Brainfire (45 page)

And Gull's hand turned inward toward himself.

Inward. The gun an inch from his own face.

Rayner turned away and waited, waited for what he knew was going to happen, listening for the sound of the gun going off. Again and again and again he heard the silenced violence of the weapon and when it had stopped, when it seemed to him that there was no other sound in the world save that of the rain drumming on the roofs of cars, he turned to look. Gull—what was left of Gull—lay some feet away. Rayner slumped against the hood of the nearest car. He could still hear the echo of Gull's voice,
Christ, Christ
, a useless litany. He felt the rain falling on his face. He couldn't look at Gull again. He couldn't bring himself to look. He thought of the old woman now, wondering what debt she felt she owed him—a death for a death: George Gull for Richard Rayner. A savage repayment. A sequence of events that began with a broken window in Moscow and ended here, here in the goddam rain, outside a sports stadium in Washington.

But it isn't ended, he thought.

It isn't finished
.

A canceled debt, a check written in too much blood. My brother's life: my own survival. What was that power? What exactly? He walked away from George Gull, realizing he was back in that territory where nothing had any proper definition, a place beyond language and sense. The old woman. Repaid with interest. Repaid with more blood than he wanted to think about. He turned and looked back at the stadium.

It isn't over, he thought.

You're left with a piece that doesn't fit.

Maybe a piece you can never make fit.

But it isn't over.

14.

The cop in the white overcoat said, “I wouldn't want to put any money on what happened in here.”

An agent of the FBI, dressed as an anachronistic hippie, beads and leather vest and flowery shirt, stared across the room. “The smell's doing bad things to my stomach,” he said.

The cop stood over the body in the doorway. “Poor fucker looks like he stepped into a furnace.”

The room was filled with law officers, guardians of an inscrutable peace. Cameras, lights, fingerprint men, agents from various state and federal agencies; confusion and disorder and bewilderment.

A uniformed officer said, “The woman in the bathroom might be able to tell us something.”

“Yeah, if we're lucky,” said the cop in the white coat. He stopped in front of a wheelchair where a police physician, an open black bag between his legs, was bent over the shape of an old woman. He had his stethoscope out, pressing it here and there against her chest.

“What's the story?” the cop asked.

The physician took the stethoscope from his ears and folded it. He had been holding the old woman's wrist, trying to find a pulse. He rolled up the stethoscope and dropped it into his bag. “We've lost this one,” he said.

The cop shrugged. “I didn't think she'd pull it off.” He stared at the doctor a moment. “What a hellova thing to happen—especially with Mallory upstairs. What a hellova thing.”

He turned to the uniformed cop and said, “Where did that other guy go? The one that slipped down here?”

“Vanished,” the uniformed man said. “In all the confusion—”

“Yeah. Confusion is the word. Confusion is the only word.” He saw the thin middle-aged woman being laid on a stretcher. She was being carried out. As she was taken past him, he turned his face away. Some things, he thought, you can't look at. He turned once more to the uniformed cop and said, “See if you can put together a description of the guy from the guard he belted. Maybe we can find him.”

He walked back toward the wheelchair and bent down and looked at the expressionless face of the old woman. There was a little pile of colored snapshots, like pieces of a puzzle, lying under her feet. He picked them up and sifted slowly through them.

Epilogue

He waited in the reception area of the hospital, remembering how much he hated these places: that sense of the sick and the dying shut in rooms you couldn't see. Flowers in vases, intravenous drips, people hooked up to machines that kept them barely alive. Tired, he slumped in his chair and watched two nurses—white, even their shoes gleamed like frost—pass the reception desk. Voices over speakers:
Will Dr. Morris report to Emergency? Dr. Sandman is requested in Maternity
.

A place, he thought, where you don't have to think anymore. Where you can let it all wash off. A shower room of the brain. Where the shock of suspicion might be alleviated by lobotomy. He shut his eyes.

