Welcome to Moscow, the words from behind him like manna, and with them a rush of cold air. And there she was, signature red lipstick against pearl-white skin, eyes glistening beneath their hooded lids. In the nick of time, as if she did it half on purpose. The inspector gazed up, took her in, her features slightly elfin, slightly shark-like, her eyes as green as Darcy’s were blue. She glowered at Darcy as if to say: what the fuck? A brown fur hat with a grass-green brim and a leather patchwork sheepskin coat he hadn’t seen before. Better late than not at all, he whispered, his voice a shadow of itself. She ungloved and spread a slender hand on the edge of the inspector’s desk. She spoke to him fluently, tilting her head. A gesture she and Darcy had in common—or had he picked it up from her? The timbre of her voice lower in Russian, sultrier, perhaps not just from smoking, but studied, unfaltering. Just three years of Russian at Monash and barely five months here. A gift for languages he didn’t have.
The inspector improved his posture, responded, and Fin translated. A message sent ahead by the train conductor: photos taken. She cocked her head again, but this time she was imitating, gripping the fur ends of her scarf. He wants to examine your camera, she said.
Darcy reluctantly unzipped the pocket of his backpack and fished out his Pentax leaf-shutter sports model, three hundred dollars from Tom the Cheap in Dandenong. I took a shot of a woman in a field, he said.
She must have been strategic, said Fin, extending a hand. Her nails were painted a foresty brown.
She handed the camera over to the inspector, smoothed him along with quiet conversation, the guttural language seemed to lilt from her lips, while he fiddled with the camera until the back clicked open, a shining roll of undeveloped pictures released onto the arm of his chair. Darcy mourned shots of Albanian feet, foxes frolicking in snow through the smoky train window, the endless steppe. Fin turned to Darcy with a cool, false calm, retying her scarf. We can go, she said.
He still has my passport.
She eyed Darcy intently. Later, she said, teeth gritted, then flashed a sharp, pained smile. I need my passport, he said, stubborn now, but she grabbed his arm. We’ll come back.
Fin waved to her new inspector friend as he watched her from his office doorway, still holding Darcy’s camera. Her seduction had currency here. The Albanian stood nearby, his socks bulging through the straps of his sandals. Darcy paused to acknowledge him but Fin took his arm. Don’t say anything, she whispered, the warmth of her breath in his ear.
Out in the cold, among the crowd of commuters and blaring announcements, they hugged each other hard. The familiar musk of her Prince Matchabelli, her cold sepulchral cheek. As she held her narrow frame to his, Darcy felt his loneliness transcended; in her strength and frailness he knew why he’d come.
The night fell quickly, swathed in fog. The taxi driver hunched low against the door, eating as he drove. It smelled like herring. Fin produced a pack of Gauloises and patted the box, offered Darcy one. After all, it’s Europe, she said. Sort of. Darcy cupped his hands over her flame, uncertain if it was a reward or consolation. Her lighter was covered in hammers and sickles, and she smoked with a small black cigarette holder, a new affectation. She rotated the slim silver ring in her nostril.
I can’t believe you let him keep my passport.
Don’t be too chatty, she said. She motioned with her chin at the driver, but Darcy sensed it as an excuse. I needed a transit visa for Poland, he added, then he saw the driver’s eyes brush across the rear-view mirror and fell silent. He looked out at the bluish sprays from occasional street lamps, the red tentacles of the tail-lights.
You’ll need to be careful, said Fin, her lips left slightly parted as she returned the cigarette to them.
You were the one who told me it was good to seem naïve.
Not that naïve, she said, smiling.
Darcy stared out at the grim-looking people, eyes down as they crossed at the lights. I was only taking photos of the countryside, he said.
I know, she said. I’m just glad you’re here. She placed her fleece-lined fingers over his ski gloves but his hand felt unsteady. He’d always assumed he was expert at being out of his element, he’d always been that, but he’d never been this far away.
This is my home, said Fin, as though gleaning an aspect of his thought. Sometimes it seemed they didn’t need to speak at all. She gazed out as if the darkness held some private fascination. She seemed different here, somehow uneasy; she usually found everything funny. Darcy was used to sharing adventures with her, the secrets only she knew, but now he decided he wouldn’t mention his encounter in the station in Prague, how he’d felt jangled by it, the glazed collusion in the soldier boy’s eyes, how easily it had skewered him. But that had been Prague and this was Moscow. He promised himself again.
It’s great you’re here, said Fin, giving him a weary but grateful smile. He wondered why she’d said it twice. As the taxi turned to cross the river, Darcy caught their twin reflections mirrored in the window, two sides of a coin. Almost thirteen years since he’d first seen her on the drive in Mount Eliza. When she was young her hair had been untidy and long, so fair it was almost white, blonder than his. Now it was cropped, orange hints of it poking from beneath her fur hat. Her freckles had faded to silk. A slight masculinity in the set of her mouth, a firmness. He was tempted to reach over and touch her face.
The bridge seemed foolishly wide and foreboding, statues of heroes. Fog hung in layers through a light that shed like a scrim on the river, the ice glistened black like shards of coal. See the Kremlin, said Fin, turning.
Behind them, he made out the vague misted beams from towers. The driver coughed into a handkerchief, skirted a street sign fallen onto the road. The fabric of the city is fraying, said Fin, as though she’d lived here since the time of Stalin. The way her eyes held the distance without squinting.
Do you have a man here? he asked.
In lieu of an answer she drew deeply from her cigarette and blew two quick smoke rings in Darcy’s direction, pointed to the distant gates of Gorky Park. On a clear night you can see the lights of the Ferris wheel above the trees, she said.
They turned into a street that was narrower than the grand boulevards, and darker, rimmed by low-rise apartments: Ulitsa Kazakov. The taxi parked outside a red brick building with curved art deco corners. Old-fashioned, iron-framed guillotine windows. Three storeys high with an identical block beside it: her brave new world. Is it a special place for foreigners? asked Darcy.
If I’d wanted to live with Australians I’d have stayed there, she said. They didn’t quite think of themselves as Australian, their mothers from California, but that didn’t make Fin or Darcy feel American either. They came from a country of their own. It had two inhabitants.
Fin negotiated the fare while Darcy unloaded. It seemed the driver wanted extra for carrying bags he hadn’t handled. Fin gave him a note and dismissed him in an offhand way that reminded Darcy of his mother.
As the taxi receded through the slush, the mist iced Darcy’s face, dampening his cigarette, and then the street was quiet save for the whining of lorries from a main road, the buzz of the overhead wires. Fin was silent too as they followed a side path to a raised courtyard littered with snow, up some stairs that whistled with cold. He’d never imagined this kind of cold.
In the corridor, the burgundy carpet was black along the edges from damp, the smell of cabbage boiling, urine-stained walls. A man stood at the end where there wasn’t a light. I expected a babushka at a desk, said Darcy.