David Francis - Stray Dog Winter

Darcy pushed his fingers deep into his temples as the dog approached him timidly, the memory of blood from Chuprakov’s wound and now Svetlana bitten. Darcy moved past the dog and locked the door then rushed into the bedroom, knocking over a canister of lard. He pulled open Fin’s wardrobe and searched the pockets of her quilted patchwork coat, where he’d seen her fish for cash, felt along the hem. The dog behind him playful now, its paws on Darcy, but Darcy said no and it sat like a sculpture as he fingered Fin’s winter dresses, her short leather skirt, stopped when he heard someone pass in the hall. He waited, a glimpse of himself so gaunt in the mirror, and the dog sniffed back into the other room, but there was no one. The other dogs had gone quiet. Then Darcy saw Fin’s fake fur stole, curled up on the floor in the corner like a black cat. He reached down and felt the touch of something solid and square inside the silk backing. He shook the solidness down through an opening. A burgundy passport, an emblem and Cyrillic letters, a bundle of cash clipped inside. Different currencies, roubles wadded with American dollars. Darcy didn’t count but he knew it was a lot, imagined stashes everywhere, Jobik’s people, Chechens, Estonians, rebels, whatever they were. The passport embossed with an indecipherable stamp and a photo of Fin with short peroxided hair, without make-up. It wasn’t as if it couldn’t be him. He drank what was left of the tintasting milk from the fridge and grabbed at the crackers, poured some on the floor for the dog, then pushed what he could into his daypack, Fin’s suede mittens and extra socks, buttoned himself in Aurelio’s coat. Beneath his scarf the leather leash was now back on the hook from the first day, hanging like a promise, and the dog looking up as if ready, a liability or saviour, a charm.

Darcy didn’t lock the door. He headed down the back steps with the dog jumping up on him, out into the still-dark street where there was no white Zhiguli, no Svetlana, just a wind that cut into Darcy’s face like a flurry of spinning razors, the dog looking up with its eyes closed against it. Darcy felt exposed and paranoid; checking behind, he leaned into the bite of the gale and tried to remember the name of the restaurant, a car’s name. He’d looked it up in Fodor’s but kept his promise, not written it down. But now his mind was all fuzzy. A lane off Polyanka or Solyanka? He’d forgotten the name of the church.

He scanned the parked cars for men in pairs or solo, cleanshaven and waiting; he couldn’t risk going back to check. And the restaurant wouldn’t be open now, anyway. He looked down at the dog beside him, almost airborne in the wind, the weather both for and against them, this visibility, the taste of ice that stung Darcy’s lips. His hand in his pocket with the end of the leash, clasping the small roll of money, the sharp edges of the passport. No point in the dress shop, he’d already shouted Aurelio’s name from that knifecold alley. The money, the chance of a bribe, or flagging down a US consular official, explaining how his mother grew up near Montecito. But it wasn’t yet seven, no embassies open, then he remembered it was Saturday, they wouldn’t be open at all. Without written travelling permission he wouldn’t get far on a train.

Out on Ulitsa Dimitrova he walked among the early pedestrians, trudging, their heads low and covered. Darcy and the quickwalking dog moved through them, turned and cut through towards Polyanka on a street that passed near the Church of St Gregory. Maybe this was where she’d meant. He dipped up a narrow culde-sac to see who had followed and in the shelter of an alcove he kneeled and held the dog close to his coat. He saw no restaurant there, just a man in a well-lit second floor window, sitting in his dressing-gown, sipping from a teacup at a simple breakfast table. His little finger extended as he lifted a tea kettle with what could have been a cosy. A reddish-haired woman appeared at his side and served him a plate from a pot on a stove. Darcy imagined it might have been porridge, that they were expats, English, maybe one of those Cambridge spies, the defector and his Russian wife, one was still alive. Darcy blew his breath into the scarf that covered his face, the only warmth whispering from inside him and he breathed it on the dog, trying to remember the defector’s name. The woman eating her toast in the window, what if that was them?

Kim Philby, Darcy shouted, startling the dog, but his shout wasn’t as loud as Darcy had hoped. The woman stared out and Darcy started to walk forward like a child returning home, but above him he saw the silhouette of a man on the steep-pitched roof, roped by his waist to a chimney. He swung something and there was a shot; the dog jumped, pigeons rose up in flight from the eaves.

Darcy cringed breathless behind a metal rubbish bin, but if he’d been hit he couldn’t feel it, nothing but snow on his knees and the dog right there with him. Another shot reverberated and Darcy peeked up; it wasn’t a rifle but the echo of a hammer strike, sledging out birds from the crowns of the chimneys. But now a guard stood attentive in the glass doorway to the building, and upstairs the woman was drawing her curtains closed.

Darcy broke for the main street. Back out among the sluggish cars, he jumped in a taxi at the lights and let the dog jump right in with him. Hotel Metropole, said Darcy, checking the back window, car lights in the dark, grim faces through the wiped arcs of the windscreens. Anyone could have been anyone.

Nyet , said the driver, Nyet sobakoy . He stared at the dog on the seat but Darcy held out the roll of notes in the palm of his hand and was driven on through the muted fuss of the first morning traffic, past the grey mass of the Variety Theatre, the great stone bridge and the shadowy river, and then the black embankment. Darcy sat, relieved to be in the smoky heat of the cab. He asked the driver for a papirosa but the driver just grunted, didn’t turn around.

’otel Ukraine, he said in the rear-view mirror.

Nyet , said Darcy, anger flooding through him, the dog standing up on the seat as if incensed. Metropole, said Darcy. You heard me. He knew that’s where the foreigners stayed.

Metropole, the driver nodded.

He looked out at the Kremlin towers lit with gold through what was now a blizzarding snow. The rifle shot that wasn’t had torn his nerves. He watched a red star that dangled from the rear-view mirror and thought of his mother, drunk and unattended, recovering from left-side neglect . He could feel his breath laboured. A boulevard lined with snow-blotched flats and barely lit shops, the blue street lamps flickered themselves off even though it wasn’t yet daylight. He could search the lobby for Western businessmen, tourists, give his name and tell his story, then he’d try the Americans. If that didn’t work, the railway station. He looked out but couldn’t recognise a landmark now through the wipers. No GUM or the Square or the towers of the Kremlin. Hotel Metropole, he shouted. They should have been close to the Bolshoi, near the Place Sverdlova, the Moskva. Stop, said Darcy. Stoitye.

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.