“Just so.”
Ten minutes passed, her fear more intense with every second, every footfall she heard. Soon there was the sound of a trolley — more footsteps, fading; then knocking on the door. Her heart jolted. What a fool she’d been — but where else could she have gone? The door opened. Another porter, a smaller, stockier man, a little older than the other, beckoned to her quickly while looking down the corridor.
Once in the lobby, he led her to a taxi, and though she tried to walk more slowly than usual, the intense cold quickened her pace and in a moment she was inside the taxi and whisked out into the night. How the Chinese loved secrecy — it came with their mother’s milk, from having to contend all their lives with the paranoia of the regime. “I will let you out next street,” said the driver, whom she could not see beyond his dim outline behind the wheel. “You go out next street — to your left. There will be another taxi waiting. Ask to go to Stalin Park for the festivities.”
Before she could answer, the cab had stopped. She knew nothing of festivities in Stalin Park — it must be thirty below, the only people out those watching the ice sculptures and—
The driver reached over and quickly pushed open the door. “Out!”
The cab was gone. Alexsandra found herself alone again in the darkness as she started hesitantly to walk down the two blocks, crusted snow crunching beneath her feet so loudly that she felt everyone in the street must hear her. She saw the dark shape of another cab. Sensing a trap, she stopped. The air was pungent with coal smoke that made the fog seem heavy and gritty, even more suffocating than it had been in the hotel. She glimpsed a small flame illuminate the darkness, the waiting cab driver lighting a cigarette. She breathed in deeply, felt giddy, almost slipping on an icy patch as she steered herself resolutely but nervously toward the cab. Her whole body felt in the grip of a deep, damp cold, and she thought of the tea she’d had at the hotel— Long Jin. She would remember the tea forever, even if—
“Stalin Park — yes?” said the driver.
“Yes.”
“Then hop in. We must hurry!”
As they drove off, the taxi quickly gaining speed, she thought it impossible that he could find his way through the dimly lit, fog-swirling world, but at one point she could see the speedometer needle quivering on a hundred kilometers an hour. They hit a dip and for a second she was suspended, her head tapping the car’s roof before she crashed back down on the seat. She smelled and felt dust all about her, as granular as that from the Gobi Desert. The car braked. A Mao-suited figure — a woman, how old it was impossible to tell — opened the door.
“Come,” and the next moment she found herself following the bent black figure down a narrow hutong to a small mud brick house pungent with the smell of something overripe, on the verge of rotting, and vegetables frying. She was shown to a single-cell-sized room, a lone tallow candle burning on a small wall table, flickering in a draft.
“You must stay here,” the woman told her. “The busybodies are everywhere. Worse now there is war.”
The busybodies, she found out, as the old woman brought her tea, were the neighborhood grannies — nosey parkers with red armbands. Fanatically loyal to the party and much more feared than their male counterparts, these were the bullies of the one-child-a-family rule and other party edicts, spies who, despite their age or because of it, were much more dangerous than the police — for their job, and one they followed with zeal, was to know everything that was going on with everyone in the street.
“Sooner or later they would find out,” the old woman told her. “So we will try to get you north as quickly as we can.”
“Who are you?” asked Alexsandra, cupping the tea as much for warmth as for nourishment. “I mean — not your name — but why do you do this? You are so kind to a stranger.”
“Tiananmen,” said the woman simply. “There are many like us,” and suddenly a burden was upon her and she shuffled away.
Young Xiao Ping, a kitchen helper at the Fandian Hotel who had been sent to the Baltic legation by the porter to deliver the note, had no difficulty whatsoever. Despite snow now falling heavily, and the poor street lighting as in all Chinese cities — the recent order of the Harbin people’s council to dim streetlamps still further adding fuel to the rumors of war — Xiao Ping simply wrapped the message about the Nanking Bridge in a clean linen pillowcase from the Fandian Hotel, the hotel’s monogram carefully removed, and tossed it over the legation wall, well away from the main gate, which might be under surveillance. The rock-weighted pillowcase landed softly in the compound on the other side of the wall. It hadn’t occurred to Xiao Ping to wrap it in any other color than white, and in any case by morning it was completely covered with snow.
“Where is she now?” asked Latov, seated at the Siberian consulate table at the banquet celebrating the Chinese lunar new year, the Public Security Bureau man standing behind him, in a waiter’s uniform, informing Latov that the PSB car had had difficulty following her from the hotel in the fog. To have followed the cab too closely would have given the PSB car away.
“You idiots!” said Latov, though still smiling, raising his glass as his Chinese host began an interminable speech about the new and glorious socialist brotherhood between the new United Siberian Republic and the People’s Republic of China.
“Don’t worry, comrade,” the PSB man assured him. “We know the general area. All we have to do is carry out a house-to-house search. And we have already identified at least two contacts she made at the hotel. Two porters.”
“Have you picked them up?”
“No, we were waiting until we told—”
“Do so. Immediately.”
“Must I remind you, comrade,” replied the PSB man, offended by the Siberian’s tone, “that you are our guest in Harbin?”
Latov did not even deign to turn about, bored though he was with his Chinese host’s babbling about socialist brotherhood.
“And yours, comrade, in Novosibirsk.”
“Where are my men?” snapped Latov. He meant the Black Berets.
“At your legation.”
“Tell them I want them to be in on the search for her. They know what she looks like.”
It was a stupid thing to say, and Latov regretted it the moment he had uttered it, feeling the PSB man’s contempt almost immediately.
“We have no difficulty recognizing foreigners, comrade.”
“You mean barbarians?” said Latov.
“As you wish.”
“I want my men involved in the search,” insisted Latov. “You find out who’s hiding her. But when that’s done, she’s to be brought back to me. That was the agreement. She’s a Siberian national.”
“She’s a Siberian whore.”
“As you wish, but she is my whore and I will punish her.”
“We will see.”
“You’ll do as you’re told, comrade, or else you’ll find yourself on the Amur front.”
“You mean the Black Dragon front, comrade?”
“It’s forty below up there, comrade.”
“We Chinese are used to the cold.”
Latov gave a contemptuous snort and reached for his wine. “It’s forty below and the Americans are shooting at you, comrade.”
“Not for long,” said the PSB man. “We know how to deal with Americans. We defeated them in Korea. They ran away.”
