There were no more shots, just cries in the night from the direction of the river. A figure disappeared around the house into darkness and Darcy scrambled up blind among the snowy logs, so numb with cold and not even sure if he was wounded. More shouts and he kneeled. The Turk face down in the dark beside him, he didn’t dare kick him to see if he was dead, just felt the document inside his own wet coat, and then he was running back through the firs, away from the hut, stumbling through the black underbrush, back towards Aurelio. More gunfire behind him, the pine branches whipping his face, and he imagined Fin somewhere down near the river, scooting across the ice, covering ground on her elbows like one of those frogs that run across water, or laid out on the edge, riddled with bullets, the general inspecting his kill.
Darcy felt feverish, heaving for air at the sight of the Lada, its parking-light eyes shining orange. But the general was here—he leaned against the car smoking in a black velvet overcoat, a dress coat. No shape of Aurelio in the car. Run, thought Darcy, turning back to the forest, but the general was opening the driver’s side door. You will drive us back, he said, waving a pistol produced from a holster under his coat. You can trust me, he said. I take you to a nice place now.
Where’s Aurelio? asked Darcy, his voice faraway.
He is better now, the general nodded, and waved the pistol. Get in.
But Darcy didn’t move. What have you done? he asked.
I deal with him, send him out into the night, said the general, like I deal with Tugrul, like my men are doing with your Armenians. He fired a silenced shot into the grey-black snow near Darcy’s feet. Like I can deal with you.
Darcy approached the car slowly, doubting his will to survive, if he should just turn back into the gun-yielding trees and receive the shot in the back, fall face down and be gone like the Turk, or just die of exposure on his own, out where the dogs barked. But he got in the Lada and sat where he’d last seen Aurelio, the general resting the gun against the velvet of his coat, the tinny smell of a weapon just fired. Opera on the radio. The heater. As if civilised. Darcy didn’t flinch as the general reached over into his wet coat pocket for the plastic bag.
He try to take this from you, said the general. Now he is dead. He placed the document inside his own fresh coat.
Darcy fixed on the narrow track that appeared in the car lights, looking for eyes in the night, for witnesses, but there were just shadows and blackness. He changed roughly through the Lada’s gears, drove where Aurelio had driven, trying to the fight the blur of tears and his imaginings—Aurelio out in the splintering night, the blood from his cuts, from his mouth, run thin.
What did you do to him? asked Darcy, his voice hardly his own.
He has been digging his own grave, the general said. Digging your graves, all of you. His calm had a shiver that ran through Darcy, a calm that filtered psychosis, and the flourish of horns and operatic voices from the radio. That he dared listen to music. But as the general tapped his cigarette ash onto the floor he looked away, and Darcy thought he saw the slightest shake in the leather-gloved hand. A hand like a black claw that now rested on Darcy’s leg, smoke curling from it, and Darcy imagined accelerating off into the tree trunks, their heads dashed against glass. He tried to ingest the warm tobacco air but all he could feel was an animal panic. Then, at the main road, the general directed him, the pistol like a wand, back towards the city. And now all Darcy saw in the gliding darkness was the light that had left Aurelio’s eyes. You killed him, he said.
The general emerged from some reverie. You do not know that, he said.
Darcy looked out at the half-lit factories, then down at the gun, the way it was pointed at him. He is your son, he said.
The general nodded resignedly. But he was not a man, he said. I could not trust him. He gestured with the weapon for Darcy to turn from the river and pointed up a narrow street, carved between cedars, an area of compounds.
We have invitation, he said, but Darcy didn’t believe him, wondering if he could slide the car off the road and turn it over without being killed. But he was halted by a guard who appeared from a booth between stone gateposts and the general leaned forward in the torchlight to be recognised. The Lada was saluted through.
Someone wanting to meet you, said the general.
But it didn’t make sense, everything short-circuiting: Aurelio abandoned out in the night and a driveway opening up to a pale two-storey mansion. A lantern by the door threw a triangle of light on the walls like a Magritte and Darcy recognised it from the photo, the garden now in winter, the stones clawed with deciduous ivy in the dark. In the general’s photo Anyetta Chernenko had stood on the lawn. And Darcy in this car with the general, fresh from his Black Sea honeymoon, his new wife nowhere to be seen, untouched by his newly dead son. Talk, thought Darcy, make yourself seem human.
What do you want from me? he asked.
Just be polite, he said. She is my friend. Wanting to meet with the artist. He checked himself in the rear-view mirror, removed his hat and pushed his hand through his buzz of white hairs. Darcy stopped the Lada without the handbrake, let the tyres lodge in the slough, and he stared out in the way he’d learned when his mother was drunk, when dealing with someone irrational, but it hadn’t equipped him for this. Did you never love Aurelio? he asked.
