The Baron was sobered by this mercenary vision but accepted it as truth.
“The passengers refused by CER trains will need transportation. I’m buying up wagons and carts as a new business. My drivers can go south to Beijing or east to Vladivostok, where you catch a ship. Secret routes. Anyplace to avoid plague and inspection.”
“Who are your clients?”
“Restaurant owners and gamblers. Officials and their wives. Merchants. There are fur traders who trust my word. I get a large fee for supplying these escapes. I guarantee surviving this travel even during winter in Manchuria.” It was vodka speaking for Andreev, who was gratified to have an audience. “Why stay here? You can do nothing. Save yourself and serve others elsewhere.” The Baron didn’t reply. “Friend, I can offer train tickets from Kharbin to St. Petersburg. Or Paris, Shanghai, Tokyo. Anyplace that puts distance between you and Kharbin. You’d arrive by New Year’s Eve. Bring your wife and servants. A favorite nurse. I’m discreet.”
The Baron had only to waver to say yes. “The Chinese believe fate is fate. The one unchanging certainty in the world.”
“You talk to too many Chinese.” Andreev was never interested in hearing about Chinese customs. He raised his voice, disregarding stares from the others in the restaurant. “Soon, Kharbin will be nothing but a death pit. Piles of corpses inside and outside the city with a few creeping survivors. No one left to bury the dead. What do they tell you at the hospital?”
Andreev’s words struck him like a stone.
“At least save your wife. Send her away. Give her a choice.”
“It’s a war,” the Baron finally managed to say. “I serve in the war.”
Andreev pulled his hat back on his head. “Let’s leave while there’s enough light.”
Outside, the snow reflected the sun and the two men blinked, dazed by its sharpness, standing without a sense of direction. There was an odor of burning, and a pale yellow glow was visible above the rooftops. They followed a few others to the next street, where the silhouette of a house was visible inside sheets of brilliant orange and yellow flame. The building stood isolated on a jagged black shape, an island, as the surrounding snow had melted from the fire.
The number of buildings burned in the city had rapidly increased, as it was more expedient to destroy them than disinfect them. But buildings that had been made uninhabitable, doors nailed shut, roofless like a mouth open to the sky, had their use: the plague-stricken crawled into these poor shelters and died anonymously. Fewer crowds gathered to watch the fiery spectacles, since they feared smoke carried bacilli, a gray and weightless veil of infection that breath drove deep into the lungs.
There was a struggle near the flames as dark figures and soldiers fought over goods salvaged from the house. The soldiers threw furniture back into the blaze. A man with a bayonet tore a bundle from the arms of an old woman.
“Why burn good clothing?” she cried, her fur coat whitened by intense light from the fire.
“They belonged to the plague dead. They’re poisoned,” the soldier shouted.
A boy grabbed a blanket off the ground and darted away with it. A soldier seized the child and shook him until he dropped it.
“Easy to throw you into the fire.”
The Baron stepped forward and the soldier released the boy.
A boom as a supporting wall of the burning house collapsed, slid at an angle, raising a cloud of sparks fine as insects.
The Baron pivoted away from the fire and was immediately chilled.
“Look.” Andreev nudged the Baron. “A corpse carrier.”
A flat wagon carrying lumpy cargo under a tarp moved slow as a barge between two snowbanks. The crowd immediately turned away or fled in the opposite direction. Puzzled, the Baron waited. The tarp haphazardly roped over the wagon blew free, exposing dangling white arms and intertwined bare limbs, frozen together, the corpses shaking obscenely with every jolt of the wheels on the road.
Andreev’s hand on his shoulder and his voice. “The fear is that you’ll recognize someone’s face in the wagon.”
The Baron closed his eyes, wishing away the wagon and its terrible burden. Andreev continued talking. “I’ve seen families of the dead running after the corpse carriers on the street. They bribe the drivers to release the body. Or offer something in trade.”
“It will bring their deaths.”
“The corpse carriers are desperate railroad workers and servants who lost their jobs. Nothing else pays in Kharbin except picking up the dead or sick.”
The Baron crossed himself and whispered, “Where do they take the dead?”
“Outside the city. Some corpses are dumped on an island in the Sungari. Others are dumped on the ice until the river thaws.”
Andreev’s face was barely visible inside the fur hood but his scornful expression was obvious. “The bodies must be destroyed or the dead will return to haunt us with plague.” He proposed visiting another destination, where he said the Baron would see something of interest. They crossed the city without conversation in a droshky, stopping near a wharf on the river.
They climbed to the top of the Soskin grain mill, one of the tallest buildings in the city. From the small high window, they viewed the shadowy irregular line of the ravine obscured by dense clouds from twenty fires burning in Kharbin. It appeared that an artery had opened in the ground, gushing smoke. The Baron’s focus moved. Several verst away, in an area of desolate land, train tracks patterned a net of black lines and curves in snow. Small figures moved around a stationary line of boxcars as a constant stream of carts, wagons, and other vehicles arrived.
The Baron turned to Andreev. “I expected to see the fires. But what’s the activity around the train cars? Why are so many people in the field?”
“General Khorvat didn’t explain? No? You’ve been blinded by your grief for the patients. What you see is Khorvat’s solution. People with symptoms are picked up by the plague-wagon men and locked inside the train cars. If they survive three days, they’re freed.” Andreev’s words, delivered in a patient mocking tone, had an undercurrent of fear.
The Baron felt the glass in the window would shatter under his gaze, that the tower couldn’t hold his weight, that he’d plunge from this height. Flight was the only escape from this place.
During a calligraphy lesson, the Baron’s teacher Xiansheng had once described a Chinese painting of a storm—immense thick clouds, lightning, rain, dark sky—that represented lung, the dragon. The monster was there but not his physical image. The dragon was present only for those who knew how to translate the significance of the visual clues. The Baron nervously scanned the sky, certain a dragon would emerge from the smoke of Kharbin’s burning buildings, jaws unclenched, hungry for survivors.
Chang evaded the servants at the door and bustled into the Baron’s sitting room, still wearing his coat. “Look. Kharbin has marked me.” The dwarf raised his arm to display a red badge on the coat sleeve. “They’ve set up barricades. Divided the city into four quarters. Everyone must wear a colored badge according to where they live. Red, yellow, blue, or white. When you enter or leave your quarter, soldiers shove a thermometer in your mouth. If you have a temperature, you’re arrested. You disappear.”