Brainfire

by Campbell Armstrong

  “There was pain,” she said. “I’m sorry for that.”

  Still, he said nothing.

  “I wish you well, Andreyev,” she said. “I hope it works for you.”

  He moved very slightly. His hands touched the edge of the bed. London, she thought. Why had they come to London? Now she remembered, as if through a haze, the young men on the plane.

  “Please,” Andreyev said. His voice was low, a whisper, hoarse. “I told you I didn’t know—why did you have to inflict me with …”

  She raised one hand slowly, pressing it upon Andreyev’s wrist. This gift, she thought: could a thing in itself be evil? She looked up into the man’s eyes. A man without knowledge of any future save that of his own complete desperation. What can he tell me? She watched him pull his hand away, as if from a hot iron.

  “You didn’t have to—” His sentence faded. He pressed the palms of his hands against the sides of his head. He sat on the edge of the mattress now, limp, exhausted, beaten. The last privacy, she thought, is no privacy at all. She wanted badly to sleep.

  “I had to know, Andreyev, if you were telling me the truth.”

  He said something that she barely heard. She was thinking of Rayner, a dream of broken glass, of dying. If she felt some distant anger now it was directed less at those around her than at herself: she had become the object of her own rage. But rage took strength, and she had none. Her heart was sluggish, each slow beat suggesting the onslaught of pain. She felt Andreyev rise. His words came from a distance. You mustn’t tell anyone. Promise me that.

  When she opened her eyes he had gone from the room. She stared at the dark window, where Andreyev had untidily drawn the draperies back. Outside, in the distance, there was a neon light pulsing. Tiny reflections, like electrified fish, flashed on and off upon the black glass.

  6.

  It was after midnight when Rayner stepped out of the house in Belsize Park. He paused at the bottom of the steps and turned up the collar of his raincoat. The wind had dragged in its turbulent wake a chilly rain. Sally, he thought. There ought to be a book called Uses and Abuses of Sex. His lovemaking, if you could call it that, had been less for her than for himself—an act of anxiety, of self-gratification, a weirdly empty satisfaction. Consider something impossible, he thought: like performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on yourself. It had been as meaningless as that. Quick and cold. And she had known she was being used. Lying in the dark, smoking a cigarette, she had said, “There’s something to be said for masturbation, Rayner.” What could he do? Apologize? Rayner, he thought, you have to pull yourself together. You have to apply epoxy to the dismembered parts of yourself—because it’s a long fucking way down.

  He stared at the streetlamps and at how the branches of wintry trees beat madly against the blurry lights. He was tempted to go back inside and say he was sorry, but sometimes words were just things you fumbled with. Maybe she understood anyhow. You lose somebody you have loved all your life: there had to be a temporary loosening of some essential screw in the old head. Brave fronts and stiff upper lips weren’t his style. He felt the wind in his hair and he shivered. He realized that what he really wanted was a form of revenge—the problem being that he had no object in mind.

  He crossed the street, thinking of heading down to Swiss Cottage, or to Finchley Road, where he might find a cab. But halfway across he paused, conscious of some faint movement behind—and he remembered the noise on the stairs, the shadow passing the light. Gull: would good old George go to all that trouble? Would George have a specialist somewhere in pressing ears to doors? Not now, surely; after all, Gull had brought it out into the open. So why would he continue surveillance if Rayner knew about it?

  He bent down, pretending to tie a lace, wishing that his shoes were not of the slip-on kind. Who? he wondered. He heard the parting of shrubbery, a damp stick breaking slowly, and he turned around to see a man moving quickly against the low white wall that surrounded Sally’s house. Along the street a little way the headlights of a car were turned on. The man was going in that direction. Rayner moved after him, walking quickly, while the car edged forward. The man, who wore an old-fashioned soft hat low on his forehead, swung around to look at Rayner. The horn of the car was sounded once. Rayner moved faster. The man, tugging on his hat, holding it down against the ferocious wind, went to the edge of the sidewalk as if he needed to remind the driver of the car where he was, but Rayner caught him just as the car pulled up at the curb. The man was middle-aged, flabby, ghostly in the streetlamps. The door of the car swung open, striking Rayner hard in the thighs. Momentarily he loosened his grip on the man. The hat was tugged away, whipped by the wind. Stupid, stupid, stupid, Rayner thought, rubbing his thighs through the folds of his coat. The hatless man was climbing into the car, exchanging some hurried phrase with the driver, then swinging the door again so that it hammered into Rayner’s groin. He slipped to the wet pavement, watching the car—a black Saab of uncertain vintage—pull away from the side. Ah, fuck, Rayner thought, squatting there absurdly on his knees and feeling both dampness and pain spread through him. Turning, he watched the car go; and, as if in some surreal comic strip, he noticed the windblown hat dancing down the street over branches, lamps, and telephone wires, and finally vanishing somewhere above the rooftops of Belsize Park like a misdirected homing pigeon.

