The Concubine's Secret Read Free

China to this godforsaken dead-and-alive hole in Russia.
    A shout dragged her attention back to where it should have been, and her young stomach swooped with a sudden flutter of panic. Popkov was losing. Not just pretend losing. Really losing.
    She felt sick. Coins were pouring into the grubby green kerchief on the bar where the bets were held, and all of them were now against Popkov. That was exactly what she and he had planned, but she’d left too late her signal to him to start fighting back. The black hairs on his burly forearm were only a hand’s breadth from the surface of the table as his opponent forced him down, and the bulging muscle started to twitch and shake.
    No, Popkov, no.
    Damn it, how could she have left it so late? She knew he would see his arm break before he’d allow it to collapse in defeat.
    ‘God damn you, Popkov,’ she yelled at the top of her lungs, ‘are you some kind of babushka or what? Put a bit of effort into it, will you?’
    She saw his teeth flash, his shoulder swell. His fist lifted a fraction, though he never took his one good eye off his opponent’s face.
    ‘He’s done for!’ someone shouted.
    ‘ Da , I’ll drink well tonight.’ Raucous laughter.
    ‘Finish the job. You’ve got him-’
    Sweat dripped on to the stained table and the dog in the corner barked in time to their rapid heartbeats until someone slapped it down. Lydia elbowed a path through the crush of bodies to stand right behind Popkov, desperately rubbing her own right forearm as if by doing so she could rub fresh life into Popkov’s tearing muscle.
    She couldn’t let him lose. Couldn’t.
    To hell with the money.
     
    Up on the landing Alexei Serov lit a black cheroot and flipped the dead match down on the drinkers below.
    The girl was impossible. Didn’t she realise what she was doing?
    He narrowed his eyes against the pall of smoke that clung to his hair and his skin like dead men’s breath. There were probably thirty men down there in the bar, plus a handful of women in dark dreary clothing, heavy grey skirts and brown shawls. That was one of the things he loathed most about this new Stalinist Russia: the dreariness of it. All the towns the same. Depressing grey concrete, grey garb and grey faces, dull eyes that slid away from you to the grey shadows and mouths that stayed firmly shut. He missed the exuberant colours of China, the same way he missed its swooping roof lines and vibrant songbirds.
    Lydia was proving harder to deal with than he’d expected. When he sat her down and explained the dangers here, she just laughed that effortless laugh of hers, tossed her flaming hair at him and assured him with eyes wide that she might be only seventeen but she’d lived with danger before and knew how to handle it.
    ‘But this danger is different,’ he’d explained patiently. ‘It’s everywhere. In the air you breathe, in the khleb you eat and in the pillow that lies under your head at night. This is Josef Stalin’s Russia. It’s 1930. No one is safe.’
    ‘ Davai, davai, davai! Come on, come on, come on!’
    The gamblers in the bar were chanting the words, and to Alexei it sounded dismally like the bleating of sheep. The locals had bet their petty kopecks on their own man and now crowded round the pair, who were locked together as intimately as a couple in the throes of sexual frenzy, mouths open and spittle in silver threads between their lips. There was nothing more than a shiver between Popkov’s arm and the table. You couldn’t slide a goddamn knife between them. Alexei felt his heart kick up a pace and that was when Lydia leaned down to the Cossack and whispered something in his ear. She was a small slender figure among the bulk of broad swarthy faces and thick padded waists, but her hair stood out like a fire down there in the dim light as it drew close to the greasy black curls and stayed there.
    It took a moment. No more. Then slowly the massive arm began to rise, to force the other arm back,