The Dark Clouds Shining

by David Downing

  The familiar room reached out for him on her behalf, but he knew there was no going back. Not now, not after Grazhin had given his life for their traveling money. And Aram was right. You couldn’t always choose who your comrades were. As long as they were committed, and Brady was certainly that. Even Chatterji, in his own way. Maybe the Indian had just panicked—it was easy to do. He and Aram would keep things . . . What was the word he was looking for? Decent? His laugh sounded eerie in the candlelit room. After the last few years?

  He got up and walked around. Where the hell was she? He wanted to part as friends, to wish her well, to know she understood.

  The last six months had been hell, but the two years before that had often been wonderful, and he wanted her to know that the one hadn’t wiped out the other. The good times had been something to cherish and, despite all else, still were. He remembered a stroll in the snow-covered forest outside Petrograd when their paths had crossed again in that city and several walks in the summer woods around Moscow. She had always been impressed by his knowledge of the natural world, his ability to name the trees and birds and flowers that crossed their path. She was a city girl, she said—all she knew about nature, she had learned in a park near her home. Prospect Park, he seemed to remember.

  They’d sometimes gone boating on the Moscow River with her friend Fanya and Fanya’s boyfriend, who had shared Piatakov’s own taste in poetry but whose name he couldn’t remember.

  In the early days, he and Caitlin had read each other poetry lying in bed in their candlelit room. They both admired the new revolutionary poets, but the ones they loved, and could quote verbatim, were from further back—Pushkin for him, a woman named Sara Teasdale for her.

  They had talked about their families—something he’d never done with anyone else—and their respective passions for teaching and journalism. All the men he’d known, starting with his father, had scoffed—gently or otherwise—at the thought of finding one’s vocation in a room full of children.

  And then there was the lovemaking, which had seemed so glorious at first, but had turned into something difficult, loaded down with emotions he couldn’t begin to understand or control. Once you’d watched enough human bodies ripped asunder, it was hard to see them as a way of expressing love.

  But they had. In the early days, they had.

  He grabbed a pencil and one of the Zhenotdel flyers from her desk. How did you say good-bye to the love of your life?

  The words wouldn’t come, but looking up, he spied his own battered volume of Pushkin’s verse. Leafing through, he found the poem he wanted and left the book open at the page in question.

  She would understand.

  As he descended the stairs to the street, he softly spoke the first few lines out loud:

  I loved you—and maybe love

  still smolders in my heart;

  but let my love not trouble

  you or cause you any hurt.

  As midnight approached McColl was having trouble staying awake. But he needed to establish contact with Muhammad Rafiq, and the later he knocked on Rafiq’s door, the better his chances of finding the Indian home, and doing so unobserved. So he paced his room for another thirty minutes, until the traffic in the corridor had more or less withered away, and only then put his head around the door.

  There was no one in sight.

  He tiptoed down the threadbare carpet, seeking out room 467, which his list said belonged to Rafiq and Nasim. If both men were there, or only Nasim, McColl would say he’d come to introduce himself and try to catch Rafiq on his own the next day.

  A strip of light under the door suggested there was someone home, and its sudden disappearance confirmed as much.

  McColl rapped softly on the door.

  There was no response. He briefly wondered whether he might have imagined the light—some sort of reflection perhaps . . .

  Then he heard the faintest of sounds on the other side of the door.

  Not wanting to knock any louder, he tried the doorknob instead, and rather to his surprise, the door swung open with a loud creak. The room beyond, now dimly lit from the corridor, was unexpectedly empty. Suspiciously so, McColl realized, just as someone else’s breath almost tickled his ear.

  McColl threw himself forward, shoving the door as he did so. Something swished past his head, and the room fell back into darkness.

  “Rafiq!” McColl whispered loudly as he struggled to his feet. “Akbar,” he added more softly, using the Indian’s code name.

  The response was an attack. Something flailed through the air and crashed into McColl’s left shoulder, sending spasms of pain through his upper arm. He threw a punch into the darkness and felt it connect, but the something hit him again, on almost the same spot, and he went down.

  A black shape loomed over him. McColl lunged forward, grappling for a hold, and they both fell across a bed, before tumbling onto the floor beyond. A foot dug into his stomach, pushing him into a wall, and suddenly a hand was at his throat, a shadow rising and falling against the ceiling. He squirmed aside, trying to knee his assailant in the balls, but managed only to lever him sideways.

  McColl rolled free across the bed and back down onto the floor. As the other man came around the end of the bed, McColl threw out both legs, aiming at the shins. The man stumbled, tried and failed to keep his balance, and fell through the curtains, striking the frame of the half-open window with a soft, sharp crack.

  It was a sound that McColl had heard only once before, and guiltily remembered ever since: playing for the school football team, he had wildly thrown himself into a tackle, and badly broken another boy’s leg.

  With the curtains now divided, he could see the prone body arched across the sill. Was the man dead or merely unconscious?

  Still breathing heavily from all the exertion, McColl grabbed hold of the feet, pulled his attacker back into the room, and drew the curtains. Grabbing a sheet from a bed, McColl rolled it up and laid it across the foot of the door before turning on the light.

