Taras Schevchenko, the driver was saying, Taras Schevchenko, pointing towards a statue in the shadow as a towering sixties eyesore rose up in the windscreen; no grand arcades or ornate grills—it wasn’t the Metropole. All Darcy knew was that Taras Bulba was a famous racehorse from home, and this driver had a deal with the Hotel Ukraine, dropping foreigners there. Darcy thrust out some roubles that fell from his hands into the front seat, got out while he could, in the hope of divine intervention.
He and the dog ran through the snowfall, handed some notes to a doorman in a sagging green jacket so he would let the dog in. The lobby unfolded, flocked with what looked like dressed-up farmers, queues of them checking in and congregating. A clamour of the guttural mother tongue and piped folk music. Darcy stood with the dog on the edge of an endless green carpet littered with cheap canvas luggage, wind-burned men with wrinkled bloodshot eyes, crow’s-feet like claws of eagles, some shrouded in sheepskin, others in boxy suits. People who didn’t seem to notice the dog but Darcy knew he couldn’t blend in here. No other Westerners. The wrong hotel. A heat rose up his spine, against the back of his wet coat. A clock. It was still before eight. He found a deep corduroy lounge chair in a vestibule among a group of milling women in bright woollen headscarves. One sat nearby and smiled at the dog, wrestling to glove her large hands. Darcy had no smile left in him. He removed Aurelio’s coat. It felt heavy, like a shawl of dread.
Then he noticed, beside him, a pair of glassed-in booths, oldfashioned black phones. He imagined the sound of his mother’s cigarette voice, a chance to tell her he was here and he was sorry. A row of surly clerks behind counters, he noticed a prettyish one at a separate desk just feet from him, a benign pale face alone in a tight blue cardigan. He searched her grey Slavic eyes for signs of benevolence. Her blonde hair was tied back loosely and she passed her eyes over Darcy and smiled, lit up at the sight of the dog. On a whim, Darcy stood and approached her, an ache in his neck ran through his shoulders as he leaned on a chair back in front of her polished teak desk and she petted the whippet. I need to make an overseas call, he said. He knew he spoke each word too carefully.
Number of room? she asked, nuzzling the dog now.
Darcy leaned in, forced his fear back down so it lay lit like kindling on his voice box. I stay at Hotel Metropole. He sounded croaky, his English broken.
You have Intourist guide?
With my group, he said. I must call my mother. She has a sickness. She is Australianski.
The girl seemed wary, but Darcy reached forward nervously, touched her hand as he took a hotel envelope from her pile. A photo of an old man sitting, cradling a trumpet, lay beside them on the desk.
Your father? asked Darcy. She nodded as he slipped a sheaf of roubles from his pocket into the envelope, proffered it to her quietly. For your father, he said, smiled as best he could. He wished his forehead wasn’t sweating, that the tingle didn’t run along his lip like an alarm.
She nodded with an odd muffled smirk, whisked the envelope out of sight under her desk. Darcy followed it into her lap. To call my mother, he said. For calling international.
Why you have a dog? she asked. She touched a plastic flower pinned to her lapel.
My friend, he said. He was afraid she’d wanted sex, not money, but she pushed a small red pencil at him.
You give me number, she said.
Darcy took the pencil, concentrated, whispered to himself as he wrote. The numbers lay scratched on the paper like an inculcation. His mother, oblivious, eight hours behind. Almost midnight on Baden Powell Drive, another planet. He stared up into this girl’s ashen eyes. Spasiba, he said, pleading.
In the telephone closet all he could do was stare at the phone, a dial without numbers and a frayed brown cord. It didn’t seem like it had the capacity to reach far away. He glanced out only once, to the dog on its lead, anxiously watching with the girl at the desk. He pictured his mother, alone in her dark bedroom, a species apart in her light summer nightie, recovered from her stroke. A last drink in one hand and a lit cigarette, ready for bed, unsuspecting.
When the telephone beeped Darcy sucked in air as if the floor was a trapdoor to water. He lifted the worn receiver, listened. A clicking sound, an echo and then the familiar Australian ring that made him feel heavy, his breath loud now and uneven; the phone rang and rang. He imagined it there on her bedside table, her clock radio, the latest Dick Francis, but no answer, no message machine. Darcy’s heart sinking. He tried to spot the dog and his grey-eyed confidante but the desk was now unattended. Then he heard a new click. Hairlo? His mother, her husky drinker’s voice, confused by the beeps.
Mum, it’s Darcy, he said and heard the echo, biting his lip at the sound of her, the remnants of her American vowels, the way mothers know sons. Overcome with a rush of blearing tears. I’m in Moscow, he said. I’m in trouble.
How did you get there? The sound of him staving off sobs seemed to strike her quite lucid.
Darcy looked down at the damp, muddy square of linoleum, his sodden boots, uncertain what to say.
Darcy Dancer?
He pressed his fist against his cheek, knowing this would be recorded, he took his chance. They took my passport, he said. I’m afraid I might disappear.
Disappear! He heard her confusion, her own swallowing. What are you into now?
Please help me, said Darcy. The tears coming back, afraid if he started he might not find the words. I need you to contact the embassy. Write down these names.
His mother wasn’t fighting tears, she was stunned silent, then the sound of her scratching around her bedside table for a pen. What are you talking about?
Write these names. Nikolai Chuprakov. Tell them he’s dead. That I didn’t kill him. Tell them Fin’s here. Remember Jostler. She’s here with him. They’re involved in something.
His mother coughed. In Moscow?
I’m sorry, Mum, he said. I should have told you. But now I need you. Tell them I’m in the hands of a General Sarfin. His son is my friend. They will say I killed Nikolai Chuprakov.
With that the line went dead.
Darcy knew he’d said too much as he wiped his eyes on the arm of Aurelio’s coat, stepping quickly from the booth of this wrong hotel, ready to flee, but his cardiganed friend appeared through the crowd. He avoided her apologetic smile, sniffing as he nodded. Where’s the dog? he asked but she shook her head as if in apology.
Darcy said nothing, just slipped through the peasants to the large double doors. He did a half-halt when he saw the exit framed by two men in black-lapelled coats like his own, one man bearded, the dog muzzled in a cage like a captive thing being loaded into a van outside.
Darcy briskly changed course to a revolving door, pursued by the beard who crammed into the compartment behind him, and the revolving stopped. Darcy made a rush against the faltering glass and it flung him outside to the cold, to a hand that enveloped his face in cloth, damp against his nostrils, stinging his eyes, the shriek was his own at the fact of his capture, his head in what felt like a sack, the septic taste of a toxin and a roaring that pounded inside his ears. Then, for a brief suspended instant, it all felt as fluid as a dream, he could no longer feel it as real or fight it, hoisted by his arms through the snow, his feet kicking faintly but only the air. He tried to shout his name but could feel he was only mouthing, coughing up a foul astringency, asphyxiating, a suffocating glove. As the cloth flapped from his face he searched the air for the dog, for witnesses, fighting his tongue for the shape of Aurelio’s name, the side of his face wet against an ice-blown roof of the van that came right at him, the feel of iron wrist bands as they clamped his hands, forced him into the back seat at an unnatural angle with his knees up, the ribbed edge beneath his hip. The slamming of a car door, then another, and they were driving through furry falling snow that drifted up high through a smeared piece of window. Ravens on the passing branches, a hint of blue above a jaundiced building. Daylight.