Metro Winds (10 page)

It was the sun and lack of food that were making him imagine things, he told himself. A headache drilled into the top of his skull like a hot needle.

He came to the end of the street and realised he must have walked right past the café. Only when he retraced his steps did he understand there had been nothing to miss. The street was short and the only thing in it, aside from residences and apartments, was a smart boutique with a hat draped in a swathe of emerald cloth. Standing outside the shop he noticed a small tobacconist on the other side of the road. He was about to turn away when his eyes fell on the sign above the door.

The Smoking Dog.

He crossed the road and went inside. The man behind the counter spoke and when Daniel did not answer, he looked up. He had thinning salt-and-pepper hair combed straight back from a slight widow's peak, but his brows were so thick and black they looked false. He raised them enquiringly as he asked in accented but very good English what Daniel wanted.

‘The name of this shop. The Smoking Dog,' Daniel told him. ‘I came from Australia to find a restaurant by that name. In this street.'

The owner's eyes slitted, but perhaps it was only that the coiling, heavy-looking smoke from his cheroot had got in his eyes. ‘There was a restaurant here before the war,' he said. ‘It was burnt out. It was still a mess when I moved here from Estonia and took it over.'

‘Burned?' Daniel prompted.

‘It was a Resistance stronghold. They were betrayed and the Boche took away everyone they found here, then burned it.' Daniel thought of the policewoman who suggested the dead man had probably been a political refugee. Was it possible that he and the woman had been in the Resistance and had been taken by the Germans for interrogation? If the man had been the informant, and the woman had realised the truth, it would explain why she had issued her strange invitation, talking of truth and lies instead of love. But when could they have had that conversation? At the club when they had been rounded up, or later wherever they had been taken to be interrogated? Or even after they had been freed? The woman might have realised the man had been the traitor and confronted him with it, concluding with her invitation. Which in turn might have caused the man to flee to the other side of the world, fearing vengeance by the Resistance. But why make a date so far in the future? And what was it she had intended to give him at that meeting? Proof of betrayal?

Realising he had been standing there like a fool, his head full of wild speculations, Daniel gathered his wits and said, ‘I was supposed to meet a woman in the restaurant this evening.'

‘You want a woman?' There was a mocking note in the man's voice.

‘I am to meet a specific woman. She made the arrangement,' Daniel said, hoping the man would not ask her name.

‘Have you heard the saying about sleeping dogs?' asked the man. ‘Forget about a woman who makes an appointment in a place that doesn't exist. Go back where you belong.'

‘I'm not sure where I belong anymore,' Daniel murmured, for the man's words reminded him of his mother. He felt a sudden dizziness at the depth of his words, at the unexpected abyss they opened up in him.

The man said, ‘You can see the old restaurant, if you want. The shop is only a frontage. I couldn't afford to refurbish the whole place and there was no need. A tobacconist's shop should be cosy.' The man stood up from his stool, becoming in an instant extraordinarily tall. He opened a door behind the counter and Daniel entered the darkness of an enormous warehouse-sized room whose walls retained striped sections of what once might have been some sort of giant mural. There were round tables and a few chairs pushed against one wall, and he had a strange sense that he had stepped back in time, or at least into another dimension.

‘The whole place was done up to look like a circus,' the man said, relighting his black cheroot. ‘The name of the place comes from a famous sideshow act with a dog. It was a popular place among intellectuals and students, a good cover for secret meetings and the passing on of information and microfilms and all the rest of it. You can still smell the smoke. That's why I got it so cheap.'

‘If a woman comes in asking about a man, would you give her a note from me?'

The tobacconist nodded to indicate that Daniel should return to the shop. As he turned, Daniel heard, quite distinctly, a gasp or a cough. He glanced back but there was no movement. The shadows hung like frozen smoke, darkening with every minute that passed. The tobacconist gave him a little push and they went into the shop that had also darkened in their brief absence.

The proprietor closed the door and reached for a panel of switches on the wall while Daniel dug from his wallet the receipt the receptionist had given him. He scrawled his name on the back of it, along with the name of the dead man. He did not know the name of the woman and he told himself he had done all he could. She would come, or she wouldn't. The lights flickered on and the tobacconist brushed a brown-stained forefinger over the words written on the receipt, but he did not read them.

