“We’re much safer here than in the hotel,” Tony began, but catching sight of Klim, he cut himself off midstream. “How are you? You look terrible.”
“I’m fine,” Klim replied rubbing his face.
They improvised a dinner of smoked sausage and some other supplies from the basket. Tony lay down and in a second was fast asleep, but Klim couldn’t sleep a wink.
It felt strange that the person most dear to him might not be of any value to anyone else. It felt even stranger to suddenly realize that Nina was the dearest thing in the world to him—in much the same way that a drowning man values his last desperate gulp of air.
Before his wife had left him, or to be more precise, before Klim had emotionally abandoned her, there had always been an unspoken safety net between them: I can always come back. But now he felt as if a large chunk of flesh had been torn from his stomach, and there was no way of ever sewing it back in place.
In the morning, they were woken by the sound of artillery. Dressed in nothing but his underwear, Tony ran into the corridor demanding to know what was going on.
The warden rushed towards him. “Whatever you do, don’t leave the prison!” the man yelled, his eyes full of horror. “It’s the NRA! They’ve captured the city!”
29. THE GREAT WALL ARMORED TRAIN
Every day more and more warships sailed into Shanghai with reinforcements, and Martha’s establishment was now working round the clock. The Madame would take the most promising clients aside and let them in on a “secret of the house”: “Every night a mysterious young lady arrives at the Havana in a mask. Her dresses are the latest word in chic from Europe, her ears and neck adorned with the finest diamonds, but you wait until you see her dance.”
“Who is she?” the client would ask, intrigued.
“A lady of quality. You can always tell a high society damsel by her manners. She is very discerning; she won’t dance with just any man, but when one does take her fancy, she is his for the entire night.”
“You don’t say!”
“It’s true. And the lucky man she chooses is in heaven. She orders champagne, and then they go upstairs. The rich have their own whims and fantasies—after all, they are in a position to make them a reality. She never ever tells anyone her name, but we call her Messalina after the Roman empress who liked to pretend to be a prostitute.”
The clients were sure Martha was telling them tall stories, but none could resist the lure of the lady in the mask. And she would never disappoint, appearing at midnight on the dot—pale with blood-red lips, her dress slit up to the middle of her thigh—accompanied by a black attendant in a turban carrying a huge curved scimitar.
On her arrival, the orchestra would stop playing and all eyes would be drawn towards Messalina. And she—seemingly oblivious of the attention—would saunter around the tables, assessing each and every one of the customers. All of them would ask themselves with their heart in their mouths, Will it be me?
Eventually she would halt next to some confused and lucky individual, proffer her velvet-gloved hand to him, and greet him with a simple “Good evening.”
Martha guarded Messalina’s secret identity jealously. The taxi-girls and the rest of her staff were strictly forbidden to try to make her acquaintance, and the clients were told that anyone who tried to remove Messalina’s mask would have their head chopped off. Whenever the femme fatale took a client to her room, her bodyguard would stand sentry at the door, his scimitar drawn.
Before dawn, Messalina would disappear, and Martha would stow the crumpled banknotes in her safe, thinking: A girl in a mask—it’s ingenious. If Messalina ever gets married or, God help us, slits her wrists, there will be no shortage of substitutes.
At dawn the Madame invited Ada into her office, switched on the table lamp, and started calculating Ada’s cut of the takings. “Twenty, thirty, forty…” Martha’s plump hands deftly counted the banknotes, stacking them portrait side up.
“I don’t know what these men are thinking about,” she grumbled. “The NRA is at Shanghai’s gate, the governor has fled, and the Red Guards are about to take control of the Northern Railway Station. But all our army boys can do is carouse their nights away in brothels. Of course, it’s good for business, but all the same…”
She hadn’t finished her sentence before a powerful rumble rattled the window panes.
“That’s the Great Wall armored train!” Martha gasped, looking anxiously out of the window. “It must be in the North Railway Station fighting the rebels.”
Ada went pale, scooped the money into her bag, and hastily buttoned her coat. “I have to go.”
“Where? Wait!” Martha shouted, but Ada was already outside.
Despite the early hour, the street was crowded. Policemen blew their whistles, and fire trucks raced past. A huge cloud of smoke blotted out half the sky.
Ada spotted a vacant rickshaw.
“I need to go to the North Railway Station,” she told the rickshaw boy, but he shook his head.
“I’m not going there. There’s heavy fighting there.”
Ada noticed a man walking past with a decrepit bicycle.
“Can I buy it from you?” she said. “How much do you want?”
She paid fifty dollars for the rusty piece of junk and rode it down the street, still in her smart dress, fur jacket, and heels.
The Great Wall and its crew were trapped on a short section of the railroad next to the North Railway Station. The Red Guards had dismantled the tracks and leveled the embankment on either side of the station. The train was forced to move back and forth, its heavy guns obliterating hundreds of shacks where the enemy was taking shelter. Soon a huge fire started, torching the entire neighborhood next to the railroad.
When the Great Wall returned back to the North Railway Station to refill its boilers, the train’s commander, Colonel Kotlyarov, summoned Felix to his staff car.
“The Red Guards won’t dare make a direct attack until they’re sure we’ve run out of ammunition,” the colonel said. “Unfortunately, they don’t have much longer to wait.”
“If we surrender we’ll be sure to die,” Felix replied.
Kotlyarov nodded. “We need to send a messenger to the foreign concessions and ask for their help.” He wiped a dirty sleeve on his perspiring forehead, leaving a sooty smudge. “You speak English well, Rodionov, and you know how to deal with the British. After dusk, you need to find a way through to the International Settlement.”
“Yes, sir.”
Felix left the staff car and stepped up onto a flatbed car protected by armored steel plates on its sides. On seeing him, the soldiers from his machine-gun detachment jumped up. “Permission to speak, sir. What’s the plan?”
“We’re going to make contact with the folks in the foreign concessions.”
Smoke from the fires had turned the sky a brick-brown. Large flakes of ash settled on shoulders, caps, and hair.
A pair of heavy boots thudded along the platform.
“Felix, Ada’s here!” Father Seraphim roared.
“What?”
“She’s waiting for you over there, by the station platform.”
Felix jumped out of the car and immediately recognized her, standing between a couple of soldiers.
“You’re alive!” she shrieked and threw herself into his arms.