The Dark Clouds Shining

by David Downing

  Despite the cold, several of the older children were out on the stoop. “Good evening, Comrade Piatakova,” they all chorused. “Your husband has returned,” her neighbor’s daughter Lana added, with what looked suspiciously like a leer.

  “How long has he been back?” Caitlin asked automatically.

  “Not long. Ten minutes, perhaps.”

  As she started up the stairs, Caitlin tried to sort out her feelings. She was glad he was safe, glad that he wasn’t one of those taking on the Kronstadt rebels. Which didn’t mean she was pleased to see him.

  She told herself to be more generous. Sergei was always interesting to talk to, and having him hold her in bed was warming in more senses than one, even when being held was the only thing on offer. Of all the men she’d met in Russia, he was—or had been—the kindest and most likable.

  They had met at Kollontai’s wedding in early 1918 and become lovers a year or so later on one of his leaves from the Volga front. The relationship hadn’t been easy at first because she couldn’t be her usual honest self with him. It wasn’t a straightforward case of two people falling in love—she knew only too well that Sergei was filling the emotional space that Jack had left behind. But other leaves had followed, and she’d gotten used to walking the line between playing a part and finding real satisfaction in what they actually shared. They had become what Kollontai, in one of her writings on love, called “erotic friends”; they had, almost on a whim, embarked on what many party members called “a comrades’ marriage.” Or so Caitlin believed. She sometimes worried that he felt more for her than she did for him, but he was never fawning. He was ruthless in argument and would never do anything just because she wanted him to.

  And until the previous fall they had made each other happy enough, sharing their thoughts and their bodies, and leaving their future for a postwar discussion, always assuming the war ever ended. Then, in October 1920, his regiment had been one of the units sent to Tambov province to crush the peasant rebellion, and several months later he’d come back a different man. For one thing he was impotent; for another he would often wake up shouting or—which seemed even worse to Caitlin—weeping. By day he was either depressed or angry and, on each succeeding trip to Moscow, seemed to spend more and more time at one or other of those disreputable clubs where renegades of every stripe met to share their rage and despair. When he’d last gone back to his regiment, she’d realized with a shock that all she felt was relief.

  Caitlin took a deep breath and opened the door to her room. He was standing at the gable window, looking out over the moonlit roofs, and the face he turned toward her looked boyish and terribly bleak.

  “Sergei,” she said, walking across and throwing her arms around his neck. “It’s good to see you.”

  He was stiff in her arms, but slowly relaxed. “And you,” he said, just about managing a smile.

  “How long are you here for? Where have you come from?”

  He explained that the regiment was on its way back to Tambov province, and that he and many others suspected that part of the reason was to get them as far away from Kronstadt as possible. “I don’t think they trust us to go against the rebels.”

  “That’s terrible,” she said.

  “What is? That we couldn’t be trusted or that that’s what they thought?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know what to make of what’s happening at Kronstadt.”

  “As far as I can tell, it’s not complicated. The sailors are the revolution’s conscience, and they say the things we fought for are in danger of being lost. Have already been lost in some cases.”

  “But according to Pravda it’s not the same sailors who were there in 1917, and there are Whites involved.”

  Piatakov shook his head dismissively. “They’re lying.”

  “That’s a serious accusation. Are you sure?”

  “Not a hundred percent. But I know these men. And even if I didn’t—sometimes you just know. Sometimes the facts only add up one way. But is there any news from Kronstadt? I’ve been on a train for more than a day.”

  “None that I’ve heard. But I was in an Orgbureau meeting for almost that long.”

  That made him smile. “I’m hungry,” he said. “Let’s go to the cafeteria, and maybe someone will know something.”

  “All right.”

  They walked the three blocks arm in arm, Caitlin silently wondering why she found it so hard to believe that Lenin was actually lying to his own party. Was it because the truth would be too damning? Would undermine everything?

  The cafeteria was still almost full, despite the lateness of the hour. They queued for their soup and bread, but Sergei was more interested in asking the other diners questions than eating his food. “They say that Trotsky has appointed Tukhachevsky to lead an attack across the ice,” he said, when he finally returned to their table. “Sixty thousand men against three thousand,” he added, picking up his spoon and staring stonily into space.

  It occurred to Caitlin that the rebels would have been wiser to wait a few weeks until the ice surrounding their island had melted, but Sergei seemed depressed enough already. On the walk back to the house, he suddenly stopped, grabbed both her hands, and earnestly looked her in the eye. “Sometimes I think it’s all over,” he said, “and we should just find another country, and start again from scratch, determined not to make the same mistakes.”

  No, she thought, remembering Rahima and the others. It wasn’t over. But she didn’t want to argue with him. Not tonight.

  In bed, they undressed and held each other for what seemed a long time, until he murmured, “I’m sorry,” and turned his back.

  June–July 1921

  Quid Pro Quo

  It was the middle of the morning, and hunger was doing its usual best to flatter the coming lunch, when a jangle of keys announced an official visit. “Someone to see you,” the screw told McColl. “Look sharp.”

  Who the hell? McColl thought. His mother had been down only a week or so before, and the normal hour for visits was in the afternoon. Had something happened to her?

