The Winter Station

by Jody Shields

  “I need you as a witness, Baron.” Khorvat raised his voice. “Deputy Diakonov, bring the doctor’s coat.”

  The clean warmth of vodka was still on his tongue as he strode after Khorvat and Diakonov down a bright corridor, wincing when the door opened into the darkness outside. A force of frigid air as he struggled into his sheepskin coat.

  “We’re not going far.” Khorvat charged ahead of them, his unbuttoned coat flapping.

  Outside, the landscape was empty, unbroken by trees. The cold space was a block of pressure that they slowly traveled through, dark moving lines against the snow, isolated in their heavy furs. Their figures seemed diminished. The crisp, bitter sound of their footsteps overlaid faint music from the ballroom behind them, a schottische. In the distance, a lantern threw a generosity of light on the squat shapes of two men. The scene reminded him of an execution. Closer, he noticed one of the men was drunk, and his shadow swayed with his unsteady movements, hugely elongated.

  A cloth had been loosely thrown over the irregular shape of a corpse on the ground. The Baron immediately dropped to his knees, his posture an arc of tenderness as he leaned toward the still body, unerring as a figure in a holy painting. He sensed the other men turn away, embarrassed to witness this intimacy. He crossed himself, then pulled up a corner of the cloth, motioned for the lantern, and a hard geometry of light, blue at the edges, entered the shadow cave of the blanket, revealing the upper half of a body. Another twitch of the cloth revealed the side of a face, a white cheek, barely shaded with stubble. A young man. No visible marks. Blood on his chest.

  “A Chinaman.”

  Someone cursed and laughed nervously.

  “Of course he’s Chinese. Russians don’t drag the dead out into the snow.”

  A flood of irritation at Deputy Diakonov’s words. “Mother of God.” The dead man’s exposed hand was rough and callused. A laborer, probably a servant in the kitchen. The man’s arm was bent across his torso, solid and unyielding, as the sleeve was frozen in place. The body must have been here for hours. To examine the corpse, he pulled off his bulky mitten.

  “Don’t touch him!”

  The Baron stopped at Khorvat’s shout. He waited for an explanation, but Khorvat smoked a cigarette, silently staring down at the body. He exhaled a great stream of tobacco smoke as punctuation. Uneasy, the men shifted their boots in the snow.

  The Baron instructed them to stake a tarpaulin over the corpse to protect it from animals. No one answered.

  “Gentlemen, when we return to the reception, forget what you have seen here.” Khorvat lowered his voice. “The ladies would be alarmed by talk of a corpse near the ballroom.” A card had been played and nothing else would be revealed.

  “We walked outside to look at the moon,” Diakonov said.

  “To share a cigar,” another voice added.

  Behind the men, the snow churned up by their boots was cast into relief by the harsh lantern light. They should have been told to walk on fresh snow, not over the first set of footsteps made by witnesses or the murderer. A mistake. But the Baron was a doctor and his expertise was with the living, not the landscape around a dead man.

  “General Khorvat, I should examine the body at the hospital tomorrow. A formality, to establish cause of death. An account must be recorded. Especially since the corpse was found here at the club.”

  Deputy Diakonov, impatient with the process, thumped his gloves together. “Why are we talking over a dead Chinaman in the cold? Let’s finish the vodka.”

  “You’ll follow the doctor’s request tomorrow at the hospital.”

  “He’ll have his corpse.” Diakonov hissed his acknowledgment.

  They returned to the club, and servants knelt at the men’s feet, drying their wet boots at the door.

  The Baron calculated that the frozen body lay in a direct line from where he stood. He imagined that his weight balanced the dead man on the opposite end of a scale. A step, any movement, would upset the balance and the dead would win. His eyes closed.

  Khorvat directed him into an alcove. “You tell the servants here to stay silent about this death.”

  So he had been ordered to threaten the servants. Did Khorvat really believe that they would keep a secret? “I can’t carry around threats like a stick. I’m a doctor, not a policeman.”

  “Surely you’ll survive the loss of your credibility with servants.” Khorvat spoke quietly so they would not be overheard.