Who told George Gull
? he wondered. A conundrum of an impossible kind. Who killed Cock Robin? Who? He shifted in his chair and, opening his eyes, looked along a corridor at a window at the far end where a white rainy light fell on glass.

Nobody told him. He just knew. Something psychic in the air, after all. Leave it that way. George Gull just
happened
to know.

Come this far, Rayner. Cover the whole distance. You might as well. There's nothing left to hold back. The whole way.

He stared down the corridor. Nurses and orderlies moved back and forth. Physicians with little clipboards. Nobody else knew, he thought. Nobody. Nobody else.

Goddam. He wanted to get up and walk out and stroll through the rain and make believe he was somebody else in another place, that the time was different, that the season was not the same. Another place on a map: Shawnee, Oklahoma. Council Bluffs, Iowa. Names spotted on the great freeways of America. Nothing places where you might contrive to become another person.

He saw her now.

She was standing by the distant window, talking with a nurse. Their heads were close together: collusion, he thought.
She's going to be okay, Mrs. Rayner. The girl's going to be all right
. He felt both angry and weary, a combination he couldn't handle. Sleep would defuse both sensations. A long sleep.

Nobody else knew, he thought.

She was walking toward him. He got up from his chair and waited. What was that expression on her face now? Disbelief? Shock? You weren't exactly expected, he thought. You're the uninvited guest at a private dinner. The one they haven't laid a place for. No knife, no fork, no wineglass, nothing. And then she was smiling. She was smiling and moving more quickly. When she reached him, she put her hand on his arm. The smile. The smile. She was saying something, speaking quickly, speaking with the rapidity of nerves:
Overnight for observation but she's going to be okay she's okay it's a great relief
.

She put her arm through his and they went outside, back into the rain. She was still speaking—a flow of noise, of nonsense. He didn't listen. Nobody else told Gull, he thought. Nobody else could have known.

He waited for her silence.

And then he wondered: What do I say? What is there to say? You open the door to a room, you expect to find everything as you left it, but something is altered, something has been taken away, you just can't think what it is—

She was looking at him, asking him something now.
Well? Well? What happened
?

He could feel his own heart stop. His mouth was dry, unbearably so. It was the rough cutting edge of things, a serrated surface, an uneven slicing. You don't need to say it, he thought. You don't need it. Leave everything as it stands. Put up your hand and bring the whole goddam world to a halt and stop everything exactly now, exactly where it is now, with questions unasked and therefore unanswered.

He heard himself say it. “George Gull is dead.”

He had seen masks before, but never one like this. What moved across her face? Of course, she had the sensibilities of an actress, the poise and perfection of someone who has run through a thousand rehearsals of this moment. Playacting: she had to have it down, neat and tidy; she had to have it perfect.

“Who?” she said.

There was a moment here where he wondered if he had made a mistake, a miscalculation, if he had blundered impossibly.

“I wonder when you called him,” he said.

She was shaking her head, laughing, a sound of ice in a glass.

“I figure you must have done it twice,” he said.

“I don't know what you're talking about, John.”

“Maybe the first time was after I arrived back in the States. Maybe even after I'd called you from Kennedy,” he said. “Maybe you dropped your dime just as soon as I'd hung up.”

She stared at him in a bewildered way. The laugh was gone; she was still shaking her head.
How did you know for sure, George? How
?

“Then when you knew I was going to Washington, that I was going to the stadium, you called him again—maybe when I fell asleep in the motel or even later, when we had to stop because the kid was sick, at the rest area. Only this time good old George was back here in D.C., waiting.”

She turned away from him a moment. He was taken by her beauty—flawed as it was in the rain, he was taken by it. The incongruity of desire: even now, even now as he stumbled around the frayed edges of what he was convinced was the truth.

“Only one person,” he said. “Only one person could have told Gull.”

She looked at him. The eyes—the eyes were cold. Light, warmth, whatever, had gone out of them. “You've fallen out of your tree this time, John. You've really fallen.”

