The Master Of Rain

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.

“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