The general reached for the keys and placed them in his pocket. You do not know that either, he said, magnanimous, perverse, and with his gun he motioned Darcy into the cold and Darcy wondered fearfully what he was being spared for. He opened the door to a narrow avenue of poplars, trimmed as thin as pencils, and for a moment Darcy hoped he’d be sent in alone, to knock on the door like a soldier returned from the trenches, the lapels of his coat and the knees of his jeans wet with snow, to take refuge in a woman’s face. Maybe Fin by the fire, wrapped in a mohair blanket—perhaps it was all a surprise. The panelled door opening, a tall figure silhouetted and the whippet bounding down. Darcy knelt to nuzzle its warmth against his hands and it pushed its face against him like a cat might. The general strode past and was ushered inside by the widow.
Darcy looked up at her waiting for him in the chill of the threshold, in the same evening gown and a silver fox stole, her eye shadow Elizabeth Taylor blue. Can you help me? he whispered, but she bent her head towards him puzzled, not hearing, not wanting to, as they both watched the dog lift a leg in the snow.
Thanking you again for caring him, she said softly, is very kind. She observed Darcy as if trying to take him in, but he didn’t understand. Her husband was dead and she’d been out in bright colours, socialising.
Help me, he whispered, he pulled down his collar, tried to show her the burn but she glanced away, and together they watched the gossamer dog, a fine Gucci belt fashioned as its collar, and Darcy remembered the Borgward, the sadness in the son-in-law’s eyes. I’m sorry, he said, but the woman shook her head, it wasn’t the time, and still Darcy wanted to ask her for sanctuary but the general loomed in the doorway, tuxedo shirt and holstered gun, a Western bolo tie, his formal clothes beneath his coat all along. Come on, he said, smiling. Is cold.
Boyar, said the woman and the whippet bounded inside, but the general stayed, smiling, waiting. He swung his black-rimmed glasses by an arm of the frame, as though he were the man of the house, and the sight of it disturbed in Darcy a morbid loathing. He looked up as if seeking help, at a face in an upstairs window, an old man, wrinkled and unshaven, and for a moment their eyes met and Darcy wondered why he’d really been brought here, if there was hope in this house.
In an entry hall he removed Aurelio’s black fur hat but not his coat. He noticed the general’s velvet dress coat on the hallstand, hung like a pelt. The general was already in the next room, a lavish parlour, but the widow stood waiting, observing Darcy, her old-fashioned Soviet elegance like something from a silent film. She pointed humbly at the Laika painting leaning against a low bench, her whippet’s slender shape atop the obelisk, Finola Dobrolyubova scrawled across the lower right-hand corner in black. Darcy looked up, disconcerted.
Your dog, he said tentatively, acknowledging the canvas.
She smiled shyly as if she knew. Your painting, she said, as if she also knew it wasn’t Fin’s, and Darcy searched her eyes for something, recognition or deliverance, the way he trusted women.
I arrange it for her, the general interrupted from the adjoining parlour, and through the archway, past her, Darcy could see him standing by a fireplace, and as the widow now joined him, Darcy felt the need to protect her, to hurt him. He remembered her appearing in Lubyanka, through the grate in the interview room, but he couldn’t tell what she’d been told, how much she knew. He checked down a narrow corridor, searching for exits, but a maid in a black dress and white apron stood there, holding a tray, observing him from the shadows with dark cynical eyes. She watched as if she was the one who knew things, the old man from upstairs now sheltered behind her in a doorway, a craggy face, a valet or apparition.
Darcy stood in a kind of stunned abeyance, like something dragged in from the night, uninvited in his sodden coat, too grimy to enter and join the couple as they chatted by the fire, the whippet curling comfortably into a shallow wicker basket at their feet. Darcy took in the room as if the furniture might warm him, anchor his longing for beauty, a pair of floral sofas, a low table. Silk flowers, irises and hyacinth. And art. A Hockney swimming pool on one wall and a Rothko, mournful and abstract. Replicas, probably, but Darcy didn’t know; he looked at his own canvas, the image of the stray found by the river replicated from the dog in the other room. The general leaned in towards Anyetta Chernenko, their heads close together, bald and caramel blonde, he was telling a story with words Darcy recognised—Dashnak, Jobik, Nikolai, Garabed, Armenia—seducing or using her. The general’s eye fixed on Darcy like a bear might eye a fish that flopped about on shore.