  “Who is it?” he asked the screw as they threaded their way through the wing.

  “I wasn’t told. This way,” he added, taking an unexpected turn.

  Another door unlocked, and suddenly there was a carpet on the floor.

  “In here,” his escort said, showing McColl into what looked like a sitting room. A desk stood against one wall; two comfortable sofas faced each other in front of an open fireplace. The governor’s reception room, he guessed.

  “Sit down and don’t touch anything,” the warder told him, as if he were five years old.

  At first McColl did as he was told, but the lure of the window was too much. Standing beside it, he could see treetops above the prison wall. Trees that had sprung into leaf since his day at the Harrow assizes.

  He was still engrossed in this new outside world when the door opened behind him, and Mansfield Cumming stepped into the room.

  McColl had last seen the Secret Service chief toward the end of 1918, but Cumming looked more than three years older. His former boss hadn’t many years left, McColl thought, surprised by how sad that made him feel.

  After shaking hands, they each sat down in the middle of a sofa. “How would you like to get out of here?” Cumming asked without preamble.

  “Show me a man who wouldn’t,” McColl admitted, wondering what the price would be. Cumming was no one’s idea of a fairy godmother.

  “I have a job for you. A full pardon can be arranged if you agree to do it. Are you interested?”

  More so than he would have been three months earlier, McColl thought, but that wasn’t saying much. “Curious at least,” he said. “But I’m sure you know that the last one left a very sour taste.”

  Cumming had the grace to nod his agreement. On McColl’s final mission for the Service, he h
ad been ordered to participate in a plot by Russian Whites and the French secret service to poison the crops around the Bolshevik capital and thereby starve the city’s residents to death. After thwarting the scheme he hadn’t wanted anything more to do with the sort of people who’d dreamed it up.

  “Where and what?” he asked.

  “Russia,” Cumming replied, with more than a hint of apology.

  McColl sighed. If there was one country on earth . . . No, that was wrong. There’d been something special about Russia and most of the Russians he’d met. It had simply been the place where he’d run out of rope. “Do you still have people there? I thought we pulled everyone out in 1918.”

  “We did, but only for a while. We have new agents now, all of them locals. And so do Kell’s people.”

  McColl was surprised. “What are MI5 doing there? I thought their writ was Britain and the empire.”

  Cumming settled back in his seat, as if finally sure he had McColl’s interest. “Last year,” he began, “after the Bolsheviks held their second international jamboree in Moscow, a school for Indian revolutionaries was set up in Turkestan. In Tashkent, to be precise. Around forty men were enrolled, and they were given weapons training along with all the usual propaganda about how brutal the British have been to India. We know who most of these men are—your old friend Bhattacharyya was one of them—and in my estimation there wasn’t much cause for worry, but the government, both here and in Delhi, has been close to panic ever since that idiot Dyer ordered his troops to open fire on that demonstration in Amritsar. They’d been insisting that it was vital to cut any links between the Indian opposition and Russia, and early this year they got their chance. Having virtually destroyed the Russian economy, the Bolsheviks were so desperate for economic help that they agreed to close the Tashkent school in return for a trade deal. So far, so good, you might think,” Cumming said, pausing for breath.

  You might if British interests were all that concerned you, McColl thought, and of course, defending those interests was the point of Cumming’s job. McColl’s time in India had convinced him that British rule was, at best, a mixed blessing, and he also thought it highly likely that the collapse of the Russian economy owed as much to the Whites and their Western allies as it did to Lenin’s incompetence. But then, as Caitlin had always argued, and as his own experience had finally taught him, most people couldn’t see past their own nationality. Even those who tried.

  “The deal was signed in March,” Cumming continued, “and as far as we can tell, they’ve been true to their word. We had a man with the Indians in Tashkent, and he recently reported that they’ve all been shipped back to Moscow. There’s a third jamboree scheduled for the end of June, and they’ve been told they’ll all be attending. Which is all to the good. But the other thing he reported is not. It seems that one of Kell’s people has sounded out at least one member of this group for another project, but—and here’s the interesting part—without revealing that he’s a British agent. We don’t know why or what the project might be, and Five refuse to enlighten us. They claim that our people in Moscow can’t be trusted, so neither can we. And when I pointed out that Moscow was definitely not on their patch, they claimed that their business there was all to do with India, and that they were simply trying to nip potential trouble in the bud before it actually crossed the border, so to speak. Which was credible as far as it went, but I still didn’t like it.

  “And then we learned two other facts about this supposedly Indian business. One was that Russians were involved. Not at the official level, or not as far as we can tell. Lenin’s volte-face on trading with the West hasn’t pleased all his friends, particularly as it seems part of a general backpedaling that a lot of Bolsheviks find almost treasonous. I’m told that men like those might see encouraging foreign revolutionaries as a way of shaming their own leaders.

  “And finally, last but not least . . . I don’t suppose you’ve forgotten Aidan Brady?”

