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 sound 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.
You thought I was to kill you? the general said, smiling, and Darcy’s knee was bashed as he was thrust into the back seat of the Lada, the familiar tobacco smell, anise. He held a mitten to the eruption of pain in his neck, stunned and silent. Then he righted himself, clenched the ear that clamoured with the bullet that hadn’t been shot, and breathed as if he’d forgotten how, looking up for Aurelio—Aurelio who didn’t dare look around, doleful eyes caught in the rear-view mirror as the general hefted himself around to face Darcy, his great arm on the seat back. My son, Aurelio, he said with relish, his lips loose. You know him?
Darcy withdrew from the yellow-toothed smile, a cautious glance from Aurelio, stiff and uncertain, then silence. Aurelio was ballet dancer, said the general. Weren’t you, boy?
Aurelio didn’t suspend an elegant arm as he’d once done for Darcy but instead put the Lada in gear and stared out into the rough U-turn he made.
He drove now with lights, the Turk a dark blur behind them. Darcy, his sight blurred again, watched out through the drumbeat rhythm of wipers, unsure if he should be grateful. A passing clump of bare black forest. He blinked to focus, touching his lip, the burn, as both cars ran parallel with the silvery Moskva. Shabby wooden dwellings, the ways that wove down to the river. No lights of a skidoo. The general, two fingers pressed to an ear, listening for news from scratchy, faraway transistor voices. Aurelio’s downy dancer’s neck didn’t turn to see him, but the general leaned slightly sideways, kept watch with accusing eyes, extending his free arm along the bench seat, the pistol at Aurelio’s shoulder.
Fear snaked in Darcy’s veins like a system of rivers, Aurelio’s hands tight on the wheel, the general’s zealot eyes, bloodshot under the rim of his black fur hat. My son, he said as if Aurelio weren’t there. He never dance with Bolshoi. They only use him because he is strong, lifting ballet girls. He gestured with his big hands lofted in the air, the pistol held firm in one. But they don’t like Cubanos at the Bolshoi, do they? Nyet, nyet, nyet. He pushed the gun at Aurelio’s neck. Not specially the half homosex, half Cubanos.
Aurelio, mute, twitched his neck and drove on, rigid. Darcy avoided the general’s flecked vulture eyes, focused on the gun, the silencer, a memory of the same at Nikolai Chuprakov’s feet. Could it be the son-in-law’s gun or did silencers all look the same? Darcy felt dizzied, the sardonic thrum of traffic through snow as they passed beneath what he thought was the ring road. The general so big, the seat back seemed low, his square-jowled face turned around to Darcy again. He have a dancer friend. Then he turned to Aurelio, goading. What happened to him? Sergei Beloff, was this his name? He not dance anymore. Jew boy, blue boy. He can’t dance now. A violence in the last word, an act implied, the general sweating with wrath, or it could have been drink, and all Darcy thought of was size against frailty, being heaved at, the thought of a dancer blood-smeared against the cement. Aurelio still said nothing, just the slightest shake of his head in the rear-view mirror. Darcy saw cuts on his face.
The knife felt cold and small, folded in Darcy’s mittened hand as he slid it unopened up into his coat sleeve, a soundless ribbon of panic. The general with the fingers to his transistor ear once more and another almost indiscernible shake of Aurelio’s head. Had he seen the knife, sensed it? If it gouged the general’s pistol arm, into whose head would he shoot the bullet? The Lada would skid through the gnawing darkness, turning over like a surfboard.
The general jerked up his pistol hand. Lyevii, he said, nudged at Aurelio’s neck with the short black barrel, shouted gruff Russian instructions. Aurelio turned left down a dark road, turned off the lights. Darcy guessed the main road had taken them away from the river; they’d not crossed a bridge, but headed back now to where the vanishing river must be. We find your friends, said the general. We make visit. He turned to Aurelio. KGB, we know how to follow. Don’t we, son? First we already follow your little boy blue to his secret restaurant.
Aurelio’s silence scared Darcy. He drove like an automaton, only the shadowy parking lights of the Lada on what was now a narrow snowy track, the sound of the tyres crawling into the stillness. Dark in the car now, Darcy clasped the knife in the folds of his coat but the knife felt ineffectual. He’d need to strike the general’s eye, or his ear, but the general kept waving the gun like a finger, turning. With a canny smile, he offered a zippered bag to Darcy.
The Turk, he kill for this, he said. His tongue glistened as it lay on his teeth and Darcy thought of Lubyanka, and the ferret-faced boy lying dead behind the restaurant—he knew how the Turk had killed. The burn still throbbed like the head of a spear broken off in his neck as the general’s mammoth ungloved hand dangled the evidence bag over the seat like another last promise.