  He got to his feet, still rubbing his thighs and groin. Goons, he thought. He limped to the nearest wall and leaned against it, struggling for his breath. Goons, nighthawks, the clandestine brigade who shared this propensity for darkness with cockroaches, wood lice, and other furtive pests. But they hadn’t come from George Gull: he was sure of that. Unless, of course, George had started to use Russian-speaking shitheads to do his dirty work for him.

  3

  1.

  A fresh morning, a March sun that had all the suspect vitality of a counterfeit coin newly minted; but somewhere there was spring, a sense of renewal. Of all the English seasons, Dubbs found spring the saddest. What else but rebirth could remind you so forcibly of the running down of your own seasons? He stepped out of the underground station in Chalk Farm, assailed at once by diesel fumes, the roar of hectic traffic, a kind of madness that suggested a headlong rush into various voids. He turned a corner, finding himself on a sleazy street of gray houses and small shops. On the opposite side of the street there was a bar called The Mother Goose, one of those brewery-owned horrors that spend half of their time trying to be discotheques. He shivered and went inside, smelling stale spilled beer, noticing an enormous jukebox standing silent in the corner. Grabowski, whose wardrobe seemingly consisted entirely of soiled raincoats, sat alone at the bar. He acknowledged Dubbs with a slight inclination of his hairless head.

  “What will you have, Eric?” Dubbs said. He drew a bunch of coins from his coat.

  Grabowski asked for a Vat 69 and a beer chaser. When the order was served, Grabowski threw the Scotch back quickly. Then, with a look of Slavic moodiness, he gazed into his beer glass.

  “So,” Dubbs said, and smacked his lips, putting his own glass of Bell’s down on the bar, “what brings me out to Chalk Farm on such a fine day, Eric?”

  Grabowski lit a cigarette, a Woodbine. Dubbs remembered the circular tins of fifty that used to be so common in wartime.

  “You’ve been busy, Dubbs, is what I hear,” Grabowski said. His English was flat, accents in all the most unlikely places.

  “Never a dull moment, Eric,” said Dubbs.

  “How I hear it is you’ve been asking around about a man, a dead man.”

  “You do make me sound morbid,” Dubbs said. He stared at the deep-orange nicotine stains on Grabowski’s fingers; an unusual pattern there, every finger covered with the stains.

  “A dead man. An American. Is that true?”

  “It might very well be,” and Dubbs tried to remember his dossier on Grabowski. A Russian of German descent, wasn’t that it? Jumped from a trawler in the North Sea. It was somehow disappointing to see the h
ero so reduced, as if the magnificent flight to freedom and democracy had been undertaken for the sake of booze and Woodbines. I must shield myself, Dubbs thought, from the perils of my own cynicism.

  “I have something,” Grabowski said. “Maybe we go over to a table.”

  They carried their drinks to the corner table and sat. A pretty girl in uniform was laying out trays of food for the expected lunchtime crowd. Shepherd’s pie and Scotch eggs.

  Dubbs watched Grabowski a moment. “What do you have, Eric?”

  Grabowski looked suspiciously around the empty bar. He clutched his pint of Watneys and drank. Beer slipped over his lips, down his chin. “You’ll pay?” he asked.

  “Well, old man, that’s going to depend rather.”

  Grabowski made a face. “I don’t have to do this, see. I don’t have to help you, Dubbs.”

  “Of course you don’t.” Dubbs began to rise, but Grabowski, with some measure of desperation that, Dubbs thought, was in direct proportion to his need for beer money, clutched at Dubbs’s coat sleeve.

