The Concubine's Secret

34

Alexei slept late. His legs ached, his skin itched. A woman with sores on her face and a broom in her hand prodded him with the bristles.

‘Up! Kozel! Out now.’

Alexei rolled out of bed fully clothed, aware of his own stink, and saw that the dormitory had already emptied of last night’s occupants. The rule was that no one was permitted indoors in daylight hours. These were mercifully short in winter. He was heading down to the single bathroom on the ground floor when a rush of cold air signalled the main door had swung open and a voice behind him drew his attention.

‘Tovarishch!’

He turned. Three men in long coats with fur shapkas jammed on their heads were standing just inside, staring at him. The lethargic concierge behind the reception desk eyed them with dislike but made no comment, and Alexei experienced a flicker of alarm. He folded his arms across his chest as though bored by the interruption and remained where he was, his mouth pulled into a tight line.

‘Da?’ he responded.

‘We want you to come with us.’

Alexei’s mind raced. OGPU operatives. They had to be. That’s all he could think. The secret police. They come for you when you least expect it, especially when there are few people around to witness it. Somehow they’d traced him. Now the bastards had come to arrest him. Because of his social origins? Just because he was from an aristocratic family? Or was there something else? Immediately his thoughts went to Antonina. Had she betrayed him? A bitter taste stung the back of his tongue because he’d believed he could trust her. How the hell could he help his father when he couldn’t even help himself? He forced his shoulders to relax and stuck a smile of sorts on his face.

‘Well, tovarishchi, why on earth would I want to go with you?’ he asked easily. ‘I’m busy now. Another time maybe.’

He took a stride away down the corridor but didn’t turn his back on them. To his surprise, instead of snapping at his heels like a pack of wolves eager for the taste of flesh, they just stood there by the main door looking perplexed. Four more steps along the tiles and he pushed open the bathroom door.

‘Of course, comrade,’ a tall coat at the front of the threesome said politely. ‘When would be convenient?’

Alexei stalled, hand still on the door. Convenient? Since when did OGPU do anything at your convenience? He released the door, moved back along the corridor and studied the intruders more closely. They were no older than himself, around mid-twenties; one short and plump, the others taller and leaner with identical moustaches. All had eyes that made him nervy.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘We met last night.’ It was one of the tall figures who spoke.

‘Last night?’

‘Da. Don’t you remember me?’

Then it came to him and he cursed his starved brain for its sluggishness. The moustaches. Of course, just like the man they called pakhan, with the droop around each side of the mouth.

‘Of course I do. Tell me, how is he today?’

‘Better.’

‘I’m glad. Send him my good wishes for his recovery.’

‘He wants to see you.’

‘Now?’

‘Now.’ The man paused and added reluctantly, ‘If it is convenient. He asks whether you would come to eat bread with him.’

Alexei laughed with relief, a good strong belly laugh that made the threesome shuffle uneasily.

‘Da,’ he said. ‘Tell him yes.’

Bread and salt.

Alexei accepted the piece of black bread on the tray that greeted him as he walked into the apartment, and dipped it in the bowl of salt. In Russia bread and salt represented much more: they meant hospitality. They meant welcome. On bread and salt you could live. Beside them on the tray stood a shot glass filled to the brim with vodka. He picked it up, knocked it back in one and felt it burn the cobwebs from his stomach.

His mind kicked into gear and he looked around with interest. The apartment was an odd mixture of old and new. On the walls hung hefty oil paintings in elaborate frames, all portraits of different men. Sharp observant eyes gazed out at him from each one. Family portraits? Could be. For a moment Alexei recalled the severe paintings of his own ancestors that used to line the grand staircase in their St Petersburg villa and frighten him as a child. At least some of these looked as if they knew how to smile. The furniture, in contrast, was new and utilitarian, a plain bleached pine that looked at odds with the paintings, but everything was clean and there was no curtain dividing the large living room into separate quarters.

‘This way, pozhalusta.’

Alexei followed the plump one of the trio into a corridor and to a heavy door, with an ancient brass handle that looked as though it might have come from somewhere else. Somewhere like a church. The soft-looking knuckles knocked.

‘Da?’

‘Pakhan, I have the comrade from last night.’

‘Come in, damn you.’

They entered a room that belonged to a man with a passion. Though the curtains were half closed, a strip of sunlight lay dim and dusty in the air, exposing the contents of the room. Wings seemed to flutter, feathers flashed scarlet, eyes gleamed corn yellow. The place was full of birds. Alexei blinked but the birds didn’t move. They were all stuffed. Exquisite masters of the air trapped under glass domes and doomed to pose on mossy branches until their feathers blackened and turned to dust. With a jolt Alexei pictured his own father, Jens Friis, trapped, penned, ensnared for so many years, unable to fly.

‘Welcome, friend.’

The words were a deep rumble. They issued from a large four-poster bed that was adorned with mulberry red drapes and long white bolster pillows piled up like snowdrifts. Sunk deep in the middle of them was the pale puffy face of last night.

‘Good morning, comrade. Dobroye utro,’ Alexei greeted him cheerfully. ‘I hope you’re feeling better.’

‘I feel like I’ve been kicked by a bloody camel,’ his host grimaced, causing his moustache to writhe like something alive.

‘Have you seen a doctor?’

