Kate Furnivall - The Concubine's Secret

‘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 did not 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 non-person. So instead I shall do as you ask and tell you about my work. It is the one thing left in me which 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 Programme 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 which 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 aeroplane’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 that of my dead friend Liev Popkov.

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 of 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 recognised him and Liev was shot for resisting arrest. No one was going to recognise 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. 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 offence 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 centre.

‘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, his jaw jutting in a display of aggression. ‘Let’s talk about tomorrow.’

Chang led her away. He wanted to rid Lydia ’s skin of the stink of them, to draw her from their cigars and their words of violence. He walked her across the city to Arbat, to a small Chinese tea room, and it pleased him when her eyes brightened at the sight of it.

‘I had no idea it was here,’ she smiled.

‘There’s one in every capital city in the world. We Chinese are like rats, we get everywhere.’

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

‘I had forgotten,’ he murmured, ‘how much my spirit misses the colours that bring life and energy. Here in Soviet Russia the streets are grey as death. Even the sky above us is flat and colourless.’

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 colours of 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.’