Stray Dog Winter

by David Francis

  If things go wrong, she told him quietly, there’s a restaurant called the Jaguaroff. It’s in a lane off Solyanka, behind the church; it’s listed in Fodor’s but please don’t write it down. She blew him a kiss as if she’d be back in a minute, leaving in her plain leather coat without so much as a haversack or handbag. He didn’t dare look at the door.

  Darcy found himself left with wax and lard caked on his hands, strangely still, her paintbrush in his fingers. The dog regarded him carefully, trustful. Everything fell suddenly silent as if a temporary deafness had come over him. He listened through the walls for sounds in the snow, from the wallowing darkness. Instead of freedom, he felt a frantic dread of being alone.

  Ulitsa Kazakov, Early Saturday morning

  Darcy dreamed he was in California, driving too fast on a winding road, birds thumping on the windscreen, blue jays, blood and feathers, eucalyptus and orange groves, a cottage in the distance. A sea of round lilies that turned out to be melons. He dreamed Aunt Merran waved a long-leafed vegetable over a fence, calling out but not to Darcy, to a blind ram with its bedraggled head twisted up. Aunt Merran’s hair a dirty grey, long and loose. Darcy sketched her with his left hand, shaky and childlike, as the ram ran around in suspicious circles, sniffing up at the air. Eyes sunken deep in a woollen face, eyes that came at Darcy. If I left he’d die, Aunt Merran shouted, her farmer’s tan and weathered face; she walked away with undulating hips. A cumquat tree looked like a large umbrella floating above the fence. But Fin was your daughter, said Darcy. The veranda sofas sprung and uncomfortable and the drumming of rain on the corrugated tin. You’ll look after her, Merran said and Darcy drove away fast on a road through a jungle lined with emaciated men in rags, shaved heads and bleeding tattoos. He jolted awake in a sweat, his heart in his teeth at the squawk of the keys in the shifting locks. He leapt up from the couch where he’d been lying, the whippet held close for protection, watched a gloved hand slip inside the front door, reaching for the light, a hand that remembered the switch by feel.

  Aurelio? he whispered.

  Svetlana, she said. She stood in the entry hall, buried in the collar of a coat dusted with snow, a pistol extending from her glove. She pointed it at him with a thin-lipped smile and Darcy’s breath went loud and quick inside his head. Where’s Aurelio? he asked. The words faint, struggling from him as he gripped the whippet’s fine coat, its skin taut in his fingers. Its collar.

  You must let this dog go, said Svetlana. Her fringe was plastered wet against her forehead, no colourful scarf or sunglasses now. She produced a bone-shaped biscuit from her pocket. Boyar, she said, then something in Russian, the treat in one hand, pistol in the other, the name Darcy’d last heard from the son-in-law’s lips, had him holding tight to the quivering dog, its heartbeat pulsing fast in Darcy’s palms, its white-rimmed eyes looking back for permission.

  Svetlana jolted the pistol, impatient. I shoot you right here and not one will be come to see you, not one. And Darcy believed her but still he held the dog hostage. Is Aurelio in trouble? he asked.

  Svetlana squinted. We are all in trouble, she said. All of us. You were the honeytrap, but you gave us no honey. She moved a step forward, brandishing the treat and weapon, trying not to scare off the now cowering dog. Don’t be hero, she said.

  I need my passport, said Darcy.

  You need more than passport, she said. Give this dog.

  Darcy released his grip on the whippet’s rib cage and Svetlana eased the handgun onto the end table and whispered to the dog in Russian, coaxing it to her. Warily, the dog stepped over the frayed purple rug and delicately sniffed at the treat in her hand, then, without looking back at Darcy, took the treat and chewed. Svetlana shoved her pistol in her coat and pulled a choker leash from her pocket. She looked older, her mascara washed away. Where is your Finola now? she asked.

  Gone, said Darcy. She’s gone.

  You didn’t leave with her? She regarded Darcy with a kind of pity. Get yourself out of here, she said. I can maybe say I never saw you, but still they will be coming. She reached to place the choker chain about the whippet’s slender neck but it reared quietly away from her on its spindly hocks and growled. She calmed it, tried again, extended her arm. It let out a yelp, darted at her leather-gloved hand and bit her. Darcy did nothing to stop it, just shrouded himself in the duvet. Svetlana cried out and the dog barked up at her, baring teeth and making a second quick lunge, the sound of another dog somewhere in the building, a big dog howling and then a third shrill yap started. Svetlana held her wounded hand to her chest and pulled out her pistol with the other, retreating out into the hall, her face twisted up with pain. She didn’t shoot Chernenko’s dog, just took her injury away in a cacophony of barking. The other dogs kept on but the whippet peered back at Darcy like a finely hewn bird, a heron or egret, concerned.