  “I have an item. Twenty-five quid.”

  “That’s somewhat steep,” said Dubbs.

  “Hear what I have to say first.”

  Dubbs shrugged. Grabowski emptied his glass with a loud glugg-ing sound and then gazed into the emptiness of it with a disgruntled look.

  “Okay. Listen. Your place is wired.”

  “My place is what?”

  “You heard me, Dubbs. Wired. Tapped.”

  “How do you know this?”

  Grabowski mysteriously tapped the side of his nose. “Hey, Dubbs, what do you want for your money? That I tell you my sources?”

  “It helps,” said Dubbs.

  “Let me put it so you understand. You started to ask some questions. Well, frankly, you don’t know how to be discreet. A certain party approached … some friends of mine. They are electronical wizards, see?”

  Dubbs nodded. “Why would anybody want to bug my place?”

  “I’m not the oracle, Dubbs. I only tell you what I know. You go around asking about this American, well, this interests a certain party and so a job is subcontracted. Are you following me?”

  “You have a name for this certain party?”

  “Are you stupid, Dubbs? I say a certain party and it means only the one thing.”

  Dubbs was silent a moment. Then he said, “I understand we’re talking about the Embassy of the USSR?”

  Grabowski fiddled with his empty glass; a conspicuous gesture.

  “How many devices, do you know?”

  “I understand three,” Grabowski said. “My friends, the electronical wizards, they are not exactly pleased to be working for this certain party on any kind of basis. They don’t do their best work, do you follow?”

  “I’ll find them, is that what you’re saying?”

  Grabowski got up, hands in the pockets of his soiled coat. Dubbs wondered how one could accumulate so many disparate stains, unless you were lying under a leaky car, devouring a hamburger smothered in tomato sauce, and simultaneously dropping cigarette ash all over yourself.

  “I’m going to the lavatory now,” Grabowski said.

  “I’ll accompany you.” Dubbs got up, feeling in an inner pocket for his wallet. He followed Grabowski through into a cavernous room of stained urinals. There was the sound of water dripping from a cistern somewhere.

  “Your money,” Dubbs said.

  “Very fine,” Grabowski said. “Can I buy you a drink?”

  “I think not,” Dubbs said. “Some other time.”

  2.

  Dubbs met Rayner in the late afternoon in Marylebone High Street. Dubbs carried a string bag that contained a box of parrot food, two onions, and a piece of porterhouse steak already leaking blood through its paper wrapping. They went inside a Salisbury’s supermarket, where Dubbs purchased a couple of green apples, which he slung inside the bag. Then they walked in silence for a while, cutting down a side street away from the noise of traffic. Eventually, in a small square area between blocks of flats, they came to a park—a couple of spindly trees, kids on a slide, a sandpile, mothers looking lonely on benches. They sat down on a bench and Dubbs surveyed the park disapprovingly.

  “A veritable oasis,” he said. “Courtesy of some benign municipal power. I can just picture some idiotic clerk putting his signature to a requisition. A park? Good Lord, what do they need a park for? We are overrun with civil servants, my dear. They have bad teeth, poor eyesight, and they take their vacations, under sufferance, in such places as Torquay and Torremolinos. They have white sticks for legs and they suffer dreadfully in the hot sun. Ah, well.”

  Dubbs bit into an apple, his jaw revolving. He watched a gang of kids come tumbling down the slide. The easy spring of youth, he thought. Bravery and broken bones. Then he turned to look quickly at Rayner.

  “I was telling you about the eavesdropping devices,” he said. “The first was under the sink. Really, an eavesdropping device in the kitchen? The second was more stupid—inside a clock that offers the listener Westminster chimes on the quarter hour. The third, at least, was in my bedroom. Not that I indulge in any great activity in that particular room, John—but it was a better shot than the others.”

  “The Russians?” Rayner asked.

  “As I understand it,” said Dubbs, putting the core of his green apple back inside the string bag. He surveyed the bloodied package of meat with some distaste. “The Russians, of course. Which presents us with something of an enigma, my dear. The Russians who savaged you last night—”

  “It was hardly that,” Rayner said.

