Had Borisov known Nina was in charge of a large security organization consisting of several hundred armed White Army men, he would have been the first to put her up against the wall to be shot. It was only in the eyes of the Russian émigrés that Nina had made a brilliant career for herself.

The Bolsheviks saw things differently. In their opinion, if some young lady who had run off to China after the revolution suddenly became rich, it could mean only one thing. After all, it was a well-known fact that nobody could achieve success through their own brains and hard work in a capitalist country.

Things were made worse by the fact that Nina had managed to get American passports for herself and Klim, as an exceptional case, without having set foot in the country. Clearly, she was a spy and an enemy of the workers.

Borisov raised his head and looked in at Nina’s window. Then, with a decisive air, he set off inside the house toward her.

Nina’s heart lurched. What should she do now? Make another barricade? What if Borisov started shooting, or, worse still, set the building on fire? Just a few days ago, the Bolsheviks had been saying that the house would have to be burned after they left because it would be impossible to take all their secret documents with them.

Borisov burst into the room and seized Nina by the arm. “You’re coming with us.”

“Where to?” Nina gasped.

“To the Soviet Union. We’ll hammer all the bourgeois nonsense out of you.”

She tried to make a dash for it, but two guards came running to help Borisov. They pulled Nina from the house and pushed her into the back seat of one of the waiting cars.

Borisov thrust a large, blue-tattooed fist up close to her face. “Just one sound out of you, you bitch, and you’re dead.”

2

The small procession left Peking in mid-August, and for some weeks, they traveled a circuitous route along country roads, trying to throw the police off the scent.

All this time, the Bolsheviks continued to keep a close eye on Nina. They were tired, their nerves frayed, and they took out their anger on whoever happened to be on hand. For them, letting Nina go would have meant giving the “White bitch” a chance. This was something, in their eyes, she did not deserve.

When they had got as far as Inner Mongolia, they were joined by more cars carrying Chinese communists and their Russian advisers. These newcomers frightened the fleeing Soviet agents by telling them of the in-fighting that had begun among top party officials in Moscow.

Joseph Stalin had unexpectedly begun to build up authority. In casting around for someone to blame for the foreign policy debacle, he had singled out none other than Leon Trotsky—one of the main organizers of the Bolshevik Revolution and the founder of the Red Army. Those who supported Trotsky were now openly referred to as counter-revolutionaries and were being hounded by the press. This was a bad sign. The agents who had worked in Peking had, almost to a man, been supporters of Trotsky.

Nina shuddered to hear the news. If loyal Bolsheviks were seriously concerned about their own fate, what might lie in store for her? Though, truth be told, she was not at all sure she would even reach Soviet Russia. Borisov made no secret of the fact that he was planning to teach her a lesson. He had recently bought himself a chain metal whip at a village market, and he had promised Nina that he would soon be trying out his new acquisition on her.

Once the convoy had crossed the low mountains, they saw the great Gobi Desert stretching to the horizon, but they were not able to travel far across the stony, trackless waste. One of the cars broke down, and as they tried to mend it, night fell.

For the first time since they had left Peking, the fugitives allowed themselves to relax a little. Borisov had some rice vodka in his luggage, and he passed his flask around the circle.

Nina realized that this was her last chance to make a run for it. They had still not gone too far from the last Chinese village.

As the revolutionaries, warmed by the drink, sat around the fire reminiscing about their life in China, Nina hurriedly gathered her possessions. She took only a compass, a blanket, some bread rusks, and a water flask. There was no point in taking more—if she got lost, she would never survive in any case.

Nina tried not to think about what would happen if she managed to make it to a Chinese settlement. She did not know any Chinese, she had no documents, and it would be impossible to send a message to Shanghai—the nearest telegraph office was more than a hundred miles away. But it would be better to rot in remote Chinese backwater than to fall into Borisov’s clutches.

A little the worse for the drink, the Bolsheviks went off to their tents one by one, and when the first light appeared in the sky above the mountains, Nina quietly stole away from the camp.

Hardly a thing could be seen in the gray half-light. Nina made her way across the flat, stony plain by looking at the stars. All around, it was deathly quiet. Twisting an ankle, stepping on a scorpion, or simply grazing a heel—any of these would be enough to spell death.