  “No,” McColl said dryly. Aidan Brady, the Irish-American firebrand whom he’d met in 1914 at a workers’ rally in Paterson, New Jersey. Who had fatally stabbed a riot cop on the following day, and had left McColl himself for dead in a Dublin dock some four months later. Who had turned up again like the worst of bad pennies on that day in Kalanchevskaya Square. No, McColl hadn’t forgotten Aidan Brady. “You don’t forget a man who tries to kill you twice and blows a small boy’s head off in the process.”

  Cumming gave him a sharp look. “He was caught in Ireland a couple of months ago. In a village not far from Queenstown. He obviously felt at a loose end when the Russian Civil War ended and decided to join the war in Ireland.”

  “So where is he now?”

  “Back in Russia.”

  “Why the hell wasn’t he tried and hanged?”

  Cumming made a face. “Because Five decided they had a use for him, I suppose.”

  “And it was Five that sent him back to Russia?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you think it’s likely that he’s involved in this Indian business, whatever it is?”

  “Why else send him to Moscow?”

  “But once he’s out of their reach, what’s to stop Brady just disappearing? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t. None of it does. Which is why I want you to go. Because you know Brady, because you know Moscow, and because I daren’t send one of my own. I’ve been told, in no uncertain terms, to let Five get on with whatever it is they’re doing.”

  “And yet,” McColl said, smiling for the first time.

  “And yet,” Cumming agreed. “This is between us. I get you out of here, and you find out what the hell’s going on. I’ll see what I can do about arranging some help, but basically you’ll be on your own. And reporting only to me.”

  “Won’t people wonder why you’re springing me?”

  “I shall say you’ve been granted a full pardon on account of your past services to the Crown. Which you yourself could have brought up in court, if you hadn’t considered yourself bound by the Official Secrets Act.”

  “Sounds feasible.”

  “Why didn’t you bring them up?” Cumming asked unexpectedly.

  McColl thought about it. “It didn’t feel right. Like stepping over corpses.”

  “Does this?”

  “No, not when a bastard like Brady’s involved.”

  “Do you need more time to think about it?”

  “No, I’ll go. Do you know if Caitlin Hanley’s still in Moscow?”

  Cumming offered a thin smile. “I had a feeling you’d ask that, so I made some inquiries. The answer is yes. She works for the Bolshevik women’s organization—I forget the name. She edits their magazine, among other things. But I don’t think . . .”

  “No, neither do I,” McColl said. “Just curiosity. That flame went out a long time ago.”

  “She was always your Achilles’ heel,” Cumming mused. “You were—how shall I put it?—one of my most reliable men until the two of you tangled yourselves in knots. I hope she was worth it.”

  He sounded almost mystified, which McColl didn’t find surprising—Cumming wasn’t the sort of man to let a woman come between him and his work. “She did save my life in Dublin during the Rising,” McColl said wryly. “And probably again in Moscow.”

  And even if she hadn’t, he thought, she had made his life worth living.

  McColl was released a week later, walking out through the Wormwood Scrubs gates on a sunny mid-June afternoon. The days inside had felt appreciably longer once he knew he was getting out, and the sense of relief at finding himself on a London street was even sweeter than he’d imagined. He had half expected to find someone from the Service waiting to pick him up and was pleasantly surprised that he could simply walk off down the road. A small sum of money had been left at the gate for a meal and bus fare, but by the time he’d exhausted his joy
in space and movement, he was almost at the address off Baker Street that Cumming had commandeered for McColl’s temporary home.

  The flat was on the second floor of a four-story house, at the end of an old Victorian mews. A Secret Service hidey-hole, McColl assumed, for the use of itinerant agents and anyone Cumming might want to keep under wraps. McColl let himself in with the key he’d been given, and found he already had company: a bespectacled young man with wavy blond hair who languidly rose from an armchair and offered his hand. “Julian Bracegirdle,” he said. “I’m here to get you up and running.”

  He reminded McColl of several former Service colleagues—adenoidal, entitled, but reasonably benign. Indulged by nanny, damaged at school and Oxbridge, finally loosed on the world. The empire’s hollow spine.

  McColl told himself to rein it in and give the man a chance.

  Bracegirdle wasn’t a waster of words. McColl would be leaving for Russia on the following Tuesday, taking ship from Harwich to Esbjerg, a train to Copenhagen, and a second ship up the Baltic to Helsinki. The arrangements for getting him into Russia were still being made, and he would probably learn what they were only once he reached Finland. Over the next few days he would be exhaustively briefed on the situations in Russia, Central Asia, and India, and on the particulars of his mission. And no, there would not be time for him to visit his mother in Glasgow before he left, but the flat did have a telephone. He could have the rest of the day to enjoy his newfound liberty—there were five one-pound notes on the mantelpiece—and a car would come to fetch him at 8:00 a.m.

  Once Bracegirdle was gone, McColl explored the flat. It didn’t feel like anyone’s home, but wasn’t as bland as a hotel room—the motley range of knickknacks, magazines, and books left behind by previous guests were more suggestive of an Indian clubhouse. The water was thrillingly hot, a private bath the height of luxury. After soaking for almost half an hour, he rummaged through the clothes that someone had brought from the room he’d rented in Kenton and dressed for an evening on the town.