The Girl from Junchow

by Kate Furnivall

  There is something else I must say. Alexei and I traveled to the forest around the secret clearing where you work, and I have seen the wall. Seen the hangars. I believe I saw you, but my brother says I imagined it because I wanted the person to be you. Today there will be no imagining. Soon everything will change. We are coming for you. Be ready. Alexei has friends here in Moscow who are willing to help us; he has given much to gather these allies to our side. I can’t tell you more. I am nervous of putting words to paper.

  I cannot come into the prison again as I have nothing more to use to bribe the baker. Fortunately he has a greedy heart, but my pockets are empty now. So this is good-bye for the moment. Au revoir. Till I see you again. I am nervous. What if I am not the daughter you hoped for? I love you, Papa.

  Your Lydia

  Jens’s hand shook. He knew already that he would not be the father she was hoping for. But for one day with her, just one day, he would bargain his miserable soul. Oh Lydia, my own sweet daughter, how much are you risking?

  “ALEXEI, THIS MAKES ME PROUD.”

  “That pleases me, Maksim.”

  “He’s done a fine job. He is a true artist.”

  Alexei lifted his arm and studied the new tattoo. It was of a large spider climbing up his bicep, an indication that the bearer is active in the criminal life. A second mark of Cain.

  “Is everything arranged?” he asked.

  “My men are ready. The final meeting is today.”

  “Lydia has asked to be included.”

  “No.”

  “Pakhan, she and I have traveled a long way for this.” He raised his eyes from the spider to Maksim’s face. “Let her come.”

  “My son, you are bewitched by this girl. She is no longer your sister, remember that. A vor has no sister.” He sipped his brandy, eyes stern.

  Alexei pulled on his clean white shirt and buttoned it thoughtfully. “Maksim, I am grateful for all you have done.” He lifted his own brandy to his lips, though the morning had only just started and his stomach was still empty. “When this is over, you can ask of me any favor you choose.”

  “When this is over you may be dead.”

  Alexei laughed, a loose easy sound that took Voshchinsky by surprise. “In which case I shall hold the door open for you, my friend.”

  Maksim didn’t smile.

  My Lydia,

  To hear of your Chang An Lo, your white rabbit, and your taste for an artist I have never heard of puts flesh on your bones. You have become real. I also am greedy. I want to know all of your life till now, each day, each success and each stumble, each thought that grows in your young head.

  You ask me to tell you about myself and what I think but, Lydia, there is nothing to tell. I barely exist. I don’t smile and I don’t laugh and I try not to think. Somewhere in the prison camp my laughter died and I no longer mourn for it. What kind of person am I? A nonperson. So instead I shall do as you ask and tell you about my work. It is the one thing left in me that is good and fine and worthwhile. But even that facet of me is one I am corrupting. Nevertheless here it is.

  You have probably never heard of the Italian General Nobile. Why should you? He is a brilliantly skilled designer of semi-rigid airships. I was told about him by a young Ukrainian who used to be his assistant but who ended up in the bunk below mine in Trovitsk prison camp. The poor bastard had made a minor error, so that his calculations proved to be inaccurate. “Sabotage!” they screamed and threw the Ukrainian in prison.

  He died in the harsh winter of the timber forest, but first he told me things. About Nobile’s plans. He intends a massive expansion of the use of airships for military purposes. Lydia, you wouldn’t believe how exciting this is. It is the future. Nobile has even enthused Stalin himself. So what will happen now? Stalin is going to order a Red Airship Program to be set up and demand a public subscription of millions of roubles for it. Josef Stalin may be brutal, he may be an egocentric tyrant, but he isn’t stupid. He knows another war is coming and he is determined that Russia will be prepared.

  He needed engineers, so that’s why I was brought back from the dead. There is an airship project at Dolgoprudnaya near Moscow that is public knowledge, but the one I’m working on in the forest is secret. We are constructing a . . . what shall I call it? A monster. A vast silver thin-skinned monster with lethal breath. A killing machine.

  Oh Lydia, is that what God felt when He created man? That he had created a beautiful killing machine?

  For that is what my project is. Airships can fly long distances, well beyond any airplane’s range. So—this is the part I can barely let loose in my brain, let alone set down on paper—we have slung two biplanes under the envelope of the airship, both of which will be equipped with—not bombs—but gas canisters. Equipped with a poisonous gas. Yes, you read it right. Poison gas. Phosgene. When the airship has flown unsuspected, deep into enemy territory, the planes will drop from a height and skim low over a city or an army barracks. They will spray their lethal gas and pass on like the Angel of Death.

  Stalin intends to build a fleet of these. With my help. My help. What kind of man am I, Lydia, who can construct such a creature? This week we carry out the first full test—that means with real phosgene instead of soda crystals, and real people instead of rubber dummies. My beautiful killing machine will go to work.

  Pray for my soul, Lydia, if you have any faith and if I have any soul. And for Liev Popkov’s.

  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 in 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 recognized him and Liev was shot for resisting arrest. No one was going to recognize 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’s Yes. 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 offense 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 center.

  “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 with his jaw
jutting in a display of aggression—“let’s talk about tomorrow.”

