Fin stared down at her food, poured water from the carafe, then she looked Darcy in the eye for the first time. They killed more than a million, she said. She spoke with a purpose that seemed heightened; it almost didn’t sound like her.
That was 1915, said Darcy.
It has to be recognised.
Darcy knew it wasn’t that. He felt something deep from their past, an anger that shook in his gut and pitted against the sadness in his chest—she’d been intoxicated by Jobik from the beginning, out of her depth in a way Darcy understood. A force of nature that had given her this acute, anxious radiance, the sheen of her great secret, and sex that was probably as violent as the terror she’d seen and concealed in her veins all these years.
He’s a killer, said Darcy.
Fin nodded. I love him, she said, unapologetically, as if that would explain it. And in a way it did. She pulled restively at the edge of a bliny, her fingers seemed smaller with no nail polish. Like Merran loved our father, she said.
What? asked Darcy. He hated the way she called her mother Merran, as if she was some friend from high school. He watched Fin pocketing bread from the small wicker basket, thinking.
Did you know that when she slept with him, your mother was in hospital, losing that baby?
Darcy cradled his neck as it throbbed again suddenly. He knew his mother had lost a three-day-old baby, but what did this have to do with anything now? Her name was Tilda, he said, the baby’s name was Tilda. That’s all his mother had said. Why are you telling me this?
You always want to know the truth, said Fin, so here it is. My mother flew out from Santa Barbara to be there for yours. That’s what she meant to do. But she ended up in the Frankston Hospital parking lot in the back of your father’s kombi, fucking him. That’s how I was conceived.
You call that love? said Darcy. He couldn’t believe he knew none of this, and he saw the vengeance in Fin’s now verdant eyes as she told it, as if misguided conceptions produced difficult lives, but Darcy just thought of his own mother—the cruelty of it took him slightly sideways. He pushed his fingertips in under his eyes. The burring in his ears and the balalaika woman from the other room, malinka, malinka moia! It felt like a kind of madness.
This is what happens in our family, Fin whispered matter-of-factly. You got the Mormon, and it fucked you up. Not the gay thing itself, but the way you do it. I got Jobik when I was only fourteen and then I got pregnant and he took me away. And then he got radical but I was in love. She broke off a piece of wax and played with it in the candle flame, moulded it. Maybe it’s a thing that runs in us like a kind of greed, she said. Like a gene. She reached for a chunk of cheese from Darcy’s plate. Eat, she said. You look like a heroin addict.
Darcy looked down at a forkful of the floury potato, thought of himself on the verge of having sex with her in the apartment only days ago, a thing that had brewed between them. He looked over at the wan determination in the green of Fin’s eyes, her lids red with fatigue. I don’t want to be like that, he said.
Like what? she asked bitterly.
Like you, he said.
Fin stood gradually, nodded slightly as if she understood. She pressed a telephone number into Darcy’s hand, a moment’s apology in those blood-grained eyes. Get to Ulli Breffny in the Australian Embassy, she said. She can help you. Darcy registered this as an admission that Fin no longer could, or would.
The cook now stood in the kitchen door, removing his headband as if that meant it was time. I need to get home, said Darcy.
Then do as I tell you, said Fin.
I already did that, he said. He stared at the candle flame, then up at the tiny crystals of ice on a visible edge of the hoar-frosted pane, the scattered scraps of their lives. The annoying sound of the balalaika woman laughing, her friends clinking glasses.
You can dial that number from here, said Fin, they’ll get you home.
Darcy envisaged how Fin’s life would end almost more clearly than he saw his own. It would be all of a sudden. He watched her slip out through the narrow vestibule of empty fruit cartons and stacked chairs, being judged by the odd-looking boy. A lump left in Darcy’s throat, the usual sense of chaos in her wake, he wished he felt relief, or a surge of confidence. He sat there in a funnel of cold air as the cook received a ladder that was being folded down from a manhole, arms extending down from the ceiling and Fin going upwards, following the legs of the cook’s checked pants, his big biker boots, climbing up into the roof. Fin’s elfin feet seemed almost large in her Doc Martens, quietly ascending the rungs. The sight of her dematerialising brought back in Darcy a sense of loss that felt like childhood, a sadness that eclipsed all his fear. She’d been trained in disappearance.
