Brainfire

by Campbell Armstrong

  “Good-bye, Lord Warsdale,” said Dubbs, going to the door.

  “Quite,” Old Warsy said. “Quite, quite.”

  3.

  It was, Rayner thought, a pointless lunch—an uneasy lingering over fettucine that neither of them wanted particularly to eat but at which they picked for the sake of good form. Besides, the upstairs dining room at Bianchi’s was Sally’s territory and not his own and he felt an acute disadvantage. When she had come in, some ten minutes late, it had taken her several more minutes to reach the table at which Rayner sat—she seemed to know everybody in the place, literary agents and authors, other editors like herself: she would flit here and there to make a joke or exchange a greeting in a manner Rayner found exceptionally irritating. He was reminded of a queen bee acquainting herself with the denizens of the hive. The outsize broad-brimmed hat, the loose flowing scarf, the short fur jacket that might have been rescued from mothballs, the shoulder satchel overflowing with tissues, bits and pieces of paper, a thin typescript in a purple folder—and he wondered: What could he ever have expected from this crazy disorganized lady?

  “Pardon my lateness,” she said when finally she sat down. A Campari came, even though he hadn’t seen her order one. He watched her a moment, wondering in spite of himself how many of the other diners had been her lovers. Impossible games, he thought. You promised yourself to stop. It was all he could do to keep from saying that there was no beef Wellington on the menu. A kick in the heart—well, that separated the men from the boys.

  He sipped his Scotch and surveyed the menu. Why had he even bothered to call and make this date? Was it for an amicable farewell? a form of apology? She lit one of her colored cigarettes and tasted her drink. Irritatingly, she was wearing dark glasses; he wanted to reach across the table and slip them off.

  “Here we are then,” he said.

  “Cheers,” Sally said. She raised her glass and knocked it against his.

  “About last night—”

  “Forget it, Rayner. C’est fini.”

  “The incident or the whole affair?”

  Sally shrugged. “It’s a matter of definition, darling. For you, maybe, it was an affair.”

  “What was it for you?” That goddam past tense, Rayner thought.

  She smiled. He wished she would take off the absurd black hat as well as the glasses. What was she into today? Femme fatale? Lady of mystery?

  “Look, love, I don’t think I’m quite ready for you yet,” she said.

  “You talk in riddles.”

  “Well, let me turn it around another way, shall I? I’m silly and immature and oversexed and lewd and all the things you can’t cope with—”

  He waved her words away. “Sally—”

  “Let me finish, John. Let me speak my piece, all right?”

  He looked down at the tablecloth, the breadsticks in a glass, and saw, from the corner of his eye, a waitress approach with the order of fettucine. He picked up his fork, toyed with it. Immature and oversexed and lewd, he thought. Was that how she really perceived herself?

  “The point is, I think you’re ready for something a little more substantial than anything I might be capable of offering, that’s all. You don’t need to look so pained, love.”

  Betrayed by a facial muscle, Rayner thought. He finished his drink and coiled some of the fettucine around his fork. He had no appetite.

  Sally took off her hat at last and shook her tangled hair free. “When your brother died … listen, love, I don’t want to sound macabre or utterly without feeling, but when he died I rather felt you needed some kind of comfort and that I could supply it. I never wanted you to build it up into something else.”

  Key words, Rayner thought. Why did they sound like embalmer’s terms? Comfort. Macabre. Why did this meeting feel so damned heavy?

  “What happens now?” he asked. “Do we shake hands? Do I sometimes get to call you on the jolly old telephone, baby?”

  “Shit,” she said. She dropped her fork on the table, where it clattered. “I’m trying to explain but you aren’t exactly making it easy for me.”

  He looked at her dark glasses, seeing only his own distorted reflection there. Did she really mean all this? He felt just as he had done when he had found the fat novelist in her flat—an emptiness, a disappointment, a slow fuse burning somewhere inside him. Sigmund, Sigmund, he thought, did I see in this careless girl some compensation for my dead brother? Was it so obvious that I was seeking—ah, the word—solace? Was it in my eyes? the way I moved? the words I said? Poor Sally, he thought. She had to suffer through it too—a Florence Nightingale in scanty underwear. Sex as Valium. Sex as medication. Even the best of nurses have other patients, Rayner.

