Brainfire (40 page)

“Wet?”

“Sure. Look.” Rayner pointed vaguely. “Stands to reason you won't get it stoked if it's wet. You want to dry it off. Paper towels.”

“I guess.” The guy scratched his scalp, pushing the baseball cap back. He picked up the stove and closed it so that it looked like a briefcase of green metal.

“Well. Thanks a lot. Mighty nice of you folks to take the time. Trouble nowadays is nobody gives a hoot about others. Makes a real fine change when you run into people that care.” He touched the peak of his cap and began to move toward the bathrooms. Go, Rayner thought, grinning foolishly in the rain. Go. Forget your keys, if there are keys. He watched the guy go under the stone arch, where he paused as if he had recollected something. But Rayner was already ushering the kid toward the cab. He opened the door that lay on the guy's blind side and saw—shining, wonderful, attached to a sham turquoise key ring—the keys hanging from the ignition. He stood back and let Isobel climb in after the girl, let them slide across the bench seat, then he got in and started the motor. The owner would raise hell, but even raising hell took a few minutes, and by the time he had noticed the cop in the rest area, by the time he had supplied the data the cop would need, by the time he had finished bitching about the breakdown of American civilization, Rayner would have a five- or six-minute start. Maybe. Just maybe, he thought.

“If you want my advice, John, you ought to get off the highway as soon as you can,” Isobel said.

“My very thoughts,” Rayner said.

Between them, the girl leaned forward suddenly, clutching her stomach, her body stiff and rigid, her hands twisted, her mouth open and slack—and for a moment Rayner wondered if she was dying.

9.

In the executive dining room at D.C. Stadium, which had been sealed off by Secret Service men, Mallory shook hands with Ambassador Leontov. It was an infirm handshake, slack and loose, like a dead fish in your palm. Mallory understood that because of the seating arrangements he was obliged to sit next to Leontov, both during lunch and throughout the game itself. He shook a great many hands in the dining room: representatives of the American Soccer Federation, the Soviet trainer, the trainer's interpreter, executives of the stadium organization, the entire Soviet team, the entire American team—neither of which would be sitting down to lunch; a matter of dietary strategy before a game, he was told—and even the hands of the waiters and waitresses who would be serving the meal.

He sat down with Leontov on his right and a man called MacMillan, the president of the American Soccer Federation, on his left. The doorways were blocked by the Secret Service men. The whole stadium would be policed, crawling with agents, plain-clothes cops, security guards. It was, he reflected in a bemused way, a strange feeling to sit down to a meal that had been prepared in such stringent conditions. He looked across the table at Callaway; on a chair by the door sat the reaper with his black case. One could imagine, Mallory thought, how the Pharaohs must have felt; the problem was that of keeping at bay the insidious intoxication of power.

MacMillan, who spoke in a subdued Scottish accent, was a tidy man with a small white moustache and a layer of white hair neatly combed flat. “I understand, Mr. President, that this will be your first experience of our game?” he asked.

“I'm looking forward to it,” Mallory said. A plate of vegetable soup was pushed in front of him. “I expect to have it explained to me.”

“It's not difficult, sir,” said MacMillan, spooning some soup with a hand that trembled slightly.

The Presidential aura, Mallory thought. It sends out vibrations. He sipped some soup, which was watery, laid his spoon down, and turned to Leontov. “You want to predict the outcome, Mr. Ambassador?” he asked.

“Only a fool would predict,” Leontov said. He smiled in a quick way.

“You expect your side to win?”

The Ambassador nodded. “Of course. But I think the game has made such enormous strides here in America that the result will be a close one.”

Mallory looked down into his soup, perceiving a piece of floating carrot that had collided with limp parsley. What was it about the little shit? he wondered. What was it? Something more than the usual scumminess of his personality. A nervous quality, perhaps. Maybe he was a soccer nut and the result was of some real—rather than diplomatic—import to him.

“I think it will be very close,” Leontov said.

“But fair.”

“As you say, Mr. President. One trusts that violence will not be allowed to interfere with the proceedings.” Leontov nodded his head slightly.

