The Russian Concubine Part 61

Chang seized a handful of brittle icy gra.s.s from the lawn and pulled it out, stuffed it into his mouth to still the scream of pain that gripped his chest. To love someone. It sliced open your heart. It made it soft and pulsating when the crows came to tear it apart with their savage beaks. He dropped his face into his hands. The bandages had been discarded. Love made you vulnerable as a kitten asleep on its back, its tender belly exposed to the world. That's how he felt. That weak. How could he fight when all he wanted to do was to protect her? Not China. Just her.

He bit on the raw place on his hand where his finger had once been and felt the pain of it dig into his mind, but still he could-n't shake free from the hook that held him. He reminded himself of Mao Tse-tung's doctrine that the needs of the Individual must be suppressed in support of the Whole. In his head he knew it to be the only way forward, but right now his head was as much use as a donkey in a gambling den.

His was a strong arm in the Communist fight and a strong mind.

She was one girl. A fanqui fanqui girl. girl.

But there was one last way he might find her. Save her. Though he would certainly die. Would that be too selfish? To give his life for the girl he loved, instead of the country he loved.

Lydia, tell them what they want to hear. Don't bare your teeth at them.

He spat out the gra.s.s. Rose to his feet and loped into the grey light of morning.

56.

They did the water trick twice more. Each time for longer. Her lungs burned. She retched up filth. s.n.a.t.c.hed at air. Vision blurred. She wanted to die, yet each time she fought for life like a wild animal.

The man with the gloating laugh enjoyed his work. He kept slapping Box's sides and chattering in high-pitched Chinese. Only when she knew that this time she would drown for certain, when stars flared in the black tunnel that filled her head and her lungs were seared by fire, did he dart around and slide a narrow slat from under her. The water gushed out and she curled very nearly dead on the floor of Box. Everything hurt.

When her bowels opened, she barely noticed.

She lost track of time.

Sometimes she pinched her cheek to make sure she was still alive. Still Lydia Ivanova.

She was beginning to doubt it.

When the bolt drew back again, her whole body flinched. The footsteps on the stairs. She forced her lungs to drag in air, deep down, expanding even the tiny sacs at the end of each airway. She had to stockpile on air. Before the water came. Her skin felt numb with cold. With panic. She crouched. Ready.

But this time there was no sound of dragging hosepipe. This time it was the sc.r.a.pe of something wooden across the floor and the flickering light grew brighter.

What now?

Focus. Breathe. Don't cry.

Suddenly the world changed. The roof flew off. A hand reached in and grabbed her hair, wrenching it from its roots, hauling her to her feet. Her stiff body was sluggish and earned her a blow on the ear. She was staring into the face of an olive-skinned Chinese man with a pointed face and black eyes set close together. His teeth were red and for one crazy moment she thought it was blood, that he was eating some live creature, then she saw he was chewing on some dark red seeds that he held in his free hand.

'Guo lai! Gi nu.'

He yanked her out of Box and she looked around her, eyes screwed up against the dim light. She was right. It was a cellar. Two rats paused in a corner and inspected her, whiskers twitching. Box was a metal cube raised on a wooden plinth with a drain underneath and a small ladder propped against its side. She fell down the ladder, her feet too numb to guide her.

Don't cry. Don't beg.

Spit in his G.o.dd.a.m.n face.

She didn't cry. She didn't beg. She didn't spit in his face. She did as she was told. Her captor slipped wooden shackles on her wrists and a rope around her neck, then led her like a dog out of the cellar along a narrow dank corridor, slatted walls on both sides like some kind of pa.s.sage between buildings. Up steps. Five of them. Should she try to break free? Here?

But it took everything inside her just to walk upright. When she stumbled or hesitated the rope was tugged tight with such force, she was under no illusion about the man's strength and knew her own body was a physical wreck. So. No. No escape yet. The narrow-faced man pushed open a door.

Warmth.

That was what hit her first. It flowed over her skin, silky golden waves of it, sucking out the cold from her bones. She wanted to weep with pleasure. She felt a sudden rush of grat.i.tude toward her captors for giving her this warmth, but part of her mind insisted that was insane. She hated them. Hated.