  Darcy pushed his fingers deep into his temples as the dog approached him timidly, the memory of blood from Chuprakov’s wound and now Svetlana bitten. Darcy moved past the dog and locked the door then rushed into the bedroom, knocking over a canister of lard. He pulled open Fin’s wardrobe and searched the pockets of her quilted patchwork coat, where he’d seen her fish for cash, felt along the hem. The dog behind him playful now, its paws on Darcy, but Darcy said no and it sat like a sculpture as he fingered Fin’s winter dresses, her short leather skirt, stopped when he heard someone pass in the hall. He waited, a glimpse of himself so gaunt in the mirror, and the dog sniffed back into the other room, but there was no one. The other dogs had gone quiet. Then Darcy saw Fin’s fake fur stole, curled up on the floor in the corner like a black cat. He reached down and felt the touch of something solid and square inside the silk backing. He shook the solidness down through an opening. A burgundy passport, an emblem and Cyrillic letters, a bundle of cash clipped inside. Different currencies, roubles wadded with American dollars. Darcy didn’t count but he knew it was a lot, imagined stashes everywhere, Jobik’s people, Chechens, Estonians, rebels, whatever they were. The passport embossed with an indecipherable stamp and a photo of Fin with short peroxided hair, without make-up. It wasn’t as if it couldn’t be him. He drank what was left of the tin-tasting milk from the fridge and grabbed at the crackers, poured some on the floor for the dog, then pushed what he could into his daypack, Fin’s suede mittens and extra socks, buttoned himself in Aurelio’s coat. Beneath his scarf the leather leash was now back on the hook from the first day, hanging like a promise, and the dog looking up as if ready, a liability or saviour, a charm.

  Darcy didn’t lock the door. He headed down the back steps with the dog jumping up on him, out into the still-dark street where there was no white Zhiguli, no Svetlana, just a wind that cut into Darcy’s face like a flurry of spinning razors, the dog looking up with its eyes closed against it. Darcy felt exposed and paranoid; checking behind, he leaned into the bite of the gale and tried to remember the name of the restaurant, a car’s name. He’d looked it up in Fodor’s but kept his promise, not written it down. But now his mind was all fuzzy. A lane off Polyanka or Solyanka? He’d forgotten the name of the church.

  He scanned the parked cars for men in pairs or solo, cleanshaven and waiting; he couldn’t risk going back to check. And the restaurant wouldn’t be open now, anyway. He looked down at the dog beside him, almost airborne in the wind, the weather both for and against them, this visibility, the taste of ice that stung Darcy’s lips. His hand in his pocket with the end of the leash, clasping the small roll of money, the sharp edges of the passport. No point in the dress shop, he’d already shouted Aurelio’s name from that knife-cold alley. The money, the chance of a bribe, or flagging down a US consular official, explaining how his mother grew up near Montecito. But it wasn’t yet seven, no embassies open, then he remembered it was Saturday, they wouldn’t be open at all. Without written travelling permission he wouldn’t get far on a train.

  Out on Ulitsa Dimitrova he walked among the early pedestrians, trudging, their heads low and covered. Darcy and the quick-
walking dog moved through them, turned and cut through towards Polyanka on a street that passed near the Church of St Gregory. Maybe this was where she’d meant. He dipped up a narrow cul-de-sac to see who had followed and in the shelter of an alcove he kneeled and held the dog close to his coat. He saw no restaurant there, just a man in a well-lit second floor window, sitting in his dressing-gown, sipping from a teacup at a simple breakfast table. His little finger extended as he lifted a tea kettle with what could have been a cosy. A reddish-haired woman appeared at his side and served him a plate from a pot on a stove. Darcy imagined it might have been porridge, that they were expats, English, maybe one of those Cambridge spies, the defector and his Russian wife, one was still alive. Darcy blew his breath into the scarf that covered his face, the only warmth whispering from inside him and he breathed it on the dog, trying to remember the defector’s name. The woman eating her toast in the window, what if that was them?

