David Francis - Stray Dog Winter

Thanking you again for caring him, she said softly, is very kind. She observed Darcy as if trying to take him in, but he didn’t understand. Her husband was dead and she’d been out in bright colours, socialising.

Help me, he whispered, he pulled down his collar, tried to show her the burn but she glanced away, and together they watched the gossamer dog, a fine Gucci belt fashioned as its collar, and Darcy remembered the Borgward, the sadness in the son-in-law’s eyes. I’m sorry, he said, but the woman shook her head, it wasn’t the time, and still Darcy wanted to ask her for sanctuary but the general loomed in the doorway, tuxedo shirt and holstered gun, a Western bolo tie, his formal clothes beneath his coat all along. Come on, he said, smiling. Is cold.

Boyar , said the woman and the whippet bounded inside, but the general stayed, smiling, waiting. He swung his black-rimmed glasses by an arm of the frame, as though he were the man of the house, and the sight of it disturbed in Darcy a morbid loathing. He looked up as if seeking help, at a face in an upstairs window, an old man, wrinkled and unshaven, and for a moment their eyes met and Darcy wondered why he’d really been brought here, if there was hope in this house.

In an entry hall he removed Aurelio’s black fur hat but not his coat. He noticed the general’s velvet dress coat on the hallstand, hung like a pelt. The general was already in the next room, a lavish parlour, but the widow stood waiting, watched Darcy, her oldfashioned Soviet elegance like something from a silent film. She pointed humbly at the Laika painting leaning against a low bench, her whippet’s slender shape atop the obelisk, Finola Dobrolyubova scrawled across the lower right-hand corner in black. Darcy looked up, disconcerted.

Your dog, he said tentatively, acknowledging the canvas.

She smiled shyly as if she knew. Your painting, she said, as if she also knew it wasn’t Fin’s, and Darcy searched her eyes for something, recognition or deliverance, the way he trusted women.

I arrange it for her, the general interrupted from the adjoining parlour, and through the archway, past her, Darcy could see him standing by a fireplace, and as the widow now joined him, Darcy felt the need to protect her, to hurt him. He remembered her appearing in Lubyanka, through the grate in the interview room, but he couldn’t tell what she’d been told, how much she knew. He checked down a narrow corridor, searching for exits, but a maid in a black dress and white apron stood there, holding a tray, observing him from the shadows with dark cynical eyes. She watched as if she was the one who knew things, the old man from upstairs now sheltered behind her in a doorway, a craggy face, a valet or apparition.

Darcy stood in a kind of stunned abeyance, like something dragged in from the night, uninvited in his sodden coat, too grimy to enter and join the couple as they chatted by the fire, the whippet curling comfortably into a shallow wicker basket at their feet. Darcy took in the room as if the furniture might warm him, anchor his longing for beauty, a pair of floral sofas, a low table. Silk flowers, irises and hyacinth. And art. A Hockney swimming pool on one wall and a Rothko, mournful and abstract. Replicas, probably, but Darcy didn’t know; he looked at his own canvas, the image of the stray found by the river replicated from the dog in the other room. The general leaned in towards Anyetta Chernenko, their heads close together, bald and caramel blonde, he was telling a story with words Darcy recognised— Dashnak, Jobik, Nikolai, Garabed,

Armenia—seducing or using her. The general’s eye fixed on Darcy like a bear might eye a fish that flopped about on shore.

Tell her about Aurelio, said Darcy, but his voice was so raspy no one heard except the maid, who surfaced unexpectedly, as though on cue, and offered Darcy herring on bread and a tumbler of vodka poured from a jug. Darcy drank then ate voraciously, wanting another, more, but she glided into the main room, the general accepting drinks with Anyetta Chernenko as if Darcy had not been at his wedding to somebody else, or been pressed against the cement wall in Lubyanka, and now things undreamed of, unhinged, bodies mounting up in the woods, by the river. Then he heard his name, the general calling Darcy , as if they were friends, and Darcy looked over. You can be showering, said the general. My friend says you can be shower here. How you are so dirty? The drink raised in the general’s hand.

Darcy felt a wave of nausea, the promise of clean you up suddenly reverberating, had him sweaty again, clean you up pretty … like a real Polish boy . Next time. But why here? The general issuing orders to the maid in Russian, Anyetta Chernenko looking on, bemused, and Darcy taking another vodka from the maid’s tray, chugging it, and the shiver of it ran through him, familiar; afraid that’s what the general wanted: him loosened, clean, spared to be cut like Aurelio, or worse.

The general sitting on the sofa in the parlour, consoling Anyetta Chernenko, holding her to him in front of the fire, and it looked like she was weeping. He eyed Darcy through strands of her hair and the maid, waiting for Darcy to put his glass back on the tray, emitted a grunt of annoyance, as if she didn’t care for what she saw. As if she were Nikolai Chuprakov’s maid.

She ushered Darcy down the corridor, the old man in a doorway, his rugged poet’s face, and Darcy remembered the roll of notes in the hem of his coat. These people might help him, he thought, as he wrestled for the money deep in the hole through a pocket. He found himself in a bathroom with plum-coloured carpet, the maid gesturing to a towel and a shower, and Darcy showed the roll of roubles, offered them in the flat of his hand. Pazhalsta , said Darcy, please, he will kill me, and the maid glared at the fat little wad of money, wanting but not understanding, her button-like eyes full of fear. Help me, he pleaded, but she retreated, afraid.

He grabbed the green jug of vodka from her tray as she slithered out the door and he drank and felt himself unravelling, his pledge broken again when he knew he needed clarity most, the buzz about his face like a quiet sponge and the sound of a key as it turned the bolt; she’d locked him in. He searched frantically for an exit, found only a vent and a too-tiny window, a long wroughtiron dresser with a silver shaver and a wooden-handled brush, two small framed drawings from covers of Vanity Fair . A candy-striped toothbrush dry in a mug. Nikolai Chuprakov’s?

Darcy caught sight of himself in the mirror above the sink, his face bruised purple and strafed with mud, lines where dimples had been. He took a swill of vodka as if that would help him think, washed dirt from his face, the water steaming hot straight from the tap, scabs on his lip and cheek tender. In his face he saw Fin, lying dead out on the ice. Wishing he had the whole bottle to upend in his mouth, something caught his eye in the mirror’s reflection; by the toilet was a niche with a black phone. He left the taps running, turned on the shower to add to the noise, and fumbled in his coat for Fin’s slip of paper, a wet folded piece with ink that had run, but numbers. He crouched on the toilet and dialled hastily, listened to the beeps, the most-tapped phone in Moscow or, if he was lucky, the least. He stared at the bolted door with his chest pounding like there were animals fucking inside it and listened, the pungent smell of dread that he now knew lived in his sweat. The shower water smacked the tiles.

Hello? A woman, well-spoken, accented.

Darcy knotted his eyes in supplication. Ulli Breffny? Hysteria in his whisper.

I’m listening, she said.

My name is Darcy Bright. I am in the house of Anyetta Chernenko. I am in danger.