Uneasy with the Baron’s insistence, Andreev put on a false smile, attempted to take back his words. “He told me very little. What I heard, I’ve mostly forgotten.”
“But you must know how to contact him, since you delivered supplies for his expedition.”
“My men made the delivery to him. I don’t drive goods around Kharbin.”
Their exchange became jagged, stressful, as both men recognized it had decayed into evasion and falsehood. The superior man is master of his demeanor. The Baron relaxed his mouth. “I see. You might recollect the information later.”
“Yes. I might.”
“And the Jesuit priest, Alexiovich’s guide? Who is he? Where is he?”
“Lost in Manchuria. Never returned.”
There was some reason for Andreev to withhold information about the Russian hunter and his guide. Alexiovich was probably a prominent businessman or official who could afford a lengthy expedition. Andreev might know about a scandal, potential blackmail that involved this man. Alexiovich. A common name. A hare’s chase. But he couldn’t afford to dismiss Andreev for keeping this secret. Friends, anyone, could die within a day. A lapse of judgment could be forgiven. Even an insult could be forgotten.
Andreev returned his attention to the Baron. “There’s something you should see. Follow me.”
Outside the bank, the wind caught them and they doubled back on Konnaya Street. Andreev turned into a narrow alley and grabbed the Baron’s arm.
“There. See,” Andreev hissed softly, pointing at two shadowy figures standing so still they seemed embedded in the courtyard wall. One of them had something draped over his arm, perhaps a cloth or net, and they both held stout sticks.
“Don’t move,” Andreev whispered.
One of the silent figures stepped cautiously forward, then stopped. Another step and a pause. Then he leaped forward and smashed his stick into the ground several times.
The Baron turned for an explanation, but Andreev’s hand gestured for quiet. The two figures edged along the wall, waiting motionless for twenty breaths, then chased something back and forth, furiously slamming their sticks down again and again, churning up the snow. Then they slowly searched the ground, stabbing their sticks to impale small dark objects, dropping them into a sack. Finished, they stopped and pulled back their fur hoods. Two women.
“Rat hunters. Each dead rat gets a bounty from the Kharbin government,” Andreev said. “Thousands of rats are killed every day. People are desperate. There’s no work. The railroad dismissed all the Chinese workers, thousands of men, fearing they’d spread infection. But the Russians are still employed.”
So Dr. Mesny’s rat-collecting program had survived his dismissal.
A man pushed a cart over to the women rat catchers and they swung their heavy sacks into it.
“Rats are saviors of the starving. Some hunters boast they can strangle rats with their bare hands.”
“You’re well informed about rat hunters, Andreev.”
“I’m always interested in new markets.”
“You’re considering work as a rat catcher?”
“Broker and importer.” Andreev made an expansive gesture. “I have wagons and carts loaded with dead rats moving from Kirin, Hulan, and Shitaochengtzu to Kharbin. The rats are packed frozen. Flattened. Easy to transport here for the bounty payment. There’s no proof of origin.”
The Baron felt something like admiration and the absurdity of the situation bubbled inside and erupted. His laughter was a white cloud between them.
They walked past the opera house and the Standard Oil office, Andreev waving at patches of dirty snow and bright red ice patterned with spatters of blood from the clubbed rats.
Andreev hailed a droshky and they drove past the sites haunted by rat hunters stalking their prey in alleys, garbage dumps, cesspools, wells, burned-out buildings, warehouses stacked with timber, and flour mills. By the tanneries, footsteps marred the snow around foul black pools, the waste from skinned goats, lambs, and horses, scummed over, crusted, never frozen.
“A tour of hell.” The Baron pulled the fur collar up under his nose as the smell penetrated even inside the droshky.
At a collection point, the driver stopped and they watched a steady stream of men, women, and children line up with bulky sacks and baskets balanced on poles across their shoulders. The dead rats were dumped out, counted. The hunters were paid. A row of wagons, guarded by soldiers, transported the dead vermin to a warehouse in Staryi Kharbin, about five miles from the Sungari River.
Next, the droshky driver took them to the stock exchange building, where three soldiers loitered near the door. One of them lifted his rifle and slowly swung around, tracking something moving on the ground along a stone wall. He fired once, triggering a faint high-pitched squeal, and then he ran forward and thumped his rifle butt into the snow, finishing off the animal.
Andreev grimaced. “They kill cats and dogs since they also carry plague fleas. I begin to think everything that moves is infected. There’s one last place to show you.”
Daylight was fading. Snow hid a vast mesh of train tracks around a warehouse so it appeared stranded in a field of smooth snow. The droshky driver refused to go farther. The two men jumped from the vehicle, moved unsteadily toward the warehouse, their legs plunging deep into the snow, unable to judge its depth. At the warehouse, the guard acknowledged Andreev’s salute and the Baron followed him through a low door. Inside, a terrible stench, and he clapped his cold glove over his nose, shaken by the howling and barking of dogs. He stepped back from the hundreds of dogs locked in cages, row upon row stacked above his head.
Andreev had blocked his nose with a cloth and gestured toward the door. Outside, they fell back against the wall, gasping, gulping fresh air. The Baron wanted to throw himself in the snow, roll and roll to suffocate the memory, the smell of the place.
“Why did you bring me here?”
Andreev’s eyes were fixed in calculation. “The men who raise the animals for skins and meat smuggle in food for the dogs. They buy scraps to feed the animals from several sources to avoid raising suspicion. If this place was discovered, all the dogs would be slaughtered, since they have fleas that might carry plague.”
The Baron staggered upright, waded through snow in the direction of the droshky, moving so slowly he felt it was the suspension of a dream. Then Andreev helped him stand up although he didn’t remember falling. “I want you to report this place. For the sake of the dogs.”
“But the animals will be killed.” The Baron was bewildered.
“It will be a mercy. The poor beasts suffer.”
CHAPTER TEN
Wu fiddled impatiently with his spectacles while a boy moved around the hospital conference table, deftly serving everyone hot tea from the samovar. The Baron recognized this was not an empty moment and prepared himself during the wait, correcting his posture, settling calm into his breath. Stilling the heart, as his teacher had described. It was a relief to be free of the bulky protective clothing, the white mask, and sit face-to-face with the others. But the smooth wood table, the metal chairs, shelves, the scattered papers, offered no defense against the bacilli that haunted them. He imagined the hospital empty, the soft bodies of the doctors and patients vanished. Was anyone else uneasy? Zabolotny, Iasienski, Lebedev, Haffkine, Wu?
Wu wished them good morning, called for their attention. “A few points of business to begin. After Dr. Mesny’s untimely death at the Metropole, the hotel was fumigated and temporarily closed. Unfortunately, his death also prompted a neighboring hotel, the Grand, to evict all the doctors and medical workers who were guests. Until there’s an alternative, we’ll rent private homes or rooms for the displaced. Never discuss this with anyone outside the hospital. Certainly never speak to newspapers or representatives from foreign countries. Rumors harm us.”