Then came the noise. The room was so full of sound it made her head spin. Big voices. Boisterous laughter. It boomed inside her hollow brain and the bright lights cramped her eyeb.a.l.l.s. She squinted, adjusting quickly, and tried to make out what kind of place she was in. A large high-ceilinged room, ornate carvings peering down at her from painted beams, red patterned tiles under her bare feet, small barred windows. The walls were covered in heavy embroidered drapes and lined with wooden settles. Full of Chinese faces. Jeering. Fingers pointing. Mouths spitting. Black figures everywhere. Too much black. Too much death.

The fact that she was wearing nothing except a primitive form of handcuffs and a rope around her neck did not distress her. She was beyond that. She cared no more about her nakedness than she would if she were standing in front of a pack of wild dogs.

A bunched fist swung lazily at her face. She ducked and it missed. The faces around the room split open into wide red caverns of laughter, but the man who had tried to strike her found no amus.e.m.e.nt in it. He was broad across the chest, solidly built, with a fleshy face and smooth oily skin. She was useless at guessing Chinese age, but he looked about thirty to her and carried himself with an air of authority. He had a high hairline and dark petulant lips. Oddly he wore a respectable black Western suit. It gave her hope. He stood in front of her and cursed in Chinese.

'You the filthy b.i.t.c.h wh.o.r.e of the s.h.i.t-eater without the fingers. ' The English words startled her. 'You lose fingers too. And eyes. And white putrid b.r.e.a.s.t.s. I feed to rats in cellar.'

The threats came not from the smooth-skinned man but from a young boy, no more than fourteen or fifteen years old with long unruly hair and nervous eyes, as he mouthed the words with no emotion of any kind. He stood behind the shoulder of the big man who was cursing her, and it dawned on her sluggish mind that the boy was only the interpreter, echoing his master's words.

She switched her gaze back to the master and abruptly the cogs inside her brain turned faster. She recognised him. From the Chinese funeral Chang had taken her to. He was the one in white prostrating himself behind the coffin. Yuesheng's brother, Feng Tu Hong's son. It was Po Chu himself. She spat at him, the man who tortured Chang An Lo. He hit her hard and growled something. 'Ni ei xi xue hui vhun.' 'Ni ei xi xue hui vhun.'

'You learn respect,' the boy translated.

'Release me,' she hissed, tasting blood inside her cheek.

'You answer questions.'

'I am the daughter of an important British newspaper tyc.o.o.n. Release me immediately or the British Army will come with their rifles to . . .'

'Bao chi!'

'Silence,' the boy echoed.

The man's hand seized a hank of her hair and twisted her head back. He shouted in her face, his breath sour with alcohol, and his dark gaze roamed over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and throat, down to her thighs and . . . She shut her eyes to block him out.

That was when he released her hair, reached down, and yanked out a piece of her pubic hair. The pain was sharp but brief and she didn't cry out. He held up the copper curl as a trophy for all to see, and the men around the walls cheered. Instead she thought of how Chang An Lo had twirled those same hairs around his good fingers and called them her fox flames. But what disturbed her more was the glimpse she got of her forearm when she struggled to free her hands. The skin was covered in bite marks. They were the marks of her own teeth where in the dark inside Box she'd been gnawing at a limb. Like a fox in a trap. That frightened her.

She made herself stand straight. 'Sir Edward Carlisle will skin you all alive for this.'

The boy translated. Po Chu laughed. 'Zai na? Where Chang An Lo?' Where Chang An Lo?'

'I don't know.'

'Yes. You know. You say.'

'No. I don't know. He ran away when the Kuomintang troops came.'

'You lie.'

'No. Bu. Bu.'

'Yes.'

Each time the words came from Po Chu, with the boy echoing softly in English.

'Tell truth.'

This time the question came with a slap.

'Tell truth.' Another slap. 'Tell truth.' Slap. Slap. Slap. Again. Again. She lost count.

Her lip split. The s.p.a.ce inside her head turned red. Her ears hummed.

Slap. Slap.

Harder. A knife point nicked the corner of her left eyelid and started to slide along the bottom of her eye as if to pop it out.

'He's dead.' She screamed it.

The knife froze. The slaps ceased. She breathed. Small panicky gasps.

'When dead?' Po Chu demanded. In English. But she barely noticed. Her mind was struggling.