May you be the one, he said.
He imagined her route across the icy rooftops, a pathway back to the thrall of Jobik.
Darcy stood, looked again at the phone number, the small distorted piece of wax she’d plied. He knew he had to find the phone, but he’d been overtaken by a kind of shock. He needed the lady with the pendant, to ask her, so he could go home, but as he reached for his daypack he caught a glimpse of shadows outside, through the filmy drapes. At first he thought it was Fin and her minder but he realised the balalaika had stopped, the two suited men were slipping away. The boy had vanished.
Darcy dashed to the kitchen but it was empty, just a pig’s head hanging on hooks and cabbages, leftovers, the sink full of dishes still. He searched frantically for the phone but couldn’t find one, nor a cash register. There was just an unnatural quiet. Pazhalsta? he asked. Please? Words met with hollowness, as though he was the only one left in the world. Out the back door there was no sign of the woman, just a grey-white mist, a panic ripping around in Darcy’s chest and the soundless night. He took a quick look down the side wall for the ferret-faced boy. He was there, staring up from the snow in his discoloured apron beside the rubbish barrel, dead, a cigarette butt stamped into his forehead like a small wilted horn. A wave of cold came over Darcy, a whisper behind him with a quick icy hand that clenched about his face like a vice on his swollen cheek, tight about his lips. He screamed for Fin into nicotine fingers that twisted his sore lips up and shut, forced him down to a kneel in the slush with an arm pulled up behind him. He writhed against the muzzle of a pistol pressed into the burn on his neck, an agony that blacked him out, suffocating on a hand. On a sister lost. Aurelio.
Beyond Kapotnya, outside Moscow, Sunday, 7.45 pm
Darcy came to in the back of a car that drove slowly without lights, the pain in his head like a throttle and his vision taking on shapes, a driver, bull-necked in front of him, then a sickening feeling—the cigarette eyes that half turned to greet him from the passenger side: the Turk’s narrow face and pencil moustache, lit for a second by an oncoming car. A sheet of paper over the seat, being pushed by the Turk at Darcy’s face.
Today’s London Times, he said, but it wasn’t a newspaper, a page that wouldn’t quite keep still in his freezing fingers, encased in Fin’s damp suede mittens, all he had left of her. A pain that stabbed at his temples, a headline legible in a new sweep of approaching carlights. Turkish Attaché Shot in Tbilisi. A photo of a body on steps, a bloodstain on his neck. His name was Isik Yonder, said the Turk. I knew him.
Darcy squinted, trying to understand. Two unidentified suspects on a motorcycle opened fire yesterday evening outside his official residence. Darcy felt concussed and suddenly claustrophobic, cracked his window as the city blinked by, rows of apartment buildings lay up against factories, the sting of iced air; he wrapped his coat tightly, conjuring Fin, clasping Jobik on a stolen motorbike, her heels above the splashguard. How far is Tbilisi? he thought or said, he wasn’t sure, his words barely there.
Did you know the Turkish Consul-General in Melbourne was my roommate at Oxford? said the Turk. Do you know Oxford?
Darcy shook his head. He felt as if he were drowning, collapsing into the sea. An image blazed in his mind of the rodent boy dead in the snow. The s
ound of the tyres whispered beneath him, and the Turk snuffed a new cigarette out in the ashtray, pulled a hand-held device from the dash and listened. He cast a sidelong glance at Darcy, but Darcy still didn’t answer his question, didn’t care about Oxford, if they’d been lovers at college, the consul and the consul. He blinked hard, his vision still hazy, the horror of the pistol mashed into his burn, the whoosh of the pain, and his coat and the knees of his pants wet through. He was already back on the verge of delirium. He didn’t know why the Turk hadn’t killed him too. If death would be better than this.
The car crept past a dark row of wooden houses, then a small ragged factory. Darcy focused on smoke coiling up from the ashtray, the Turk’s cigarettes like weapons. Darcy looked out into the naked woods, the black velvet dark, thought of the son-in-law slumped in the front of the Borgward.
My friend from Oxford, said the Turk. They shot him outside his home. His wife was at the door. His children, in the garden, were playing.