‘If she comes, tell her I will come in again tomorrow in the morning,' Daniel said. He thanked the man and went out into the street. He had walked several blocks before he noticed a small boy shadowing him. Clad in scruffy, too-big clothes of the hand-me-down rather than the American-street-cool variety, his skin was the colour of dark honey and his eyes liquid tar, the lashes as long as those of a newborn calf.

‘Want to go to circus?' the boy asked, seemingly unabashed.
Sair-coos
, he said.

‘Circus?' Daniel echoed, wondering if he had misheard. ‘What kind of circus is there in the middle of a city?'

‘A ver' zmall sair-coos,' the boy said, and they laughed together.

‘Why not?' Daniel said, liking his cheek. The boy looked puzzled, so he added, ‘Yes.'

The boy beamed at him. ‘Okay!'

Daniel felt suddenly lighter. He had done the best for the dying man, after all. ‘Let's go then,' he said.

The boy took the lead, walking quickly. Several streets later, they turned into a lane that sloped down to a small square where, to Daniel's amazement, he could see the dim yet certain shape of a circus tent, though it did not seem to be properly circular. There were lanterns swaying around its uneven rim, but they gave off very little light, so that he could only see the sections of the tent where they hung, blurring away into the growing darkness. The sight of it reminded Daniel of what the tobacconist had said about the decor of the café during the war, and he shivered a little at the coincidence.

The lane became wide, shallow, uneven steps and Daniel came along behind the boy cautiously, forced to concentrate on his footing. When he reached the bottom, he was startled to find his young guide had vanished. He hesitated, and heard music, long sobbing notes that roused in him an unexpected and potent hunger to be home, riding the flat red plains. Moving closer to the tent, he had the unsettling feeling that the longing evoked by the song was the same as his longing for his parents, who were irrevocably lost to him.

‘Shall I whisper your future?' a voice asked by his ear, and Daniel started violently.

He turned to see a gypsy woman with a small baby in her arms, sitting cross-legged in an opening in the side of the tent. She seemed to be sitting on a platform, but he could not make out what was behind her.

His silence seemed to anger her, and she sat up stiffly, eyes flashing. ‘But you have no time for Calia, have you? You want the main attraction! Another mooncalf come lusting for the Dove Princess. Fool! There is no future in her for any of you.' She was so angry she was almost spitting, and Daniel, taken aback, wondered if she was mad. Yet her words made him curious enough to decide that he would go into the tent.

The gypsy gave an angry grunt when she saw him glance to where a wooden sign had been erected, marking the entrance to the tent. She bared a plump golden breast with a dark nipple. The baby seemed to scent it and butted and struggled until it had the nipple fastened in its mouth, then began to suckle hard. Embarrassed by the bared breast and the derision in the woman's eyes, Daniel made his way to the entrance and pushed the closed flap aside. Light flowed out past him in bright streams as he stepped into a sort of curtained corridor that followed the outer curve of the tent to the left. He tried to push the curtain aside so that he could go into the main part of the tent, but the fabric was heavier than it looked and there was no opening. He gave in and went along the corridor. The outer wall swayed and brushed against him as the wind gusted, and a heavy musty smell puffed out of the cloth. The music he had heard grew steadily louder until he came to an opening in the inner wall of the corridor, through which he could see the main section of the tent. It was smaller than it had looked from the outside, because of the outer corridor that took up a good portion of the space.

Bright lights centred on an empty circle of sandy ground that ran up against the tent wall on the farthest side of the space. On the near side of the circle were curving rows of bench seats, separated from the circular stage by long wooden bolsters wrapped in red satin. There were not more than fifteen people in the audience, most sitting alone. Daniel glanced around, looking for someone to pay, and saw a lean gypsy man approaching with a leather pouch slung about his neck. Daniel paid what he was asked, fumbling at the unfamiliar bills, distracted by a high-wire artist he had just noticed, clad in glittering red and gold, spiralling down on a rope. Obviously she had come to the end of her performance, for when she reached the ground, she stepped away from the rope and bowed to a smattering of applause. Then she ran lightly away and vanished through a slit in the tent wall. The strange, complex tent must have been constructed in this way to allow a backstage area.