Tell her about Aurelio, said Darcy, but his voice was so raspy no one heard except the maid, who surfaced unexpectedly, as though on cue, and offered Darcy herring on bread and a tumbler of vodka poured from a jug. Darcy drank then ate voraciously, wanting another, more, but she glided into the main room, the general accepting drinks with Anyetta Chernenko as if Darcy had not been at his wedding to somebody else, or been pressed against the cement wall in Lubyanka, and now things undreamed of, unhinged, bodies mounting up in the woods, by the river. Then he heard his name, the general calling Darcy, as if they were friends, and Darcy looked over. You can be showering, said the general. My friend says you can be shower here. How you are so dirty? The drink raised in the general’s hand.
Darcy felt a wave of nausea, the promise of clean you up suddenly reverberating, had him sweaty again, clean you up pretty…like a real Polish boy. Next time. But why here? The general issuing orders to the maid in Russian, Anyetta Chernenko looking on, bemused, and Darcy taking another vodka from the maid’s tray, chugging it, and the shiver of it ran through him, familiar; afraid that’s what the general wanted: him loosened, clean, spared to be cut like Aurelio, or worse.
The general sitting on the sofa in the parlour, consoling Anyetta Chernenko, holding her to him in front of the fire, and it looked like she was weeping. He eyed Darcy through strands of her hair and the maid, waiting for Darcy to put his glass back on the tray, emitted a grunt of annoyance, as if she didn’t care for what she saw. As if she were Nikolai Chuprakov’s maid.
She ushered Darcy down the corridor, the old man in a doorway, his rugged poet’s face, and Darcy remembered the roll of notes in the hem of his coat. These people might help him, he thought, as he wrestled for the money deep in the hole through a pocket. He found himself in a bathroom with plum-coloured carpet, the maid gesturing to a towel and a shower, and Darcy showed the roll of roubles, offered them in the flat of his hand. Pazhalsta, said Darcy, please, he will kill me, and the maid glared at the fat little wad of money, wanting but not understanding, her button-like eyes full of fear. Help me, he pleaded, but she retreated, afraid.
He grabbed the green jug of vodka from her tray as she slithered out the door and he drank and felt himself unravelling, his pledge broken again when he knew he needed clarity most, the buzz about his face like a quiet sponge and the sound of a key as it turned the bolt; she’d locked him in. He searched frantically for an exit, found only a vent and a too-tiny window, a long wrought-iron dresser with a silver shaver and a wooden-handled brush, two small framed drawings from covers of Vanity Fair. A candy-striped toothbrush dry in a mug. Nikolai Chuprakov’s?
Darcy caught sight of himself in the mirror above the sink, his face bruised purple and strafed with mud, lines where dimples had been. He took a swill of vodka as if that would help him think, washed dirt from his face, the water steaming hot straight from the tap, scabs on his lip and cheek tender. In his face he saw Fin, lying dead out on the ice. Wishing he had the whole bottle to upend in his mouth, something caught his eye in the mirror’s reflection; by the toilet was a niche with a black phone. He left the taps running, turned on the shower to add to the noise, and fumbled in his coat for Fin’s slip of paper, a wet folded piece with ink that had run, but numbers. He crouched on the toilet and dialled hastily, listened to the beeps, the most-tapped phone in Moscow or, if he was lucky, the least. He stared at the bolted door with his chest pounding like there were animals fucking inside it and listened, the pungent smell of dread that he now knew lived in his sweat. The shower water smacked the tiles.
Hello? A woman, well-spoken, accented.
Darcy knotted his eyes in supplication. Ulli Breffny? Hysteria in his whisper.
I’m listening, she said.
My name is Darcy Bright. I am in the house of Anyetta Chernenko. I am in danger.
You must get to the embassy, she said. I will be here. The gates will open for you. She paused for a moment.
General Sarfin is killing people.
We cannot come there, she said. You must get yourself here. She hung up and Darcy couldn’t breathe enough to cry but he peed and didn’t know what else to do so he knocked on the door for the maid and prayed that the old man might help him but it was the general who answered. You talking with someone?
Darcy stood petrified, unsteady. No, he said. Myself.
The general undid his holster belt and placed it on the vanity, the pistol clipped inside it. You think we don’t hear you, he said, you think we don’t know where you are? He grabbed Darcy, vice-like, by the upper arm, ripped a brass-covered button from Aurelio’s coat and thrust it up at Darcy’s eye like some gold signet. This is device, the general said through the steam, blood vessels bulging at the black rims of his glasses.
