The Dark Clouds Shining

by David Downing

  Caitlin was silent for several moments, torn between Kollontai’s vision and the unwelcome sense that it wasn’t achievable.

  “I know it’s not easy,” Kollontai said, anticipating objections. “In order to survive, we Bolsheviks have done some terrible things. We have let ourselves down more often than we would have liked. Everyone knows that. But most people—and most of our leaders—realize that now we must do better, must hold ourselves to a higher standard, if we want to save our revolution. If we don’t, then heaven help Russia.”

  “We fight each battle as it comes,” Caitlin said, more to herself than her friend.

  “Every last one. Which is why I’m so reluctant to resign. And which reminds me: I haven’t forgotten Anna Nemtseva. A friend of a friend who knows Orel—I think his mother still lives there—has more or less confirmed what Anna told you. I know there wasn’t much doubt, but I don’t want any surprises when I eventually take the matter up with the Orgbureau. And I’ve also spoken to a couple of comrades who knew Agranov before the war. He was a bureaucrat for the old regime back then, and he only joined the party in 1918, so his rise has been quite spectacular. Suspiciously so, I’d say. A little more digging, and I think we’ll find a way to bring him down.”

  Kollontai sounded so much like her old self that Caitlin couldn’t help but smile. “Do you know a Chekist named Komarov?” she asked.

  “Not well,” Kollontai said. “The M-Cheka, yes? In his early forties, stern looking, old-school.”

  “Fanya and I worked with him in March on rehousing a group of orphan girls. He seemed quietly outraged by what had been done to them, and he might feel the same about Anna and the others. If so, and if he has any influence with Dzerzhinsky . . .”

  “The Cheka usually look after their own,” Kollontai said, “but who knows? There are exceptions, and he might be one of them. I’ll bear him in mind.”

  They parted with hugs at the National entrance, and Caitlin walked slowly home, pondering Kollontai’s words and hoping that just this once her friend had read the situation wrongly. She was almost home when she passed an open window and saw two people dancing in what seemed an empty room. They were probably in their fifties, and the only music was in their heads. As if to hear it better, both had closed their eyes, and the expressions on their faces were ones of utter bliss.

  There was a dingy café almost directly opposite the house where Arkady Ruzhkov was supposed to have a room. This was fortunate, because McColl had been nursing his glass of tea for over an hour, and lingering that long out in the street would have been asking for trouble. As it was, the crone behind the counter was eyeing him with what looked like increasing suspicion.

  “You are sure my friend didn’t come by earlier?” he asked.

  “No one asked for anyone.”

  “Well, I’ll give him another half an hour.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  McColl went back to his vigil. He’d always had good visual recall, if not a true photographic memory, and Ruzhkov’s picture was clear in his mind. So was the man’s story, which had been part of the briefing.

  The Russian had come to England as an exile after the 1905 upheaval and had married another exile, a young Polish girl. They’d had three children and were, as far as Ruzhkov was concerned, a happy and contented couple. Then, one day late in 1917, he’d returned to his Shoreditch tailor’s shop and found his young wife enjoying herself on the cutting table with another Russian. In a frenzy of anger, he’d picked up his tailor’s shears and stabbed them both to death.

  The French would have called it a crime of passion and probably been sympathetic; in England he was promised a hanging, until some bright spark in Special Branch mentioned him to the Secret Service. Cumming’s people had offered him a choice: the rope or a five-year stint in His Majesty’s Service back home in Russia while England looked after his children. He had, not surprisingly, plumped for the second option. Since his return three years earlier in the company of genuine political exiles, Ruzhkov had risen through the ranks of clerks who served the Moscow Cheka.

  Cumming had protected Ruzhkov well. He had returned late in 1918, and had thus been spared the carnage of agents that had followed the Cheka’s unmasking of the famous Lockhart Plot. Since then, Cumming had kept his “steadiest man” well away from gung ho colleagues like Sidney Reilly. Indeed, so precious was Ruzhkov considered that he’d been contacted on only a handful of occasions, in situations of minimum risk.