  His assailant had been a short, powerful-looking man with thinning blond hair and a wide, typically Russian face. His head was now at an unnatural angle; the crack had been his neck. McColl turned him over to get a better look at his face, and received another shock. The last place he’d seen these features was on a photograph in Cumming’s office. The man’s name was Pitirim Suvorov, and he was one of Five’s men in Moscow.

  What had he been doing in Rafiq’s room?

  And had he known whom he was attacking?

  McColl could ponder such questions later. He went to the door and put an ear against it. He couldn’t hear movement or voices, and if no one had turned up by now, it seemed unlikely that they would. If his struggle with Suvorov had been overheard—and it beggared belief that it hadn’t—then the listeners had decided it wasn’t their business. Which, McColl decided, wasn’t that surprising—the foreign delegates in the surrounding rooms would consider any investigation the prerogative of their hosts.

  Repressing a keen desire to get out while the going was good, he embarked on a search of the room.

  A jacket hung on the back of the door yielded some Kerensky notes, a few kopek coins, and an unopened packet of Russian cigarettes. On the small table between the beds, there were piles of Congress literature and three books, all in English: Dickens’s Bleak House, a compendium of Gokhale’s speeches, and H. G. Wells’s Kipps. McColl flicked through the pages in search of handwritten notes, but there were none.

  The only suitcase was Rafiq’s—his name was stenciled inside the lid, along with a Lahore address. Inside it McColl found a pair of opera glasses, a small wooden Ganesha, and a crumpled map of Tashkent. The rest was clothes. There was nothing to suggest that Rafiq wasn’t the foreign comrade the Russians thought he was.

  McColl put the map in his pocket, thinking it might help bolster his cover, and turned his
attention back to the dead man. If neither Rafiq nor Nasim returned that night, a housemaid would probably find the body next morning—the Bolsheviks, as far as he knew, still employed such people. Later, of course, would be better: the longer the corpse stayed undetected, the longer the Cheka would take to identify its owner.

  So what should he do? Removing the corpse from the room would cut the connection between Rafiq and Suvorov, and help to muddy the waters, but where could McColl move it to? A bedding cupboard? The out-of-order lift?

  And why take the risk? Dragging a corpse down hotel corridors was the sort of behavior that got you noticed.

  The only thing he could do was hide it in the room, which meant under one of the beds. He dragged it between the two, then rolled it under the one that stood against two walls and bent the legs away from the open end. It was now invisible to anyone standing, which was probably the best he could hope for.

  Standing once more with his ear to the door, he could hear nothing stirring outside. A quick silent prayer to whatever God looked after spies, and he was quietly stepping out of the room and into a gratifyingly empty passage.

  A few seconds later, back in his room, he found himself starting to shake.

  Rafiq was dead when Piatakov got back to Brady’s room.

  “I didn’t think he’d make it,” Brady said as he finished packing his bag.

  “Are we just going to leave him there on the bed?” Piatakov asked. Was he imagining it, or had both pillows been under Rafiq’s head when he left?

  “Why not?” Brady replied.

  Piatakov grunted his agreement and asked himself whether it mattered if Brady had hastened the Indian’s death. Not a lot, he decided. Spies and traitors knew the price of failure.

  “Those coins on the table are yours,” Brady told him.

  Piatakov tipped most of them into his shoulder bag, saving just a few for his pockets. With their small denominations, they wouldn’t last long—a half-decent fortune-teller might see further robberies in their future. If they had one.

  But the walk to the yard was less fraught than he expected, the silence of the postcurfew streets offering plentiful warning of Cheka or militia patrols, either motorized or on foot. As they passed a billboard bearing the slogan let those who are not for us leave russia, Brady murmured, “We’re trying.”

  An hour after leaving the house, Piatakov was sitting in a boxcar doorway, his legs dangling over the side, as the train threaded its way out of the vast Paveletsky yards. Brady was already asleep inside.

  Another departure, Piatakov thought, another moment like the one in 1916, when he’d known in his heart there was no going back.

  After that leave-taking, there’d been several months when he’d doubted the choice and his reasons for making it. His father, who’d pressed Sergei in vain to join the service after his older son was lost at sea, had died only a few weeks before, and Piatakov sometimes feared he had joined up when he did mostly to spite the old man.

  They certainly hadn’t gotten on in those last few years. As a child Piatakov had worshipped this large overbearing man, who appeared out of nowhere with his tales of other worlds, but he had gradually come to know his father for who and what he was. Or perhaps not gradually—something fundamental had changed after he listened in on one particular conversation between his parents. He couldn’t remember what it was about, but he knew that his mother had been right and his father wrong, and that her way of seeing the world was the one he instinctively shared. His father had the practical intelligence, but he’d barged his way through life, seeing little and closing doors behind him. His mother had been too generous for her own good, but the world had been a better place for her presence.

  Piatakov had been about fourteen when he’d overheard that exchange, the age at which boys usually swap their affections in the other direction. But then, he’d always been a misfit, like the man now snoring behind him.