Did Tugrul tell you about Tbilisi? he asked. Your sister in Tbilisi? Just day before yesterday. Maybe we find her any minute. Family reunion…with fireworks.
A horrible dryness returned to Darcy’s mouth, his teeth as if covered in cloth; he didn’t want to know any more. The prospect of a fire on the river ice, he and Aurelio lined up with Fin and her dissident Armenians. Darcy searched the shadowy back of Aurelio’s head, his shoulders still rigid, unyielding as a costumer’s dummy. The general dropped the bag down in Darcy’s lap. It was light, almost floated. Just paper.
I can’t read, said Darcy.
Aurelio cleared his throat but the general barked at him sharply, scolding, then turned back to Darcy. It is English, he said, placing his elbow over the seat. He cocked a silver cigarette lighter, his face like a ghoul’s in the fluttery flame, and Darcy thought to stab those fingers if the flame came near his face. He cagily held up the evidence bag, the thought of it burning, a decoy for Aurelio, a chance, but in the jittery light a date: July 13, 1915. American Ambassador, Constantinople. Typewritten, faded, beige letterhead frayed in the folds and corners. Old and authoritative.
You know this? asked the general. Is it original or forgery?
Darcy looked at the cream paper behind the plastic, the ridges of the seal. Index Bureau, stamped with an official seal, to Robert Lansing, US Secretary of State.
I never saw this.
A copy is left with the body of the dead Consul Turk in Tbilisi. The general a shifted personality, not the drunk transgressor but probing. This one they try to deliver to manuscript museum in Yerevan. You ever go to Yerevan?
Darcy didn’t answer, felt the night crawling by, his life, the lives of dead Armenians. He wasn’t even sure where Yerevan was but he was drawn to the undulating typeface. Persecutions assuming unprecedented proportions. Uprooting, tortures and wholesale expulsions accompanied by rape, pillage and murder turning into massacre, to bring destruction and destitution on them. Levitical-sounding words. Initials above a signature stamp. Lawrence Andersen, United States Ambassador to Turkey. In the margin he read Classified. Could it not be real? He directed his eyes to the general, who looked back at him with a predatory disdain.
You bringing this to Moscow, he said. Strapped to yourself like suicide. But you never saw it?
Darcy felt his own head shake, dubious and slow, as he lifted the plastic flap, the page where it creased, and knew it could have been folded, sewn into the lining of the money belt. In the pit of his stomach he believed it was true.
You very clever, said the general, or very stupid. He flicked the lighter off and muttered into a miniature speaker between fingers, men out in snow flurries still tracking Fin. Darcy heard her phone voice, the night she’d called in Melbourne, offering him a chance, sensing his suspicion, her faith in his need to escape that world, believing he’d come. And he had known even then it was stupid. Now, he cradled the old document in the dark, its red stamp embossed like the burn on his neck. If he’d been part of something, that something was over.
Aurelio stopped the car where the track dead-ended, glanced up at the rear-view mirror but Darcy couldn’t make out his eyes, just the sound of the other car pulling in quietly behind them. He felt a strange surrender, a momentary transcendence of fear. Aurelio? he said softly, but Aurelio still didn’t turn, it was the general who swung over the seat back, dark wild eyes and his pistol shoving at Darcy’s face. You never speak with him, he said. You hearing? You do what I tell. Darcy reefed back from the small black barrel, his eyes so tight they burrowed deep inside him until he could feel his lips open, but he heard no shot, only words. You will walk through those trees. You will see a house. You knock on door.
Stoitye. Aurelio’s muffled voice, and Darcy looked up as the general grunted, pistol-whipped his son against the driver’s door, and Aurelio lay there, one arm draped over the wheel, horribly still. Darcy’s instinct to run out into the darkness, out through the shadows of others, out of their cars, the Turk and the pastel-eyed henchman, men in black felt coats. The general half-turned.
Look what you do, he said, a quaver in his voice. He try to save you. But he cannot even save himself. As the general opened the door to get out, the interior light sparked on Aurelio’s face and Darcy’s eyes filled with a sudden revulsion—the cuts in Aurelio’s cheeks like mutilations, not fresh from the pistol, but his mouth, scabby and black, sliced up his cheek on one side, sewn together by rough string stitches. Darcy understood why Aurelio hadn’t turned—too proud to be seen, a mouth so wounded he didn’t open it except to shout stop, to lunge at his father’s pistol arm. The general regarded Aurelio, mumbled in Russian, an oath or a prayer, then closed the door.