  “Okay,” he said. “Do we call it a day?”

  “John, love.” She leaned across the table, touching the back of his hand. “I can’t go on carrying the weight of your dead brother. Don’t you see that?”

  He nodded his head. He looked through the narrow window and down into Frith Street, remembering now how Dubbs had called him that morning after dawn, the request for information, an item that the computer, in its infinite wisdom, might spit out. He remembered, too, the hard look in George Gull’s face—

  “It’s so bloody banal, darling,” she said. “But I don’t want to lose your friendship.”

  Rayner pushed his plate of pasta away. His immediate feeling was to get up and leave—go back to the Embassy and deal with Dubbs’s request, process the Folweiler material, make good old George a happy man. But what he had come to realize was that in the right circumstances he could have loved this thoughtless girl; he could so easily have come to love her ways. Now he was left with a sense of desolation, an awareness of business that would always be left unfinished. Postcards from foreign places, sporadic letters, irregular exchanges of information. And the curiously lingering sense of sexual jealousy. Mad as hell, he thought. I have to be out of my tree.

  He took his hand away from her fingers. She removed her dark glasses. There was, he thought, some small sadness in her dark eyes—but how could you be sure of that? He got to his feet rather clumsily and looked down at her.

  “Call you in a day or two,” he said.

  She shook her head. “I’ll be out of town until next week, John. Wait a while, okay?”

  “It’s your game, Sally. The rules are yours.”

  He walked across the dining-room floor to the stairs. Somebody—he wasn’t sure who—helped him with his raincoat. He went down the stairs and out into Frith Street—a cold March afternoon, a numbing wind, papers blown along the gutters. He thought of her sitting alone at the table in the restaurant—knowing, knowing with certainty, that somebody would have moved already into the vacant chair. Sally, love, how have you been?

  To hell with it, he thought. Consider it a near miss, a close call, a vague flirtation with disaster. He walked hurriedly toward Shaftesbury Avenue, where finally he found a cab.

  4.

  Stanislav Koprow, sent at the express request of Secretary Maksymovich, arrived at Heathrow from Moscow just after three in the afternoon. He was met by Oblinski after he had cleared customs and Immigration, using a passport that had been issued in the name of Sergei Lefkowitz. The two men went to the snack bar, where Koprow, tired after the flight, fatigued by the sheer need of having to travel abroad at all, drank two cups of black coffee quickly. Oblinski, he thought, looked rather sheepish—but if he knew Oblinski at all, then it was a safe bet that the KGB man would be attributing the blame for failures elsewhere.

  Koprow sucked on a Polo mint and rolled the green cylindrical package back and forth on the counter of the snack bar. A little silence, he considered, could go a long way with someone like Oblinski, whose nightmares, he was sure, concerned demotion, banishment, and even imprisonment. There was always enough uncertainty to go around, Koprow thought.

  “Your explanation?” Koprow asked eventually.

  “Andreyev escaped from the hotel—”

  Koprow frow
ned. “We keep a tight rein on our people, don’t we? I like to see that.”

  “I blame Zubro,” Oblinski said, pulling on his lower lip, as if by extending it he might look petulantly innocent. “I blame a certain laxness in Zubro’s security arrangements.”

  “You don’t credit him for covering his mistake?” Koprow asked.

  “Well, to a degree, of course—”

  “Messy. Messy.” Koprow picked up his empty coffee cup and gazed inside it. “Instant shit,” he said. He crumpled the paper cup and dropped it to the floor. “What else could he do anyway, Oblinski? Permit Andreyev to find safety?”

  “Of course not,” said Oblinski, his face flushed.

  “How much did Andreyev give away?”

  Oblinski shook his large head. “Nothing—”

  “Are you sure?”

  “He was killed before he made contact—”

  “Are you sure?”

  “According to Zubro—”

  “Ah, yes, Zubro.” Koprow shoved the pack of mints into his brown overcoat. “I still don’t entirely agree with the decision not to inform Zubro of what, so to speak, he has in his charge. But that was not my policy to make. However, Secretary Maksymovich has placed me in total control of the situation. I want to see … more definite action.”