  His mother hadn’t wanted him to go—which was hardly surprising given that she’d already lost a husband and son to the Baltic’s icy waters—but she hadn’t tried to stop him. The reason he’d given her—that someone who aspired to teach literature and history had to know more of the world than the town he was born in—was one she had understood.

  In the event he hadn’t seen much of the world in a geographical sense, but he had seen one world give birth to another. And not just seen: like many of the fleet’s junior officers, he had sided with the men and helped make it happen.

  He had still been walking on air when he’d finally found the time to visit home, only to discover that he’d left it too late. A sudden illness had taken his mother, and Olesya’s parents had whisked their daughter out of Russia, beyond the reach of godless Bolsheviks like himself. If she’d ever written expressing regret, he’d not received the letter.

  After donating the family house to the local soviet, he had headed back to Petrograd. It was only a few weeks later, at the sailor-leader Dybenko’s wedding to Alexandra Kollontai, that he’d first laid eyes on Caitlin, and only a few months after that that he’d left Moscow on a similar train to this one, heading south and east to fight for Trotsky’s newly formed Red Army on the banks of the Volga.

  Now here he was again, watching the last moonlit roofs of the city recede, this time with Lenin and Trotsky’s Cheka on his trail, and the city soviet’s money weighing down his breeches.

  There was sadness and bitterness, a sense of ill fate lodged in his heart. And yet, still, for the first time in months, he also felt at one with himself. He had climbed off the fence at last. The die had been cast.

  For better or worse, he was a revolutionary.

  And revolutionaries made revolutions.

  Real Police Work

  It had been light for about an hour, but most of the depot still lay in shadow. This was the best part of the day, Komarov thought, as he followed the official down the tramlines: a few hours of merciful freshness between a sweat-inducing night and a broiling day.

  “This is where the Indian died,” the official said, stopping in front of him.

  The body had long since been taken away, but the blood it had shed remained visible. A few coins glinted in the running gap beside the rails, presumably dropped when the man went down.

  There was nothing else to see. A strange place for an Indian to die, Komarov thought, as a tram clanked out through the distant gates. He was annoyed by how long it had taken the militia to report the robbery, but supposed he should be grateful they had done so at all—at least someone at the local HQ had realized that an Indian dying violently in the middle of an International congress was likely to have political ramifications. “The foreign comrades are here to be impressed, not perish in anarchist robberies,” was the way Dzerzhinsky had put it.

  Had there been only one Indian? All the robbers had been masked, but some depot staffers had noticed that two at least had unusually dark-skinned hands. Against this, two other men had been heard speaking Russian, including the one who seemed to be in charge. The latter’s accent had sounded strange to all the people questioned, but not in “an Asian sort of way.”

  India, of course, was a British possession. Could the agent they were hunting have anything to do with this? Komarov wondered. It seemed unlikely—the man had only just arrived in Moscow.

  If the witnesses were to be believed—and there seemed no reason they shouldn’t be—the man with the funny accent had boasted that “any true Bolshevik” would approve their plans for the stolen money. Which hardly suggested British involvement. It was much more likely that the men concerned were renegades of one sort or another—perhaps a bunch of anarchists as Dzerzhinsky had suggested, perhaps a splinter group of Socialist Revolutionaries. There was no shortage of men with a grievance.

  There was no foreign power behind this. And no organization with any prospect of widespread support. This was just another bunch of disside
nts who’d grown bored with the problems of putting ideals into practice, men who thought compromise equaled betrayal. They’d be planning some sort of desperate action, something to show the world just how right they were.

  Komarov’s new assistant emerged from the building where the witnesses were still being questioned. His name was Pavel Maslov, and he’d been seconded from the Vecheka on account of the possible foreign ramifications of the investigation. A young fair-haired Ukrainian with a childlike face, he seemed efficient enough, but hadn’t yet shown signs of anything more.

  “We’re finished,” he reported.

  “Nothing to help with identifications?”

  “No.”

  And he wasn’t verbose, Komarov thought, adding to the mental appraisal. “Then we’ll visit the morgue,” he said.

  The expression on Maslov’s face asked why, but he didn’t voice the question.

  It was a short ride in the Russo-Balt. The pavements were thronged with people heading for work, and Komarov watched the eyes turn away from the Cheka car, pretending they hadn’t seen it. He wondered if Maslov noticed and what he felt if he did. Angry? Pleased? The sadness that Komarov himself felt?

  The morgue was attached to the Pavlovski Hospital, a place he knew only too well—it was there that his wife had spent her final weeks. The main chamber was artificially cooled, and the stench of putrefaction seemed fainter than usual. The four corpses, still fully clothed, were laid out on marble slabs.

  Komarov looked at the Indian first, a slim young man not much older than twenty, with sleek black hair and a rather handsome face. Two bullets had entered his chest, leaving egg-shaped brown stains on the thin white shirt. The eyes were still open and looked strangely excited.

  The Russian on the next slab was familiar. His name was Ivan Grazhin, and if Komarov remembered correctly, he had been a well-known voice in the soldiers’ soviets, both before and after the first revolution. The man didn’t look like he’d prospered since, but the eyes were serene for those of someone who’d fired a gun through the roof of his mouth.