  Until now, McColl thought, anxiously watching the time. The half hour was nearly up when his contact finally appeared, a small, wiry man with the face from the photograph. The blonde on his arm was taller than he was, with sunken eyes and prominent cheekbones. The two of them walked through the open door of the three-story building, and half a minute later a light came on in the middle floor.

  McColl crossed the street, climbed the stairs, and knocked on the appropriate door.

  The woman answered. Up close, her face seemed terribly gaunt.

  “Comrade Ruzhkov?” he asked.

  Ruzhkov appeared behind her shoulder, his round-lensed spectacles glinting beneath the shock of black hair. “What is it?” he asked sharply.

  “I’ve come with a message from Brother Ivan,” McColl said. “It’s private,” he added, offering the woman an apologetic look.

  “Yes, Tamara, go for a walk,” Ruzhkov said brusquely. She glared at him, and seemed about to object, but then brushed past McColl and headed down the stairs.

  “You shouldn’t have come here,” Ruzhkov said reproachfully the moment McColl was inside.

  “I had no choice.” He told the Russian what he needed.

  Ruzhkov shook his head slowly to and fro, as if he were trying to nudge his brain back into its cranial slot. “Perhaps,” he said. “I will see. You must go. Two days from now at the Sukharevka Market—the music section. At noon.”

  McColl nodded and turned toward the door.

  “Are you Russian?” Ruzhkov asked.

  “No, British.”

  “Your Russian is excellent. My children, are they well?”

  “They’re all fine.”

  “Good, wonderful. Tomorrow you must tell me more.”

  McColl went down the stairs. Tamara was standing in the hall, one foot on the ground, the other against the wall, smoking a cigarette. She returned his nod with a contemptuous glance and headed for the stairs. He wondered if Ruzhkov had mentioned killing the wife in England.

  Outside the light was beginning to fade, which had to be good news. The Chekist on the train might have a memory for faces, but any likeness conveyed by phone could be only the roughest of sketches. Even if Miliutin talked, McColl was surely safe for a couple of days. He would keep the beard for thirty-six hours and shave it off when he had the new papers.

  No hands roughly shook McColl awake during the night, and when he woke of his own accord, the sun was streaming in through the dormitory’s high windows. Some of the twenty-odd occupants of the other bunk beds had already departed; some were still snoring with annoying gusto.

  McColl lay there for a while, wondering what to do with the day and night that lay ahead. He wasn’t due to meet Ruzhkov again until the following day, and until that time he was stuck with the identity papers he’d been given in Vyborg. But no one else knew the name that was on them, not even Miliutin. It would, he decided, be safer to stay another night than switch dormitories—two addresses would double the risk. And it was Sunday, which even in atheist Russia was a day of relative rest. Chekists should be thinner on the ground.

  He would leave his suitcase there and spend the day out, preferably in crowded places. There was precious little chance of running into any Russian Muscovites who knew him from earlier visits, and all the English undercover men were gone. There was only Caitlin, who would probably see through the beard. Running into her would be disastrous, but also
extremely unlikely, given the city’s million or more residents.

  His mind made up, he went for a cold-water wash. After putting his clothes back on, he asked the babushka at the door for directions to the nearest communal canteen and was nodded down the street. There was a queue at the door, but it moved quite quickly, and a brief perusal of his papers ensured the provision of a free but decidedly basic breakfast. After begging and drinking a second glass of tea, he walked back out onto a sunlit Rozhdestvenka Street. Moscow was his for the taking.

  It proved a mixed day. For reasons that McColl didn’t want to fathom, he felt drawn to the antiques shop on Bolshaya Nikitskaya that he and Fedya had shared for several days in the summer of 1918. It wasn’t far away, he told himself, and he had to walk somewhere.

  In the event, the shop was gone, replaced by what looked like a private café. He resisted the urge to look inside, standing instead on the opposite pavement, more or less where Caitlin had stood when she’d waited to warn him that the Cheka was hot on his trail. It was the last time he’d seen her.

