by Tom Bradby
“We went on telling him that we were teaching, and he knew that we were poor but believed that we were honest. But our hunger grew. And then Papa was ill and needed medicine and we had no money for that. At first, Natalya did not tell me. Then she said she could keep it from me no longer. She had done it so that I didn’t have to, she said. So that I would only have to dance. My poor, sweet, gentle Natalya. There were no tears in her eyes when she told me. I think she had no tears left to cry. So I cried for her, and I thought I would never stop.”
Natasha wiped her eyes. “There was a little more money then. The teaching was getting better, we told Papa, but a friend, a friend, told him it was not true.” She stared at him. “Papa was a very proud man, Richard.” She nodded. “Like your father, he was so proud. He did not believe his friend. How could he believe that his two beautiful daughters would do such a thing? It was impossible. Impossible. So he came to see for himself. He was ill, shuffling. He had lost everything, but came to be certain that that which was priceless could not have been sold. It was impossible. He knew Shanghai, of course, and he had never chosen to come here. By the time we left Russia, flight to the West was too risky, and we had no family there, so we went east, like Lena, hoping that, by some miracle, the White generals in Vladivostok would turn the tide. And once it was clear Vladivostok would fall, where could we go? We were poor then, living by selling the last of our possessions. Where could we go? Shanghai . . . like so many others. It was better than nothing. Papa knew nothing of commerce, but he was proud and believed we could begin again. He believed we could be poor and honest and he knew his friend’s vicious slander must be a mistake. Then he saw her. She was on a raised platform inside the door of this place, and in front were men queuing to fuck her—his precious, beloved elder daughter, whom he raised himself after Mama died and whom he loved more than life itself. She was in red, she told me. Her best outfit. Red garters, with a corset and fur lining on the collar. That was what Papa saw. And the men were watching her dance, then they—just so, with a flick of the finger, they ordered her. Upstairs to a tiny room with a mattress. And for a few dollars, they could do what they wished, Richard. Anything they wished. They could beat her. They could humiliate her. What could she do? A Russian girl. Once proud and beautiful, the daughter of a general of high breeding, with a farm on the Volga. But now—”
“Stop.”
“You want to know—you must know.” She wiped her eyes again as she sat. “You must know the end of the story, because it is the story of Natasha. She was Papa’s favorite daughter. She would never, never be dancing for money—with anyone who wanted her. General Medvedev would never believe this. It was absolutely impossible. Perhaps Natalya . . . he loved her, of course, she was his firstborn, but perhaps . . . the death of Mama . . . she had been the most affected. Perhaps she was weak, too easily influenced. But Natasha? She was a daughter to adore, to be proud of. One day, he dreamed, she would marry an officer of the regiment. Or perhaps another landowner in Kazan, so that she could be close to home. His heart is so soft that it melts for her. Always. And even here in Shanghai, she is supporting him, looking after him as he gets older.” She shook her head. “No. Not Natasha. Please, Lord, if you have any mercy, then not Natasha. It could not be. Not with any man who wants to grab her breasts for money. It is not possible. A whore and a tea dancer, his two darling girls, keeping him alive by selling themselves.” There were tears in her eyes now. “But it was true. It was all true. Everything his friend had said. He saw it with his own eyes. So Papa put on his uniform. A general again in the tsar’s army, with everything in its proper place. The crops were almost ready to be harvested. A few weeks in St. Petersburg for the winter. Perhaps he would take us along. We could stay at the Rivoski on Nevsky Prospekt and he would take us shopping. There would be balls and dinners and perhaps we would even find a husband, Natalya and I. We would be so excited.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“But we are not in Kazan anymore, Richard, we are in Shanghai.” She looked up at him. She was starting to cry. “He put the cold barrel of his army revolver in his mouth, and then he pulled the trigger. Gone. With Mama. To a better, better world. Shanghai killed him. And we did.”
The fight went out of her. Her shoulders sagged and she wept, her body racked with pain.
Field took a step toward her. “No,” she said firmly, raising a hand. “I haven’t deceived you, Richard.”
Field didn’t answer.
“If you love me, then you must leave.” Her face softened. “If you love me as you say, then please go now and don’t come back.”
“I cannot.”
She looked at him, tears flooding her eyes. “He killed himself three years ago. I have mourned him every single day since.”
He nodded. “When I saw that photograph of you all together, I envied you.” He knelt beside her chair. “All I wanted, all I ever wanted, was for my father to say just once, ‘I love you, Richard. I love you, my boy. Well done. You played really well, you tried really hard, you did your best.’ Just once. Just once. Your father loved you, Natasha. I saw it in his eyes. I hear it in your voice. However it ended, you did what you had to do. You had no choice, but my father . . . Just once, that was all I wanted, just once, and even if he couldn’t bring himself to say it, at least to have felt it, to have shown it. A hand on the shoulder, my hair ruffled. It’s so meaningless unless you don’t have it, and then it’s the most important thing in the world.” Field thought he was going to cry himself. “My anger is because he blew his brains out as well and I never had the chance to say all the things I wanted to.”
She stared at the floor.