  CHANG LED HER AWAY FROM THEM. HE WANTED TO RID LYDIA’S skin of the stink of them, to draw her away from their cigars and their words of violence. He walked her across the city to Arbat, to a small Chinese tearoom and it pleased him when her eyes brightened at the sight of it.

  “I had no idea it was here.”

  “There’s one in every capital city in the world,” he smiled. “We Chinese are like rats; we get everywhere.”

  She tugged off her hat, shook down her hair, and inhaled the familiar scents of spices and jasmine and incense that rose from the jade fretwork on its façade.

  “I had forgotten,” he murmured, “how much my spirit misses the colors that bring life and energy. Here in Soviet Russia the streets are gray as death. Even the sky above us is flat and colorless.”

  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 colors of a 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 Colonel 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 labor 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 labor 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, who had reappeared at the door last night, was curled up on Elena’s lap. The woman 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. “Good-bye 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 tumbled unbroken to the floor. “I’m coming, damn you, girl. Jens Friis was my friend.”

  Elena’s pale eyes glared at Lydia, who promptly picked up the bottle, marched over to the bed, and smacked it against the bruise on Popkov’s cheek. “You just wait here, you brainless bear, and I’ll bring him to you.”

  “ALEXEI, I HAVE A PRESENT FOR YOU.”

  “The only present I need is right here.”

  He lifted Antonina’s hand and kissed the pale back of it. It was gloveless. She was still in shock at what she’d done, still prey to shivers and sobs, and the anguish in her dark eyes had not yet abated. Alexei knew only too well that the first time you kill is a moment seared into your brain. It never leaves you, but lingers, fretting at you until you learn to put it safe in a box and close the lid on it, as quietly as a coffin.

  “Don’t stare at me,” she said self-consciously, “I look hideous.”

  “No, you look lovely.”

  He meant it, despite the swollen nose and the bruises. Since her husband’s death, there was something about her, something real and solid that hadn’t been there before. As if she were tentatively removing some of the fragile layers.

  “Show me what it is,” he said, “this present of yours.”

  Antonina led him through the apartment to a closet at the far end of the hallway and threw open its doors with a flourish. He frowned at what was inside, surprised at first, and then slowly he started to smile. On a brass rail hung a Red Army officer’s uniform.

  Fifty-two

  THE FOREST WAS A DIFFERENT WORLD IN THE dark. Lydia expected her eyes to adjust to it but they didn’t. Still she could see nothing. But she could hear things. Night sounds. They made the hairs on her arms stand on end and the back of her throat grow dry. It was a world of creeping and rustling and great gusts of dank breath, so that she had to force herself to keep still. Her hands wanted to flail around her, feeling for approaching shadows. Her feet just wanted to run.

  “All right?” Chang whispered next to her.

  “Fine.”

  She heard his breath inhale slowly and wondered how much her one word had betrayed. How long had they been crouched beside the tree trunk? One hour? Two? She’d lost track of time. There was no moon, no sky, just a black blanket above her head interspersed with even blacker shapes as the trees swayed in the wind, their branches making needy feral whines.
It reminded her of wild creatures in a snare. She didn’t speak, didn’t move. Tried to find stillness. The cold ate into her bones. Warmth from Chang’s body seeped through her coat into her arm and she concentrated on that. If she thought too hard about what was about to happen, her limbs started to spasm.

  “Frightened?” Chang’s breath was moist on her ear.

  “Not for me.”

  “For your father?”

  She nodded. He couldn’t see it, but she knew he would feel the movement in the darkness.

  “He will die for certain if we do nothing.”

  “I know.”

  “I will protect him all I can.”

  “I know.”

  “But first I will protect you.”

  He stiffened beside her suddenly, and she realized his sharp senses had picked up something she’d missed. Fifteen seconds later she saw it, the faintest blur of light, far off, coming and going between the trees. It was a good distance away, too far to hear any noise yet, but they both knew immediately what it was. The truck convoy. Lydia’s heart thudded in her chest, pumping hot blood and adrenaline into her chilled limbs. She was ready to move, but Chang’s hand descended on her thigh, pinning her there.

  TODAY WOULD BE HARD. INSIDE THE TRUCK JENS SAT ON THE bench with his eyes closed and his back braced against the metal side panel. That way he shut out the darkness. The truck rattled and roared, its engine straining on the rutted road, its wheels skidding over patches of snow and ice, stabbing into his thoughts. He braced his mind as firmly as he braced his back.

  Today would be hard, he was under no illusions about that, but he was used to hard. He’d forgotten what easy tasted like. And that thought saddened him. He filled his mind instead with the glorious image of the airship, gleaming silver in a cloudless sky, its intricate internal structure of girders that he had so painstakingly created like a spider’s web inside the soft outer envelope. He let himself risk a smile. The last months had been good, better than he could ever have imagined, and now his daughter had reentered his life. He’d seen her. He’d actually seen Lydia. Yet even that brought its own sorrow, a sharp stabbing pain at the sight of his daughter because she reminded him so shockingly of the loss of his wife, his Valentina.