  And the next day Brady had tried to shoot him, but had succeeded only in killing Fedya. At least the boy had died instantly, which had to be some consolation.

  Enough, McColl told himself, forcing his feet into motion. It was done. Fedya was dead and Caitlin was gone. Had been for almost three years.

  He walked down toward the Alexandrov Gardens, around the Historical Museum, and into Red Square. The huge space was relatively crowded and seemed, as it always did to McColl, like something lying in wait. He carried on down to the river, and wandered along the towpath, passing the spot where Caitlin had told him the czar had been murdered.

  It took him about an hour to reach open country, and after a fifteen-minute rest in the shade of a riverside willow, he walked back the way he had come, the domes and spires of the Kremlin gradually filling the skyline ahead. A tram ride brought him to Sokolniki Park, which he remembered from earlier visits and which was now full of families enjoying the sunshine and sampling the many and varied entertainments. Fortune-tellers were out in force, and seemed to be intent on outdoing one another’s optimistic forecasts. Jugglers, musicians, and photographers competed for attention and kopeks; an old man in a thick winter overcoat played Tchaikovsky melodies on his flute without breaking a sweat in the ninety-degree heat.

  In late afternoon McColl used the distant Sukharev Tower to guide him back to the ring road, and the stretch of it that housed the Sukharevka Market, his meeting place for the following day. Having reminded himself of the lay of the land, he was wondering what to do next when he noticed a cinema just down the street. The place was filthy but crowded, and McColl found himself wedged between a boy of about thirteen and a woman who smelled of onions. The propaganda short that opened proceedings provoked neither cheers nor jeers; the wartime Charlie Chaplins that followed almost brought the house down. Halfway through the second film, laughing so hard it actually hurt, McColl knew he was close to hysteria. Normal life, it seemed, was something he still had to work at.

  A Few Lines of Pushkin

  Komarov got out from behind his desk and walked across to the open window. Prisoners were shuffling in the courtyard below, ravens circling in the blue sky above. As he was watching the latter, he heard Sasha clear his throat in the doorway.

  “There was another call from Comrade Baranov, comrade. I told him you were in a meeting.”

  “What did he want?”

  “They’ve arrested one of the foreign agents. A man called Miliutin.”

  Komarov laughed. “Not a very foreign name.”

  “No. A Russian. He was discovered in bed with two prostitutes,” Sasha said in a thoroughly disapproving tone.

  “Spending the money he was paid to bring the foreigner across the border,” Komarov guessed.

  “Yes, and he was only too eager to tell Baranov’s people all about the man. An Englishman. And he was on his way to Moscow. Here’s the description,” he said, handing over a sheet of paper.

  “But he doesn’t know what this Englishman intends to do when he gets here?” Komarov asked, just to be sure.

  “Baranov says he doesn’t.”

  “Okay. Get Borin, Yezhov, whoever else is free,” Komarov told him.

  By the time Komarov had read the description, there were four Chekists gathered in front of his desk.

  “We’re looking for an Englishman,” Komarov announced. “About five feet nine inches tall. Dark hair, beard, and mustache, brown eyes. He’s wearing either a shabby dark grey suit or a White blouse and leather breeches. His Russian is near-perfect. His papers are in the name of Anatoly Joseyevich Mazin, metallurgist, from Monchegorsk. Or at least, one set are. He may have others. And he’s armed.” Komarov paused. “Right. Divide up the city among you. Start with the dormitories; then move on to the hotels. If you draw a blank with both, liaise with the Vecheka about known White sympathizers, both their own and any real ones they’ve left out as bait to catch their comrades. Understood? Then go.”

  Their boots tramped down the stairs and through the outer office.

  Komarov looked at the new information again. This was better. This one they should find.