Poached fish of some kind was brought. Tasteless and flaky. Mallory picked at it in a halfhearted way, wondering if he might ascribe his unease to the hypocrisy of sitting down to lunch with a representative of Maksymovich's regime.

Leontov said, “A moment ago you asked me for a prediction. I've been turning that question over in my mind.”

“I thought you said only fools make forecasts,” Mallory said.

“On certain occasions, perhaps there's a fine line between recklessness and foolishness. It's only a game, after all. I think the Soviet team will win. But only by a single goal.”

Mallory smiled. “Are you a gambling man, Mr. Ambassador?”

Leontov shrugged. He looked faintly uncertain.

“I've got a dollar that says you're on the wrong horse,” Mallory said.

“A wager?” The Ambassador, smiling, displayed a flake of fish stuck to his upper dentures. “I accept, Mr. President. Gladly.”

10.

For the past fifteen minutes or so Isobel had been holding the girl against her body, rocking her slightly, rubbing her forehead with the palm of her hand. “She's like ice, John. I've never felt anybody so cold.”

Rayner, whose attention had been divided by watching the rearview mirror and glancing at the kid, pulled the camper over to the side of the street. He looked for a moment at Fiona. The stiffness—there was something quite unnatural about the rigidity of her body, as if it were less human than humanoid, something lifeless pressed out of a mold. He reached over and touched the back of her hand, feeling coldness even before his fingers had made contact. What now? Just what do you do now? He had intended to dump the camper, and with it his sense of vulnerability, but how could you walk through the streets with a kid who looked like she was dead and fail to draw some attention to yourself? He had crossed the Rochambeau Memorial Bridge sometime before; now, after a series of turns out of the mainstream of traffic, he realized he was somewhere in the vicinity of the Fort McNair War College and the Anacostia River just beyond.

He looked morosely through the windshield, tapping his fingers on the rim of the steering wheel. His only certainty now was that the camper had to be abandoned. He wasn't even sure anymore of his assumption that the kid's old woman would be in the stadium; why did she have to be anyhow? He had simply assumed it. But whatever her force was, it surely had the capacity to cross distances. Ah, despair—she could be almost anywhere, the proverbial needle in the psychic haystack. Pennsylvania even—what difference did it make? He watched two naval officers cross the street. Crisp movements: they might have been looking for someone to salute.

Only the kid can tell, he thought. I sit in this hot camper and think: Only the kid can know. He turned to look at Isobel, noticing her weariness in lines around her mouth, in the way her hair hung uncombed.

“You can't put her through any more of this,” she said. “There's a point, John, where you have to pause and wonder if you're being reasonable—”

“And I passed that point a while back,” he said. He looked out at the rain. “All I know is I've got to get this pile of steel off my back before it's too damn late.”

Isobel said nothing. She held the girl's face to her breasts, an unexpected little moment of maternalism, touching in its fashion if he had had the time to be touched. The kid moaned and moved her head slightly. Rayner slid across the bench seat and put his hands against her cheeks, trying to turn her face this way and that way as if it were possible to massage this dreadful stiffness out of her. Come on, kid, he thought. Come through for me. He was aware of Isobel's grip on the girl, her defensive hold—another thing he would have to break through.

“Fiona,” he said.

Isobel sighed.

“Fiona,” he repeated. He rubbed the sides of her face gently, noticing how dirty his hands had become along the way, the darkened fingernails, a film of grease. “Fiona.”

The child's lips moved. But there was no sound.

“Fiona, where is this woman? Can you tell me?”

Nothing.

“Can you tell me?”

Again, nothing. He was irritated; despite whatever better feelings might have prevailed—sympathy, a hint of some compassion—he was annoyed by her lack of response. He took his hands away from her and looked once more through the windshield. Christ, what now? What now? And suddenly everything he had pieced together seemed thinly circumstantial, ludicrously fragile, as solid as the filaments of a spider's web. He started up the motor of the camper and pulled away from the sidewalk, looking for M Street, where a right turn would take him in the direction of the stadium—where else? What else did he have left?

“It's all the way then?” Isobel asked. Her voice was flat.