  Kim Philby, Darcy shouted, startling the dog, but his shout wasn’t as loud as Darcy had hoped. The woman stared out and Darcy started to walk forward like a child returning home, but above him he saw the silhouette of a man on the steep-pitched roof, roped by his waist to a chimney. He swung something and there was a shot; the dog jumped, pigeons rose up in flight from the eaves.

  Darcy cringed breathless behind a metal rubbish bin, but if he’d been hit he couldn’t feel it, nothing but snow on his knees and the dog right there with him. Another shot reverberated and Darcy peeked up; it wasn’t a rifle but the echo of a hammer strike, sledging out birds from the crowns of the chimneys. But now a guard stood attentive in the glass doorway to the building, and upstairs the woman was drawing her curtains closed.

  Darcy broke for the main street. Back out among the sluggish cars, he jumped in a taxi at the lights and let the dog jump right in with him. Hotel Metropole, said Darcy, checking the back window, car lights in the dark, grim faces through the wiped arcs of the windscreens. Anyone could have been anyone.

  Nyet, said the driver, Nyet sobakoy. He stared at the dog on the seat but Darcy held out the roll of notes in the palm of his hand and was driven on through the muted fuss of the first morning traffic, past the grey mass of the Variety Theatre, the great stone bridge and the shadowy river, and then the black embankment. Darcy sat, relieved to be in the smoky heat of the cab. He asked the driver for a papirosa but the driver just grunted, didn’t turn around. ’otel Ukraine, he said in the rear-view mirror.

  Nyet, said Darcy, anger flooding through him, the dog standing up on the seat as if incensed. Metropole, said Darcy. You heard me. He knew that’s where the foreigners stayed.

  Metropole, the driver nodded.

  He looked out at the Kremlin towers lit with gold through what was now a blizzarding snow. The rifle shot that wasn’t had torn his nerves. He watched a red star that dangled from the rear-view mirror and thought of his mother, drunk and unattended, recovering from left-side neglect. He could feel his breath laboured. A boulevard lined with snow-blotched flats and barely lit shops, the blue street lamps flickered themselves off even though it wasn’t yet daylight. He could search the lobby for Western businessmen, tourists, give his name and tell his story, then he’d try the Americans. If that didn’t work, the railway station. He looked out but couldn’t recognise a landmark now through the wipers. No GUM or the Square or the towers of the Kremlin. Hotel Metropole, he shouted. They should have been close to the Bolshoi, near the Place Sverdlova, the Moskva. Stop, said Darcy. Stoitye.

  Taras Schevchenko, the driver was saying, Taras Schevchenko, pointing towards a statue in the shadow as a towering sixties eyesore rose up in the windscreen; no grand arcades or ornate grills—it wasn’t the Metropole. All Darcy knew was that Taras Bulba was a famous racehorse from home, and this driver had a deal with the Hotel Ukraine, dropping foreigners there. Darcy thrust out some roubles that fell from his hands into the front seat, got out while he could, in the hope of divine intervention.

  He and the dog ran through the snowfall, handed some notes to a doorman in a sagging green jacket so he would let the dog in. The lobby unfolded, flocked with what looked like dressed-up farmers, queues of them checking in and congregating. A clamour of the guttural mother tongue and piped folk music. Darcy stood with the dog on the edge of an endless green carpet littered with cheap canvas luggage, wind-burned men with wrinkled bloodshot eyes, crow’s-feet like claws of eagles, some shrouded in sheepskin, others in boxy suits. People who didn’t seem to notice the dog but Darcy knew he couldn’t blend in here. No other Westerners. The wrong hotel. A heat rose up his spine, against the back of his wet coat. A clock. It was still before eight. He found a deep corduroy lounge chair in a vestibule among a group of milling women in bright woollen headscarves. One sat nearby and smiled at the dog, wrestling to glove her large hands. Darcy had no smile left in him. He removed Aurelio’s coat. It felt heavy, like a shawl of dread.

  Then he noticed, beside him, a pair of glassed-in booths, old-fashioned black phones. He imagined the sound of his mother’s cigarette voice, a chance to tell her he was here and he was sorry. A row of surly clerks behind counters, he noticed a prettyish one at a separate desk just feet from him, a benign pale face alone in a tight blue cardigan. He searched her grey Slavic eyes for signs of benevolence. Her blonde hair was tied back loosely and she passed her eyes over Darcy and smiled, lit up at the sight of the dog. On a whim, Darcy stood and approached her, an ache in his neck ran through his shoulders as he leaned on a chair back in front of her polished teak desk and she petted the whippet. I need to make an overseas call, he said. He knew he spoke each word too carefully.