  He leaned back in his chair, again thinking about Piatakova. Another foreigner, but one, as far as he could tell, who’d devoted her life to Russia and its revolution. She had irritated him—he couldn’t deny it—but over the last few months, he’d had a bellyful of party idealists so busy rearranging the world that they didn’t notice who was keeping it safe for them. That wasn’t surprising, but finding her desirable had been—it was a long time since he’d thought of a woman in that way. Those lovely green eyes and waves of chestnut-brown hair. That fluid way of walking—all graceful limbs and head held high—which reminded him of his wife. It had been almost two years since Mariya had died, and lately he sometimes found it difficult to picture her face without the help of a photograph. At other times she was right there in front of him, almost as real as she had been in life. Only much more accusing.

  A flock of ravens wheeled across the corridor of pale blue sky above the Rozhdestvenky Convent, graceful, black, and silent. McColl wondered if they were the same birds he’d seen arrowing down the river the previous afternoon, the same flock that had drawn wide circles in the air above the Kremlin cathedrals that morning. If so, they seemed to be following him around.

  He smiled at the thought. Considering the inherent dangers of his situation, McColl was feeling pretty good. He’d found Ruzhkov, and was, he hoped, on his way to collect a new set of papers from the Russian. He had slept surprisingly well in the visitor’s dormitory on Kuznetsky Most.

  He heard the Sukharevka Market before he saw it, a swelling babble of chatter and shouts that evoked memories of his times in India. Turning a corner, he saw the ragged lines of stalls occupying the wide center of the boulevard on both sides of the Sukharev Tower.

  He walked down the first lane, which mostly featured peasant women sitting on rickety chairs, holding on their laps makeshift trays bearing large pats of butter, irregular scraps of sugar, or berries of various hues. One woman was carefully counting out wild strawberries to exchange for a chartreuse silk handkerchief; another was examining a coral necklace through a pince-nez with all the concentration of a Hatton Garden jeweler.

  The next lane was mostly eggs and books. McColl stopped to look at the latter, which were almost exclusively romantic novels, and opened one at random. Would she feel the same pang in her breast every time the count came to visit her husband?

  Probably, McColl thought.

  “A complete set of Verbitskaya’s stories—only one ruble,” the woman behind the table called after him. “For next winter—they burn beautifully.”

  He could see the gramophone section at the end of the fourth lane, table upon table holding dozens of machines and hundreds of records. There was no sign of Ruzhkov, no sign eithe
r of more genuine Chekists.

  He looked through the records, a bewildering mixture of classics, comic opera, and popular airs. There was even some of the new American jazz music. The showstopper was a recording of “Over the Sea to Skye” by the Massed Pipes of the Glasgow Cooperative. Noting his interest, the stall holder insisted on playing it, offering McColl a seat while he wound up the gramophone and lowered the needle. Then, through a dense crackle, the sound of pipes swirled up into the Moscow air, causing heads to turn from all directions.

  “What is it?” the stall holder asked. “Indian music?”

  McColl shrugged. “Sounds like rats being strangled,” he said.

  The Russian thought this hugely amusing, and decided to play the record again. There was still no sign of Ruzhkov. McColl walked over to where a samovar was steaming, paid a few kopeks for two glasses of tea, and settled down to wait on a convenient pile of wrought-iron gates. The bagpipes droned on.

  “Why don’t you stand up and shout that you’re a British spy?” Ruzhkov hissed in his ear.

  McColl grinned, which only infuriated the Russian more. He almost slapped the folded copy of Pravda onto the gates between them.

  “They’re searching the city for you,” Ruzhkov whispered angrily. “They know what name you’re using. They’re checking the dormitories at this very moment.”

  McColl’s heart missed half a beat. “Then I won’t go back to mine,” he replied, a lot more calmly than he felt. “Have you managed things?”

  “Yes.” The Russian sounded almost sorry that he had. “You’ve been very lucky. The Indians actually asked for an Urdu translator last week. They all speak English—some of them don’t even speak Urdu—but they decided they didn’t want translation in the language of their oppressors.” Ruzhkov snorted in merriment, then remembered he was supposed to be angry. “You weren’t exaggerating when you said you could speak Urdu?”

  “No.”

  “Well, that’s something. Are you going to tell me what this is all about?”