The Russian Concubine

33

Lydia had to run. Even though he had been drinking, Liev moved fast on his great long legs, as if there were a demon inside him.

‘Damn you, Liev Popkov,’ she swore. ‘Slow down.’

He halted, studied her blearily with his one eye. He seemed surprised to find her at his side.

‘What,’ she demanded, ‘was all that about? Why did you break up the wedding party? O chyom vi rugalyis?’

He shook his head and lumbered on, at an easier pace this time. It was raining now, but cold enough to turn to snow again at any moment. Lydia was in the wrong clothes. The green beaded frock was not meant to keep out the Chinese winter. She had seized her coat from the cupboard in the hall on her way out, the old thin coat, not the bloodied new one – she hated that one – but she was wearing silly satin shoes and no hat. She took hold of his arm and gripped it hard. Her fear that the violent confrontation with her mother would cause him to abandon her made her dig her fingers in tight and concentrate on seeking out the right Russian words.

‘Why did you do that to my mother? Tell me. Why? Pochemu?’

‘A Russian must marry a Russian,’ he grunted and lowered his head into the rain. He would say no more.

‘That is nonsense, Liev Popkov.’

But she left it there. Her Russian was not adequate to the emotions she was struggling with. The sight of her mother’s beautiful face so twisted with anger and the sound of the Russian words pouring from her mouth too fast for Lydia to grasp had shaken her. It had stolen something solid from her world. Why would Liev barge into the house? None of it made sense.

She guided the big bear past the railway station and down to the docks. He seemed to have no care for what direction he took, unaware of where he was going until a singsong girl in a bright yellow short cheongsam that showed off her legs reached out and touched his cheek with a hand whose nails were as green as dragon scales.

‘You want jig-jig?’

He brushed her aside. But his head came up and he looked around, saw the tall metal cranes and the gambling dens and the chain gangs of porters. For the first time he noticed the rain. His bloodshot eye turned to Lydia and frowned.

‘I have a plan,’ she said in Russian. ‘I found a man. He knows my friend, the one I’m searching for. This man I found is… dead now. I did not understand his Chinese words but he said the name Calfield. I think it is here. Somewhere.’

‘Calfield?’

‘Da.’

She knew she hadn’t explained it well, but it was hard to find the words in his language. Her impatience got the better of her. She pulled him toward the buildings overlooking the quayside and pointed to the names up on their frontage. Jepherson’s Timber Yard and Lamartiere Agence. Across the road Dirk & Green Wheelwright next to Winkmann’s Chandlery. All jumbled up among the Chinese businesses.

She gestured to Liev. ‘Calfield? Where is it? You must ask.’

Understanding dawned. ‘Calfield,’ he echoed.

‘Yes.’

It had taken her hours. Lying awake last night, trawling through the nightmare of yesterday. Again and again she came back to the knife disappearing into Tan Wah. His soft hoarse cough. The blood. How could there be so much blood in one so thin? She wanted to scream aloud No, no, but she had made her mind go back, further back. To the wood. When she first asked Tan Wah about Chang An Lo. His chatter of words meant nothing to her but she went over them. Remembering. Listening. Seeing his floating eyes. His hairless face, already a skeleton. His teeth, yellow and chipped.

Words. Sounds. Unfamiliar and alien.

Just as the folds of the dividing curtain turned from black to grey, the start of their last morning in that attic room, one word stepped out into the front of her mind from all the meaningless sounds. Cal-field. Tan Wah had definitely used the word.

Calfield.

She gnawed at it like a bone. He had been taking her to Chang, that much was clear. Then he had waved his bony hand toward the quay and said Calfield.

It was a business or trading company of some sort, she was sure of it. Calfield was an English name and no Englishman lived down there at the docks, so it had to be a business. She had planned to seek out Liev Popkov the second her mother and Alfred left for the station, but his intrusion just made it happen earlier. The honeymooners would set off anyway and probably not even notice she wasn’t there in all the excitement. They wouldn’t miss her.

‘Lydia Ivanova.’ It was the bear. His voice was steadier now, his words less slurred. ‘Pochemu? Why you want this friend so bad?’

She glared at him. ‘That is my business.’