“Please go now,” she said quietly.
“I won’t go.”
“You don’t understand, do you? This is what I did to my father, Richard. And this is what I will do to you. It is what I am.”
“No, you don’t understand. Everything has changed for me now. It’s like I woke up and the world is a different place and everything has moved and the view is so bleak in one direction, and so filled with possibility in the other, and without you—without you, there’s nothing.”
“There’s already nothing. You can’t change anything.” Her voice caught. “You . . . you must accept that.”
“Who was the boy, Natasha?”
She shook her head. “It is not important. He was not mine.”
“I won’t give up.”
She looked at him and he could not tell what he saw in her eyes: sorrow, or anger, or fear. They were windows to a lost soul. “Richard, I have taken risks to be with you that I had no right to take.”
“I cannot accept that there is not a way to escape, and I will go on until I can make you believe that we can find one.”
She sighed, her head bent. Then she turned to him, her expression that of a woman he didn’t know. “Very well,” she said. “I will tell you the truth.”
Field felt his breath quicken.
“Why do you think I go down to Lu’s?”
“Don’t do this.”
“I do it because I’m a whore. I don’t like him touching me, Richard, no, I don’t like that, it’s not like it is with you. But what can you give me? I had a home. I had a family, but where are they now? I have no one. No one. So I go down to Rue Wagner and I take off my clothes for him—”
“Stop it.”
“You don’t want to hear it?”
“You’re lying to me again.”
“I’m telling you, Richard, what you need to hear. You’ve pushed me, and now you will hear it. You were a momentary escape. A handsome boy, naive, a little foolish, perhaps brave. But the reality does not change. So I go down there because I like to live here. Look around you. How else could a Russian girl afford all of this? Do you understand? This is what I want.”
“This is not the truth.”
Her face was a mask. “What is wrong with you?”
“I know what is true. I know it here.” He touched his chest.
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“You know it, so it must be true?” She shook her head, incredulous. “Do I have to spell it out to you? Do you want me to tell you that I enjoy the power? You saw me in the nightclub, you know how it is.”
“I saw fear in your eyes, not power.”
“Do you want me to tell you that I enjoy him touching me, watching the power I wield over him? Do you want to see the lust in his eyes, the things he dreams of doing to me?”
“Enough.”
“Do you want to know that I enjoy it when he reaches out with his fingers—”
“Enough.” Field lunged forward, grabbed her arms, and shook her. He got to his feet, raised his hand, fist clenched.
She looked up at him, her lip curled. “Go on, Richard, hit me. Isn’t that what you want—to hurt me? Isn’t that it? Go on, be a man.”
Field turned and left, slamming the door. His feet pounded on the stairs as he tried to stamp out the image of Lu’s stubby fingers running slowly along the length of her body, caressing the soft skin of her breast, moving inexorably toward the patch of dark hair at the top of her thighs.
He ran out into the warm, fetid air of the street and bent over as he tried to catch his breath. A thick fog had descended and a tram rattled past, ahead of him, unseen.
Field straightened, thrust his hands deep into his pockets, and forced himself away.
He took ten paces and then turned, convincing himself for a moment that this was just a test, that she must be following him.
The doorway was half-hidden by the gloom, but he could see that there was no one there.
Forty
Number 73 Avenue Joffre was an ugly three-story building, close to the border with the Chinese city, built with deliberate disregard for the attractiveness of most of the buildings in the Concession. Field felt barely under control—unwanted, uncontrollable images of Lu and Natasha together still tearing through his mind.
It had been another long, sleepless night. For much of it, he had walked through the darkened streets.
Both ground-floor flats had tiny yards beside them, behind a wrought-iron fence, next to the road. In both, lines of laundry swayed in the breeze. Natalya had lived in 1A, and the woman who lived there now also looked like a prostitute—heavily made-up, with high leather boots and a tight top. She must have been fifty, and looking at her made Field feel queasy. The door was slammed in their face.
“Silent again today, polar bear,” Caprisi said as they turned away.
Field didn’t answer.
“But I’m glad you called.”
Field still didn’t respond. He wasn’t certain whether he had been right to give Caprisi Natalya Simonov’s address. He hadn’t told him that she and Natasha had been sisters.
“You’ve done well, polar bear.”
In the flat opposite, they found an elderly couple named Schmidt who, shaking their heads sadly, said they had known Natalya and invited them in.
The sitting room was even smaller than Field had expected, and nothing about it suggested any connection at all with Shanghai. Neither of them was allowed to refuse Mrs. Schmidt’s offer of chocolate torte and coffee, and as they listened to her—she was a talker, he could see, too often devoid of company—Field studied her husband and the photograph of a young boy in uniform on the sideboard.
“Our son,” Mr. Schmidt said proudly.
“Otto,” his wife said, handing each of them a plate with a large slice of cake. “He is the butcher now.”
They both spoke with broad German accents, and Mrs. Schmidt had said this without a hint of irony.
“Your son is a butcher?” Caprisi asked.
“It was Hans’s business when we married and we build it up. Now we give it to our son.”