  “That’s my decision.”

  “Information does not belong equally to everyone.”

  “I’m a doctor and a health official. I need to evaluate how this unexplained death affects the city. Am I to stay blind and mute at your request?”

  “The body will be delivered to you at the Russian hospital.”

  “And the other bodies left on the street?”

  Khorvat demonstrated his lack of concern with a shrug. “Why am I always answering to you? We don’t have enough soldiers to follow the trail of every dead Chinaman. I’d like to launch an investigation but who would back my decision? St. Petersburg? No. Only the dao tai has jurisdiction over the Chinese. He must act.”

  “The bodies were discovered in the Russian districts.” He drew back, conscious that Khorvat was carefully studying his face in the light from the open door, and his cheeks reddened as if he had confessed to a fault.

  “The bodies will soon be forgotten.”

  “Even Dmitry Vasilevich? His widow seems to have completely disappeared. Sonya Vasilevna, her stepdaughter, knows nothing. Unless there’s news you haven’t shared?”

  “I grant you, the widow’s behavior was peculiar. She fled without proper mourning. Unless she committed suicide from grief in a discreet place. If the widow had stayed in Kharbin, she’d get a hundred offers of marriage. Baron, what type of woman walks away from that security? There are few women here. Kharbin is a paradise for widows. It’s suspicious. But what damage can a widow, a single woman, cause?”

  “Dmitry’s body was quickly buried. All evidence of his death was stripped from his home. The servants vanished.” He watched Khorvat but sensed no willful deceit, only impatience with the conversation.

  “Perhaps the widow had a jealous lover.”

  “An ideal solution, since we have no witnesses. No autopsy report.”

  Khorvat directed his entire focus on the Baron. “No. It would be ideal if Dmitry had been murdered by his Chinese cook. The dao tai would administer justice to the accused Chinese citizen and then the mercy of an execution. No Russians involved. End of case.”

  The Baron made his expression carefully neutral as if in agreement. This wasn’t the place to issue accusations and demand answers. Khorvat’s heavy hand was suddenly warm on his shoulder.

  “Baron, it’s to everyone’s advantage to keep the system operating. Put Dmitry Vasilevich’s death in perspective.”

  “The police?”

  “I don’t anticipate any conflict.” Meaning they would follow Khorvat’s orders.

  They entered the ballroom. The Baron sensed they’d been marked by contact with the corpse. Or did he only imagine that voices became hushed, that people moved away as they stood in the doorway together? Khorvat recognized it too but quickly signaled to a waiter, and the tense atmosphere in the room was broken, the swell of music and conversation returned. They saluted each other with glasses of vodka.

  The Baron managed to slip away. He hurried down a corridor past the dining room, following the noise of clattering dishes. The cooks didn’t look up from the stoves as he entered the hot kitchen. He shouted in Chinese above the din, “Who is sick?” Startled, the kitchen workers stared at him.

  “Who are you?” A rough voice.

  “A doctor. Someone is sick here. The club will pay for treatment.”

  The uneasy kitchen workers were silent. One of the younger cooks stared at the floor.

  “A worker is missing from his job in the kitchen. Who is he? Who saw him tonight? Does anyone know what happene
d to him?” It was pointless to threaten them to keep silent about a dead worker that no one would acknowledge existed. These witnesses would never speak. The men in the kitchen shared the fear of dismissal from their jobs, fear of an outsider speaking their language. “There’s a reward for information about the missing man. No harm will come to anyone who helps.”

  No one broke the silence.

  If he’d spoken with them one by one, something might have been discovered. No one confesses before an audience.

  He returned to the ballroom. His vodka glass, a cold solid shape, shook in his hand. He abruptly pushed his way through the room, barely noticing the blur of faces around him. He slammed the rear door of the building open, staggered into the snow. He squinted into a pattern of white thrown by the wind, the snow flattening the landscape, unable to distinguish the dark blanket over the body or the tracks of a vehicle that he was certain had stopped to pick it up. Bitter-cold air was driven into his nostrils, inside his throat. Breathless, he flailed through the snow back to the building, closed the door, and discovered that the glass had mysteriously vanished from his hand.