  Number of room? she asked, nuzzling the dog now.

  Darcy leaned in, forced his fear back down so it lay lit like kindling on his voice box. I stay at Hotel Metropole. He sounded croaky, his English broken.

  You have Intourist guide?

  With my group, he said. I must call my mother. She has a sickness. She is Australianski.

  The girl seemed wary, but Darcy reached forward nervously, touched her hand as he took a hotel envelope from her pile. A photo of an old man sitting, cradling a trumpet, lay beside them on the desk.

  Your father? asked Darcy. She nodded as he slipped a sheaf of roubles from his pocket into the envelope, proffered it to her quietly. For your father, he said, smiled as best he could. He wished his forehead wasn’t sweating, that the tingle didn’t run along his lip like an alarm.

  She nodded with an odd muffled smirk, whisked the envelope out of sight under her desk. Darcy followed it into her lap. To call my mother, he said. For calling international.

  Why you have a dog? she asked. She touched a plastic flower pinned to her lapel.

  My friend, he said. He was afraid she’d wanted sex, not money, but she pushed a small red pencil at him.

  You give me number, she said.

  Darcy took the pencil, concentrated, whispered to himself as he wrote. The numbers lay scratched on the paper like an inculcation. His mother, oblivious, eight hours behind. Almost midnight on Baden Powell Drive, another planet. He stared up into this girl’s ashen eyes. Spasiba, he said, pleading.

  In the telephone closet all he could do was stare at the phone, a dial without numbers and a frayed brown cord. It didn’t seem like it had the capacity to reach far away. He glanced out only once, to the dog on its lead, anxiously watching with the girl at the desk. He pictured his mother, alone in her dark bedroom, a species apart in her light summer nightie, recovered from her stroke. A last drink in one hand and a lit cigarette, ready for bed, unsuspecting.

  When the telephone beeped Darcy sucked in air as if the floor was a trapdoor to water. He lifted the worn receiver, listened. A clicking sound, an echo and then the familiar Australian ring that made him feel heavy, his breath loud now and uneven; the phone rang and rang. He imagined it there on her bedside table, her clock radio, the latest Dick Francis, but no answer, no message machine. Darcy’s heart sinking. He tried to spot the dog and his grey-eyed co
nfidante but the desk was now unattended. Then he heard a new click. Hairlo? His mother, her husky drinker’s voice, confused by the beeps.

  Mum, it’s Darcy, he said and heard the echo, biting his lip at the sound of her, the remnants of her American vowels, the way mothers know sons. Overcome with a rush of blearing tears. I’m in Moscow, he said. I’m in trouble.

  How did you get there? The sound of him staving off sobs seemed to strike her quite lucid.

  Darcy looked down at the damp, muddy square of linoleum, his sodden boots, uncertain what to say.

  Darcy Dancer?

  He pressed his fist against his cheek, knowing this would be recorded, he took his chance. They took my passport, he said. I’m afraid I might disappear.

  Disappear! He heard her confusion, her own swallowing. What are you into now?

  Please help me, said Darcy. The tears coming back, afraid if he started he might not find the words. I need you to contact the embassy. Write down these names.

  His mother wasn’t fighting tears, she was stunned silent, then the sound of her scratching around her bedside table for a pen. What are you talking about?

  Write these names. Nikolai Chuprakov. Tell them he’s dead. That I didn’t kill him. Tell them Fin’s here. Remember Jostler. She’s here with him. They’re involved in something.

  His mother coughed. In Moscow?

  I’m sorry, Mum, he said. I should have told you. But now I need you. Tell them I’m in the hands of a General Sarfin. His son is my friend. They will say I killed Nikolai Chuprakov.

  With that the line went dead.

  Darcy knew he’d said too much as he wiped his eyes on the arm of Aurelio’s coat, stepping quickly from the booth of this wrong hotel, ready to flee, but his cardiganed friend appeared through the crowd. He avoided her apologetic smile, sniffing as he nodded. Where’s the dog? he asked but she shook her head as if in apology.