Darcy wanted to cup the pain in his neck in a handful of snow. He couldn’t defend any of them, Jobik and his Armenians, Fin, or the slaughters of seventy years before. Where were they taking him? He watched out as best he could: the cranes of the Southern River Terminal rose up through the night like black pterodactyls. Then Darcy turned to see out the back, the burn stinging against his collar. Your friend is with us, said the Turk. Don’t worry.
Another car rolled through the dark like a shadow, no headlights either, the broad silhouette of the general. Darcy felt him staring out, right there behind him, where he’d been all along; the memory of the anise smell and animal sweat brought on a new wave of nausea and Darcy was coughing up nothing into the sleeve of Aurelio’s coat. He’d done exactly as they’d hoped—Fin out there somewhere, en route to her secret Armenian bolt-hole.
Urgent spurts of Russian on the two-way and the Turk now pointing to the kerb. Naleva, he whispered and the driver slithered to a quiet halt. A rundown industrial zone. Silent outside, and drizzling, not even the sound of a dog. The Turk concentrating on the side mirror as the other car slid through the snow and parked in behind them.
Darcy glanced back again. Through the fan-shape of wipers, the general monitored the dark with silver binoculars and Aurelio, beside him, gazed at his own knuckles on the Lada’s steering wheel, afraid to look up. A wordless mourning now lay deep in Darcy’s heart. They’d been reduced to shadows, the two of them. As God made them.
The Turk wiped his window with a glove and stared through his own small field glasses, down an unlit space between buildings, towards where Darcy sensed the frozen fleece of the river must lie. He didn’t look at Darcy as he spoke. I would have shot you, he said, but the General Sarfin asked me no. Not yet.
Darcy crouched in the back seat, weak but somehow defiant. The Opinel knife still there, tight against his ankle. He examined the Turk’s profile, his beaky nose and tapered neck, the wolverine smile, imagined slicing with the hawk-bill blade and ripping his smile out wide across his cheeks. What are you doing with me? he asked.
Maybe we need you. Let your sister see we have you, he said, his eyes still pressed against his binoculars. Dangle you on a stick.
Darcy reached down for the knife, just to feel it. Where is she? he asked softly. But it was the bull-necked driver who turned for the first time and Darcy, his hand down by his boot in the sights of grey crystalline eyes, felt the narrow path of his life. The same snub un-Turkish face he’d left in the crowd outside the exhibition, who’d let him believe he’d got away. His fingers stiff as branches, Darcy picked up the newspaper article fallen from the seat, handed it over. The guard who’d not stopped the trolleybus near the Ploshchad Revolyutsii.
Darcy averted his eyes, gazed out into the close black verge as if he wasn’t half-paralysed with cold and fright. If there were a gunfight he’d take his chances out there—a small clump of conifers and from it another pair of eyes, glowing, the shape of a wary angular dog, wolfish, staring back. They watched each other for a moment, and Darcy thought of Laika, a stray captured down by the river, hanging in the air near the sun, exploding. Darcy could only see as far as the spindly pines, through to a factory fence where the timid dog disappeared into the immutable dark. He envisaged his own feet splayed in the blanketed gutter, his face down, silent and cold on this roadside, listening to the snow, wondering if he were dead.
He looked back again for Aurelio but the Lada was empty now, and a voice on the Turk’s handset, the receiver back up to his ear as a light flickered on in the night and spread through the dark, up the side of a rusted industrial building that stretched from the road, down to a low gravel barge moored where ice had been dredged in the river. In the shadows, a tractor with a front-end loader axle-deep in muddy snow, a narrow, tyre-slushed track to a small concrete quay. A cold whiff of pine mixed with the smells in the car and Darcy’s words congealed on his tongue, an unshouted warning, as a shape appeared in the shallow-lidded helm of the barge, a figure that rose up then disappeared. Darcy imagined a hull full of bunks where Armenians hid—separatists, terrorists, avengers of distant history, Jobik waiting for Fin.