Daniel took a seat at one end of the front row of benches as a man in a black cloak lined in gold silk stepped through the slit onto the sandy stage. His long, thick, red-brown hair was drawn tightly into a tail that hung down his back like the brush of a fox. His face was narrow and his teeth flashed white with a hint of gold as he bowed gracefully. The boy who had shown Daniel to the circus pushed through the slit after him, wheeling a glittering gold casket as big as a fridge on wheels. A magician, Daniel thought, as the boy withdrew, and he set himself to watch for sleight of hand.

Cymbals crashed and another boy appeared, so like the first as to be a younger brother, leading a small white goat. There was a burst of violin music and the fox magician began to speak. His words were foreign and incomprehensible to Daniel, but it was clear from his movements that he was describing his prowess as a tamer of the most ferocious sorts of beasts. Then, very slowly and theatrically, he opened the mouth of the goat and pushed the top of his head gently against its teeth.

It ought to have been funny. That music and the seriousness of the cloaked man allied to the symbolic offering of the bright head to the blunt teeth of the goat. Certainly the plump woman nearest Daniel gave a bark of muffled laughter and a young man with a shaven head and ripped T-shirt giggled wildly, hitting his leg and rocking back and forth. But Daniel found that he was not able to laugh or even to smile.

The goat was led away, and the violin music swelled as the man opened the case, unfolding its sides. Gypsy music. Daniel's father had loved classical music, but had said that most of it was like beauty prowling in a cage. This was wild music and Daniel felt a sudden sharp ache that his father would never hear it.

The spotlight split and the music stopped abruptly.

For a long, straining moment, all that could be heard was the wind and the flapping of the tent walls and roof. Daniel saw that the opened case had become a red velvet table upon which lay gleaming rows of daggers.

A pale, strikingly lovely, dark-haired woman clad in a skin-coloured body suit stepped through the slit in the tent into the light. Instead of looking naked, the skin suit made her look like a sexless doll. The boy came darting out after her to fasten about her slender waist the flexible frame of a crinoline, which reached the ground, caging her lower body and legs.

A movement drew Daniel's gaze to the fox magician. He took up one of the daggers, kissed the blade and raised it over his head, looking all the while at the woman who lifted her arm, a slender pale stalk. The gypsy violinist began to play a swift, staggering tune until, without warning, the man threw the dagger straight at the woman. Even as people in the audience cried out in shock and alarm, the dagger exploded into feathers and suddenly it was a bird fluttering to her uplifted hand. A white dove.

The audience applauded in relief and delight as the woman lowered her arm. The bird hopped from her fingers into one of the gridded squares of the crinoline and began preening itself. She lifted her arm again. The music played and another dagger flew and was transformed into feathers and beak and bird. The music quickened and slowed and dipped and wailed as dagger after dagger flew, unerring and deadly, from man to woman, always to transform into doves until her lower body was hidden in a dress of living birds. It was an extraordinary sight, but the music went on, striving ever higher, and the birds began to land on the woman's torso and on her slender shoulders and along her arms, which she now held out on either side of her at shoulder height. There must be a net over the body suit, Daniel guessed. The doves flew to her head, too, but their grasp on the silky braids was less secure and occasionally one of the birds slipped and had to claw its way back into place. Daniel noticed a small streak of red on the woman's forehead. He told himself it was only a scratch, a minor accident in a masterly act and nothing more, but there was something in the way the woman stood, the defencelessness of her, the seeming nakedness and the way she offered herself to the man and his daggers, that troubled him.

It had taken only a few moments, his senses told him, but Daniel was sweating hard, as if the performance had lasted an hour. There were more birds and more scratches. None were serious, but the blood on her white skin was very vivid. There was a cruel beauty in the spectacle and the possibility that a knife might not become a dove in time or that the doves were daggers after all. That possibility was provoked by the tiny smears of blood. He was repelled by the thought that the blood should be part of the act. For some reason he found himself remembering the two Murri men engaged in their silent deadly fight, and the savage beauty of their desperate and hopeless desire for a woman who wanted neither of them. The beauty, he thought now, came from the hopelessness; the fact that both had known the fight would make no difference.