The Concubine's Secret

38

The blindfold was removed from Alexei’s eyes. He blinked fiercely as his vision adjusted to the sudden light and he examined his surroundings. It was an underground wine store. The stone walls were lined with racks of bottles in all shapes and sizes, the air so dusty it caught in his throat.

‘Who is this?’

‘Why have you brought him to us, Igor?’

The questions came from the group of about twenty young men gathered in the room, each with his shirt open to the waist. Tattoos covered their naked chests, distinctive blue messages to the outside world, and above them were lean faces and sharp suspicious eyes. None of them smiled a welcome. Shit, this looked like a bad mistake.

‘Good evening, comrades,’ he said amiably. He nodded a greeting and tried to steer his gaze away from the tattoos, which wasn’t easy. ‘My name is Alexei Serov.’

He placed the sack he was carrying on the floor in front of them, where dust and cobwebs coated the black tiles. One of the men with a whispery voice and his hair oiled either side of a neat parting, stepped forward and untwisted the neck of the sack. He lifted out its contents. Immediately the tension in the air eased.

It had been an easy steal. Yet it had disgusted Alexei. Revolted him. But it was what Maksim Voshchinsky demanded, a show of his fidelity, a demonstration of his courage. A gift for the vory. He’d said yes immediately and gave himself no time to change his mind. That same evening he went out on the streets of Moscow to prove he was worthy of their trust, that he was as much a thief as they were and had no fear of State authority. He’d spent two hours roaming the back roads, searching out an opportunity with the same precision he had used to reconnoitre military manoeuvres. When the chance came, he took it without hesitation.

He’d moved out of the darkness of a narrow lane into a rectangle of light thrown from an open door, slipping silently into a stranger’s hallway. That’s all it took to turn him into a thief, to make that jump that crossed the boundaries of decent conduct and plunged him into the wrong side of the world. His hands had reached out as though they had been performing such acts for years and removed the carved clock from the wall, as well as a small pewter vase from a table. In and out of the house in less than a minute. Less time than it took to slit your own throat.

The man who lived in the house saw nothing. He was outside in the dark street roping pieces of furniture to a cart, a horse dozing between the shafts, and he had no idea he’d just been robbed. Why someone would be shifting furniture at this hour of the night Alexei chose not to enquire, but it served his purpose well. The eagerness with which he wrapped his spoils under his coat appalled him.

He wasn’t seen. Except by the short, dogged figure of Igor, who hovered somewhere hidden by the darkness. He had seen. He knew.

‘It’s a good clock,’ the man with the oiled hair announced, holding it up for the gathering to inspect.

It was a beautiful timepiece, old and beloved, judging by the patina of polish on its case, and Alexei felt guilt, raw and spiteful, take a great bite out of him.

‘It’s for the vory v zakone, the brotherhood of the thieves-in-law, ’ Alexei stated. ‘I offer it to this kodla for your obshchak, your communal fund.’

They nodded, pleased.

‘Was there a witness?’ one asked.

‘I bear witness,’ Igor said. He stood up in front of everybody, his eyes challenging any dissenters. ‘He stole like a professional.’

‘Good.’

‘But has he been in prison?’

‘Or in one of the labour camps? Has he been in Kolyma?’

‘Or worked the Belomorsko-Baltiiskii Canal?’

‘Who else speaks for him?’

Alexei spoke for himself. ‘Brotherhood of vory v zakone, I am a vor, a thief, like you, and I am here because Maksim Voshchinsky ordered me to be brought to this place tonight. He is sick and in bed but it is his word that speaks for me.’

‘There must be two who speak.’

‘I, Igor, speak for him. My word stands side by side with that of Maksim, our pakhan.’

So this was it. Dear God, he had become a vor. He still had much to prove before they fully accepted him as one of their own, but with Maksim behind him, he’d pushed open the door. He’d learned from his talk with Maksim that cells of vory criminals exactly like this one ranged throughout the length and breadth of Russia, especially in the prisons, all with the same strict code of allegiance and system of punishments. Some called them the Russian mafia, but in reality they were very different from that Italian organisation: they were not supposed to have a boss, the status of each member was meant to be equal and family connections were rejected. The brotherhood was the only family that mattered. Decisions were made and disputes settled by the skhodka, the vory court that was as all-powerful as it was ruthless. But the pakhan was nevertheless in a senior position and his word counted. Maksim was the pakhan.

Alexei prayed to God that Maksim’s name, even on his sickbed, was enough. Oddly, he felt no fear. He knew he should. He’d lied to them about having been in prison and their punishments were harsh. But these men reminded him too much of the young recruits he’d commanded in the army training camps in Japan, except that here they had banded into a criminal fraternity rather than a military one. They drew courage from each other as eagerly as the owner of this storeroom drew wine from the bottles. It flowed red and intoxicating. But as he studied their faces and their disfigured chests, he had a sense that these were damaged men. Both inside and out.