“Just wait for me—that’s all I ask,” whispered Nina.

For several months now, she had been keeping up a constant conversation with her husband as if Klim could hear every word she said. When the Chinese had arrested her, Klim had rushed to Peking to make all possible efforts to get her released, and this despite all their quarrels and offenses of the past. No matter what happened between them, he never deserted her when she was in trouble.

The Bolsheviks had almost certainly not told Klim where they had taken Nina after the trial, and she could only guess what he had done after that. Had he gone back to Shanghai? Or had he perhaps stayed in Peking?

“Just you wait. I’ll come back to you,” Nina kept saying. “I’ll make everything right again. Just give me a chance.”

3

When a huge, red sun rose over the desert, Nina was so tired that she felt a constant ringing in her ears and a sharp pain in her side. But she could not stop trudging uphill—she had to walk as far as she could before the heat of the day set in.

Suddenly, the deafening sound of a gunshot broke the silence, and a fountain of small stones erupted right beside Nina. Flinching, she looked around, and her blood ran cold—down below at the foot of the hill stood a familiar, dust-covered Buick.

The German flight instructor, Friedrich, lowering the barrel of his gun, beckoned to Nina. “Come here!”

There was nowhere to hide. Nina sank to the ground and hid her face in her hands. Let them carry her back to the car if they had to.

Borisov came running up, grabbed her by the shoulder, and forced her to her feet.

“Idiot!” he shouted, dealing her a great slap in the face. “Do you know how much petrol we’ve wasted because of you?”

Nina tried to get away, but Borisov twisted her arm and pulled her toward the car.

“You’re for it now!” he hissed. “You backstabber! What if they’d caught you? You’d have handed us all over to the Chinese, wouldn’t you?”

He was about to hit Nina again, but Friedrich stopped him. “We should go,” Friedrich said. “We still have to catch up with the others.”

Nina, sobbing, was bundled into the Buick between boxes of tinned food and a shining gramophone speaker.

“Oh, don’t worry,” said Borisov. “I’ll set you free in a week—without food and water. But first, I’ll thrash the living daylights out of you.”

Friedrich glanced at Nina in the rearview mirror. “Get into the truck with Magda,” he said suddenly in English. “And don’t leave her for a minute, or this scoundrel will beat you to death.”

Nina was bewildered. She had had no idea that any of the Bolsheviks sympathized with her.

Borisov frowned. “What did you just say to her?” He knew no English, despite having spent three years in the Peking Legation Quarter.

“I was just telling her to get into the baggage truck,” said Friedrich. “I don’t want her in my car.”

4

Englishwoman Magda Thomson felt like a pariah among the Bolsheviks. She had an inherent and irreparable defect in their eyes—she was the heiress of a large soap factory near Liverpool. Tall and heavily built, she looked more like a butcher’s daughter than a “soap princess,” but that did not help—the Bolsheviks looked askance at her. Sometimes they would even mock her openly.

Magda had traveled the world at her leisure before settling in Peking. She took a room in a hotel not far from the Legation Quarter, and one night as she sat reading in her room, she had heard a suspicious scuffle outside the door. Looking out into the corridor, she saw a man clutching a bloody wound on his arm.

“The Chinese police are after me,” he panted. “Could I hide out here with you for a while? My name is Friedrich. And yours?”

At the sight of this Teutonic knight with his haughty stare and close-cropped head of graying hair, Magda had been unable to resist. She let Friedrich stay and began helping him in any way she could: driving him to the apartments of fellow conspirators and organizing the evacuation of Chinese communists and their Russian advisers. At night, they would make love.

Magda asked Friedrich about his plans for the future.

“I’m going to Moscow,” he said.

“But why? You’re a German. What is there for you in Moscow?”

“A new life is dawning there. As for your beloved West, it has nothing to offer but vulgarity, tedium, and moneymaking.”

Friedrich told Magda of how he had been taken prisoner by the Russians during the Great War and how he had become friendly with Bolsheviks and realized that it was his fate to try to bring about world revolution. In China, he had instructed National Revolutionary Army pilots in aerial warfare.