The Master of Rain Part 54

"If you love me, then you must leave." Her face softened. "If you love me as you say, then please go now and don't come back."

"I cannot."

She looked at him, tears flooding her eyes. "He killed himself three years ago. I have mourned him every single day since."

He nodded. "When I saw that photograph of you all together, I envied you." He knelt beside her chair. "All I wanted, all I ever wanted, was for my father to say just once, 'I love you, Richard. I love you, my boy. Well done. You played really well, you tried really hard, you did your best.' Just once. Just once. Your father loved you, Natasha. I saw it in his eyes. I hear it in your voice. However it ended, you did what you had to do. You had no choice, but my father . . . Just once, that was all I wanted, just once, and even if he couldn't bring himself to say it, at least to have felt it, to have shown it. A hand on the shoulder, my hair ruffled. It's so meaningless unless you 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 wh.o.r.e. 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 wrong with you?" 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 enjoy the power? You saw me in the nightclub, you know how it is." 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 l.u.s.t 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. 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 deliberate disregard for the attractiveness of most of the buildings in the Concession. Field felt barely under control-unwanted, uncontrollable images of Lu and Natasha together still tearing through his mind.

It had been another long, sleepless night. For much of it, he had walked through the darkened streets.

Both ground-floor flats had tiny yards beside them, behind a wrought-iron fence, next to the road. In both, lines of laundry swayed in the breeze. Natalya had lived in 1A, and the woman who lived there now also looked like a prost.i.tute-heavily made-up, with high leather boots and a tight top. She must have been fifty, and looking at her made Field feel queasy. The door was slammed in their face.

"Silent again today, polar bear," Caprisi said as they turned away.

Field didn't answer.

"But I'm glad you called."

Field still didn't respond. He wasn't certain whether he had been right to give Caprisi Natalya Simonov's address. He hadn't told him that she and Natasha had been sisters.

"You've done well, polar bear."

In the flat opposite, they found an elderly couple named Schmidt who, shaking their heads sadly, said they had known Natalya and invited them in.

The sitting room was even smaller than Field had expected, and nothing about it suggested any connection at all with Shanghai. Neither of them was allowed to refuse Mrs. Schmidt's offer of chocolate torte and coffee, and as they listened to her-she was a talker, he could see, too often devoid of company-Field studied her husband and the photograph of a young boy in uniform on the sideboard.

"Our son," Mr. Schmidt said proudly.

"Otto," his wife said, handing each of them a plate with a large slice of cake. "He is the butcher now."

They both spoke with broad German accents, and Mrs. Schmidt had said this without a hint of irony.

"Your son is a butcher?" Caprisi asked.

"It was Hans's business when we married and we build it up. Now we give it to our son."

"He fought in the war?" Field asked.

She looked at him, trying to gauge if there was any hostility in his eyes. "He wished to. For his country."

"We understood," Hans said in a manner that indicated they had not.

Hans was a small man, with a face permanently set in a smile, a long nose and forehead, and an almost oval skull, with a few hairs straying in different directions across its crown. His wife was plump, neat, and ordered, her dress pressed, her hands placed carefully in her lap.

They were poor but honest, Field thought.

"Natalya," Caprisi said.

"You were friends?" Mrs. Schmidt asked him.

"In a manner of speaking."

She leaned forward. "Do not worry. You are police, I can tell, but we will not . . ." She looked at her husband conspiratorially, then back again. "The French police . . ."

"Yes." Caprisi cleared his throat. "You knew her?"

"Of course! We are neighbors. I know it is the way of some in the big city to . . . But we are from a small town in Bavaria. It is not our tradition." She looked at her husband again. "We have lived here so many years."

"So you knew her well?"

"We would look after her cat sometimes. And her little boy, of course." She shook her head sorrowfully.

"Her little boy?" Caprisi said.

"Yes. Alexei."

"How old was he?"

"Her little boy?" Field asked, finally taking in what she'd said.

"Alexei, yes. He is six."

"She had a son?" Field said.

"Yes."

"Natalya Simonov had a son?" he repeated.

"Yes."

"It was her own?"

"Ja. Of course." Of course."

"Natalya Simonov had a boy?" he said once again. They were all frowning at him now. "What has become of him?" he added quickly.

The Schmidts looked at him, as if he were stupid. "The orphanage, of course." Mrs. Schmidt turned to her husband. "What could we do? We could not have him. Could we, Hans?"

"No." He shook his head firmly.

"Where else could he go?" she said.

Field felt a sense of despair creeping over him. "The boy, Alexei, went to an orphanage?"

"Ja."

"What about his family?"

The Schmidts looked at each other, shaking their heads.

"Natalya had no family?" Field said. "No one who came to see her, no one the boy could have gone to?"

They shook their heads again.

"Which orphanage?"

Mrs. Schmidt exchanged glances with her husband. "They came in a car . . . there was a nun. I do not know her name. In Shanghai they are all the same."

"Did he want to come here?" Caprisi asked.

"How could we?"

"We are old," Hans said. "We are old!"

"It was Otto. He should never have had . . . She was no good for him. Afterwards he could not bear to see the boy."

"The boy . . . Alexei was his?"

"No!" She shook her head vigorously. "Of course not. My Otto is not like this. He is an honorable man, but the boy reminded him of his love for her and the family they could have had. He could not shake her from his silly head, even before she died." Mrs. Schmidt looked at her husband, then back at Caprisi. "She was pleasant to us, always friendly. I must say that. But she was-"