Darcy arched up with the pain, the general’s thumb dug deep in his bicep, but Darcy didn’t struggle, he felt for the knife in his pocket with his free hand, the general shaking him savagely. We track you like this every day. Aurelio did give you this coat. You think he did not know? You think he love you so much? He turned Darcy around, wrenching him from the coat but the knife had already unfolded, the rumble again in Darcy’s head. I clean you up, the general hissed, I clean you, jerking the coat sleeves off Darcy from behind but Darcy bent his arms up, struggled now, the knife cold in his palm. He let the sleeves fly free, his arms unthreading and turned, the general losing his balance, his glasses falling through the thick white air and Darcy reached through it, quick as a diving bird he swung across the general’s face, as the general slipped on the tiles, lurching back with a stifled wail, big hands all over his bloodied face, he kicked and slid as his great head made a hollow sound against the lip of the iron bath, hitting, and Darcy’s head went deaf as the general’s hands flopped down like slabs and Darcy lunged and stabbed through the vapour, went for his eyes through the blood on the flesh of the general’s bloated face, plunging the blade deep, until he retched vodka at the sight of what gushed from the eyes to the salivating lips, the surge of dark red onto the wide bristled chin, onto the white ruffles of the shirt. Darcy could neither speak nor hear nor think, his mind glazed; blood on the knife, the knife still in his hand, he knew he had to rinse it, fold it back into itself, blood on his hands as he grabbed the holster from the counter, the jug knocked over, smashed on the floor, a river of vodka clear through the curtain of steam towards blood that coursed from the spigots of the general’s hacked-up eyes, the body still not moving. Darcy felt his chest constricting, everything upside down, reaching, as if into the pelt of an injured, stunned animal, its heart still pumping, he searched the pockets of the general’s tuxedo. Repulsed by the blood-infested face, the mouth laid open, accusing, he had to turn away, the tremor in his own body, in his hand as he felt for the Lada’s keys, the pistol in his free hand, the keys in his fingers as the general’s arm twitched.
Darcy jumped up as if swept outside his consciousness, the fact of what lay there, half-alive or dying, the fact of a gun in his own hand, and, bathed in steam and the drum of the pouring water, Aurelio’s coat behind him, a black lake on the floor, the brass button that had been listening all along, floating like a tiny crucible. Darcy found himself out in the dark abandoned corridor. The gun in a hand that didn’t feel like his hand, his blood-smudged fingers turning the key in the door, locking the general in. Darcy stood there in a hallway silent but for the whippet skulking in the shadows as if sent down to check, the dull thrum of the shower. As Darcy pocketed the key he began to shake, a trembling rippling through him, and he knew only violent people should be violent. Darcy knew he had to keep moving, that if he’d stabbed a man in the eye, he could use a gun. The echo in his head of the general’s hollow contact with the bath, skull on iron, the stolen car keys and knife now stuffed in the pocket of his denim jacket, his vision seemed altered as he searched for a servant’s entrance out into the cold black coatless nothing, but the corridor ended so he moved towards the entry hall, rubbing the blood on his pants, the dog by his side licking up playfully as he walked.
In the entry hall stood the widow by the Laika picture, not hiding but standing, pale and stricken, the old man by her side. They were expecting the general. Darcy held the gun in the air like a quivering grenade but the old man had no weapon, and Darcy saw his face in the light for the first time. Nikolai Chuprakov, older, the same mournful dark eyes, Nikolai Chuprakov’s father. I’m so sorry, said Darcy, he slipped the general’s dress coat from the hallstand, soft as mink, and he was crying as the old man opened the door for him as if he somehow understood.
Darcy stumbled down through the narrow poplars, shouted no at the following dog and heard the widow call its name. He pushed its felt snout from the car door, set the gun on the passenger seat. He slammed the door and closed his eyes for an elevated second as he turned the cold ignition and it started, the rattle of the engine, the crunch of tyres reversing. He glanced back and saw the maid standing under the eaves like a shadow and prayed she’d not called for help, that they somehow believed he was Nikolai Chuprakov’s lover, and forgave him.
The snow fell in a sudden sheet as he drove through the columned entrance, from a place with a climate of its own, and the last thing he saw in the rear-view mirror was the whippet, perched like a statue in the lantern light behind him, the old man and widow gone. Now he felt engulfed in darkness, the taste in his mouth almost sulfuric; perhaps they’d have helped him, hidden him, but why? He couldn’t trust a look in an old man’s eyes.
He’d sneaked cars down driveways since he was nine, but then he’d felt an exhilaration, now he gripped the wheel to stop his own shaking, jumped through a gear and switched on the lights to blind the sentry who raised his hand. Through the snow and the thrash of the wipers, Darcy was the general with the general’s gun, leaving for the night, but then he saw the guard in the mirror, outside his box in the blanketed street, and Darcy accelerated.
