The Concubine's Secret

33

‘It’s fascinating to see the construction of it.’

‘I agree,’ Jens Friis responded to Olga, who was standing at his side. They were both gazing upward. ‘Every time I see it, it takes my breath away.’

‘It’s like a huge pregnant whale floating up there.’

Jens laughed, his breath a shimmer of white in the early morning air. ‘Ah, Olga, you don’t do it justice. It’s an airship. Look at it. Sleek and elegant. A gigantic silver bullet waiting for someone to pull the trigger.’

He was proud of the design. However much he hated it, he was proud of it. Like a child who goes bad, it’s hard to stop loving it. Airships had a far greater range than aeroplanes and this one, with two biplanes attached to it, would provide a weapon that could terrorise whole cities and battlegrounds.

With a shiver Olga looked away from the creation looming above their heads. Instead she stared at young Fillyp struggling with the ropes, at the cement floor meticulously clean, at her own hands, a skilled chemist’s hands.

‘Olga,’ Jens said gently, and for a brief second while everyone’s attention was elsewhere he touched her shoulder. ‘It’s not your fault. You have no choice. None of us have.’

She turned her bleak blue eyes on him. ‘Is that true, Jens? Is that really true?’

The airship’s hangar was as high and as intricately ribbed as the vaulted ceiling of a cathedral. It towered above them like a new kind of sky, but no sun ever shone inside this world. It dwarfed the band of engineers and scientists who set about their work with well-schooled efficiency, reduced to the significance of worker ants by the vast structure.

Today it was Jens’ task to reconstruct the release triggers on the gas containers, adjusting his new design for one of the holding brackets on the underside of the biplanes in the adjoining hangar. The weight of each biplane was crucial to the airship’s balance, so he had to calibrate his measurements with minute precision. He was watched carefully. Not only by the guards who shuffled up and down, rifles slung over their shoulders, beating their arms across their chests to keep warm, but by the others. He never knew who they were or what they did. Lean-faced, grey-haired observers, two of them, always dressed in black suits. He called them the Black Widows because they crawled all over the place, poisonous as spiders.

They both wore spectacles and one was constantly unwinding the wire frames from his ears and polishing the glass with his pristine white handkerchief, which seemed to be reserved for that one specific task. They rarely spoke. Just watched everything he did. Sometimes when he glanced over his shoulder, one of the overhead lamps would be reflected in their lenses and it looked to Jens as if hell fire itself was trapped in their eyes.

Outside in the mist Elkin was lolling on a bench at the side of the hangar, smoking a cigarette and picking at a burn on the back of his hand. Smoking of any kind was strictly forbidden inside the hangars, or even anywhere near them for that matter, but once out here in the surrounding compound no one bothered much and the massive buildings provided good protection from the biting wind.

Jens lit his own cigarette – one of the bonuses of being part of this unit was free smokes – and took a place next to his colleague on the bench, folding his long legs under the seat.

‘Elkin,’ he said, ‘you and I have got to have a serious talk about timing. You told Colonel Tursenov that we’ll have it fixed in two weeks.’

‘It’s true, we can.’

‘I think that’s very doubtful. We’ll have to run a sequence of tests first.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Friis, don’t treat me like one of those dimwits over there.’ He gestured with the tip of his cigarette towards a guard sitting on the top step of a stone store hut over by the compound’s brick wall. Near enough to keep an eye on them but too far for words to carry.

‘Elkin, just think about what we’re doing here,’ Jens murmured. ‘Think about the monster we’re creating.’

‘All I’m thinking about is my release at the end of it. That’s what they promised us. Our freedom.’

‘You’re a fool, Elkin.’

‘What the hell do you mean by that?’

‘Use that big brain of yours. What we’re involved in here is top secret. Do you honestly believe that when we’ve completed our work, they’ll just open the doors and let us walk out?’

‘Yes!’

‘Like I said, you’re a fool.’

Elkin jumped to his feet and glared down at Jens, who remained seated, unwilling to attract the guard’s attention.

‘Friis, I did nine years in the camps in Siberia, including three in the Kolyma gold mine. I’m bloody lucky to be still alive at all. I’m not going to risk this one chance of becoming a free citizen, of returning to my family, just because you have some stupid misplaced notion of noble behaviour to protect others.’

‘We are all lucky to be alive. And every one of us wants our freedom.’

Elkin leaned over so that his scarred face was only inches from Jens and whispered fiercely, ‘Then don’t fucking ruin it for the rest of us by causing any more delays.’ He turned on his heel and strode through the damp air back towards the hangar, his figure dissolving in the mist.

Jens didn’t move. He let his unfinished cigarette fall to the wet grass and inhaled deeply while he fought off a black wave of sorrow. He was used to depression. It always came and sat at his heels like a faithful dog until he was as accustomed to its rank and fetid breath as he was to his own. But now he had a weapon against it, a bright light he could switch on at will, shine in its dull lifeless eyes and drive it back into the darkness from which it came: the knowledge that his daughter was alive.

He closed his eyes and conjured her up. An elfin dancing creature. He tried to imagine her as she would be now, a young girl of seventeen with hair the colour of flames and clear amber eyes that looked at you straight. A face that kept private thoughts hidden behind a slow, curious smile. But he couldn’t do it. That seventeen-year-old kept sliding away into the mist like Elkin, and in her place skipped a laughing child, one who tossed her head when she ran into a room or creased her smooth forehead into a frown of concentration when helping her father bang a nail into a length of wood, or draw a perfect angle of ninety degrees. A heart-shaped face that would tilt up at him, eyes bright, and break into a wide grin when he tapped her little chin and said, ‘Well done, malishka.’

‘I’m glad you’ve found something to look happy about.’

Jens opened his eyes to find Olga standing in front of him. He liked that shy uncertain way she had about her, and had an overwhelming urge to take her hand firmly in his and walk away to freedom. Except that the field and the hangars were surrounded by a ten-metre-high wall topped with coils of vicious wire, and guards patrolled its perimeter day and night.

So instead he said, for her ears only, ‘Someone is looking for me.’

‘Who?’

‘My daughter.’

Olga’s eyes widened, soft blue eyes that were good at spotting his moods. ‘I didn’t know you even had a daughter.’

There was something in her voice, something regretful just under the surface, but he was too engrossed by the images in his head to notice it.

‘I thought she was dead,’ he said.

‘What happened?’

His ears heard the crack of a gunshot and he looked around quickly before he realised it was in his mind. ‘We were on a train.’ He recalled the temperature in the cattle wagons. So cold it transformed the blood in his veins to agonising ice and he’d watched the lips of his wife and daughter turn blue, their skin whiter than the snow outside in the wastelands of Siberia.

‘The Bolsheviks were everywhere,’ he said, ‘stopping all White Russians escaping. They hauled all the men off the train and…’ He grimaced and lit himself another cigarette to rid his mouth of the taste of death.

‘Shot them?’ Olga asked.

He nodded. ‘I was one of the lucky ones. Because I’m Danish, they threw me in a labour camp instead.’ He drew hard on his cigarette. ‘Lucky,’ he repeated bitterly. ‘It depends what you mean by that word, doesn’t it?’

‘What about your wife and daughter? What happened to them?’

‘I thought they would have been killed as well.’

‘But now you’ve heard your daughter is alive?’

‘Yes.’ His broad smile came as a surprise to both of them. ‘Her name is Lydia.’