He growled, literally growled. Then he reached into the greasy pocket of his long overcoat and pulled out a stack of banknotes. He took her hand in his great paw and placed the money on her palm, curling her fingers around it to hide it from jealous eyes.

‘Two hundred dollar,’ he said in English.

A wave of sickness hit her stomach. The return of the money was so final. He’d finished with her.

‘Don’t leave. Nye ostavlyai menya.’

He said nothing. Just removed the long woollen scarf from around his neck, draped it over her wet head, and wound it around her shoulders. It stank of God-knows-what filth and stale sweat all mixed up with tobacco and garlic, but something in the gesture stilled her fear. He wouldn’t leave her. Surely.

But he did.

She felt betrayed. There was no reason why she should, but she did. It was a business arrangement, nothing more. Two hundred dollars of protection, that’s what she’d bought. Liev had more than earned it already, risked his life time and again during her search in this dangerous place for no more than Alfred probably paid for her new coat. But now he had returned the money. All of it.

She didn’t understand.

Nor did she understand why she felt so hurt by it. It was business. Nothing more. She watched him walk into a kabak and knew he would not come out this time. He was there to drink. She wanted to shout after him. To beg.

No.

She pulled the scarf as far over her face as it would go and scuttled along close to the wall, keeping her eyes on the ground, seeking no contact of any kind with the faces and bodies that milled around her. She knew she was in danger. She remembered the moon-faced man who had tried to buy her and the American sailor. She fingered the two hundred dollars in her pocket and was tempted to cast it away, knowing it increased her risk, but she couldn’t bring herself to do so. To throw money away would feel like slitting her wrists.

What she needed to do was to go into one of the European companies and ask. Simple.

A hand touched her shoulder, a black-eyed smile leaned toward her face. She jumped away and hurried for the first door she could see that bore an English sign above it. E. W. Halliday. Maybe the smile meant well. She would never know. She pushed open the door and was instantly disappointed. The place was nothing like she had been expecting. It was a long and low-ceilinged room that even in daylight remained dim because the window was so small and grimy. A handful of Chinese workers were busy stacking cardboard cartons onto pallets against the wall, but an unpleasant oily smell seeped in from behind large double doors that led to what appeared to be a factory behind.

A Chinese man at a desk near the door raised his head. He wore tiny steel-rimmed glasses and a thin ribbon moustache that made him look almost European, and his desk was littered with thick ledgers. A tall black telephone was ringing, but he ignored it.

‘Excuse me,’ Lydia said, ‘do you speak English?’

‘Yes. How may I help you, miss?’

‘I am searching for a company called Calfield. Do you know it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where is it?’

‘In Sweet Candle Yard.’

‘Could you direct me there, please?’

At that moment the double doors swung open, breathing a gust of hot air into the front office and giving Lydia a brief glimpse of a kind of purgatory taking place behind. Dozens of matchstick figures were leaning over great vats with long paddles, pushing something down into a steaming liquid that scalded their faces a raw and blistered scarlet. As the doors swung shut they disappeared back into their own daily hell.

‘You go down Leaping Goat Lane and over to the godowns. Calfield is there.’

The man waved a hand in a vague direction, bowed a dismissal, and picked up the telephone to stop its jangling. Lydia left, the oily stink still in her nostrils. Outside she stared at the numerous streets and alleyways running off the quayside. Leaping Goat Lane.

Which one?

All the signs were written in Chinese characters. She could be looking straight at Leaping Goat Lane and not know it. A rickshaw raced past and water splashed from its wheels, drenching her in slime. Her satin shoes were ruined; she was wet through and shivering.

‘Leaping Goat Lane,’ she said aloud and climbed up on the low ledge of a stone trough in front of a water pump where the water had dripped into a frozen tear. At the top of her voice she shouted out, ‘Can anyone tell me which is Leaping Goat Lane?’

Several of the heads hurrying past turned to stare at her with interest, and she saw two thin men in bamboo hats swerve from their path and shoulder their way toward her. She swallowed. It was a risk, but time was running out for Chang and she was desperate to find him. Suddenly she was whisked off her feet. Something seized her, whirled her into the air, and shook her like a rag doll. Her eyes rattled in her head. She kicked out. Punched the side of a face. Bit some thing.