Darcy started ripping buttons from the general’s coat, throwing them out into the snow, with no horrid exhilaration, just disgust; and Darcy couldn’t know if he’d ever forgive himself but the shaking wasn’t stopping and he didn’t turn back to search for Aurelio, or for evidence of Fin. He drove on towards the city.
A siren, but it was a train, the gates of a level crossing lowered quickly before him. He looked back at a van behind him, prayed it wasn’t police, imprisoning him, he gazed ahead into the hoot and rattle, the blur of endless hammers and sickles emblazoned on carriages, symbols of cutting and bludgeoning, in rhythm. He touched the burn on his neck, scabbed now, and he tore at it, the pain like a tranquiliser, ripping the crusted edge as a whoosh of windswept snow blasted the car from the last carriage passing and he stared at oncoming cars at the crossing—two green sedans in tandem, militiamen, and as he jolted the Lada over the tracks, Svetlana turned from the second car and caught him there, and as they passed they watched each other but Svetlana’s eyes said nothing to him but go. And he wished he could tell her to look for Aurelio but the city was somewhere ahead, the river to his left, and he wove through the night, his vision blurred with fear and vodka.
He dabbed his neck with the collar of the coat with fingers already tainted with blood, and thought of axes pounding through the bathroom door, searching for spare keys, the widow calling her father, the head of Special Forces. He thought he saw the beacons of the Siminov Monastery above him, lights that hit the pistol on the seat, his fingerprints all over it, his eyes that stung like nettles, straining as far as they could; he twitched and slowed at a claxon sound, an ambulance blaring, coming towards him, but he pressed the Lada forward, passing cars that pulled over, a snow plough, a military truck, if he could just keep the river to his left, but he felt as if the road was veering away. The outlines of buildings clustering, closing in, he wondered if he could find the metro station at Taganskaya, abandon the car, but he knew how to get to Kropotkinskaya by road—follow the river to the Chayka Pool—the weather so thick, his head aching, he dabbed his neck and pressed his elbow against the velvet coat and sensed the slide of plastic, the sacred telegram, how the Turk had almost reached him, crouched and then been felled. Darcy pictured KGB men, done with the Armenians, waiting for him at the embassy gates.
He looked over at the gun, uncertain how to shoot it, then up at a stoplight that burned red and the gun flew from the seat to the floor as he braked and his heart rose up, the car was sliding, bunting a black metal barrier. He swung into the skid so the Lada caught traction and Darcy turned left; then he saw what he knew was the lustreless sweep of the river. Out behind him everything refracted, camouflaged in snow, but there was the embankment approaching, the high sloping stones, and his hopes high with it. He couldn’t yet see the lit panorama of the Kremlin, but he knew where he was, the unyielding stone towers, the Armoury Palace and the endless facade of the walls and cathedrals, all of them above him, places with names he remembered. The Ivan the Great belltower and the Presidium.
In the wake of a bus he looked up at the school-age eyes peering scattershot out a back window, children in a winter like this, and he didn’t feel Russian, crushed by loss and steeled by it, he felt desperately alone. He reached down for the gun but grasped cigarettes. Aurelio’s. But there would be no Aurelio. There would be stray dogs in winter, a general congealing in steam. There would be shaven-headed boys being raped in the gulags or cast out into snow.
He turned at the swimming pool onto Kropotkinskaya Prospekt, but a car turned behind him, and all he could do was stare in the rear-view mirror as he slowed for number thirteen. The other car crept past and no obvious convoy of KGB vehicles waited, yet the quiet felt suspicious, the guard hut lonely as an outhouse in the guttering light. He reached down for the pistol and rested it in his lap, under his new coat, pulling in beside the sentry box, and he felt how easy it would be to use a gun, after cutting at eyes with a knife—you could turn a gun on yourself if you had to.
No one inside the gates, in the snow-blurred shadows, the pitch-dark mansion. A torch shining in the window and Darcy held the roll of notes from his pocket and closed his eyes as he wound the window down into the light on his face and the sleet that spat on his cheeks—the blunt, oval face and same spare chin that denied him the last time. Darcy handed over what remained of the roll of money and looked straight ahead.
Ulli Breffny, he said, clasping the wheel so his hands didn’t tremble, willing himself through, letting go and holding on. Another car passing, the guard picking up a receiver concealed under the counter and phoning, mumbling in Russian, a call he hadn’t made last time, and Darcy felt the gun in his lap, about to point it up, to be sure it was the right call and then, ahead of him, the iron-barred entrance began its drag through the slush, and a pair of rusted arms lifted like they were about to embrace; Darcy drove in almost convulsively, more wary still than elated, faint, as he held for the sound of the creaking gates to lock him in, the hinges like a child screaming.