Darcy crouched in the back seat, weak but somehow defiant. The Opinel knife still there, tight against his ankle. He examined the Turk’s profile, his beaky nose and tapered neck, the wolverine smile, imagined slicing with the hawk-bill blade and ripping his smile out wide across his cheeks. What are you doing with me? he asked.
Maybe we need you. Let your sister see we have you, he said, his eyes still pressed against his binoculars. Dangle you on a stick.
Darcy reached down for the knife, just to feel it. Where is she? he asked softly. But it was the bull-necked driver who turned for the first time and Darcy, his hand down by his boot in the sights of grey crystalline eyes, felt the narrow path of his life. The same snub un-Turkish face he’d left in the crowd outside the exhibition, who’d let him believe he’d got away. His fingers stiff as branches, Darcy picked up the newspaper article fallen from the seat, handed it over. The guard who’d not stopped the trolleybus near the Ploshchad Revolyutsii.
Darcy averted his eyes, gazed out into the close black verge as if he wasn’t half-paralysed with cold and fright. If there were a gunfight he’d take his chances out there—a small clump of conifers and from it another pair of eyes, glowing, the shape of a wary angular dog, wolfish, staring back. They watched each other for a moment, and Darcy thought of Laika, a stray captured down by the river, hanging in the air near the sun, exploding. Darcy could only see as far as the spindly pines, through to a factory fence where the timid dog disappeared into the immutable dark. He envisaged his own feet splayed in the blanketed gutter, his face down, silent and cold on this roadside, listening to the snow, wondering if he were dead.
He looked back again for Aurelio but the Lada was empty now, and a voice on the Turk’s handset, the receiver back up to his ear as a light flickered on in the night and spread through the dark, up the side of a rusted industrial building that stretched from the road down to a low gravel barge moored where ice had been dredged in the river. In the shadows, a tractor with a front-end loader axle-deep in muddy snow, a narrow, tyre-slushed track to a small concrete quay. A cold whiff of pine mixed with the smells in the car and Darcy’s words congealed on his tongue, an unshouted warning, as a shape appeared in the shallow-lidded helm of the barge, a figure that rose up then disappeared. Darcy imagined a hull full of bunks where Armenians hid—separatists, terrorists, avengers of distant history, Jobik waiting for Fin.
The light went off and the Turk seemed agitated, twisting in his seat, whispering to the driver in Russian. Darcy’s heart pushed at his chest. If they stormed this boat, he could run. No more conversation as two figures emerged from the corrugated building, creeping through the shadows past the loader, down towards the frozen quay, to the barge. Darcy prayed for his moment, when the Turk and his pale-eyed driver might forget him; they strained out in the other direction, waiting. A fire in Darcy’s neck that spread to the base of his skull, the distant buzz of a motor, then dim lights on the river. He eyed the door handle to be sure it wasn’t locked.
Who is this man? hissed the Turk, thrusting a pair of field glasses into the back seat. The driver turned too, a pistol an extension of his black, gloved hand. Darcy’s hands felt so unsteady, fumbling with the binocular strap, then focusing. Lenses that produced a strange night vision, purple, searching down the grainy details of the sheeted building, the magnification almost telescopic. Fin like a species endangered, tracked through the snow, monitored from the restaurant somehow. Darcy’s eyes burned with the hazy vision of her smooth, efficient movement, climbing a rope ladder up the rusted side of the boat into what looked like mounds of gravel. She was being closed in on.
Tell me who is the man? Words spat by the Turk from the front seat. Darcy turned his attention to the one who wasn’t Fin. A heavy leather jacket, jeans high and cinched tight the way all Moscow men wore jeans. The cook, Darcy mumbled, from the restaurant, but the cook had worn thick checked trousers. This man who now climbed the ladder, cigarettes bulging squarely from his rear pocket, turned for a moment to check as the building light flickered on like a signal, and Darcy caught his rutted unmistakable face through the purple, butterflied lens. The Albanian he’d shared the sleeper with on the train from Prague. Different in jeans but him, and Fin there, small beside him as he shed his torchlight over stones frosted grey, crouched down and they both disappeared. Suddenly, the shape of the barge rendered nothing, a pregnant silence and two humps of gravel, the Turk talking feverish Russian, and Darcy’s realisation—Jobik’s people had kept an eye on him since day one, shepherding their money belt home, and the truth of Darcy’s idiocy had him staring at the seat back, retreating inside himself, the thought of himself as a fool on a train trundled like a gift bag through hell to this cold, precious moment.
He turned to the night as a great silver net of snow fell like unexpected debris and, with it, the sound of a distant motor, not the sound in his head, and nyet, nyet from the dashboard had the Turk still peering, anxious now, impatient. No one moved to storm the boat. The barge planted like a frozen wreck and yet lights moved out from it, over the ice. The Turk’s words biting into his device. No moon on the river just spidering light in the blackness. Darcy picked up his own forgotten binoculars and his heart rose slightly. A snowmobile headed out across the river, one and then another, then nothing. The barge was just a meeting place. Fin was getting away.
Quick footsteps on the road and voices, coats moving out into the darkness, ignitions starting, a chance, thought Darcy, turning to the roadside door, but in the snow-smeared window loomed the general, eyes that danced with a hint of madness. He wrenched the door wide open. Time for you, he said, little boy blue.
Darcy lunged for the opposite door but the driver’s arm was already a fist on the handle, another acid smile, and the Turk from the passenger side, shouting at the generaclass="underline" Gde most? Gde most? Where’s the bridge?
The general dismissed the Turk with a wave of his handgun, grabbed Darcy by the coat, a glove around his neck that had a yowl of agony ratcheting up inside his head, the general’s thumb like a cattle prod, a pistol in Darcy’s ear. Darcy closed his eyes against him, sensed these as last breaths, pulled out into the veil of snow, the flakes that feathered his face as his own hands scrabbled up to wrest away the general’s thumb, his gloved fingers gripping Darcy’s voiceless throat, a mewling sound sent out to Fin out on the river ice, to Aurelio, to escape these great mauling hands. Darcy flailed the binoculars strapped to his hand like some pathetic handbag weapon, the knife out of reach, the gun jammed in his now-roaring ear, just as he’d imagined it only minutes before, shot on this road in front of Aurelio, as remonstration, left in the frozen ditchwater for local dogs to lick his wound. He thought if he’d had any other life it wouldn’t end like this, the Turk yelling at the general, losing his Armenians, a glimpse of Aurelio through the Lada’s wipers, a horror caught in those rounded eyes, a barely perceptible shake of his head and in it a plea not to struggle. And Darcy was beyond it now, exhausted.
You thought I was to kill you? the general said, smiling, and Darcy’s knee was bashed as he was thrust into the back seat of the Lada, the familiar tobacco smell, anise. He held a mitten to the eruption of pain in his neck, stunned and silent. Then he righted himself, clenched the ear that clamoured with the bullet that hadn’t been shot, and breathed as if he’d forgotten how, looking up for Aurelio—Aurelio who didn’t dare look around, doleful eyes caught in the rear-view mirror as the general hefted himself around to face Darcy, his great arm on the seat back. My son, Aurelio, he said with relish, his lips loose. You know him?