‘So where are the older men of the vory brotherhood?’ he’d asked Maksim.

‘In prison, of course. In the labour camps. That’s what the obshchak fund is for.’

‘Do you use it to get them out?’

‘Sometimes. But more often to supply our brothers with food or clothes and with roubles for bribes. You see, Alexei, a prison is a vor’s natural home, it’s where he rules. Most of our brotherhood lie behind bars because each prison sentence is a badge of pride and is marked by a new tattoo.’

‘That’s incomprehensible.’

Maksim had smiled, his eyes secretive. ‘To you maybe. Not to me.’

Alexei wondered what the hell was going on here. What was this man’s history and what crimes had he committed? As if Maksim could read his younger friend’s doubts, he rolled on to his side in the wide bed and carefully undid the buttons of his pyjama jacket. He peeled it back to reveal his chest. It was broad and powerful, ribs like a bull’s, with hairless tired skin.

Alexei had drawn in a breath. ‘Impressive.’

In the centre of Maksim’s chest was a lavish blue tattoo of a large and elaborate crucifix.

‘You see this?’ The older man had prodded a stern finger at the decoration that curved above it, hanging between his collar bones. ‘You see this crown? That’s to indicate I am the pakhan. The boss of our vory cell. Without me, they’d be nothing. What I say goes.’

He yanked up his other sleeve and Alexei leaned closer, fascinated. From shoulder to wrist, tattoos crowded over every scrap of skin. An onion-domed cathedral and gentle-faced Madonna were caught disturbingly in a tangle of barbed wire and a row of prison bars. On his biceps a death skull grinned and on his elbow a spider’s web had ensnared an eagle by its wings.

Maksim watched Alexei, saw the fire rising within him. ‘Each one has a meaning,’ he said in a soft seductive whisper. ‘Look at my tattoos and you look at my life. God placed a mark on the world’s first murderer before sending him into exile. The mark of Cain.’ He pulled down his sleeve and covered up his chest. ‘It branded its bearer as a criminal and a social outcast. Tell me, is that what you are, Alexei Serov? An outcast?’

The pain was not bad. But bad enough. The tattooist turned out to be a bald man with a smooth hairless face and a teardrop tattooed at the outer corner of one eye. He was an artist who enjoyed his job, smiling to himself as he prepared to work on Alexei’s chest, humming the same snatch of Beethoven’s Fifth over and over again.

Alexei lit a cigarette and hoped to God he wouldn’t get blood poisoning.

‘It happens sometimes,’ the tattooist grinned. ‘Some even die.’

Alexei blew smoke at him. ‘Not this time,’ he said as he unbuttoned his shirt.

‘No smoking, please.’

‘I’ll smoke if I choose.’

‘Nyet. Your chest must remain still as stone.’

‘Fuck!’ Alexei said and stubbed it out.

The men in the wine store laughed as they watched, enjoying his discomfort. One thief, a wiry twenty-year-old with a rash of pock craters on his cheeks, walked over to one of the wine racks and extracted a bottle. He wiped the dust off with his shirt sleeve and used the corkscrew on a chain by the door to remove the cork. He pushed the bottle at Alexei.

‘Here, malyutka, drink.’

‘Spasibo, it might make you lot look a bit prettier.’

The young man laughed. ‘What could be prettier than this, friend?’ He unlaced his boot, kicked it off and removed his sock. ‘Look, tovarishch. Is that pretty enough for you?’

It was a cat, covering the surface of his foot. A laughing cat’s face with striped fur and a large blue bow under its chin, a wide-brimmed hat on its head.

Alexei laughed. ‘And what does that one mean? That your feet smell like cats’ piss?’

The vor nudged the tattooist’s elbow and the needle cut deeper. Alexei didn’t wince but accepted the wine.

‘It means I’m sly.’ The vor narrowed his eyes. ‘Sly as a cat. I smell out rats.’

‘Hah, comrade, smell like a rat is what you-’

‘No talking!’ The needle was buzzing and stinging, busy as a wasp. ‘Keep still.’

The tattooist had designs on his knuckles, a mix of letters and numbers that meant nothing unless you knew the code. His breath smelled of beer, strong enough to make Alexei turn his face away. He let his eyes close and unexpected images came to him. It was the sharp burning point of the needle that summoned them, its stinging pain on his chest. He remembered another day with a similar pain, his final day in Leningrad when he was twelve. His mother, the Countess Serova, was whisking him away to China, away from the Bolshevik troubles, and Jens had come to say goodbye. He had shaken Alexei’s hand as if he were a grown man and asked him to take care of his mother. ‘I’m proud of you,’ Jens had said, and Alexei recalled now the sorrow in his green eyes, the sun burnishing his hair as he rode away on his horse and the crippling pain in his own chest. Not on the skin like this, but deep inside.