Darcy sat inconsolably still in the blackness. Aurelio? he said, but Aurelio just hummed as if soothing himself, and Darcy began to rock as he’d done as a boy, side to side, holding his body together. Are you okay? he asked, but only heard humming. He closed his eyes tight, didn’t look at Aurelio, then he turned to the window, the sight of the general peeing in the snow, in front of his men, delivering instructions. Painting a yellow dog, Fin had called it, pissing in the snow, the same name as the flowers. He yearned to reach through the dark and touch Aurelio now, trace about his eyes, the scars, but instead he just rocked and stared at his friend’s silhouette, the snow as it kissed the window beside him, the murmuring of the KGB men outside, unaware. Then he heard the howl of a dog, far off, calling out through the snow, and the onslaught of something, grief, or a love that had lost its way, rested about the edges of Darcy’s eyes, as if on the lip of a dam, and then he was keening, swaying like a branch, and howling softly with the dog but the door was flung open and the general’s hand slapped him from it.
You listen to me, said the general, panicky, grabbing Darcy’s collar, ripping it against the burn as Darcy stuffed the document inside his coat. You will walk into these woods and show your friends this paper. You will see their faces, he said. Then he said something in Russian that stopped Aurelio’s hum. He reached into the front seat, ripped the fur hat from Aurelio’s head as if he were a mannequin, and Darcy saw that Aurelio’s head had been shaved.
Get out of this car, said the general, pushing the hat down over Darcy’s beanie. The sound of the dog, like a distant calf bawling, stayed in Darcy’s head as he fought being pitched like a leaf out into the night among men who stamped their feet, their breath fogging in front of them. Darcy felt strangely unbalanced, the snow wet against his face, indistinguishable from his tears. The Turk, hugging himself in the cold nearby, black eyes gleaming. The Opinel knife felt blunt as a stone as Darcy looked back at Aurelio, splayed against the car door.
The general patted the waterproof evidence bag stowed up under Darcy’s coat. They will see what you have, said the general. You give it back your friends if you want. It can burn with them. The general’s shrug was in his eyes. Just let them know we have it. And that we have you.
Darcy’s mind closed in on itself for protection, from the cold that already seeped into his veins, from these grim men warming themselves. He would be their mascot, but of sacrifice, and he felt the strangeness of life as death approaches. Aurelio’s gutted mouth plastered like membrane to Darcy’s blinking eyes, the stitches; the distant dog had gone silent, just Aurelio’s tune in Darcy’s head, a Cuban song maybe. The general poked his pistol in Darcy’s ear. Be a good boy blue, he said, shoving him forward in the wake of the powder-eyed driver.
What about Aurelio? asked Darcy, and the general ran a rough, wet-gloved finger from the corner of Darcy’s mouth up the side of Darcy’s cheek. It is a punishing, he said, we call it smiling. And a cry sank voiceless down inside Darcy. For being like you, he said, buffeting Darcy into the shapeless night.
Darcy picked his way through the black-haired pines as if walking through a bitter cold river, his coat turning to stone and death inviting as a face before him: come, it will be easier, come, like the face in the waves on Bushrangers Bay, the winter wants you to itself. He looked back but the Turk was right there behind him, nudging him on to follow the driver and his winking torchlight, KGB men swarming shadowy in their coats through the slender trunks. He looked back again just to see Aurelio, but instead caught the Turk’s beady eyes from under the brim of an astrakhan hat.
Give me the document, he whispered but Darcy hugged the plastic-covered evidence against himself, as if that was all he had, evidence of Trebizond, Thousands forced onto ships and dumped into the Black Sea, islands of innocent people. Darcy didn’t weep for them now, he was drowning himself. Give it to me, the Turk’s voice through the snow, I can help you. The driver glanced back, whispered fiercely in Russian, gesturing to a following guard to keep Darcy coming, Darcy uncertain who was in charge, the Turk was summarily motioned aside. The joint operation felt like a death march, Darcy sandwiched in the dark, on through crunching undergrowth. He didn’t believe there was help out here, no Armenian snipers swept down from these trees, no withered hand of God. The icy damp had already curled up in Darcy’s skin as he cradled the grim inevitability, his feet brittle as frozen coral. If lust was the cause of all sorrow, what had love done, what had it done for any of them? Herded out here to die, Aurelio an opuscheny. Fin weaving her way to some hut in these same woods, unsuspecting. Her departure up through that restaurant roof with not even a word of goodbye, just a telephone number in Darcy’s wet jacket pocket, her snowmobile lights switched out on the dark ice river. They’re the KGB…it’s not hide-and-seek.
