“Yes. If you plan to travel. Or escape.” A nervous chuckle from Nestorov. “Andreev always told me he was in the business of selling animals to animals. His joke. He sold sable and tarbagan pelts, horn and bone. Bear paws. Live tiger and fox cubs. Perhaps the creatures were to be raised as pets in a brothel.” He blushed. “I’ve heard of such practices.”
“Your mother mentioned that you’d stayed with a native tribe?”
“The Buryat. They treated me very well. I’ve never felt so safe. Slept like a child.”
The Baron ignored this and moved toward his target. “I heard there was an illness among the Buryat.”
Nestorov’s hesitation spanned a blink. “Father Jartoux, who spoke their language, was told about an illness that periodically returns.” He was sweating profusely and the high collar of his jacket was ringed with a dark irregular line. He rubbed a handkerchief over his face and neck, studying the Baron in calculation. “You’re a doctor at the Russian hospital?”
The Baron felt a prickle of fear, as if he were responding to a threat. He was surrounded by an aura of disinfectant, a warning to others. A death stink.
Nestorov fumbled in the drawer of his desk. “I met no one who was ill. No one.”
“You lie.”
A dry mechanical click and Nestorov’s hand swept up holding a gun. “I knew I’d be tracked here. Did you come to arrest me, Doctor? I’m not sick. I won’t be quarantined. Don’t worry, I won’t shoot you. The pistol is for my head.”
The Baron sprang at the desk, knocked Nestorov’s arm sideways. The gun thudded onto the floor.
Nestorov began to weep noisily, cheeks scarlet with tears.
Moving slowly, the Baron slid open the drawer in Nestorov’s desk. It was filled with rows of neatly rolled gauze bandages, disinfectant, liquid morphine, carbolic acid.
“You’re still alive, weeks after exposure to the sickness. The plague. You’re not contagious. Trust me.” The Baron waited for gratitude, as he’d delivered the man from a death sentence.
Nestorov was dazed. “All this time I was afraid. I waited.” His voice a whisper. “Waited for the cough. Fever. Blood on my tongue.” His broad fingers rubbed his jaw. “Then Andreev came here. Knew about the sickness, the Buryat tribe. Jartoux had told him everything. Andreev confronted me and I paid him. Otherwise, he said, the plague wagons would come for my family. Later, I realized that Andreev didn’t believe I was sick. He stood here without a mask or anything to protect himself from infection. I was a fool.”
“You’re safe now.”
Nestorov’s bluster returned. “I wonder if the plague is a Chinese plot.” Then he sighed and leaned over his desk. “We found one Buryat man who was sick. He vomited blood. Father Jartoux started to treat the man in his tent but then refused to touch him. Even Jartoux’s boots were bloody. He performed last rites outside while the man coughed and coughed in the tent.” He grimaced. “What do you think the savages did next?” Without waiting for an answer, he continued. “They sewed the sick man inside the tent. Then they packed up camp and left him. Jartoux and I traveled back together, keeping a distance from each other. I was afraid of him, afraid he’d caught the sickness and would infect me. I wanted to leave but had no other guide. We shared no foodstuffs or water, slept in separate tents. All our equipment, the Kabul tent and supplies, was burned when we arrived in Manchouli. Others would gladly have paid for the stuff but I swear we destroyed everything. You believe me?”
The Baron nodded.
“I returned alone on the train. After a week, isolated at home, I was certain that I wasn’t infected. I would die before exposing my family to any sickness. Then I heard about the deaths, the bodies in the Hailar, Chalainor, and Manchouli train stations. And bodies near Central Station here in Kharbin. I cautioned my family about crowds, forced them to stay in the house. Now I fear that this thing is among us in the city. But I’m not the carrier. I didn’t bring plague death.”
“I need a list of train passengers and staff on the day you traveled back to Kharbin.”
“What will you do with the names?”
“Check the obituaries. One match spreads fire.” But the Baron suspected this was a dead end. It was probably impossible to discover who had brought plague to Kharbin. He imagined the dim interior of the Buryat tent, walls wet with blood, hot, close, and stinking, the Jesuit priest leaning over the sick man, listening to his rasping cough, crawling backward out of the narrow space. A man of God despite his refusal, his turning away.
The Baron wished Nestorov good day and caught a droshky outside Central Station. He woke abruptly, thrown forward when it stopped at the Russian hospital. In the lobby, a messenger caught his attention before he’d even removed his hat.
“From General Khorvat, Baron. Sir.” The messenger was a young boy and he stood at a distance, obviously nervous about physical contact with a hospital doctor, a chumore. Still wearing gloves, he handed over the envelope.
“A meeting at the general’s office?”
“I—I don’t know. Sir.” The boy stuttered. “I didn’t read it.” His face, reddened from the cold, blossomed scarlet. He took the Baron’s coin and quickly left the building.
General Khorvat’s letter ordered the Baron to negotiate with Father Bourles, a Catholic priest, at his church compound. The priest and his followers had amassed a store of food and barricaded themselves in the church to wait out the plague. They anticipated that faith and prayer would save their lives.
He found the droshky outside and wearily pulled the weight of a fur rug over his legs, its pungent odor sharpened by the cold air. At the church, a ragtag group of medics, a nurse, two soldiers, and Father Androvich were waiting for him by the high stone wall surrounding the compound. A soldier angrily kicked a clod of ice at the door in the wall.
“How long will we stand here?” The second soldier impatiently pulled the bell rope by the door. He leaned over, squinting into a crack above the door latch. “I see snow in the courtyard. No footprints. Nothing moves.” He straightened up and studied the thick door. His ax splintered the wood around the latch and the door swung open.
The group crowded into a wide courtyard, a square of undisturbed snow surrounded by gray stone walls.
“Hello? Hello?”
Across the courtyard, a small figure appeared, so still that it seemed to have emerged from the wall of the building.
“Who is it? A child?”
The nurse took two steps forward but the Baron roughly pulled her back.
“Wait.”
The child made a helpless gesture and collapsed. They struggled through the snow across the courtyard and gathered around the body of a small girl. Her face was lilac and her lips were blue. Her white garment was stained with blood.
“Don’t touch the child.”
Father Androvich pushed a medic aside and fell to his knees by to the body. “Where is thy mother, little one?” he whispered. He cleaned the child’s face with his sleeve. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the wide world, and they that dwell therein.” He made the sign of the cross.
Everyone crossed themselves, muttering, “God have mercy.”
Two bodies were found near the stone wall. They were facedown, both of them in fur coats and partially buried in snow. Impossible to tell if they had died of plague or cold. The soldiers tugged at the frozen arms and legs angled stiff as branches. They rocked the bodies back and forth, pried them from the snow’s grip, and turned them over. Two Chinese, a young woman and an older man, their faces speckled with bits of leaves, the skin blotched red-purple-green where blood had settled after death. With a gloved finger, the Baron gently touched the woman’s cheek, surprised by its solid hardness. Flesh like stone.