‘Where are they now, your sons?’
He shrugged. ‘They used to be in Leningrad, but now… who knows? I haven’t seen or heard of them for more than twenty years. I wouldn’t even recognise them now if I passed them in the street, nor they me.’
Great meaty tears rolled unchecked down his face. Alexei leaned forward.
‘I am your new son, pakhan.’ The words scorched his tongue. Yet he repeated them. ‘I am your new son, pakhan.’
‘Then pour me another brandy and we’ll drink to it.’
When he had refilled their glasses, Alexei returned to blowing smoke rings and inspected his new father through half closed eyes. Now he had to ask.
‘So Maksim, will you order your vory to help me?’
‘Ah, my son, that’s a big request. You are not yet a real member of the brotherhood and they may think you unworthy.’
‘I ask you not as a vor, but as a son.’
A pause grew between them, as green and solid as the rug. It seemed to suck the air from the room.
‘You saved my life,’ Maksim stated. But still he didn’t say yes.
Alexei reached down into his own tattered boot and drew from it the fine-bladed knife he had taken from Konstantin on the barge. The older man froze for one fleeting second but Alexei yanked up his right sleeve, revealing the pale vulnerable flesh under his forearm. With careful consideration he pressed the point of the blade into his skin and saw blood spurt. In one rapid stroke he sliced down to his wrist and the movement was chased by a ribbon of crimson.
He looked up at Maksim. ‘Is the answer yes?’
In the smoke-filled silence that followed, it was as though he could hear Lydia breathing. Then the man opposite him nodded and proffered his arm. Alexei took it and thrust back the sleeve of his robe. As he lifted the knife he asked himself what price was the nod of a criminal? He dragged the blade down the loose hairy flesh of Maksim’s right arm, parting the surface skin cleanly, skimming through the grinning jawbone of a tattooed skull, the sign of a killer. But not deep. He didn’t want to hurt this man.
‘Now,’ said Alexei. He wiped the blade on his thigh, took hold of Maksim’s heavy arm and pressed it against his own where it was dripping on to his lap. Flesh to flesh. Life to life.
‘Now,’ he said again, ‘now, father, we are blood.’
A respectful knock on the bedroom door made Maksim swear.
‘Yob tvoyu mat! Fuck you!’ He and Alexei were playing cards. Maksim was a fierce competitor and was winning with ease. ‘What do you want?’
The door opened tentatively and Igor’s shape filled the narrow gap. The short young man looked nervous.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you, pakhan, but Nikolai is here. He wishes to speak with you.’
‘Doesn’t he know I’m fucking sick?’ Voshchinsky bellowed. Spittle flecked his lips and he flicked an irritated tongue over them. ‘Tell him to go away.’
‘Pakhan, I…’
The door was shunted fully open from the other side, but it wasn’t Nikolai who stood there in the doorway to report to his boss. It was a beautiful thin girl with large passionate eyes and skin like fine ivory. It took Alexei the blink of an eye to realise it was Lydia. How the hell had she found him? A grubby urchin with a shock of pale hair hovered behind her. Her ugly hat was clutched in her hand and her fiery mane shone bright as a new coin in the dim room full of dead things. She ignored everyone else, just focused on her brother.
‘Alexei,’ she said firmly and held out a slender hand to him. ‘I’ve come to take you home.’
42
The noise. The heat. The slam of sheet metal, the grinding of machinery. The bang and rattle of the overhead hoist chains. It all crashed into Chang’s mind. Like the gods stamping their feet in anger, blasting their fiery breath into his skull till it was scorched to a cinder.
How could any man work in this?
The gaping mouth of the blast furnace blistered the skin and turned workers’ faces into the scarlet sweating masks of fiends, as white-hot sheets of metal were manoeuvred into position. Tongs and drills and steam hammers beat out a deafening roar inside the steel factory, an infernal sound that Chang knew was needed all over China if his country was ever to progress. Stalin was turning Russia into a powerful force in the world. This surge of industrial development was what China cried out for; mechanisation was the future. But was Mao Tse Tung the leader to enforce it? He was still at war and still absorbed in his own private pleasures. So it meant China must wait, and if there was one thing the people of China excelled at, it was patience. Their day would come. But until then, they knew how to wait. It was their strength.
The delegation moved on through the factory behind their Russian guide. Chang could see his compatriots were overawed by the scale of its metal production. As they were meant to be. They stood in a group and watched a man operate a hole punch, a massive steam-driven fist that slammed down and knocked out a wide circle in sheet after sheet of steel. What its purpose might be, Chang had no idea, and the sound of it was too deafening to allow him to ask. The Russian worker, aware of being watched, kept his eyes lowered submissively and his hands in constant motion. Over and over the same movement, the same pull of a lever, turn of a winch, rattle of a sheet of steel on rollers, then bang and on to the next.
The delegation moved on but Chang remained. Watching and waiting for the moment the man would look up. Because Chang knew he would, eventually he would be unable to resist. Then Chang would see what a Russian worker was made of. It was the same in China, the peasant mentality, hiding all behind submissive down-turned eyes. It angered Chang, their refusal to lift the head and stand out in a crowd. It was one of the things he’d loved from the start about Lydia, that willingness to look the world straight in the eye. He smiled at the image in his head and touched a finger to his throat, laying it on the exact spot where her lips had touched.
That was the moment the metal worker chose to raise his eyes. It looked to Chang a very Russian face with its broad cheekbones, long nose, jaw hidden in a fringe of beard. But the eyes told him everything he needed to know. Pale grey and exhausted, the steam-hammer pounding its reflection in them from dawn to dusk. These were not the eyes of the contented proletariat they had been led to believe worked in these factories.
For a second their gaze fixed on each other and gradually Chang felt the heat. Not from the furnace this time, but coming from the worker himself. It was the kind of heat that was pinpoint sharp. Like a blade that has rested in flames. Chang recognised it at once. It was hate.
‘Kuan.’
She stopped and waited for him. Chang moved closer as they crossed the factory yard. The snow had turned to rain but it was the kind of rain that was like ice picks in the face. They were due to be taken to a meeting now and he would have no other moment for his words to curl in private into her ear. She didn’t ask what he wanted but inspected him, eyes black and bright. He could see the fire in them despite the gloom.
‘The factory was impressive,’ he said.
‘Did you see the number of people employed there?’
‘Yes. Communism in action. It works. Here in Stalin’s Russia we see how Lenin’s ideas function as a practical reality. They are forging a successful future for this country. It is what China weeps for, that same strong hand.’
‘A father’s firm hand.’
‘But one that will caress as well as rebuke. One that will give as well as take.’