‘Sure. Thanks anyway.’
She closed the door and leaned against it, breathing hard. Chang had not moved.
‘You have good neighbours,’ he said in a quiet voice.
‘Yes,’ she said more calmly, ‘neighbours who don’t trick me with sly words.’ By the teasing light of the candle she could see the skin of his face grow taut across his high cheekbones and he started to speak, but she hurried on, ‘And if my mother should walk in now and find you here, she’d skin you alive, with or without your kung fu kicks. So…,’ she reached for her dress and slipped it on, ‘we will go out into the street, you can tell me what it is you came to say, and then I never want to see you again. Understand?’
She heard his intake of breath, and it seemed to suck the air from her lungs. ‘I understand.’
She led him to a house two streets away. It was more of a shell than a house because it had burned down nine months ago but still lay like a blackened tooth stump in the middle of the brick terrace, and it had become home to bats and rats and the occasional feral dog. Much of what remained had been scavenged, but the outer walls still stood and gave a sense of privacy despite the lack of a roof. Rain had started to fall, a soft gloomy drizzle that sweetened the air and made Lydia’s skin twitch.
‘So?’ She stood and faced him.
Chang took his time. In silence he made himself a part of the darkness and seemed to glide through the ruined rooms, no more solid than the wind that rippled up from the river and cooled Lydia’s bare arms. When he was satisfied no others had taken refuge behind the black piles of rubble, he came back to her.
‘Now we talk,’ he said. ‘I came to see you so that we would talk.’
The faintest remnants from the street lamp on the far corner trickled into the space between them, and Lydia looked at Chang carefully. There was a change in him. She couldn’t see how or what, but it was there. She could feel it. As she could feel the rain on her face. There was a new sadness at the corners of his mouth that tugged at her and made her want to listen to his heart, to learn why it was beating so slow. But instead she tossed her head and reminded herself that he’d used her, that all his concern for her was worth nothing. Just lies and rat droppings.
‘So talk,’ she said.
‘It would have killed you.’
‘What?’
‘The necklace.’
‘You’re crazy.’ She had visions of it throttling her as she tried it on.
‘No, my words are true. You would have taken it to Junchow old town, to one of those snake holes that ask no questions. They rob the thieves that come to their doors but keep their hands white and clean. But no one would touch this necklace, no one would take that risk.’
‘Why?’
‘Because already it was known that it was meant as a gift for Madame Chiang Kai-shek. So you would have returned empty-handed and before you reached home you would be dead in a gutter, the necklace gone.’
‘You’re trying to frighten me.’
‘If I wanted to frighten you, Lydia Ivanova, there are many more things I could say.’
Again his mouth revealed a sorrow that the rest of his face denied. She studied his lips with care and believed them. Standing in the rain in the middle of the filthy ruin under a night sky as black as death, she felt a cold rush of relief. She breathed deeply.
‘It seems I owe you my life yet again,’ she said with a shiver.
‘We are involved, you and I.’ His hand moved through the gap of yellow streetlight that lay between them and touched her arm, a faint brush of skin, no more than a moth’s wing in the darkness. ‘Our fates are sewn together as surely as you stitched the flesh of my foot together.’
His voice was as soft as his touch. Lydia felt the solid ball of anger inside her tremble and start to melt; she could feel it trickling through her veins and out through the pores of her skin into the rain where it was washed away. But what if these were lies too? More lies from those lips of his that could make her believe his words. She wrapped her arms around her body and refused to let the small hard core of her anger escape. She needed it. It was her armour.
‘Involvement means sharing, doesn’t it?’ she said. ‘And it doesn’t alter the fact that the necklace was mine. If you sold it somewhere in the south where they don’t know the importance of it, then at least we should share the money. That sounds fair to me. Fifty-fifty.’ She held out a hand.
He laughed. It was the first time she’d heard him laugh and it did something strange to her. It made her mind uncurl. For that one fleeting moment she forgot the endless struggle.
‘You are like a she-fox, Lydia Ivanova, you sink your teeth in and never let go.’
She wasn’t sure if that was an insult or a compliment but didn’t stop to find out. ‘How much did you get for it?’
His black eyes watched her face, and still the laugh lingered on his lips. ‘Thirty-eight thousand dollars.’
She sat down abruptly. On a low ragged wall. Put her head in her hands. ‘Thirty-eight thousand dollars. A fortune,’ she whispered. ‘My fortune.’
The silence was broken only by something scuttling across the floor and making a dash for the doorway. Chang stamped on it. It was a weasel.
‘Thirty-eight thousand,’ Lydia repeated slowly, rolling the words around her tongue like honey.
‘As many lives were taken in Shanghai and Canton.’
Canton? What was he talking about? What on earth did Canton have to do with her thirty-eight thousand dollars…? Her mind felt clumsy, but then something clicked inside it. A massacre last year. She remembered everyone talking of it. And then there was the time in Shanghai when, on Chiang Kai-shek’s orders, the Kuomintang Nationalists ambushed the Communists and wiped them out in bloody street fighting. A purge, they called it. But in China that was nothing new. Not remarkable. There was always some warlord or other, like General Zhang Xueliang or Wu Peifu, making pacts with another and then betraying each other in savage warfare. So what was it about Canton? Why did Chang bring up that particular incident?
She looked up at him. He had stepped deeper into the shadows, but his voice had given him away. It was so full of rage.
Suddenly it all made sense to her. She leaped to her feet.
‘You’re a Communist, aren’t you?’
He said nothing.
‘It’s dangerous,’ she warned. ‘They behead Communists.’
‘And they jail thieves.’
They stared at each other in the darkness. Silent accusations unspoken on their tongues. She shivered, but this time he did not touch her.
‘I steal to survive,’ Lydia pointed out stiffly. ‘Not to indulge some intellectual ideal.’ She moved away from him. ‘I cannot afford ideals.’
She did not hear his footfalls, but suddenly his dark figure was in front of her again. Rain glistened in his cropped hair and turned his skin silver.
‘Look, Lydia Ivanova, look at this.’
She looked. He was holding up something small and thin, hanging from his fingers. She peered closer at the object. It was the dead weasel.
‘This,’ he said, ‘is my meal tonight. I am not the one who eats my food in a restaurant using sweet lies and false smiles. So do not offer words about the price of ideals. Not to me.’
Lydia’s cheeks burned.
‘Settle this business now,’ she said more sharply than she intended. ‘I want my share of the money.’
‘You are always hungry like the fox. Here. Feed on this.’
He held out a leather pouch to her. She took it. It felt light. Too light. She moved over to where the street lamp’s glow was stronger, stepping over crumbling bricks and finding the open rectangle that had once been a window. In a rush her fingers opened the pouch and tipped out its contents, the same way they had trickled the ruby necklace into her palm not so long ago, but this time there were only a few coins. Did he think a handful of dollars would keep her quiet? She felt them smooth and warm against her skin, the price of his betrayal. Was she worth so little to him? She spun around and in three quick strides she was in front of him again. She pulled back her arm and hurled the pieces of silver into his face.