The light went off and the Turk seemed agitated, twisting in his seat, whispering to the driver in Russian. Darcy’s heart pushed at his chest. If they stormed this boat, he could run. No more conversation as two figures emerged from the corrugated building, creeping through the shadows past the loader, down towards the frozen quay, to the barge. Darcy prayed for his moment, when the Turk and his pale-eyed driver might forget him; they strained out in the other direction, waiting. A fire in Darcy’s neck that spread to the base of his skull, the distant buzz of a motor, then dim lights on the river. He eyed the door handle to be sure it wasn’t locked.
Who is this man? hissed the Turk, thrusting a pair of field glasses into the back seat. The driver turned too, a pistol an extension of his black, gloved hand. Darcy’s hands felt so unsteady, fumbling with the binocular strap, then focusing. Lenses that produced a strange night vision, purple, searching down the grainy details of the sheeted building, the magnification almost telescopic. Fin like a species endangered, tracked through the snow, monitored from the restaurant somehow. Darcy’s eyes burned with the hazy vision of her smooth, efficient movement, climbing a rope ladder up the rusted side of the boat into what looked like mounds of gravel. She was being closed in on.
Tell me who is the man? Words spat by the Turk from the front seat. Darcy turned his attention to the one who wasn’t Fin. A heavy leather jacket, jeans high and cinched tight the way all Moscow men wore jeans. The cook, Darcy mumbled, from the restaurant, but the cook had worn thick checked trousers. This man who now climbed the ladder, cigarettes bulging squarely from his rear pocket, turned for a moment to check as the building light flickered on like a signal, and Darcy caught his rutted unmistakable face through the purple, butterflied lens. The Albanian he’d shared the sleeper with on the train from Prague. Different in jeans but him, and Fin there, small beside him as he shed his torchlight over stones frosted grey, crouched down and they both disappeared. Suddenly, the shape of the barge rendered nothing, a pregnant silence and two humps of gravel, the Turk talking feverish Russian, and Darcy’s realisation—Jobik’s people had kept an eye on him since day one, shepherding their money belt home, and the truth of Darcy’s idiocy had him staring at the seat back, retreating inside himself, the thought of himself as a fool on a train trundled like a gift bag through hell to this cold, precious moment.
He turned to the night as a great silver net of snow fell like unexpected debris and, with it, the sound of a distant motor, not the sound in his head, and nyet, nyet from the dashboard had the Turk still peering, anxious now, impatient. No one moved to storm the boat. The barge planted like a frozen wreck and yet lights moved out from it, over the ice. The Turk’s words biting into his device. No moon on the river just spidering light in the blackness. Darcy picked up his own forgotten binoculars and his heart rose slightly. A snowmobile headed out across the
river, one and then another, then nothing. The barge was just a meeting place. Fin was getting away.
Quick footsteps on the road and voices, coats moving out into the darkness, ignitions starting, a chance, thought Darcy, turning to the roadside door, but in the snow-smeared window loomed the general, eyes that danced with a hint of madness. He wrenched the door wide open. Time for you, he said, little boy blue.
Darcy lunged for the opposite door but the driver’s arm was already a fist on the handle, another acid smile, and the Turk from the passenger side, shouting at the general: Gde most? Gde most? Where’s the bridge?
The general dismissed the Turk with a wave of his handgun, grabbed Darcy by the coat, a glove around his neck that had a yowl of agony ratcheting up inside his head, the general’s thumb like a cattle prod, a pistol in Darcy’s ear. Darcy closed his eyes against him, sensed these as last breaths, pulled out into the veil of snow, the flakes that feathered his face as his own hands scrabbled up to wrest away the general’s thumb, his gloved fingers gripping Darcy’s voiceless throat, a mewling sound sent out to Fin out on the river ice, to Aurelio, to escape these great mauling hands. Darcy flailed the binoculars strapped to his hand like some pathetic handbag weapon, the knife out of reach, the gun jammed in his now-roaring ear, just as he’d imagined it only minutes before, shot on this road in front of Aurelio, as remonstration, left in the frozen ditchwater for local dogs to lick his wound. He thought if he’d had any other life it wouldn’t end like this, the Turk yelling at the general, losing his Armenians, a glimpse of Aurelio through the Lada’s wipers, a horror caught in those rounded eyes, a barely perceptible shake of his head and in it a plea not to struggle. And Darcy was beyond it now, exhausted.
Stray Dog Winter Page 21