“He fought in the war?” Field asked.
She looked at him, trying to gauge if there was any hostility in his eyes. “He wished to. For his country.”
“We understood,” Hans said in a manner that indicated they had not.
Hans was a small man, with a face permanently set in a smile, a long nose and forehead, and an almost oval skull, with a few hairs straying in different directions across its crown. His wife was plump, neat, and ordered, her dress pressed, her hands placed carefully in her lap.
They were poor but honest, Field thought.
“Natalya,” Caprisi said.
“You were friends?” Mrs. Schmidt asked him.
“In a manner of speaking.”
She leaned forward. “Do not worry. You are police, I can tell, but we will not . . .” She looked at her husband conspiratorially, then back again. “The French police . . .”
“Yes.” Caprisi cleared his throat. “You knew her?”
“Of course! We are neighbors. I know it is the way of some in the big city to . . . But we are from a small town in Bavaria. It is not our tradition.” She looked at her husband again. “We have lived here so many years.”
“So you knew her well?”
“We would look after her cat sometimes. And her little boy, of course.” She shook her head sorrowfully.
“Her little boy?” Caprisi said.
“Yes. Alexei.”
“How old was he?”
“Her little boy?” Field asked, finally taking in what she’d said.
“Alexei, yes. He is six.”
“She had a son?” Field said.
“Yes.”
“Natalya Simonov had a son?” he repeated.
“Yes.”
“It was her own?”
“Ja. Of course.”
“Natalya Simonov had a boy?” he said once again. They were all frowning at him now. “What has become of him?” he added quickly.
The Schmidts looked at him, as if he were stupid. “The orphanage, of course.” Mrs. Schmidt turned to her husband. “What could we do? We could not have him. Could we, Hans?”
“No.” He shook his head firmly.
“Where else could he go?” she said.
Field felt a sense of despair creeping over him. “The boy, Alexei, went to an orphanage?”
“Ja.”
“What about his family?”
The Schmidts looked at each other, shaking their heads.
“Natalya had no family?” Field said. “No one who came to see her, no one the boy could have gone to?”
They shook their heads again.
“Which orphanage?”
Mrs. Schmidt exchanged glances with her husband. “They came in a car . . . there was a nun. I do not know her name. In Shanghai they are all the same.”
“Did he want to come here?” Caprisi asked.
“How could we?”
“We are old,” Hans said. “We are old!”
“It was Otto. He should never have had . . . She was no good for him. Afterwards he could not bear to see the boy.”
“The boy . . . Alexei was his?”
“No!” She shook her head vigorously. “Of course not. My Otto is not like this. He is an honorable man, but the boy reminded him of his love for her and the family they could have had. He could not shake her from his silly head, even before she died.” Mrs. Schmidt looked at her husband, then back at Caprisi. “She was pleasant to us, always friendly. I must say that. But she was—”
“I know.”
“How could our boy be interested in a woman like that?”
“Of course.”
“It was a foolish thing. He had forgotten her, but then . . .”
“Yes.” Caprisi nodded.
She sighed heavily.
“Did Natalya ever . . . entertain . . . people at home?” Caprisi asked.
“Sometimes. Not often, because of the boy. She would go to . . . it is not work. Prostitution is not work.”
“No.” Caprisi cleared his throat. “But men would sometimes come here?”
“Sometimes.”
“During the day? At night?”
“When the boy was at school. Sometimes at night.”
“Was there anyone in particula
r the last few months before her death?”
Mrs. Schmidt turned to her husband again, seeking his approval. He nodded. “The last month—no, more, two months—there was a change.”
“In her, or the pattern of her behavior?”
“In both. In the day there were no more visitors, but at night I think one man came.”
“You think?”
“She would let him in the side gate, to the yard.”
“Did you see him?”
She shook her head. “From here, we could not see.”
“Never heard his voice?”
“It is too far away.” She clicked her tongue to indicate her frustration.
“And did she talk about him?”
“Yes,” she said, punching the air with her forefinger. “Yes. She was happy, she said, things would get better. She had met a man, a rich man, powerful, and she would be able to get away with Alexei, start again, somewhere new . . . Europe. She asked us where she should go if she were to visit Germany, and what kind of country it was, and if we had ever been to France and England.” She looked at them, suddenly suspicious. “Otto was upset, but it was not serious. He would have got over it, and I said, Liebchen, she is . . . you know. Leave her to her powerful man.”
“So you never saw this man?”
“No.”
“And you never heard his voice or found out his name?”
“Nein, nein.”
“Was he Chinese?”
Mrs. Schmidt shrugged extravagantly. “How could I know? It is possible, likely, given her . . . type. It would be like her type to go with a Chinese.” She wrinkled her nose in disgust.
“So you have no idea who he was?”
“Rich. Powerful. So she said. Good. He makes her happy. Good. Ja. She finds a man willing to consort with her . . . type. He gives the boy presents, so—”
“What kind of presents?” Field asked.
She shrugged again. “A model airplane. Wooden. Nothing special.”
As her good-neighbor act fell away, Field was beginning to find this woman vexatious in the extreme.