“It has to be,” he said. “You've got a better suggestion?”

Her silence was a reply of its own, a suggestion more profound than any words might have been. He looked quickly at the kid. Her lips were moving noiselessly and he was reminded of an autistic child foraging through the mysteries of its own condition for the simpler mystery of speech.

He reached M Street.

11.

It was a room of white tiles, cool and dark, filled with smells of wintergreen oil. She could hear the rattle of voices coming from elsewhere, from close by, perhaps even from the adjoining room. There were gray metal cabinets, lockers of some kind, and she thought it funny somehow that she couldn't imagine their purpose, their function. Another door, halfway open, led into a lit room. Through this space she could see more tiles, gleaming from overhead tubes of light. A shadow moved. There was a noise of running water. Now, rumbling slightly, the voice of the man they called Charek. The other voices were stilled.

She looked down at her photographs, which she could barely see in the dimly lit room. She shut out Charek's voice as she had done with that other voice—the sound of the child, the sound that came in a series of plaintive cries. She looked at the snapshots, unable to feel them in her numb hands, yet trying to imagine the contours of flesh from the tips of her fingers. She could hardly hold them, light as they were; she could hardly find the strength to keep them secure in her hands. I mustn't drop them, she thought. I mustn't drop them. I have to think of nothing else.

She closed her eyes.

Please tell me I need to find

The persistence of the child. The sheer persistence. She would snap, snap and die, if she went on. She opened her eyes and gazed at the slit of light through the half-open door. That shadow—was it Koprow? The woman? Both of them? She closed her eyes again because even sight was a terrible effort now.

Help me find you

God—one of the snapshots, one that depicted her son's wife, Yael, standing in front of a blue swimming pool with the two children splashing in the water behind her—it slid from her fingers to the floor; it just slipped and fell and she watched it flutter across her knees, over her rug, and touch her foot before it finally landed some yards away from the wheelchair. I have to pick it up, I have to pick it up, I can't leave it lying there like that, just like a discarded piece of trash. And she tried to move, pressing her elbows against the sides of the chair. But she forgot about the rest of the snapshots she held, and they fell also. The whole floor covered with bright colors—how could she get up and bend and retrieve them? She slumped back into the wheelchair, panicked by the sight of the photographs strewn across the floor, panicked and upset, sickened by her own loss of strength. If I lean forward, if I lean forward and fall, if I crawl, she thought. I could do it that way. I could do it that way, she thought.

12.

Koprow put the bar of white soap back in its little tray, looked at himself in the mirror a moment, seeing not only his own reflection but that of Katya—Katya, standing against the wall with her arms folded—and then turned around. He pulled a length of towel from the wall and began to dry his hands. The damned woman, he thought. What right had she to dictate the terms of the thing?

He looked toward the open door and into the darkened room where the old woman had been placed. Her proximity irritated him. Katya unfolded her arms and pushed herself away from the wall. Bitch, Koprow thought. Skinny, hard-assed bitch.

“Andreyev understood her powers better than anybody,” the woman said in a low voice.

“Unfortunately Andreyev chose to take his own route to salvation,” Koprow said.

“In this situation,
he
would have insisted that she be kept as close as possible to the subject,” Katya said. “I don't believe you grasp the intensity of energy that is expended in an act like this, Comrade Koprow.”

“She should be in a hotel somewhere. Miles away,” Koprow said. Blue in the face, he thought. One could argue oneself to a standstill against the stubbornness of this woman.

“In her condition, Comrade, her proximity to the subject is essential. The farther away you put her, the less likely are the chances of success. It's as simple as that. She's sick. She's going to die. I don't think we ought to delude ourselves. Put her miles away, as you suggest, and you are guaranteed failure—”

Koprow nodded. He looked at his pink, clean hands. It still galled him to have the old Jewess so close when he had imagined that everything could be accomplished from a far distance—a hotel in the city, a room in the Embassy, another place. Not here, not in the stadium itself. He looked at his own image in the mirror and thought: What difference does it ultimately make? All that the world will know is that the President of the United States died at a soccer match. That's all. It was the end that counted.