  “In my book, John, all violence is savage.” Dubbs looked brightly toward the sandpile, where a worried mother was removing fistfuls of municipal sand from the open mouth of her infant. “We must assume, I think, that our interest in Richard has intrigued the people at the Embassy. Otherwise, why go to the trouble of tapping my homestead? Why bother with sending their shadows after you? What, one might ask, are they concerned about?”

  Dubbs was silent, taking a Sobranie from a box, lighting it. Rayner undid the buttons of his coat in the manner of one taking a calculated risk with the weather.

  “Now why would they be so interested in knowing about Richard?” Dubbs said, more to himself than to Rayner. “The man killed himself—are they afraid we might find out something to the contrary?”

  “Like what?”

  “There’s the rub, laddie,” Dubbs said. “Like what exactly.”

  Dubbs gathered up his string bag and began to walk. Rayner followed him.

  “Consider what we’ve got, and God knows it’s little enough,” Dubbs said. “Your brother jumped from a window. Eyewitness, your brother’s wife. A perfect suicide. I trust this isn’t painful, my dear? The thing’s clear-cut, obvious, no crime to be solved. Because you aren’t exactly convinced by the situation, we do a little probing, a word here, a question there. And my people are such awful gossips—and frankly some of them are quite untrustworthy—that word gets back to the Russians. Next thing, they’re after us. Why? Because there’s something we’re not supposed to find out? Or because my dear friend Mr. Zubro is himself perplexed?”

  “Zubro?”

  “Ah, John,” Dubbs said. “We work in a hall of mirrors. A Zubro here, a Zubro there. You need to cut your eyeteeth on Friend Zubro, John. He has all the externals of an Englishman, and all the curiosity of a Cheshire cat. One day you must meet Anatoly. To his credit, he knows that the game has its rules.”

  “And he’s behind the bugging, the surveillance?”

  Dubbs nodded. “Nobody else, John.”

  They left the park and walked back in the direction of Marylebone High Street. A cloud pattern passed, like the slender hand of a conjurer, across the March sun.

  “What next?” Rayner asked.

  Dubbs, shrugging, switched his string bag from one hand to the other. “I suggest you check your own flat for foreign objects. And perhaps even this gal’s place in Belsize Park.
How can she stand it over there?” Dubbs wrinkled his nose, as if a particularly noxious stench had passed just in front of him. They paused at a traffic signal. Cabs and buses roared past: destination hell, Dubbs thought. He glanced at Rayner—young, still wet behind the ears, and out of his depth in the perplexities of the game. What could one do but lend a helping hand when it was needed? Passing that curve of forty-five on life’s wretched graph, Dubbs thought, perhaps you started to see something of your former self in younger men. Besides, Rayner didn’t look especially well, healthy: he had developed an uncomfortable expression, a look that one might see on the faces of those who expected something to happen from behind. Jumpy, nervy, a chalky pallor to the skin. Young men, Dubbs thought, ought to appear vital. He reached out, touching Rayner on the elbow.

  “Can I invite you for tea?”

  Rayner hesitated before declining. “My own embassy beckons, Dubbs. But thanks. Thanks for everything.”

  Dubbs clapped him lightly on the shoulder. “Keep in touch,” he said. He watched Rayner turn and lose himself in the throng that moved along the pavement. There were some thoughts Dubbs did not like to entertain—such as those that concerned his own sexuality. For a long time now, ever since a prim little suburban girl called Rita, domiciled in the redbrick jungle of Harrow, had rebuffed his advances, spurned his offer of marriage and respectability, he had considered himself one of those who deserve to be called asexual. But there were times, times in the depths of night, or on rainy empty mornings, when he wondered if he had mislabeled himself.

  Ah, well, he thought. And went off in search of a bus.

  3.

  The man sat in the corridor, reading, Andreyev noticed, a copy of the Reader’s Digest, whose front cover had the provocative question “What Are the Reds Up to in Ethiopia?” He glanced up from the magazine as Andreyev passed in the direction of his room. Andreyev unlocked his door and stepped inside the room, going to the window. Late afternoon: a hazy view of an expanse of park, a small body of water, a kite being flown haphazardly in the failing sunlight. London, he thought. Freedom. And all it would take was some simple cunning, some extra surge of courage. He looked at the bedside telephone. Pointless. The line would be listened to—if not by Oblinski then by one of the others, perhaps even directly patched into the Embassy itself.