Lydia had once said to him, ‘The trouble with you, Alexei, is that you’re too damn arrogant.’

Look at me now, Lydia. No arrogance left, is there? Here I am in rags, at the mercy of a gang of thieves, my skin massacred in the midst of filth and unclean needles. Humble enough for you now? And if they find I’m lying about having been a prisoner at Trovitsk camp they will remove this brand of membership with acid. Or worse, with a knife.

‘Look at him.’ It was the whispery voice of the one with the hair oil. ‘He’s fallen asleep.’

‘Trying to show how tough he is.’

‘Too bored to stay awake.’

‘He’s an arrogant bastard. What the fuck does Maksim want with him?’

Alexei opened his eyes, stared directly at the faces and lifted the bottle to his lips. He took a long, drowning drink.

Chang was gentle with her. Gentler than Lydia remembered from before. As if he feared she would break. Or was it that he’d grown used to delicate Chinese orchids who had to be handled carefully? She heard herself whimpering. She tried to silence the sound but couldn’t, because she wanted him to tear her apart and put her back together in such a way that she was fused with him, body and soul.

But as he caressed her, stroked her, kissed her breasts, explored her naked body as if it were familiar territory he was committing to memory once more, she felt something inside her break loose. She started to shake. Her bones seemed to be emptying, releasing something bad from within, all the pain and the fear and the anger and the yearning. It came flooding out of her.

He held her. He rocked her in his arms, murmuring, soothing, locking her so tight against his heart that she lost all sense of boundaries and mistook its strong beat for her own. She clung to him, breathed him in, felt him slowly, breath by breath, become a part of her again.

And when the flow of his hand on her skin had quietened the tremors within her and the sounds in her head, he kissed her mouth with a harsh hunger that made her ache. She realised he’d known she wasn’t ready before. How is it that he could know her better than she knew herself? Her limbs entwined with his and she kept her eyes fixed on his as they found each other all over again.

Her skin still smelled the same. It glistened with sweat and soothed Chang’s fear that his fox girl might have travelled too far from him. Until she trembled in his arms, he thought he’d lost her to the Russian with the wolf eyes. He brushed his lips along the soft hollow at the base of her throat and heard a moan, though he didn’t know if it was from his own lips or hers.

He lay on his side and gazed at her. At her arms, at her chin, at the scar on her breast. At the intense moist mound of red curls between her legs, a fire inside and out. She was beautiful. Not in a Chinese way. For oriental taste, her hands and feet and even her knees were too big, and her nose too long, but he loved those parts of her. Her skin was pale and shimmered like river water in the dim golden light, yet when he touched the flat plain of her stomach or the tight muscles of her thigh he could sense a fine steel mesh under the flesh. Had that been there before?

No, that was new.

In Junchow she had shown a determination he had never before found in a female, a courage he’d thought belonged only to men. She had opened his eyes and taught him otherwise. But this new inner strength of hers, this was something different. It made his pulse miss a beat. This had been forged by her journey through Russia and he felt a stab of guilt that he had not been there at her side. It stole a part of her from his soul. As if the greedy gods had decided to keep his fox girl for themselves after all, instead of giving her to him.

‘ Lydia.’

The night was passing too quickly.

‘ Lydia, tell me where your father is.’

She tucked her face into his chest and said nothing.

‘Have you discovered yet where he is?’ Chang persisted.

‘He’s here,’ she muttered against his skin.

‘In Moscow?’

She nodded.

‘That’s good news.’

She shrugged in the crook of his arm and he remembered it, that gesture. A small gesture of defiance. He’d forgotten how each little movement of hers had the power to creep into his heart.

He stroked her back, waiting.

‘I can’t find him,’ she murmured in a flat tone.

‘Tell me. Tell me what you do know.’

He felt her ribs quiver.

‘I discovered that he’s been moved from Trovitsk labour camp to a secret prison in Moscow. But I don’t know where it is.’ She raised her head, amber eyes questioning. ‘Why would they do that?’

‘He was an engineer, wasn’t he?’

‘Yes.’

‘Perhaps they are using his skills to work on something.’

‘I thought the bastards had moved him for…’ The word seemed to stick in her throat. ‘Experiments.’

He frowned. ‘What kind of experiments?’

‘Medical ones. I’ve heard rumours that this kind of thing goes on and I thought the secret prison in Moscow could be for that.’

‘Human guinea pigs?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh Lydia, you really believe that’s what’s happened to him?’

She rubbed her face against his skin. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Let’s believe it is his engineering ability that they want. You said he was one of the best.’

‘He was one of the chief advisers to the Tsar before… all this.’ She balanced her chin on his chest and looked up at him.

