My father is saying what he wants.
But what do you know? asked Darcy. Tell me what you know.
Aurelio searched up at the ceiling now. They are wanting your sister, he said, and her friend Jobik. They allegate he is murderer of Turkish Consul-General in a city you coming from. Aurelio took out another tiny bottle and upended it, let drops fall onto his extended tongue. They say your Fin was the driver.
A new seam of fear travelled up Darcy’s spine. He cast his eyes low, to his Blundstone prints in the urine-stained floor. He never saw Jobik in Melbourne during that time, but he could just imagine Fin on Queens Road in St Kilda, behind the wheel of the rusted Corvair, Darcy’s car, his mother’s. He clutched his hands as if to hold himself still. The hollow sound in his ear, like a train coming in to a station.
She’s a dangerous girl, said Aurelio.
She’s my sister, said Darcy. He shut his eyes, wishing he didn’t believe what he’d heard but he could picture it too clearly. Fin waiting out by the tramline, the borrowed Corvair in the shade of the elms while Jobik slipped up some steps to one of those Georgian houses, the Consul-General bidding goodnight to his driver, or greeting his wife at the door. Darcy remembered the photos, slain Turks on the front page of the Age.
Aurelio shook the bottle as if to prove it was empty. Jobik, he is having a history of blowing things up, he said. Turkish things. He is working for organisations. He spoke vaguely, as if this was irrelevant now. Armenian organisations. He stood to leave but Darcy reached for his arm.
Listen to me, he said. I am a foreigner. I cannot be held here without my country knowing. You must tell the Australian Embassy.
Aurelio reached down tenderly, touched Darcy’s swollen cheek. This isn’t England, he said. One time there was Jamie Brodkin, coming to start a homosex movement. Posters in the streets. He wanted to make a parade. Aurelio turned to the slot in the door. They told his family, but when his family come to take him home, his body had disappeared.
Darcy shut his eyes and all he saw was his mother, her first morning drink in hand, staring at her bedside table, strange foreign names scratched on torn paper, wondering if she’d written them down in a dream.
Lubyanka
Saturday, 3 pm
Darcy curled up in the damp, fetid blanket, too tired to sleep, his mind spinning out like a wheel. The hanging bulb went out as a knocking began from beneath the bed, four beats then three, then a flurry. The grate in the door opening, the guard’s eyes looking in. Darcy turned to the bricks, to the wet day at Monash when Fin stole his car keys and then disappeared, even though she hated to drive in the rain. Images of her and Jobik on a blustery Melbourne afternoon, the Corvair parked in a dark garage near Albert Park, the two of them breathless and silent, waiting for the sirens to pass, or fucking on the strength of it, the sound of the explosion still resounding in their ears. The kind of killings Darcy’d heard of on the news, as if they’d happened far away, like history from school, Johnny Turk mowing down ANZACs by the thousand on the cliffs of Gallipoli, everyone’s great-uncles. Darcy had a vague memory of the Armenian massacres, same country, same year, 1915. But Fin had never mentioned them.
The bulb came back on. A creak at the door and the wrenching of locks. A baba shuffled into the angle of light. Darcy squinted at her; the same old woman from the interview room, in her pale blue coat with her bucket, her unfeeling eyes. She placed the bucket on the chair with a sliver of white soap and the ripped end of a towel.
The bucket like an altar and the cement like ice beneath his knees, Darcy dabbed his bruised cheek with tepid water, pushed his wet hair back over his scalp, his head still unshaven, no grey prison pyjamas. He thought again of his mother. Would it be Sunday there or still Saturday? Who would she tell?
The baba placed a beaker of watery porridge and a metal cup of tea on the floor then left. Darcy wolfed the porridge and tea without tasting, then promptly threw half of it up on the cement, a whirring in his head. There was a guard observing through the half-open door, a narrow gaze, a head too small for the brim of his cap, a sparrow’s mouth. A handgun in its holster and a truncheon he knocked against the door. If it was morning already, Darcy knew he’d lost all track of time. He wiped his lips, unsure he’d be able to stand.
The guard viewed Darcy with a blankness he found unnerving as they waited behind tall iron gates. Under a yellow light a distant prisoner was pushed into an empty cell and as the light went off, Darcy realised it meant they could pass. No display of the cadaverous boy they’d shown him in the hall, no tattooed opuscheny this time. They entered an open elevator cage that ratcheted up. The muted stench of the drains. Darcy stared down at the guard’s black boots and focused on breathing, keeping the vestiges of oatmeal down. He scuffed along a corridor, a guard now in front and one behind, and thought of Aurelio’s last words. Your face it is sore but it is nothing. Maybe my father likes you.
In the interview room, the general was already seated, his silver lunch box beside him, an astrakhan coat draped over the back of his chair, a picture of Lenin now hung directly behind him. The general stared up at Darcy from the folder of photos, but didn’t say anything, softly tapped his glasses on the table and nodded for Darcy to sit in the same wooden chair as before. Just a creepy, knowing smile. Darcy looked over to where the dog had been. The cage was gone.
The general rose slightly but didn’t get up as a man in a pair of rimless specs appeared, a brown felt fez with a small tassel. He had a pursed mouth and crow-black eyes, and a cold sweat rose on Darcy’s back as the man removed his fez and placed it fussily on the table, smoothed his neatly parted toupee. He acknowledged the general but didn’t shake his hand as he sat beside him, assessed Darcy. I am with Turkish intelligence, he said.
Say dobry den to Consul Tugrul, said the general.
Darcy felt like a sheep emerged from a river. He avoided the perfect hairline, the moustache trimmed close along the thin upper lip. He looked instead at Lenin.
This is for you, said the Turk. He placed a photo of his own on the table, and Darcy noticed the clear-polished nails. A colour shot of Jobik in a baseball cap, leaning on a chain-link fence, a bombed-out building behind him. Jobik was younger, posing cockily in a tight-fitting T-shirt as though the bomb might have been one of his own. The fluorescent light buzzed in a way that had Darcy struggling to concentrate.
You must know something of this man, said the Turk, inquisitive, patient, his English almost perfect. If you can help us, maybe General Sarfin can help you. We extend you a leaf.
Darcy looked up at the general, who seemed slightly bemused, as if aware Darcy had nothing to offer the Turk, but Darcy tried to put himself back in the kitchen on Baden Powell Drive, his father telling him that Fin had disappeared to Queensland, but he couldn’t yet conjure the last name. He swallowed. When I was a boy in Australia, he said to the Turk, he went by the name of Jostler. I knew who he was but I didn’t really know him. Darcy looked up again at Lenin and it appeared like a gift in three syllables. His surname was Garabed, he said, back then.
Yes, said the Turk, nodding. Arman Garabed. He’s the leader of the military wing of the Dashnak party. He spoke slowly, as if trying to sense what else Darcy had for him. He reached across the table, curled a long narrow hand about Darcy’s forearm, and squeezed the muscle tightly. What else? he asked. He let Darcy go.