  Later that night, the Baron waved away the worried servant who stumbled to meet him at the door with a lantern. He walked through the house in darkness. His legs were stiff and he felt his age. In the study, he lit a candle, and a slant of light crossed the brush, inkstone, and paper on the table. He placed a thin transparent paper over a sheet of calligraphy written by his teacher. Stroked the brush on the wet inkstone and held it poised above the paper, waiting for his mind to settle into blessed calm. The first mark the brush would make on paper, the luo bi, was the most important. But the characters he formed were slippery, elusive as his brush stroked them. He couldn’t focus on the work. He cursed his lack of control. His lack of courage with Khorvat and Bakai. He struggled to quiet his breath. Let his eyes absorb the blackness of the ink. His concentration was broken by an image of a body in snow. Black and white.

  He was called by this image of the corpse as if he were a madman who reads sentences in a newspaper and is certain they’re secret orders for him to follow. A grain, a black dot of suspicion, began to form.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Baron asked whether tea might be prepared.

  “My dear friend, I have always underestimated you. You are a mind reader.” Dr. Francois Messonier transferred an unsteady pile of papers from table to shelf in his office. Two tiny cups, rimless as bells, made a dry, delicate sound as he placed them on the bare table. He lit the daisu, a small, traditional rectangular metal stand on four legs that held the kettle over heat. The Baron watched, soothed by these familiar preparations.

  The two men frequently shared tea in Messonier’s office at the Russian hospital or dinner in one of the better places, Felicien’s or Palkine, for discussions, sometimes in French, about restaurants in Paris, the shortage of medical supplies in Kharbin, the endless bureaucracy, lack of trained assistants, their patients’ distrust of treatment. Friendship broke their cold sense of isolation, as they were both critical of the ruling Russian establishment.

  Before he accepted a position in Kharbin, Messonier had been head of the hospital in Mukden, where all Western doctors and the medical schools were under Chinese supervision. The French doctor had worked well in this situation, as it wasn’t his character to directly challenge Chinese authority. He’d gradually mastered a halting, rudimentary spoken Chinese, which helped him survive the Boxer massacre in 1900. A young woman whom he’d once treated had hidden him from rebels in the woods.

  “I’ve saved something for your special attention.” Messonier cradled a small blue-and-white ceramic container.

  The Baron smiled back at him. “Caviar? Imported hair pomade?”

  There was a scraping noise as Messonier unscrewed the lid and produced a roughly wrapped thin packet tied with string. “Please do the honors, Baron.”

  He fumbled with the string and even before it was unwrapped, a strong earthy scent rose between them at the table. Inside the paper was a coarse brown disk that resembled tree bark. He closed his eyes and inhaled.

  “This is pu’er tea,” Messonier explained. “Very rare. The tea is one hundred years old. So they claimed. Fermented. Pressed into shape with a stone. Packed in a lead-lined leather trunk sent overland from Yunnan Province. Transferred to sampan and then steamboat up the Sungari to Kharbin.”

  It was a pleasure to share Messonier’s bounty. A few months ago, he’d received a box from France and they’d divided the mirabelles, pâté, cognac, chocolate bars, and a tin of mustard.

  The squat iron kettle reached a rattling boil on the daisu. Messonier poured water from the kettle over tea leaves in an unglazed clay teapot. Then he immediately emptied the water from the pot but saved the tea leaves. A second kettle of boiling water was added to the teapot. “Exactly twenty-five seconds to brew.” He softly counted out loud.

  Finished, the tea was poured into gai wan, small porcelain cups, each with a lid and saucer. “Count to five before you drink it.”

  The Baron sniffed the steam from the cup as he raised it to his lips. Pu’er had an intense mushroom aroma, woody, a damp forest, musty like clean dirt. Drinking and inhaling the tea was a single sensation, as the fragrance rushed into his nose and mouth, filled his entire head. He felt transported, as if he had opened a door into another season.

  “I was told that pu’er can be infused ten times. The last infusion is the longest, ninety seconds.”

