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, 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 sound of the tyres whispered beneath him, and the Turk snuffed a new cigarette out in the ashtray, pulled a handheld 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 delerium. 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.