Anastasia The Famous Women Series by Colin Falconer
PART I Shanghai, 1921
Chapter 1 Michael Some men don't fall in love; they get lost. I was lost from the moment I saw Anastasia Romanov in the taxi club that first night. It started like any other evening in Shanghai; drinks at the American Club until dark, then everyone went home to dress. The uniform was white mess jacket, soft white shirt and black trousers. Most nights I headed for the Carlton, for dinner and the cabaret, before I left my respectable married colleagues and their wives and hit the town on my own; perhaps an absinthe at the French club on the Rue Cardinal Mercier and then over to the Ambassador or the Casanova or the Venus and their sprung dance floors. The White Russians worked them all, charging from ten cents to a dollar for a dance ticket, you could tango all night with princesses and countesses and still come out with change from a twenty. I don't pretend I had any illusions about what kind of girls worked in those places and I wasn't looking to redeem anyone, least of all a Russian whore. After three years in Shanghai, I considered myself immune to all the tricks the taxi club girls liked to pull, no matter what colour they were. But the problem with me, the problem with most men, is we don't go out at night looking for happiness. We go searching for something we can't have. Anastasia Romanov was not exactly unattainable, not in that way and she didn't stand out from any of the other elegantly dressed professional dancers in their bright red lipstick and clicking heels. She came over to me as soon as I walked in and asked me to buy her a glass of champagne. It's not champagne, of course, it's cold tea, and none of the girls will touch it. You're buying their time, and their time belongs to the house.
Sometimes you meet a woman with a certain quality you can't define, something that attracts you despite yourself. You try to attribute it to some physical feature; the way they walk, the timbre of their voice, or most often, something in their eyes. Anastasia's eyes were the saddest eyes I had ever seen. Even when she was looking right at you, you knew she was thinking about something else, as if she was bleeding to death right under that dress and trying to hide it. Her eyes had the faraway look you see on people in hospital beds when they know they're dying. And yes, she was beautiful, but no more so than a hundred other women I'd seduced or paid for in my young life. She had fair hair, a good figure perhaps a little too skinny for my tastes - and yes, the saddest bluest eyes I'd ever seen in my life. She had no technique, I was not seduced. She hit me for a glass of cold tea and then just sat there, staring off into space and smoking her cigarette, didn't try and persuade me to sleep with her, like the other girls did, the only reason single white bachelors like me came to the taxi club. She really didn't care. You see how it happened; I always want whatever isn't on offer, anything I'm not supposed to have. "Will you sleep with me?" I said to her, and these were just about the first words I ever said to her. "Twenty dollars," she said, which was an outrageous price and I couldn't afford that sort of money, so I tried to haggle with her and she completely ignored me. Went on smoking her cigarette like I wasn't there. Normally I would walk away from this. You never get what you pay for anyway in the taxi clubs. The girls just lie there, looking at the ceiling, thinking about the rent or their kid at home in Whangpoa and wait for you to finish so they can move on to their next customer. I don't know what made me do it. I agreed to pay her twenty dollars for what I could have got for five anywhere in town.
***
She pulled her dress over her head, and let it slip to the floor. And then she stood there, naked, with this look on her face, almost contemptuous, as if she couldn't believe I'd paid so much for so little. But I suppose any woman finds it hard to imagine what a man gets from an encounter like this. You're not buying love, or even a counterfeit of it. You bring your own fantasy to the moment and whatever pleasure you get you make yourself. She let me push on her onto the bed and then she lay there while I took what I'd paid for. You are warned about this kind of girl, you hear the stories when you're at school; go with girls who do it for money and you'll get a disease. Well, I'd always been careful until then. But my one night with Anastasia Romanov left me with something in my blood but it wasn't any kind of sickness like the sailors picked up in the brothels down by the docks. It was much worse than that; in fact, it would have been better if I'd walked under the wheels of a trolley car on the Bund. End of Excerpt
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About the Author
Find Colin Falconer at: https://colinfalconer.wordpress.com or on Twitter at @colin_falconer
Born in north London, Colin Falconer worked for many years in TV and radio and freelanced for many of Australia's leading newspapers and magazines. He has been a novelist for the last twenty years, with his work published widely in the UK, US and Europe. His books have been translated into seventeen languages.
Copyright Page Revised edition copyright Š 2012 by Colin Falconer
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance of fictional characters to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the author and publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
Electronic ISBN 9781621250050
Find Colin Falconer at http://www.colinfalconer.net Colin Falconer's blog at: http://colin-falconer.blogspot.com/ or on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/colin_falconer http://twitter.com/#!/colin_falconer