‘Did you read them?’ Chang demanded.
‘No, sir.’
‘Do you swear? On the word of your ancestors?’ The jacket was ready to tear.
‘I swear.’
A heartbeat. That’s all. And a knife would have slid between the tendons of Wang’s throat. He saw it in Chang’s black eyes.
‘I can’t read,’ the soldier whispered, his voice barely scratching the air. ‘I never learned.’
Two more heartbeats. Then Chang nodded and pushed the man away.
‘So,’ Luo said quietly, ‘your intelligence information was accurate. The train was carrying more than just military personnel to the Nationalists.’ He directed a scarred forefinger at the gaping mouth of the safe. ‘Look.’
Chang moved across the rocky terrain, his eyes no longer seeing the shattered bodies that criss-crossed his path. In the back of the safe, solid enough to remain undisturbed by the explosion that blew off the door, lay three burlap bags. He reached in and lifted one. It was heavy enough to strain the muscles of his forearm, and on the outside of it in dark brown ink was a string of words stamped in Russian Cyrillic script.
Chang shook the bag and heard its metallic clink. He knew what was inside without even looking. It was good Russian gold.
5
‘Tell me, Alexei, what do you remember?’
Lydia tried to keep the hunger out of her voice as she asked the question, but it was hard. The train had stopped. It felt strange to be standing here with her brother, in the middle of the night and the middle of nowhere, under a dark and starless Russian sky. But anything was better than remaining cooped up in that compartment for hour after hour. The novelty of train travel had worn off long ago, all that initial excitement and sense of discovery had been buried under a mountain of delays and disappointment. No, not disappointment exactly. Lydia shook her head and pulled her hat down tightly in a useless attempt to keep out the cold that crept relentlessly under her skin. She stamped her boots on the icy gravel and felt her blood rush briefly into her toes.
No, not disappointment. That was the wrong word. Carefully she sifted through her newly acquired Russian vocabulary and came up with dosada instead. Frustration. That was it. Dosada. It was new to her.
‘I wondered when you’d ask,’ Alexei said quietly. ‘It’s taken you a long time.’
There was something in his voice, something that dragged at the words.
‘I’m asking now,’ she said. ‘What do you remember?’
In the darkness she couldn’t make out his expression but she sensed a tension in the way he shifted his shoulders, as though something tight was rubbing against them. Something he wanted to be rid of. Was it her? Did she rub and fret and cause him pain?
Blackness had swallowed the landscape around them, so that Lydia had no idea whether mountains hunched over them or flat open plains spread ahead. Somewhere she could hear the murmur of a river. Several other passengers had climbed down from the carriages to stretch their legs while the train took on water, but their voices were muted. Lydia ducked her head against the wind and in doing so caught sight of Alexei’s gloved fingers down by his side, clenching and straightening, clenching and straightening. When she’d asked What do you remember? she hadn’t specified which memories, but she didn’t need to. They both knew. Yet now, staring at his fingers, it occurred to her for the first time that maybe he had no wish to share his memories of Jens Friis. Not with her.
Was that space in his head where his father lived too intimate? Too private?
She waited, aware of the shouts of the rail workers calling to each other as they swung the spindly arm back against the metal water tower on its thin, spidery legs. A lamp hung from a high wire above it and was swaying in the wind, sending shadows like ghosts skittering around their feet. She shifted her boots carefully to avoid stepping on them. Specks of soot were landing on her skin, soft as tiny black-winged moths. Or were they night spirits, the ones Chang had warned her about?
‘For months,’ she said, ‘we’ve been travelling together, yet never have we talked about our memories of Jens Friis. Not really discussed them, I mean. Not even when we were stranded for three weeks in Omsk.’
‘No,’ Alexei agreed, ‘not even then.’
‘I wasn’t…’ She hesitated, uncertain how to explain to him. ‘I wasn’t ready.’
A pause. The sides of the engine seemed to heave, sighing as it released its hot breath. Lydia brushed the soot from her cheek, while out of the darkness Alexei’s voice came to her with a gentleness she wasn’t used to.
‘Because your Russian wasn’t good enough?’
‘Yes,’ she lied.
‘I wondered.’
‘Tell me now.’
He took a deep breath, as if about to plunge under water. What was it he feared down there? What dangerous current from his past? She let her glove brush his sleeve, and at that moment on this icy scrap of dirt in the middle of this land that was theirs, yet not theirs, she had never felt closer to her brother. She felt something melt as her glove touched his sleeve, fusing them so tightly that she experienced a curl of surprise that her hand could move away from him without effort.
‘He used to visit,’ Alexei started quietly. ‘Jens Friis. In St Petersburg. My mother and I lived with her husband, Count Serov – the man I always believed was my father – in a grand mansion with a long gravelled drive. I’d watch for Jens from the upstairs salon window – it gave the best view of the approach.’
‘Did he come often?’
‘Every Saturday afternoon. I never questioned why he came so regularly. Or why he always made such a fuss of me. Sometimes he brought me presents.’
‘What kind?’
‘Oh,’ he let his hand drift casually through the freezing air, ‘stamps for my stamp album or a new model for me to build.’
‘Model of what?’
‘A ship. A wooden schooner to sail to the Far East. But sometimes he would cover my eyes, spin me round and present me with a book.’
‘What kind of book?’
‘Poetry. He liked Pushkin’s poetry. Or Russian folk tales. Though he was Danish, he was keen for me to know my Russian heritage.’
She nodded.
‘So I’d rush over to the window seat,’ his voice was growing warm with the memories, ‘whenever Mama told me Jens Friis was coming to visit, and I’d crouch there, ready to jump up and wave to him.’ A self-conscious laugh pushed its way between the words. ‘Just a small boy at one of thirty or more windows.’
‘But did he see you when he came up the drive?’
‘Da, always. He would lift his hat to me and sweep it through the air with a great flourish to make me laugh.’
‘In a carriage?’
‘Sometimes, yes. But more often he was astride his horse.’
His horse.
A memory came rushing into Lydia’s head from nowhere, barging its way through the thin bones of her skull. A horse. A magnificent high-stepping chestnut with a black mane which she used to hang on to with stubby fingers. A horse that smelled of musty oil and sweet oats, a horse called…
‘Hero,’ she said. ‘Geroi.’
Alexei’s face was suddenly closer to hers and she could smell tobacco on him. ‘You remember Hero too?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I loved his ears.’
‘His ears?’
‘The way they twitched and pricked when he was happy. Or flattened when he was irritable. I thought they were so magically expressive. I wanted ears like that.’
She could hear, rather than see, Alexei’s smile in the darkness. ‘Jens used to take me riding. I would perch like a monkey in front of him on Hero’s saddle, and later when I was big enough to have a pony of my own, we’d go off for the afternoon together, just the two of us.’
A small sound escaped Lydia.