Your father who loves you with what is left of his heart, Papa
Chang An Lo watched Alexei fold the letter neatly along the creases of the thin tissue paper with its tiny penmanship and hand it back to Lydia. Saw him struggle to keep the anger out of his voice.
‘You went into the prison? You risked your life for a letter?’ Alexei demanded of his sister.
‘No, there was little risk involved.’
They all knew she was lying.
‘Let me remind you,’ Alexei said stiffly, ‘that Popkov was shot for doing the same.’
‘No, that’s not right. A guard recognised him and Liev was shot for resisting arrest. No one was going to recognise me.’
To Chang’s eyes it was obvious that Alexei couldn’t decide which enraged him more, his sister’s disobedience or his own disappointment in his father. And the letter hadn’t even mentioned him. As if bastards don’t count for anything. But Alexei was clearly shocked by the horror of what Jens Friis had described, far more than it seemed to shock Lydia. To Chang the confession in the letter made little difference because he was not doing any of this for Jens Friis, but it angered his heart that Lydia ’s father had let her down. He could see it in her eyes, the confusion.
‘So,’ Chang said quietly, ‘do we drop the plan?’
Four pairs of eyes focused on him, all but one was hostile.
‘No.’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes.’
‘No.’
The first and loudest No was Lydia ’s, the last was Alexei’s. In between came Maksim and Igor. The meeting was taking place in the Russian thief’s apartment and Chang liked neither the place nor its owner, but let none of it show on his face. He was here because he had requested it and he took no offence when the fat man with the mottled skin said, ‘Not a bloody Chink as well as the girl.’ Chang had seen the fanqui’s expression harden in the silence, the way molten iron hardens in water, and he took it as a good sign. A scheme as risky as theirs needed a heart of iron at its centre.
‘They won’t like you coming,’ Lydia had warned him.
‘I’m not here to be liked.’
She’d laughed but there was no life in it and that had saddened him. Now as he regarded their faces and noted the tension in their necks and in their hands, he knew Alexei would prevail. His voice would be the last. The fat man with the cheeks like dough would not say no to Lydia ’s brother.
Voshchinsky banged his fist down on his broad knee. ‘Very well, my comrades,’ he grinned at them, his jaw jutting in a display of aggression. ‘Let’s talk about tomorrow.’
Chang led her away. He wanted to rid Lydia ’s skin of the stink of them, to draw her from their cigars and their words of violence. He walked her across the city to Arbat, to a small Chinese tea room, and it pleased him when her eyes brightened at the sight of it.
‘I had no idea it was here,’ she smiled.
‘There’s one in every capital city in the world. We Chinese are like rats, we get everywhere.’
She tugged off her hat, shook down her hair and inhaled the familiar scents of spices, jasmine and incense that rose from the jade fretwork on its facade.
‘I had forgotten,’ he murmured, ‘how much my spirit misses the colours that bring life and energy. Here in Soviet Russia the streets are grey as death. Even the sky above us is flat and colourless.’
He drew Lydia into its fragrant interior. They sat at a low bamboo table and were served steaming red tea by a young Chinese girl in a cheongsam the colours of ripe watermelon – dark greens, crimson and black. She bowed low with respect and Lydia watched Chang with a soft smile on her lips.
‘My love,’ she said when the girl had gone, ‘do you miss your native country so badly?’
‘It is part of me, Lydia, its yellow earth is in my blood.’
Her tawny eyes held his. ‘What are we to do?’
He leaned forward and took one of her hands, curled it in a ball and wrapped his own around it.
‘Let’s talk about your father.’
She gave a nod, a barely perceptible dip of the chin. ‘He was a man of power. A man with a family, a guest in the palaces of counts and princes. Under the Tsar he had a good life but under the Bolsheviks he lost everything, stripped to nothing.’
‘That’s what he was trying to explain in the letters, how he had to cling to the hard core of self to survive. You and I, Lydia, we understand that.’
‘Yes.’ The sadness in her one word was as heavy as the golden Buddha in the window.
‘There’s something I haven’t told you, something I learned the day I was in your father’s prison.’
She said nothing, waiting.
‘I was told by General Tursenov, who runs the prison, that the whole idea for this project came from Jens Friis himself. It was all out of his brain. He wasn’t just an engineer recruited to work on it. While in the labour camp it was he who thought up the birth of this monster, as he calls it.’
Her lips tightened. ‘Are you saying you believe he is a monster too? One not worth saving?’
‘No, that is not my point. He asked for his freedom in exchange, and that’s what the whole team has been promised when the project is completed. Their freedom.’
The tension left her face and she smiled. ‘That’s wonderful. Why didn’t you tell me this before? He’s going to be released.’
‘That’s what they said.’
The tone of his voice warned her. The smile faded.
‘No, Chang, don’t.’
‘I’m sorry, my love.’
‘You don’t believe them.’
‘No, I don’t. Can you imagine that the military authorities will allow prisoners with top secret information to wander loose?’
Lydia shook her head. ‘Would they send them back into the labour camps?’
He made no comment.
Her mouth crumpled and she hid it behind the little porcelain cup. ‘You mean they’d be shot.’
‘I believe so.’
Her hand quivered inside his.
‘He’s going to die,’ she whispered.
‘Unless we get him out.’
‘Don’t judge my father harshly, Chang. We can’t know what horrors he endured, day after day for twelve years. This was a way to make them stop.’
Chang opened his hands and released her. ‘I know. Either of us would have done the same.’
They both knew he was lying.
‘Thank you,’ she murmured and smiled at him.
The boy was perched on the end of Popkov’s bed, playing cards and arguing with the big man. The two of them were gambling ferociously for dried beans and by the look of the pile at his elbow, Edik was winning. Misty was curled up on Elena’s lap, who was chuckling as the pup licked her fingers as greedily as if they were sausages. But the moment Lydia walked in, the playing and the laughing ceased. She was tempted to walk out again.
‘So you’re all better now, Liev,’ she teased. ‘I knew you were just faking it.’
Popkov gave her a crooked smile. ‘So I wanted a day in bed.’
‘You lazy Cossack,’ Lydia frowned. ‘Why do I bother scurrying around in the snow buying you medicine?’
She tossed him a half bottle of vodka and the dog galloped over to her, all paws and tongue. She pulled a brown paper bag from her pocket and gave Misty a fried pirozhok, one to Edik and one to Elena.
‘What are these?’ Elena asked with ill grace. ‘Goodbye presents?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Is it all arranged then?’ Popkov demanded at once, between great swigs from the bottle.
‘Yes.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll be there.’
‘No you won’t!’ Lydia and Elena both said it in unison.
‘Anyway,’ Lydia added quickly, ‘you won’t be needed. Alexei is arranging everything and you know he’d rather have a rabid dog at his side than you.’
Popkov scowled, screwed the top back on the vodka bottle and hurled it across the room at Lydia. It banged against her hip and rolled unbroken to the floor. ‘I’m coming, damn you, girl. Jens Friis was my friend.’