The dog eyed Aurelio carefully and Aurelio looked at it in disbelief. You must keep this hidden, he said. Stay in that apartment and wait.
What about my passport? asked Darcy.
I have only a photo of you in Chuprakov’s car. And photo of him dead. Same car, but later. His English was deteriorating. You are my friend, but we have no choices. You must do what I say. Trust me, he said. Fin’s words when she’d phoned St Kilda the first time, to make her invitation.
Aurelio held out a hand to touch Darcy’s cheek but the dog emitted a long low growl. I did trust you. A pleading shrouded Darcy’s voice. He held the whippet to him as if it were a weapon of his own.
It is my job, said Aurelio. They punish me too.
But Darcy had slid beyond any sense of jobs and consequences, he felt faint now, his mind askew as he closed the car door behind him, looked back through the misted window. Aurelio’s big haunted eyes, searching to be understood, and tears came to Darcy’s that turned to frost on his lashes. He let the whippet down in the snow and it stood there, silvery, like a stolen ornament, suddenly unafraid.
Ulitsa Kazakov
Friday evening
The donkey drawing looked out from the easel, called Darcy back. It was too late to say sorry or return to a car that was gone.
Fin called out from her bedroom. Darcy felt too cold and stupefied to answer but the timorous whippet pricked its ears. The usual cabbage steam in the corridor had been overtaken by something in her room, a smell of suet. The whippet was sniffing under the door.
Darcy pulled his freezing feet from sodden boots, shaky, his bridges ached, toes caressed by dead hands, Aurelio gone. Shutting the whippet out behind him, he guardedly opened Fin’s bedroom door. She stood alone in her Joan Armatrading T-shirt, the portable hotplate on the ironing board, tins of lard. She was pouring from a pot into a mould but she stopped, rested her eyes on Darcy, shocked. What happened, little brother?
He glimpsed himself in her mirror, faint mud smeared around his eyes, cheeks daubed with the dog’s saliva.
It didn’t go well, he said, brushed past her into the bathroom and turned on the shower, hoping that water might scald him of feeling, rid him of the ache in his chest and the pain in his feet. As he stripped, Fin came in behind him and together they regarded the mud and slush on his jeans, the telltale absence of socks. Did you have sex with him under a bridge? she asked.
Not exactly. He stepped under the water, so hot it felt cold, pouring into his upturned mouth. Fin waited for details, a streak of lard in her umbered hair, and Darcy felt her watching him through the plastic curtain, then he noticed the shape of the dog behind her; baleful and silent, it stood on the threshold. It must have nudged the bedroom door and now its front legs lifted lightly onto the lavatory seat, it dipped into the bowl, long-necked as an ibis drinking. Fin shrieked and jumped aside. He’s mine, said Darcy, stepping from the shower.
Fin turned on the taps in the sink to add to the noise so they could talk. She placed a towel around Darcy’s shoulders.
Nikolai Chuprakov shot himself, he said. This is his dog.
Fin cocked her head. The pink rims of her eyes seemed to deepen to red as she opened them wide. Chuprakov is dead? she whispered.
In his car on the farm where he grew up, he said. Speaking the words and seeing Fin’s shock seemed to tranquillise Darcy into a false, heightened calm as the shower cascaded behind him and the truth took hold in the green of Fin’s eyes.
And you have his dog, she said.
I couldn’t just leave it. Darcy didn’t tell her he’d looked after it briefly once before. As he dried himself, Fin kneeled for the curious dog, stroked its spine. It belongs to the next General Secretary’s daughter, she said.
Darcy thought of the woman in the indigo suit at the Bolshoi, up in the balcony. The Lady and the Dog, he said.
Jesus.
Darcy put on Fin’s sheepskin slippers, tried to keep his thoughts from careening.
Fin pushed her sallow red-tipped fingers through her hair. How did you get back here? she asked.
Aurelio, he said. He took a photo of me in the car with Chuprakov, then photos of him dead. Darcy now felt a deliberate tone in his voice that was tinged with accusation, implicating Fin. He wanted to blame her.
What are you supposed to do now? she asked.
He told me to wait for him here, said Darcy, unless you have a better idea.
Fin’s face seemed even paler against her hair and flat brown lipstick. Did you get your passport? she asked.
Darcy stared at his garments curled up on the floor; jeans and sweatshirt and woollen jumper. I just saw a man bleeding to death, he said. He picked up his clothes and stuffed them into the shower, let the water wash away evidence. The dog looked up at him, showing the self-conscious whites of its eyes.
Fin dipped a Q-tip in dark make-up. Aurelio’s last name is Sarfin, she said. He’s that general’s son.
Darcy stood dumbstruck. Who told you that?
Jobik found a source, she said. She ran the Q-tip over her eyebrows. General Sarfin was stationed in Cuba during the Missile Crisis, she said, leaned and petted the anxious dog.
Darcy dried his hair, felt himself being drawn back into her world. He thought of Aurelio’s face through the frost-rimed window of the Lada—right country, wrong general, driving his father’s car, carte blanche at the dacha, the sister with the spoon.
His mother still lives in Havana, said Fin. Darcy looked over at his own sister crouched in the steaming bathroom, regarding him in bewilderment as he took his Longines watch from the basin and put it on.
Get dressed and come with me, she said. Maybe Jobik will help you this time.
Darcy turned off the taps. It’s not safe for me to leave now, he said, unless you can get me into an embassy.
I can’t go to the embassies, she said.
The ache twinged in Darcy’s underarms. Why’s that?
I just can’t right now. She went back into the other room. I’ll wait here with you, she said, and they worked in silence, carving dried casts with what looked like dental instruments, tiny picks and cutters. The room smelled like an abattoir. The ancillary piece Fin promised the curator, a sculpture of the same museum. Art from dried lard, the innards of a pig—Darcy had once told her it hardened like marble. She remembered everything; what he remembered was the son-in-law, his poet’s eyes and owlish glasses, his old-fashioned English, his torturedness.
Fin turned on the radio, her hands caked, her neck streaked where she’d wiped it. Dirges for Andropov played still. She’d poured hot lard into Russian Tupperware the shapes of horses’ hooves, hardening. He took the teardrop painting knife he’d used to shape wax and chose a dry hoof-shaped cast, began to carve small columns, indents for windows, the Atomic Energy Pavilion. All he could do was look at what was right before him, no sense of the future, he’d flapped his wings in Prague and led himself to this. His breath now warm inside him, butcher’s grass resting on top of the trestle table, the lake in the middle cast with bluepainted lard, tacky as folk art. He watched her pin the foldout postcards on the wall for shapes and reference. She looked over. I’ve made mistakes too, she said.
He moulded a tray for the People’s Friendship Fountain. Was wanting to sleep with me one of them?
At least I’ve always known how to say no, she said.
To Jobik? he asked, but didn’t look up for an answer. Instead he glanced about anxiously—the ironing board in here now, the dog by the bed on the sheepskin rug. The son-in-law who wouldn’t be teaching, not quoting from Turgenev and Dostoyevsky; he’d not told Darcy what he taught, but Darcy imagined it had been literature. He also imagined the scene of the suicide, if it was still unattended, what Aurelio would be telling his father now. The way the general had stared straight at him then right through him—the new recruit, the one in the photo, was now in the fold. Aurelio doing his job.