‘You know nothing more? Just that he was moved to Moscow?’

‘I have the prison number.’

‘What is it?’

‘Number 1908.’

He narrowed his eyes, contemplating the possibilities and the impossibilities, while she laid her cheek on his naked chest and remained quiet. He looked down at the glorious tangle of hair and the clean line of her forehead. How could he tell her? How could he make her see that maybe her father wouldn’t welcome her interference? That perhaps it could put at risk a life he was building for himself now.

Lydia slipped into her room, her valenki boots dangling in one hand so as to make no noise in her stocking feet. It was snowing outside, the night suddenly alive with huge damp flakes. As Chang had walked her through the icy streets of Moscow she’d asked him about China. He talked of his travels in Canton and of city life in Shanghai, but she knew his voice better than she knew her own. She could sense the secrets hiding like shadows behind his words. She didn’t push or pry. But what he didn’t say frightened her. Her hand tucked into his and she held him safe.

At the corner of her road he kissed her goodbye and she rested her forehead against his cold cheekbone.

‘Tomorrow?’ he asked.

‘Tomorrow.’

She didn’t turn on the light in the room, but threw off the wet blanket and knew she wouldn’t sleep.

‘So you’re back.’

Lydia froze. ‘You’re up early, Elena.’

‘And you’re up late.’

‘I was restless. I went for a walk.’

They were both talking in whispers and Lydia realised with relief that Liev must be still asleep. She could just make out Elena’s bulk in the chair. How long had she been sitting like that?

‘You went for a walk?’

‘Yes.’

Elena gave a low laugh. ‘Malishka, little one, it’s me you’re talking to, not the Cossack. I am a whore and I know the smell of men and the smell of sex. You stink of both.’

The night hid the flush that rose to Lydia ’s cheeks. She started to undress, to peel off the clothes that belonged to Elena, unconsciously smelling them, searching for Chang.

‘Elena, it’s kind of you to sit up for me but you don’t need to worry so much. I can take care of myself.’

‘Can you?’

‘Yes.’

Elena gave a little snort. ‘Come here, malishka.’

Lydia tugged her nightdress down over her head, went over to the chair and knelt down beside it, so that their heads were close. In the unlit room eyes were just dark holes in pale moons. Elena’s hand found Lydia ’s shoulder.

‘Leave him, Lydia. Let the Chinese go.’

It hurt. Even the thought of it hurt.

‘Why do you say such a thing, Elena?’

‘Because he’s no good for you. No, don’t look away, listen to what I’m saying. Why would a Chinese Communist be so interested in a little Russian chit of a girl?’

Lydia wanted to shout Because he loves me, of course, but the question made her nervous. It was one she had asked herself a thousand times.

‘Why do you think, Elena?’ she enquired softly.

‘He wants to get between your sheets, that goes without saying: a Western girl notch on his bedpost.’

‘Don’t.’

‘But that isn’t the main reason, is it?’

‘No.’ Now she would hear the words she wanted: It’s because he loves you.

‘It’s because he’s using you, girl. Simple as that.’

‘Using me?’

‘Yes.’

‘How?’

‘That’s for you to find out. You’re not stupid. Maybe the Chinese have ordered him to find out through your friendship with that Russian officer what is going on behind the smiles at the Kremlin. Who knows?’

‘No, you’re wrong. Wrong, I tell you.’ She couldn’t swallow.

‘Hush, malishka. You’ll wake Liev.’ Suddenly her hand touched Lydia ’s cheek, a brief caress in the dark room. ‘What is it? Is he keeping secrets from you, little one? Can you trust him?’

Lydia pulled away angrily, remembering the shadows behind Chang’s words. ‘More to the point, can I trust you?’

‘Hah, a good question. But think about this, girl. What future is there in it for him? Or for you?’

‘Elena,’ she said, flat and firm so that Elena would know. ‘I trust him. I trust him with my life.’

‘More fool you, girl.’ She leaned closer, her nightclothes musty. ‘I don’t want to see you hurt.’

‘I won’t be. Not by him.’

A silence trickled into the room, a small stream of it between them, and they both waited to see who would be first to cross it.

‘Picture this,’ Elena whispered in a rush. ‘That your Soviet admirer, this Malofeyev, knows about you and your Chinese friend. And that is why he brought you only food today, instead of the information you want on Jens Friis. He is jealous. He doesn’t like you being with another man and so will not be as obliging as he might. It seems you can’t have both, little one. Your Chinese or your father. You must choose.’

Lydia rose from her knees. She uttered no sound, but curled up on her bed and pulled the damp blanket over her head. The ache inside her throat was strangling her. She thrust Elena’s words away into somewhere dark and unreachable, and instead she flooded her mind with the hours spent in the room with the crucifix on the wall, holding those moments up to the light. Polishing them. Making them shine.