‘Pakhan has his usual pills,’ the young man at Alexei’s elbow volunteered, ‘but he is too stubborn to let us call a doctor.’

‘Go away, Igor. You’re annoying me.’ But it was said with a fond smile that belied the words.

‘Pakhan, I don’t think-’

‘Go.’

Igor glanced at Alexei.

‘Don’t worry,’ the older man insisted, ‘this person has not come here to do me harm. Have you, comrade?’

‘Nyet. Of course not.’

‘Good. Leave us then, Igor.’

The plump face creased with concern and Alexei had the feeling the young man did not much appreciate being dismissed as if he were a schoolboy. Nevertheless he left with no further objection, just shut the door a shade harder than was necessary.

‘Come over here, my friend.’

Alexei approached the bed. It struck him as a strangely intimate act in the presence of a stranger and he became aware of the smell of the bedsheets, the blue veins bunched at the base of the ageing throat. A closer look disclosed a man considerably frailer than the voice he chose to use. Strands of grey hair were scraped severely back from his face which, despite being fleshy, had sunk in on itself, falling into crevices, crowding around the dark eyes.

‘I’m not dying,’ the sick man announced gruffly.

‘I’m glad to hear it. But it’s your friends on the other side of that door you need to convince, not me. They’re out there whittling your coffin right now.’

The man laughed, a great guffaw that had him rubbing his hand on his chest as if it pained him under his nightshirt. ‘What’s your name, comrade?’

‘Alexei Serov.’

‘Well, Alexei Serov, you don’t look much like a guardian angel to me, but I thank God for putting you in that street last night, especially when I had dismissed my companions for the evening.’ His mouth twisted in a grimace. ‘This experience will teach me to avoid brothels in future.’

Alexei sat down on the chair beside the bed and smiled. ‘Our paths crossed, friend. I was there at the right time. Now you’re safe with your people, so get well again.’

‘I intend to.’ He held out his hand to Alexei. ‘Accept the sincere thanks of Maksim Voshchinsky.’

Alexei shook the hand. It felt surprisingly firm in his and he respected the strength of will that made it so. But his eyes were drawn to where the sleeve of the nightshirt had ridden up and the muscular forearm lay briefly in view. What he saw there slowed his heartbeat. A fleeting glimpse, that was all, before Voshchinsky withdrew his hand once more, but it was enough to tell Alexei this was someone to keep far away from.

Voshchinsky’s hooded eyes conducted a slow inspection of Alexei’s appearance. ‘Most people as dirty and ragged as you, Comrade Serov, if you don’t mind my saying, would have had my watch in their pocket, my wallet in their hand, and left me to die alone on the ice.’

Alexei rose to his feet. ‘Not everyone is like that,’ he said with a polite bow. ‘But you must rest now. Don’t tire yourself. I am happy to see you are recovering well. Comrade Voshchinsky, I wish you good day.’

He walked to the door, eager to be out of this room with its winter light glinting off a multitude of glazed staring eyes. The sound of the man’s shallow breathing followed him.

‘Wait.’

Alexei paused.

‘Comrade Serov, are you in such a rush to be elsewhere?’

‘Nothing stands still in life, my friend.’

The grey head nodded again, lolling slightly on his neck as though it were too heavy. ‘I know.’ He smiled, a brief, forgiving twitch of his lips. ‘Especially when you are young.’ Sadness rustled like dry leaves in his words and the fingers of one hand slowly opened and flexed on the sheet, an unconscious movement, as if trying to grasp at Alexei. Or maybe at life. ‘But I am not ready to see you go yet.’

‘You have your friends.’

‘Yes, that’s true. They are good friends. I can’t complain. They do what I say.’

With a quiet click Alexei opened the door. Outside on the polished boards stood the three men and at the sight of him all three took a step forwards. They wanted to know what had been said in there but, in that moment when he could have walked away, back to the fleas and the prospect of never seeing his own father again, he felt a shift within himself. Through his own arrogance on the bridge in Felanka he had lost everything that would open the doors to set Jens Friis free. But now he couldn’t allow himself to walk away from the strange room with the dead birds and the sick man. This time he must swallow the arrogance. Bend the knee. Take the risk.

‘He’s resting,’ Alexei announced. Then he entered the bedroom once more and softly shut the door behind him.

‘So?’ It came from the bed.

‘You say your friends do what you say. Because I saved your life, would they do what I say? Would they owe me that?’

Voshchinsky frowned, a wary pucker of his heavy eyebrows. Alexei returned to the chair and sat down.

‘Maksim,’ he said, ‘you have many friends.’

He lifted the man’s hand in his own, touched the veins that ran like serpents under the skin, and slid the nightshirt sleeve up the forearm. Underneath it writhed more serpents, black ones. Two of them slithered round the base of the slender skeleton of a birch tree, their eyes red, their fangs sharp as knife blades. Beneath them, written in elaborate italic script, were three names: Alisa, Leonid, Stepan.

‘A fine tattoo,’ Alexei commented.

Maksim Voshchinsky touched the trunk of the tree lovingly with the finger of his other hand. ‘That was my Alisa, the mother of my sons, God rest her soul.’

‘Maksim, we must talk. About the vory.’

The sick man’s eyes narrowed and his voice grew rough. ‘What do you know about the vory?’

‘They are the criminals of Moscow.’

‘So?’

‘And they wear tattoos.’