  He blinked with delight. It seemed the scent of the tea radiated from the surface of his skin. He felt himself slowing down. Only with an effort did he return to Messonier at the table, smiling beatifically. “Do you have a teacher? A master of tea?”

  Messonier looked as if he’d been caught cheating. “A patient honored me by sharing her knowledge of tea.”

  “Payment for services?”

  He smiled, raked the pale hair off his forehead. “No. It was purely a kindness.” Inside the closed pot, tea leaves furiously unfurled in the third pour of hot water.

  “I heard that another doctor taught patients recovering from tuberculosis to sing hymns in English. There you have payment in kind.”

  “Our church has forbidden the practice of indulgences.” Messonier was a devout Catholic, unmarried, and so saintly that there had never been rumors about him with any nurses.

  “Perhaps singing was part of the healing treatment.”

  “Perhaps hymns are required to fill beds at certain hospitals. I would not give such orders.”

  “The Scottish missionaries at the orphanage taught my wife to embroider and read English.”

  “What kind of life were they preparing her for?”

  The Baron shrugged. “Li Ju left the orphanage when she was very young. She’s continued her English lessons.”

  “She’s fortunate to have a home,” Messonier said, then swiftly added, “Not that she isn’t perfectly happy with you.”

  The Baron was silent for a moment. “At times I find my wife profoundly puzzling. She always surprises me. She is a marvel.” He was suddenly self-conscious about speaking so intimately to this man, a friend who was ten years younger. “I don’t mean her beauty. Don’t misunderstand me.”

  Messonier studied him, his eyes of a peculiar opacity, the irises like yellow lines, finer than stitches of embroidery. “There’s no preparation for an enigma.”

  “My wife insisted on attending the reception at the Railway Club. Everyone ignored her except for Chang and General Khorvat.”

  “Always a gentleman.” With the graceful gesture of frequent practice, Messonier again inclined the teapot over their cups. “You’ll be delighted to hear I interviewed the sisters at the Hospital of Mercy as you requested. They are reluctant to disclose information. This you know.”

  “The capable Gorgons. No, I apologize. Forgive my words.”

  Messonier continued. “The sisters did acknowledge that several passengers from the trains had been admitted.”

&
nbsp; “The trains again. Do the passengers share a common ailment? Or are they simply held by the sisters under someone’s orders? An arrest?”

  Messonier slowly filled the two gai wan with tea while the Baron shifted impatiently in his chair. “The sisters wouldn’t reveal the number of passengers, why they’re under care, or who ordered them admitted. The contagious infections that could have affected passengers at this time of year are familiar to you—pneumonia, tuberculosis, whooping cough, scarlet fever. Unfortunately, the sisters wouldn’t allow me in the same room as their passenger patients.” He gently set the lids on the gai wan cups and handed one to the Baron. “But I was allowed to pray for the anonymous patients. Perhaps they’re in quarantine.”

  “Mother of God.” The Baron leaned closer, the cup in his hand precariously balanced.

  Messonier’s expression changed and his eyes narrowed with pleasure. “I hope you appreciate the elaborate lie that I spun for the sisters. Here is the name of the doctor who visited the patients. He also needs the intercession of the saints. Pray for him.” He handed the Baron a folded paper.

  Now he admired Messonier’s strategy and his neat black handwriting: Dr. Wu Lien-Teh.

  “Dr. Wu Lien-Teh is vice director of the Imperial Army Medical College of Tientsin. A graduate of Cambridge University. He recently arrived. Sent to Kharbin by the Chinese government, the grand councillor Na Dong, and the councillor of the Foreign Office.”

  “I don’t know this Dr. Wu.”

  “You’ll be introduced. Doctors can’t avoid each other in this place.”

  “Dr. Wu may also be a surprise introduction for General Khorvat.” He crumpled the paper. “A body was discovered outside the Railway Club during the reception. A Chinese man.”

  “Foul play?”

  “I don’t know. Khorvat promised the body would be moved to the hospital for a postmortem, but it was lost en route. Blame the snow, the cold, the lack of competence. Or something more deliberate. No one is responsible for the disappearance of the body, apparently.”