  “Of course,” said Oblinski.

  “First, I want to see Zubro.”

  “The car is waiting.”

  Koprow slid down from his stool. He thought of the sickly coffee splashing around in his empty stomach. “And what have our friends in British intelligence made of this dead Russian? Do you know?”

  Oblinski shook his head. “Zubro will be trying to find out, naturally—”

  “Zubro,” Koprow said. “Some things one has to do for oneself, Oblinski. A man can only delegate responsibility when he has the necessary confidence in his underlings. You may be sure that I have no such confidence. None at all.”

  They left the terminal building, Koprow walking quickly, Oblinski—like a beggar rattling a bowl doomed forever to be empty—hurrying to keep up.

  5.

  Rayner was in no mood to deal with George Gull by the time he returned to the Embassy. Nevertheless, when Gull put his head around the door of Rayner’s office, Rayner made a huge effort to be pleasant—even if Gull’s expression, like that of a man who has gone to the margins of madness and back, forewarned him.

  “I’m working on the Folweiler stuff,” Rayner said, looking up from the mess of his desk, noticing how Gull stared at the heaps of paper with significant disapproval.

  “I’m glad to hear you’re doing something for your keep, John.” George Gull closed the door and came slowly across the floor, his hands in the pockets of his trousers. Rayner could hear loose change being rattled; if there was a distant thunder, a harbinger of Gull’s mood, it was the noise of the coins rapping against one another.

  Silence. Rayner picked up the telexes and tried to make them look neat. But he was acutely aware now of tension, something locked into George Gull’s silence. Gull went to the window and stared out a moment. Coins, Rayner thought. Why doesn’t he stop with the coins? Rayner gazed at the little pile of telex material and waited. It was coming, he thought, whatever it was.

  Gull whistled a bar of something unrecognizable, then—in a voice that was low, hardly audible—said, “Why did you make a computer-bank request this morning, John?”

  Ah, there it was. A little data for Ernest Dubbs and you were made to feel like a candidate for the gangplank. Rayner wasn’t sure what to say—but he hated the notion of Gull’s prying, the idea of George or one of his secretaries snooping around.

  “Is it a crime?” Rayner said. “I ran a simple databank request—”

  “On a man called Victor Andreyev,” Gull said. “Why?”

  “Dubbs—”

  “Dubbs. Fuck Dubbs, John. I never knew Dubbs was paying your salary. When did that happen?”

  Whatever else his gifts, good old George wasn’t at home with the heavy sarcasm.

  Rayner stood up, folding his shirt sleeves. “Spirit of co-operation,” he said. “You’re telling me it’s a sin, George?”

  Gull stared at the desk. The computer print-out, which lay beneath some flimsy sheets, and which Rayner hadn’t even bothered to look at, caught his attention; he reached down through the mess of flimsies and scanned it.

  “Dubbs asked for this, John?”

  “For Christ’s sake, George. A helping hand, that’s all. He’s extended himself for us in the past. You know that.”

  Gull dropped the print-out on the desk. “Why do you think Ernie Dubbs is so helpful, John?”

  Rayner felt an uneasy sense of expectation; and something else—a presentiment of something altogether nasty. He stared at Gull, at the redness of the man’s neck, the short bristles of hair.

  “Ever ask yourself that?”

  Rayner shook his head. “It’s the old thing, George. You scratch my back. You know how it plays.”

  Smiling, Gull looked at Rayner. “Did it ever strike you that he might have a thing for you, John?”

  A thing? Rayner wondered. A thing? There was a delicate treading of water going on—something genteel that, if you slashed it open with a good sharp knife, would reveal all the grubby little dark recesses.

  “Tell me about it, George,” Rayner said. “Is a thing like a yen? Is that what you’re saying? Put it in good old-fashioned lingo, huh? Dubbs has a yen for me?” He suddenly wanted to laugh.

  “I don’t like queers, John.”

  “And that’s how you categorize Dubbs?”

  “I hear the usual gossip, John.”

