Free Metro Winds by Isobelle Carmody Page A

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.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜Burned?’ Daniel prompted.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜You want a woman?’ There was a mocking note in the man’s voice.
    â€˜I am to meet a specific woman. She made the arrangement,’ Daniel said, hoping the man would not ask her name.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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