Darcy withdrew from the yellow-toothed smile, a cautious glance from Aurelio, stiff and uncertain, then silence.
Aurelio was ballet dancer, said the general. Weren’t you, boy?
Aurelio didn’t suspend an elegant arm as he’d once done for Darcy but instead put the Lada in gear and stared out into the rough U-turn he made.
He drove now with lights, the Turk a dark blur behind them. Darcy, his sight blurred again, watched out through the drumbeat rhythm of wipers, unsure if he should be grateful. A passing clump of bare black forest. He blinked to focus, touching his lip, the burn, as both cars ran parallel with the silvery Moskva. Shabby wooden dwellings, the ways that wove down to the river. No lights of a skidoo. The general, two fingers pressed to an ear, listening for news from scratchy, faraway transistor voices. Aurelio’s downy dancer’s neck didn’t turn to see him, but the general leaned slightly sideways, kept watch with accusing eyes, extending his free arm along the bench seat, the pistol at Aurelio’s shoulder.
Fear snaked in Darcy’s veins like a system of rivers, Aurelio’s hands tight on the wheel, the general’s zealot eyes, bloodshot under the rim of his black fur hat. My son, he said as if Aurelio weren’t there. He never dance with Bolshoi. They only use him because he is strong, lifting ballet girls. He gestured with his big hands lofted in the air, the pistol firm in one. But they don’t like Cubanos at the Bolshoi, do they? Nyet, nyet, nyet. He pushed the gun at Aurelio’s neck. Not specially the half homosex, half Cubanos.
Aurelio, mute, twitched his neck and drove on, rigid. Darcy avoided the general’s flecked vulture eyes, focused on the gun, the silencer, a memory of the same at Nikolai Chuprakov’s feet. Could it be the son-in-law’s gun or did silencers all look the same? Darcy felt dizzied, the sardonic thrum of traffic through snow as they passed beneath what he thought was the ring road. The general so big, the seat back seemed low, his square-jowled face turned around to Darcy again. He have a dancer friend. The he turned to Aurelio, goading. What happened to him? Sergei Beloff, was this his name? He not dance anymore. Jew boy, blue boy. He can’t dance now. A violence in the last word, an act implied, the general sweating with wrath, or it could have been drink, and all Darcy thought of was size against frailty, being heaved at, the thought of a dancer blood-smeared against the cement. Aurelio still said nothing, just the slightest shake of his head in the rear-view mirror. Darcy saw cuts on his face.
The knife felt cold and small folded in Darcy’s mittened hand as he slid it unopened up into his coat sleeve, a soundless ribbon of panic. The general with the fingers to his transistor ear once more and another almost indiscernible shake of Aurelio’s head. Had he seen the knife, sensed it? If it gouged the general’s pistol arm, into whose head would he shoot the bullet? The Lada would skid through the gnawing darkness, turning over like a surfboard.
The general jerked up his pistol hand. Lyevii, he said, nudged at Aurelio’s neck with the short black barrel, shouted gruff Russian instructions. Aurelio turned left down a dark road, turned off the lights. Darcy guessed the main road had taken them away from the river; they’d not crossed a bridge, but headed back now to where the vanishing river must be. We find your friends, said the general. We make visit. He turned to Aurelio. KGB, we know how to follow. Don’t we, son? First we already follow your little boy blue to his secret restaurant.
Aurelio’s silence scared Darcy. He drove like an automaton, only the shadowy parking lights of the Lada on what was now a narrow snowy track, the sound of the tyres crawling into the stillness. Dark in the car now, Darcy clasped the knife in the folds of his coat but the knife felt ineffectual. He’d need to strike the general’s eye, or his ear, but the general kept waving the gun like a finger, turning. With a canny smile, he offered a zippered bag to Darcy.
The Turk, he kill for this, he said. His tongue glistened as it lay on his teeth and Darcy thought of Lubyanka, and the ferret-faced boy lying dead behind the restaurant—he knew how the Turk had killed. The burn still throbbed like the head of a spear broken off in his neck as the general’s mammoth ungloved hand dangled the evidence bag over the seat like another last promise.
Did Tugrul tell you about Tbilisi? he asked. Your sister in Tbilisi? Just day before yesterday. Maybe we find her any minute. Family reunion… with fireworks.
A horrible dryness returned to Darcy’s mouth, his teeth as if covered in cloth; he didn’t want to know any more. The prospect of a fire on the river ice, he and Aurelio lined up with Fin and her dissident Armenians. Darcy searched the shadowy back of Aurelio’s head, his shoulders still rigid, unyielding as a costumer’s dummy. The general dropped the bag down in Darcy’s lap. It was light, almost floated. Just paper.
I can’t read, said Darcy.
Aurelio cleared his throat but the general barked at him sharply, scolding, then turned back to Darcy. It is English, he said, placing his elbow over the seat. He cocked a silver cigarette lighter, his face like a ghoul’s in the fluttery flame, and Darcy thought to stab those fingers if the flame came near his face. He cagily held up the evidence bag, the thought of it burning, a decoy for Aurelio, a chance, but in the jittery light a date: July 13, 1915. American Ambassador, Constantinople. Typewritten, faded, beige letterhead frayed in the folds and corners. Old and authoritative.
You know this? asked the general. Is it original or forgery?
Darcy looked at the cream paper behind the plastic, the ridges of the seal. Index Bureau, stamped with an official seal, to Robert Lansing, US Secretary of State.
I never saw this.
A copy is left with the body of the dead Consul Turk in Tbilisi. The general a shifted personality, not the drunk transgressor but probing. This one they try to deliver to manuscript museum in Yerevan. You ever go to Yerevan?
Darcy didn’t answer, felt the night crawling by, his life, the lives of dead Armenians. He wasn’t even sure where Yerevan was but he was drawn to the undulating typeface. Persecutions assuming unprecedented proportions. Uprooting, tortures and wholesale expulsions accompanied by rape, pillage and murder turning into massacre, to bring destruction and destitution on them. Leviticalsounding words. Initials above a signature stamp. Lawrence Andersen, United States Ambassador to Turkey. In the margin he read Classified. Could it not be real? He directed his eyes to the general, who looked back at him with a predatory disdain.
You bringing this to Moscow, he said. Strapped to yourself like suicide. But you never saw it?
Darcy felt his own head shake, dubious and slow, as he lifted the plastic flap, the page where it creased, and knew it could have been folded, sewn into the lining of the money belt. In the pit of his stomach he believed it was true.
You very clever, said the general, or very stupid. He flicked the lighter off and muttered into a miniature speaker held between fingers, men out in snow flurries still tracking Fin. Darcy heard her phone voice, the night she’d called in Melbourne, offering him a chance, sensing his suspicion, her faith in his need to escape that world, believing he’d come. And he had known even then it was stupid. Now, he cradled the old document in the dark, its red stamp embossed like the burn on his neck. If he’d been part of something, that something was over.
Aurelio stopped the car where the track dead-ended, glanced up at the rear-view mirror but Darcy couldn’t make out his eyes, just the sound of the other car pulling in quietly behind them. He felt a strange surrender, a momentary transcendence of fear. Aurelio? he said softly, but Aurelio still didn’t turn, it was the general who swung over the seat back, dark wild eyes and his pistol shoving at Darcy’s face. You never speak with him, he said. You hearing? You do what I tell. Darcy reefed back from the small black barrel, his eyes so tight they burrowed deep inside him until he could feel his lips open, but he heard no shot, only words. You will walk through those trees. You will see a house. You knock on door.