  Rayner sat down and gazed a moment at the print-out. A queer. A fruit. Suddenly you could see all of Gull’s shit-kicking prejudices fly out of him like enraged bats—the huge flapping wings of a meaningless bigotry.

  “I thought you knew, George.”

  “Knew what?”

  “Isn’t it common knowledge that Dubbs and I have been making out for some time now?”

  “I don’t find that funny. I don’t find that funny at all.”

  “I don’t find your prejudices too amusing either, George.”

  Gull pressed the palms of his hands flat against the panes of the window. A muscle, like some cord tightening in his jaw, began to work. “Sometime, Rayner, you ought to remember your position around here. You ought to keep that in mind. Next time Dubbs wants you to run some fucking errand for him, I’ll scream so goddam loud that you’ll hear me all the way down fucking Whitehall.”

  Rayner looked at the print-out again. Was this what had brought on Gull’s rage? This simple request? How could it be? You made tiny exchanges from time to time, skirting around the rule book. Everybody did it. Tit for tat. Why the fuck would Gull bitch about this particular deal? Rayner closed his eyes: a flashing image of Sally—then darkness. So what if Dubbs was queer? What the fuck did that matter?

  Now he watched Gull pick up the print-out, fold it, fold it a second time, then shove it into the inner pocket of his jacket. “Policy, Rayner,” he said. “I can’t let you take this out of the building.”

  He watched Gull go to the door.

  There he paused, turned, smiled. “Look, dammit. I flipped my lid, okay? I’ve been worried about you lately, that’s all. Forget this ever happened. Right? Forget we ever had this goddam argument.”

  Rayner did not move. George Gull—the quick-change artist, a regular Houdini of the emotions.

  “Let me hear it, John. Let me hear you say it.”

  “Okay. It’s forgotten. Does that about cover it?”

  Gull, suddenly all white teeth and crinkled eyes, grinned. “That about covers it, John. Get back to the Folweiler stuff. See you.”

  George Gull closed the door and went out. But he had left something tangible behind, a discomfort that troubled Rayner. A single match, Rayner thought, and I could gladly burn all these damn telexes. Welcome to the USA, Herr Folweiler. He sat back, his feet up o
n the desk. George Gull—good old George, blowing his bloody top. What did it matter about the print-out anyhow? Rayner had seen enough. Victor S. Andreyev, Parapsychologist. What was Ernest Dubbs into now? Mumbo-jumbo? Powers of evil? ESP cards and ouija claptrap?

  Rayner turned on his desk lamp and stared at the telexes.

  6.

  In Anatoly Zubro’s office at the Embassy, Koprow had assumed, quite as naturally as breathing, Zubro’s chair behind his desk. The usurpation and its possible connotations did not escape Zubro, who thought that of all men only Koprow could instill such a sense of fear into him. In part it was the man’s reputation; in part, too, it was his extraordinary physical appearance—a sharp thing, as if he were delineated all around by thick black lines. Although they had met only once or twice briefly in the past, Zubro hadn’t forgotten that Koprow had the power to return him to Moscow if he ever thought it necessary. It was not, Zubro thought, the most scintillating prospect in the world.

  “When the name Stefanoff was mentioned, I surmised at once that Domareski intended to make his defection through the good offices of Ernest Dubbs,” Zubro was saying, trying to still the quietly persistent sensation that he was being interrogated.

  Koprow smiled. He was a patient man, or so it seemed. But Zubro was not deceived by the expression.

  “I went to Dubbs’s residence. The rest …” Zubro shrugged.

  “How long have you known of any connection between the Jewish dissident and this man Dubbs?”

  “For some years,” Zubro said. “There was another defection once.”

  Koprow placed the palms of his hands flat together on the desk and looked across Zubro’s papers for a time. Then he raised his face and smiled again. “Unhappily, Domareski was literally exterminated on Dubbs’s doorstep, as I understand it.”

  Zubro nodded. He was conscious of waiting; it was rather as if he expected an injection from the good doctor Koprow. This will be painful but, of course, it’s for your own ultimate good.

  “The problem now, Anatoly, is that Dubbs and his friends in British intelligence will be excavating here and there, looking for whatever riches might be hidden. No?”