‘Lydia Ivanova. Nyet. No. Nyet.’

It was Liev Popkov. He shook her again and she wrapped her arms around him with relief.

They hurried down Leaping Goat Lane. The rain was falling harder. A mule train carrying great coils of rope trekked past them with much shouting and whip cracking. Liev Popkov kept one hand firmly round Lydia’s wrist.

He had been angry with her. For misunderstanding him. For thinking he would go into a bar for anything other than information. He told her off, shouted at her for leaving instead of waiting, and his anger pleased her. She knew she should be frightened of him but she wasn’t. No more than her mother had been in the face of his drunken onslaught. That thought jolted her. Even the men at the wedding party had backed off in alarm and talked of guns and police, but not Valentina. It made Lydia wonder for the first time whether her mother knew Liev Popkov better than she was admitting.

‘The godowns.’ Lydia pointed.

Ahead of them stood a group of buildings, large and lifeless, with corrugated roofs and no windows. These were the warehouses where imported and exported goods were stored until the tax inspectors had taken their cut. A few uniformed guards with guns on their hips patrolled in a desultory manner, more interested in keeping dry than watching out for thieves. The yards here were even worse than the streets. They stank of putrefaction. All around were bundles of sodden rags, at the base of walls or hunched tight under a sill or in a gutter.

Lydia knew that there were people under the pathetic scraps of cloth, but which ones were breathing and which ones were dead and rotting where they lay, only their gods knew. The sick fear that one could be Chang An Lo drove her to approach a huddle in a doorway, where she could just make out a dark thatch of wet hair and a high forehead that looked familiar. But when he lifted his face to her, it wasn’t Chang. This man’s eyes had no fire. No hope. His skin was covered in blackened boils, and foamy crimson blood was trickling from the side of his mouth.

Lydia remembered the two hundred dollars in her pocket. She reached in for it, but before her fingers had freed up a few notes Liev Popkov yanked her away.

‘Tchuma. The plague,’ he said in English with disgust. In Russian he added, ‘He’ll be dead before nightfall.’ He took the money from her and replaced it in his own pocket.

Plague.

Just the word sent shivers through her. She’d heard Alfred mention it. He said that it had started in the army and that when the warlords were defeated, the soldiers fled back to their villages, spreading the disease like wildfire. Famine in the scorched fields sent the peasants flocking into the towns for food and work but instead they coughed their lungs into a gutter. Died frozen in their rags. Lydia took off her coat and draped it over the trembling heap of bones.

‘Fool, glupaya dura,’ Liev swore.

But she knew he would not take back the coat, not now. It was plague ridden. Her fear for Chang burned in her chest and she hurried onward to the warehouses. Calfield had to be one of them. Had to be.

It was.

CALFIELD & CO., Engine Machinery. The sign was painted in black on the eighth godown they came across. Liev had removed his own overcoat and placed it on Lydia despite her objections, but underneath he wore an odd assortment of garments, including a thick leather tunic that shrugged off the rain. They searched. Every inch of ground. They paced around the Calfield warehouse and then out farther, circling other warehouses, other storerooms.

‘Nothing here,’ Liev muttered. He looked up at the slate sky and then at her wet face. She clamped her chattering teeth shut. ‘Home,’ he said.

Lydia shook her head. ‘Nyet. I search again.’

She went around to the back of the row of corrugated buildings once more and scanned the stretch of bare wasteland that lay behind them. Nothing grew there. Even the weeds had been torn up and eaten, but a hundred yards or so in the distance were the bare spikes of a bush that had somehow managed to grub a life for itself. A bank of mist had settled behind it. For no reason other than that there was nowhere else to search, Lydia headed in that direction.

The wasteland was a sea of mud with no roots to hold the soil together. She slipped and skidded at every step, stumbling to her knees, blinking the rain from her eyes, but she finally reached the stubby bush. When she raised her head from watching where she placed her feet, avoiding the trailing coat, she saw what lay behind it. A shallow gully. Five or six feet deep with a sluggish layer of rainwater covering the bottom. That’s what caused the mist. A few yards off to her right stood a row of ramshackle shelters, half collapsed by the rain.

‘Chang!’ she shouted and slithered down the muddy bank.