'How dead?' He ran the knife blade in a circle around one breast, and she felt the sting and the trickle of blood.

'From sickness.'

'Shen meshi hou? When?' When?'

'On Sat.u.r.day. I took him to the docks. Nursed him . . . In an old shack . . . he died.' Tears started to pour down her cheeks. It wasn't hard.

The boy translated, but it was the tears that seemed to convince Po Chu. He stepped back with a shrewd smile, flicked the knife spinning up into the air, and as it fell caught its ivory handle with an easy sweep of his fist. He stared at her.

'Guo lai.'

'Come,' the boy said.

Po Chu seized the rope attached to her neck and dragged her across the room toward a screen that closed off one corner. Her eyes fixed on its panels inlaid with lapis and coral, ivory and mother-of-pearl, and she burned them into her memory. If this b.a.s.t.a.r.d was going to blind her, she had to make her last moment of sight go a long way.

'See, gi nu. gi nu.' Po Chu thrust the screen aside.

She saw. And wished she'd drowned inside Box.

On a table, neatly laid out like precision instruments of surgery in an operating theatre, were two rows of tools. Heavy tongs and blades, some serrated and some with needle-sharp points, and beside them lay small blunt hammers, chains and leather collars and cuffs. Her eye was drawn to a piece of iron with a long narrow shovel end and stout wooden handle. Not in her wildest dreams could she begin to guess its purpose.

Her inner organs turned to liquid. Nothing worked anymore. Her breathing stopped. She felt warm fluid dribble down the backs of her thighs and she knew her body was trying to flush out the fear. She felt no shame. She'd left that behind long ago.

'See, gi nu gi nu,' Po Chu repeated. 'Putrid wh.o.r.e. See.'

Her ears still worked. They heard the antic.i.p.ation in his voice.

'Tell truth.'

She nodded.

'Where Chang An Lo?'

'Dead.'

He picked up a pair of heavy iron-teethed tweezers, casually weighed them in his hand, lowered his thick black eyebrows in a frown of concentration, and clamped the metal teeth round her nipple. He squeezed.

She screamed.

Blood, bright red like paint. A burning pain in her breast. She screamed her anger and her hatred at him, bellowed it in his face, and would have hurled herself at him and bitten his eyes out if the rope around her neck had not been pulled tight from behind.

'Good.' Po Chu smiled coldly, a spatter of her blood on his chin. 'Now tell truth.'

57.

They handled him roughly. Grey uniforms all over him like dung flies. A blow to the ribs, a boot in the groin, but Chang An Lo did not retaliate. Only when they thudded a rifle b.u.t.t down on his damaged hand did he spit, but that was all. The headquarters was in a new concrete blockhouse on the edge of old Junchow, tucked into the shadow of the great stone walls, its entrance guarded by two fresh-faced young Chinese officers eager to impress their superiors. When Chang suddenly appeared before them out of the morning mist, their eyes widened in surprise. They stamped their boots and raised their rifles, expecting trouble, but when none came they led him quickly into their captain's office.

'You are the Communist dog we have been hunting,' the Kuomintang officer said with relish. 'I am Captain Wah.'

He removed his cap, tossed it to one side, and rummaged through the chaotic piles of paper on his desk. After a moment's confusion, he pounced on a sheet that he held up at arm's length to inspect. It was an indistinct portrait of Chang's face, skilfully sketched, obviously sent out to all Chinese troop centres and police stations. Chang wondered bitterly which of his friends had obliged and for how much.

Captain Wah stared at Chang with cool, sad eyes and lit himself a thin cigar. 'You will be interrogated first, gutter rat, and then a magistrate will order your execution. All you Communists are cowards who slither on your bellies, like worms under our feet. Your execution is certain, so do not add to the pain of China by worthless loyalty to a cause that is doomed. By great Buddha, we shall rid our country of you vermin.'

Even with wrists handcuffed and the fever in his blood, Chang knew he could kick this man's teeth down his throat before the soldier at the door could draw his gun. It was tempting. But what good would he be to Lydia with a bullet in his brain?

'Honourable Captain,' he said with a humble bow, 'I have information to give, as you so wisely suspect, but I will give it only to one man.'