He was silent. It was a day for betrayals, the weather for treachery. Fallen out of your tree, he thought. Yeah, a long time ago. You couldn't defy gravity.

“It makes sense,” he said. “Think about it. Think about how much sense it makes. You're with me almost constantly. You know what I'm doing, where I'm headed—and it suits George perfectly. For one thing, you can keep him posted on what I'm doing. For another, you're nicely located to help me out of the clutches of Chip Alexander, because suddenly it doesn't quite suit George Gull for the Americans to take me in. It doesn't fit his plans because there's a chance, a slight chance, they might just believe me. So all along it looks like you're with me, it looks like you're on my side—when your only allegiance is to Gull, to protecting George Gull.”

He stopped. Fatigue, a monster, had hooked onto him. He could feel claws, talons, the shuffling of great black wings through the air. Sleeplessness and hallucination: maybe it was all a construct of his own mind now, something reared in delusion, raised in an indeterminate form of craziness. He thought of the little beach cottage, the new life, the whole new world.

“You even string me along with some pointless little sexual promise. ‘Too soon, John.' Implying, Maybe later. Maybe never is what you meant to say.” He stared at her expressionless face. “You and George. If I had to put cold cash on it, my best bet would be that you were lovers. You and George. It was going to be cozy. Roses all the fucking way. Right down to the little house, the beach, umbrellas on the goddam sand. It was going to be just you and him with the past all squared away behind you.”

The mask moved. Slightly, vaguely, it shifted.

“Your only error was Fiona,” he said. “Even there you tried to cut your losses, didn't you? You tried and tried to convince me I was off the wall, didn't you? You never believed I'd pay any attention to the kid, did you? Maybe that was your best card—my own goddam skepticism. It turned out to be your weakest.”

Rayner shrugged. In the long run, what did any of this matter? George Gull was dead. Too many people had died on account of a monstrous plan that had become a failure. Too many people had to die because of that. He had a feeling now of great solitude: he might have been standing on a vast expanse of empty beach, staring at an empty sea, an empty sky. What did any of this matter?

She had been watching him, but now she looked away. Raindrops coursed from her eyelids, making tracks across her face. Like tears, he thought. How could he tell anymore? He wanted to take her and hold her and look into her eyes and see there the reflection of his own mistake, his own lack of judgment. Prove me wrong, that's all I ask. Prove me wrong. What was that small part of him that still needed to believe in a morality, a sense of rightness? And he wondered how deeply it had been eroded, how far down into the fiber of himself the damage had gone.

But he knew, he knew he wasn't wrong.

She turned to look at him. “Sometimes you don't see the whole picture, John. Sometimes you come in from such a narrow perspective that it eludes you.”

“Tell me about it,” he said. “Tell me about the whole picture.”

She seemed not to have heard him. “After five years, betrayal becomes a part of yourself. You tell so many lies you start to believe them. You don't know what's true, what's not.”

He felt uneasy, a curious emptiness. He couldn't look at her anymore. Betrayal: where does it start?

She said, “I'm sorry about George.”

And Richard too, he thought. Richard too.

She might, he thought, have been reading his mind. “I wasn't exactly making your brother a happy man. It wasn't his fault. He had his work. I was expected to be the perfect hostess in a world I didn't give a shit about. Parties, receptions, boring dinners. You have to be a zombie to get through them.”

Suddenly he didn't want to hear any more. It didn't matter to him. The history of a dead marriage.

She looked down at the wet concrete. In a broken way, she was reflected in a pool of rainwater. “Five years ago I met George Gull in Washington. What can I say?”

Cry, he thought. Show me your tears. Let me see how you feel.

“Now and then, whenever we were in the same town at the same time, Washington, London, Paris—it was classic back-street stuff, John.”

Back-street stuff. He couldn't imagine them together, Isobel and Gull, he couldn't imagine them coupling, the impossible conjunction. All the treachery, he thought. Five years. He slammed his hands together, anger, a damp firework burning out.