The older clerk looked taken aback, but Dimitri didn’t care. Then a voice came from behind his shoulder.
“Dimitri?”
He whirled around. A lovely young woman stood a few yards away, looking at him in a combination of hope and curiosity. She was a vision. Black hair, green eyes. Beautiful.
He dared not hope but couldn’t help himself. “Are you Natalia?”
She beamed a radiant smile. “I am Natalia,” she said, then stepped forward to kiss him on the cheek. “Welcome to America.”
Relief washed through him, and he grabbed her in a mighty hug. She smelled like lemon and sunshine and hope. Tears stung his eyes.
“I think this is the happiest moment in my life,” he choked out, still clutching her, but her voice was lighthearted in response.
“Oh, Dimitri, must we begin with your typical exaggerations?”
He wasn’t exaggerating. Eight months of fear and deprivation had just come to a swift end, but he had forgotten his manners. He released her and stepped back a pace.
“Forgive me for being so forward,” he said, adjusting the flap of his jacket to its proper position. “You have taken me by surprise. I did not expect you to be here.”
Her smile was sympathetic. “The telegram didn’t sound like you, but I couldn’t be sure itwasn’tyou either, so I came to see for myself.”
“I’m very glad you did. I finally know what you look like. Natalia, you are beautiful! And you can finally see me, a little ragged and worse for wear, but alive.”
She took a step back, her eyes traveling up and down the mishmash of clothing he’d collected. “You look like a Cossack,” she said, nodding toward the red sash tied around his middle.
He shook his head. “Cossacks live on the other side of Russia. This is a Buryat sash and a Mongolian coat, with trousers from a Dukha peddler. The shoes are pure Russian peasant.”
He smiled at her like an idiot, and she smiled back. “I didn’t realize you had a beard.”
“It comes and goes with the seasons.” Right now, it was itching. He probably wouldn’t keep it much longer. San Francisco wasn’t as warm as he expected, but it was no Siberia, and he didn’t like looking anything less than respectably groomed.
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
“Starving.”
“Then follow me,” she said with a charming smile, and at that moment Dimitri would gladly follow her anywhere.
Natalia led Dimitri to a shop that sold warm bread and hot soup inside the Ferry Building. He didn’t look like she’dexpected. His messages were always so genteel and well-spoken, but the man before her looked like a mangy skeleton wearing filthy rags.
And yet he displayed the exquisite manners of a gentleman. He held a chair out for her at the café and unfolded his napkin with long, elegant fingers before draping it over his lap. The way his eyes widened as the soup was delivered made her suspect he was famished, but he still bowed his head in prayer before eating.
He might not look like Dimitri, but hesoundedlike her old friend. He praised the chowder as being like ambrosia kissed with sunshine. His observations of traveling in steerage were pure Dimitri.
“What a spectacular horror. They served us rice that tasted like sawdust seasoned with wallpaper paste, but I made friends with a man from Shanghai who shared his sack of gingerroot with me. He ground it into the rice, spoke some sort of spell, and then voila! It was as though kissed by the gods. Life will never again be so grim now that I have discovered the miracle of gingerroot.”
Natalia was grateful for his talkative rambling, since it gave her time to study him. The grubby clothes and shaggy hair couldn’t disguise the strong line of his features. He had high cheekbones and a long blade of a nose. His hair was so grimy that it was hard to know what color it was, but probably some sort of chestnut shade.
He needed a bath, a haircut, and a shave. There were public bathhouses on Market Street, and she could buy him a change of clothes while he bathed. His dingy shirt stank and was smeared with old bloodstains. His shoes were strips of woven birch bark held together by a few pieces of dirty string. All of it should be burned.
When she suggested as much, his hand went to the red sash tied around his middle. “You may burn everything but this,” he said. “This sash is sacred to me, a symbol of enduring friendship and struggle. I will keep it until my dying day. It shall be a part of my funeral shroud.”
“Enough with the Russian fatalism,” she teased. “I didn’t come all the way across the country to plan your funeral.”
“Then, why did you come?” he asked. All trace of humor was gone as he watched her.
She came because she couldn’t stay away. If there was the slightest chance that Dimitri had managed to escape from a Siberian penal colony, she couldn’t twiddle her thumbs in New York while he struggled to survive. She used trouble in the port of Seattle as an excuse to head out to the West Coast.
“I had business in a nearby city called Seattle,” she said. “Our bank is financing a major expansion of their port. It hasn’t been going well. I wanted to meet with the construction manager and report back to my father.”
