He held her tight, his arms trembling.
“You silly girl!” Father Seraphim sighed. “Why on earth did you come here?”
“I spotted her riding her bicycle along the platform,” one of the soldiers reported excitedly. “I thought she was a spy or something and was about to shoot her. But then I heard her shouting in Russian.”
Felix caressed Ada’s slender fingers in his hands, looking perplexed. “What am I going to do with you now?”
“I couldn’t wait,” she kept saying. “I couldn’t live without you.”
Felix frowned at his comrades-in-arms who were crowding around them and eventually lost his temper, shouting: “Why don’t you leave us alone, guys? This is a private matter.”
Suddenly a machine gun barked somewhere nearby.
“Take cover!” Felix yelled and, grasping Ada’s hand, he pulled her up into the car.
Panting, they leaned against the sandbags piled up along the wall of the car. The armored train jerked and moved forward, clattering.
“Why didn’t you write to me?” Ada asked, sobbing. “I waited for so long!”
Felix pressed her to his chest. “I’m a military man. I could have been killed at any time. I didn’t want you to worry about me. And if I managed to survive, then I knew I’d be coming back to you.”
Felix’s heart ached for Ada, for himself, and his comrades who were facing almost certain death within the next few hours. What were they fighting for? What were their deaths going to achieve? He could find no answer.
When darkness fell, Colonel Kotlyarov ordered Felix to prepare to leave the train.
“Good luck, son! Tell the British that we have sixty-four men, and we are experienced gunners, machine gunners, and military engineers. We can serve in the Russian Volunteer Corps and have a lot to offer the foreign concessions.”
When the engine driver slowed down, Felix and Ada leaped out of the car.
Rolling down the embankment, Ada cried in pain as something cold slashed her arm. Felix jammed his hand over her mouth, hissing, “Quiet!”
He bandaged the wound on her arm with a piece of fabric torn from the hem of her skirt, and they ran away from the railroad. Broken glass crunched under their feet, and they could feel the heat from smoldering embers through the soles of their shoes.
Several times Felix and Ada ran into the unknown detachments of soldiers. It was hard to tell whether they were Red Guards, police, or soldiers serving the governor.
“If we get arrested,” Felix whispered, “we’ll tell them that we got lost in the Chinese section of the city.” He paused and added. “Do you… I mean, will you marry me?”
Ada squeezed his hand. “Yes. Then, we’ll go to America.”
Felix looked at her face, illuminated by the flames of the fire.
“We’ll talk about all this later,” he said and gave Ada a quick kiss on the cheek.
The checkpoint on the Boundary Road was besieged by a crowd of refugees shivering in the cold rain. From time to time a British officer with a megaphone and an umbrella would climb onto an armored car protecting the gates to the International Settlement.
“I repeat,” he shouted, “Chinese policemen and soldiers are not allowed into the territory of the International Settlement.”
Ada listened to him, wistfully looking at the gate draped in barbed wire. She was covered in soot from head to toe, her hair was dripping, and the wound on her arm was throbbing.
Felix hadn’t had a chance to carry out Kotlyarov’s order. He and Ada had spent two days rushing from one checkpoint on the cordoned boundary to the next, but all to no avail. As soon as people heard their Russian accent, they chased them away, threatening to shoot them on sight. “Get lost, you Bolshevik scum!”
In much the same way, abandoned soldiers from the governor’s army ran from one gate to another—barefoot, bandaged, their epaulettes and insignias ripped off and in tatters.
The previous day, three officers from the Great Wall had joined Ada and Felix.
“It’s all over,” they had said. “The Red Guards blew up the train and slaughtered every single one of our men. We were the only ones to survive.”
“What about Father Seraphim?” Ada asked.
“Caught a bullet in the head.”
Here, on the Boundary Road, Felix eventually saw Johnny Collor patrolling the barricade, and his friend let him inside to talk to the officer in charge of the checkpoint.
“I’ll get you passes,” Felix had promised Ada and the officers, but now there had been no sign of him for over an hour.
Finally, Johnny Collor took the place of the British officer on top of the armored car.
“Whites will now be allowed to enter the International Settlement!” he shouted into the megaphone. “Including Russian military personnel.”
The crowd stirred. Those Chinese who spoke English began to translate Johnny’s speech.
Felix appeared at the gates. “Ada!” he called. “Come here!”
She rushed towards him, but a Chinese officer grasped her hand. “If you’re going in, so are we.”
The Russians started to argue with him. Felix tried to squeeze through the crowd to Ada, but dozens of hands grasped at him, pulling him back. The Chinese officer unsheathed his sword, slashed wildly, and Ada felt something hot spatter across her cheek. The crowd gasped and leapt back, and Felix fell with a gash to his neck.
Ada was deafened by the roar of a machine-gun shooting over the heads of the mob.
“To the gates!” shouted the Russian officer and manhandled Ada back through the cordon with him.
The crowd scattered, and the officers had a chance to drag Felix back into the cordoned area.
They carried him into an abandoned sweet shop. Ada struggled in Johnny’s arms, screaming hysterically, but he wouldn’t let her near the medics who had rushed forward and were now bent over Felix.
Their valiant efforts were to no avail, and he died an hour later.
30. THE NANKING INCIDENT
During the long months spent in solitary confinement, Daniel pondered many things. He was angry with himself for being arrested and with Nina for betraying him—he had no doubt she was to blame. But all this was soon subsumed by a very real fear of death after he contracted food poisoning. He sent Edna a note asking for help but received no reply. The warden who conveyed the message informed Daniel that he hadn’t even been allowed into the house. With no doctor, no medicines, and without even the most basic human compassion from his family, Daniel was at his lowest ebb.
Fortunately, the poorly educated jailers hadn’t confiscated his kitsune netsuke. They had thought it was a commonplace Chinese lucky charm, and Daniel asked his warden to take the netsuke to a pharmacist who collected antiques.
The pharmacist visited the prisoner and then sent him the medicine Daniel needed. By an irony of fate, Nina had saved his life without ever meaning to.
His case never went to trial. The prosecutors and investigators were too busy defending the city with the Volunteer Corps, and in any case, no one was quite sure which authority and which court was responsible for Daniel’s trial.
Eventually, he was handed over to the Chinese authorities, but when the NRA reached the outskirts of Shanghai, the guards unlocked the cells and fled.
In a daze, Daniel walked out of the prison gate and made his way through the crowded streets. He noticed banners and portraits of Chiang Kai-shek in the windows, and every other Chinese was wearing badges with the Kuomintang emblem—the white sun over a blue field. Even the cigarette packets for sale had the emblem emblazoned on their covers. It appeared that the tobacco factory owners had been hedging their bets long before the surrender of Shanghai.