner. I imagined you were one of those deeper sorts. Still waters and all that.”

She put her cigarette out. He wanted to know who had been on the telephone, but he didn't ask; even if she had answered it would have been something impossibly vague.
An old friend, haven't seen him in ages, really
.… A dictionary of old friends, he thought. An encyclopedia of former partners. She came across the room toward him and, as if she had intuited some small jealousy in him, some vague resentment, put her arms around him. It was more a gesture of comfort and companionship than of desire.

“Are you going to stay?” she asked.

“If you want me to.”

“It's what
you
want, Rayner.”

He looked at her face, seeing not the thirty-year-old woman but the schoolgirl, dreaming of her as a child, of her school perched on the cliffs above the English Channel. She moved back from him and dimmed the lamp. Then she lit a candle, which she placed on the mantelpiece. He stared at the flame, a violent yellow flicker shivering in an imperceptible draft. She undid the belt of her housecoat.

He stepped toward her, conscious all at once of a slight sound, like that of a foot moving on wood, from beyond the door. He stopped, turned to the door, put his hand on the knob, hesitated.

“What is it?” Sally asked.

He pulled the door open and looked across the dark landing. Some way down the stairs there was a pale light. A shadow passed silently in front of it. Wood creaked. And then there was silence. Rayner went back inside the flat. He closed the door and drew the bolt, thinking of George Gull's goons, of how they came and went in the darkness like clandestine lovers on brief, illicit trysts.

“Was somebody out there?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I thought I heard a noise.”

“The house is full of noise, John,” she said.

He watched her slip the housecoat from her shoulders and toss it, with an amazingly casual gesture, to the floor. There are ways down, he thought, narrow avenues that could lead you to destinations beyond puzzlement and bewilderment—exit hatches out of darkness. He went toward her, his hands extended in front of him.

4.

Anatoly Zubro had no great regard for people like Oblinski. He considered such men—unimaginative, mere hacks, toilers in the field—to have no class, no
élan
. Just the same, as he sat facing Oblinski in the lounge of the Royal Kensington Hotel, where the soccer entourage was billeted, he had the irksome sensation that Oblinski knew more than he was able to tell. Something, maybe the smug little quirk in the expression, the muted mirth in the eyes, suggested to Zubro that Oblinski had a huge secret he would never share. It was a damned unsettling feeling, whatever prompted it, and Zubro felt an unaccustomed uneasiness.

Zubro looked across the lounge to the far corner, where there was a bar at which sat several elderly men—old colonial types, he thought, looking as if they had just had their rubber plantations repossessed. Sometimes, when he didn't want the hack to know he was paying attention, he would listen to snatches of the conversation from the bar. There was an amusing bitterness being bandied around: part regret part nostalgia. “It was in Lumpur, I remember it awfully well.…” “No, old man, you're barking up quite the wrong tree. Fella's name was Sayid, and it was Ceylon, bloody Ceylon.…” Zubro crossed his legs, conscious of the sharp crease in his pinstripe pants, aware of the shapelessness of Oblinski's heavy flannels.

Oblinski leaned forward, tapping Zubro lightly on the knee.

“Naturally, one does not anticipate any problems,” Oblinski said. “But precautions are precautions, after all.”

“Indeed,” said Zubro. He gazed at the old men and wondered what it would feel like to be a disenfranchised imperialist. Sad, he supposed. The bottom dropping out of your jolly old world.

“In the list of names you've been given, there are only two I would consider as special security cases,” Oblinski said. He raised one hand and picked at the tip of his index finger. “Vassily Kazemayov, for one.”

“Why Kazemayov?”

“Simple. The rewards for his particular talents could be considerable here or anywhere in Europe. Something like that might easily enter his mind, after all.”

Zubro nodded. This soccer charade, he thought—why had it been nagging at him ever since the meeting with Stepanek? This wasn't entirely a sporting occasion, he was sure of that. But beyond that—well, one resigned oneself at times to the certitudes of ignorance. Now he was thinking of the woman in the wheelchair he had seen at Heathrow. Trainer Charek's wife. It had occurred to him that there was a rather marked age difference between the woman and the trainer; more, that Charek was apparently quite indifferent to the woman—no words, no touches, no ostensible relationship. Still, he thought, who was he to ask questions?

“The second risk factor involves the physician, Domareski,” Oblinski said.

Zubro shifted in the uncomfortable armchair. The old boys at the bar, much the worse for drink, were tunelessly singing selections from
The Pirates of Penzance
. One of them, a short, bald man with a weathered face, was slipping from his stool. “Whoopsa-daisy,” he kept saying.

“Why should Domareski present a special problem?” Zubro asked.

“He is ideologically unsound.” Oblinski sat back, his eyes narrow now.

Zubro reached forward and picked up his gin and tonic from the table; the ice in the glass was melting, changing from cubes to opaque, misshapen slivers. Unsound, Zubro thought. “If that's the case, Oblinski, then why has he been sent here?”

Oblinski had produced a ball-point pen from his pocket. On the side of the cylinder were the words “A Souvenir of London.” Inside the clear plastic could be seen a miniature figure of a yeoman. Oblinski bit the end of the pen a moment. “I can only tell you that his presence here is necessary,” he said, taking the pen from his lips, perusing it slowly. “That comes from the highest authority, Zubro.”

Zubro looked at the other man. “Why is the old woman here?”

Oblinski shrugged. “Don't ask me to fathom that one, Zubro.”

There was something fabricated in the shrug, something false in the tone of voice. Oblinski leaned closer again, his fingers flat on the surface of the table. “The woman isn't anything you should concern yourself with. I want you simply to keep close in on Kazemayov—but even more, I want the physician locked. Completely locked.”

Zubro shut his eyes for a second. Sometimes these little self-imposed darknesses were welcome respites from the pressures of a world of secrets and sealed envelopes. His mind drifted back, and he found himself thinking again of Dubbs, of the connection between Dubbs and the young man Rayner in Grosvenor Square. He had had Dubbs's little flat bugged for the past three days—but the tapes had revealed nothing. As for John Rayner, the dead man's brother, the occasional random surveillance had turned up nothing more sinister than a girl friend in Swiss Cottage or whatever the place was called. It had been a simple matter to wire her apartment also but so far all he had listened to were several incoherent telephone calls, some of them peculiarly maudlin. Rayner went there sometimes and they made love, this much was evident. She had other callers too. A noisy girl, Zubro thought, and wondered if Rayner knew he had rivals for her bed. Or did people still think in terms of rivals in these days of free-for-all copulation? Oblinski was asking him something. He opened his eyes.