Darcy pushed a wet coat sleeve over his face, his footing unsteady as they crossed the end of a white stone culvert, he almost collapsed, a new pistol held to his neck in the dark like a branding iron. Then, in a knot of black furs, the torch ahead turned into darkness and the driver crouched beside someone waiting in the shadows with binoculars. A clearing. A small wooden dacha not a hundred feet further, a figure through the branches in the lamplit shelter of the doorway, the new gun barrel pressed deep in Darcy’s ribs to silence him. With his bare eyes Darcy knew it was Jobik, alone in the cone of lamplight, wrapped in a blanket, his thick black hair pushed back from his beaky face, waiting. The Turk looked over at Darcy, his dark face wet and weathered, his glasses fogged. He removed them angrily, cleared the lenses with his fingers, his narrow eyes, antsy, and the general with them now, from out of nowhere, short-winded. The fear in Darcy that he’d be sent out into that no-man’s-land to pleasure the general’s imagination. Into that painterly stillness.
Jobik was drinking from a mug, the steam from it wafting in the funnel of light, just him beneath a hanging basket made from rope and the wet sound of the snow on the leaves, the soft hail hammering like winter storms climbing in off the Tasman Sea. Darcy’s mouth struck dry as a figure appeared up a path from the river. Fin, like a vision, delivered. The general’s bestial smile. We follow good, no? he whispered like a friend.
The sight of Fin had an instinct well deep in Darcy, their secret call from school, elly elly etdoo, the warning from outside her window, but now he could barely walk, the sight of her returning, wet through as a child coming in from a rainstorm. Jobik, as he opened the door like a husband might, relieved she’d made it home. If Fin had found love, Darcy felt forgotten, like something forfeited, out here among these dripping trees and guns. His loyalty washing from him like rain as the lamp was snuffed and he looked into the spattering snow from a forest full of crouching men, waiting for their signal.
Go to the door, the general beside him now, whispering. You congratulate them on Tbilisi, he said. Showing them what you holding. Make it a ceremony.
Darcy looked up at the barbarous smile, then into the speckled dark. A door to be kicked in, planks hanging from hinges. The Turk’s bared teeth, the gold in them almost visible—he seemed to know it as lunacy too. His reluctant nod still held its invitation. Darcy stared again at the general’s massive face. Aurelio, as he’d known him, was gone.
You are primitive, said Darcy, and the general looked out into the night as if he knew.
Darcy turned and walked from them, no sound but himself, no barking dog now, just the rhythmic contraction of his heart as he scraped his way through dripping tree trunks, his feet on pine spindles in dark quilted snow, waiting for a shot in his back or a battle cry, in a godless zone among histories and atrocities he barely understood. He didn’t hurry, he couldn’t; the porch lamp wasn’t there for him like it had been for Fin and if he were noisy Jobik would hear, the dogfight would begin. All of them killers, warming themselves on the blood of others. He tried to remember Aurelio’s face as it had been, a last memory to hold, piecing his way through sodden branches, snow like gauze.
He wasn’t sure why, but he drifted, drawn to a pine-encased window, he stood there, divided. Waiting. A gap in the blind, a simple, dimly lit kitchen, old cream cupboards and faded wooden floors, a washboard and enamel sink, the black worn through to a flea-bitten grey. A last window. He made no sound as Fin came in and pushed life into the fire with a poker, watched the embers ignite. A kettle on the rusted iron of an ancient Aga, a yellow-painted mantelpiece. She warmed herself by the flames for a moment, before she closed the stove door. Just her and Darcy, and muffled voices from the other room, the innocent chitchat of terrorists. The kettle began its whistle and she poured herself tea, black with a dash, how she liked it. She opened an iron drawer below the ash-catch at the bottom of the stove and took out a shallow tin, then sat at the end of the table, warming her hands on her cup. Darcy knew he’d not see her apartment again, but in a way he’d been happy there. Above her a cross with a carved wooden Jesus hung on the wall, shadowed behind from the light. It had given the Saviour a dark side. Fin put her tea bag on the table and watched it form a small brown puddle on the wood. And Darcy felt the restlessness behind him, preparing.
Dully, he hummed out loud and then she looked up with an artificial calm. Tilda, he said, the name of the baby his mother had lost. He held up the document but Fin never saw it, she only saw him as she ran to the next room and Darcy heard shouting inside and a rush through the woods as he flung himself down deep under the eaves of the window, alongside the house; among the wet stove wood, he lay like he was dead already as the waves crashed around him and nothing to be done save listen to the gunshots and running, someone rushing for him. Give it to me, the Turk grabbing at him then bullets splintered on the boards above, shattering the window, the Turk on all fours like a beast beside him, and then face down and glass on Darcy’s legs. Darcy’s face bandaged in the crusted snow, the document held like a biblical thing, his eyes tight, sinking, imagining Fin tearing through black pines, feeding herself to the frozen river. Come to Moscow, she’d said, it’ll be fun, but she’d fallen in love with a savage and Darcy, drowning, reduced to a hum.