And then there were the real victims: one with his throat slit from ear to ear, looking as if he were wearing a blood-colored bib; another with a look of surprise on his face and a coin-sized hole above the heart. Several witnesses had said that the handgun was the largest they’d ever seen.
“Have the relatives been informed?” Komarov asked Maslov.
“I don’t know.”
“Call the militia and ask. If they haven’t done it, then ask them to do so.”
Maslov hurried off in search of a telephone. After one last look at the grisly tableau, Komarov walked back outside, where the air was noticeably warmer than it had been only ten minutes earlier.
Entering the hospital, he inquired after the wounded militiaman and was directed upstairs to one of the wards. The man had died in the last few minutes. “They couldn’t stop the bleeding,” a nurse told Komarov.
Five men dead, he thought, standing by the bed. And for what?
Through the window he saw a woman walking toward an automobile, and realized it was her. She must have been visiting someone, he decided. Or maybe the Zhenotdel had business at the hospital. As she went to wind the starting handle, a soldier hurried to offer his help and seemed somewhat put out when she firmly refused.
Komarov’s smile was his first of the day.
After watching her car drive away, he went down to his own, where Maslov was patiently waiting.
“There’s been another killing,” the young man said. “At the Hotel Lux.”
“An Indian?” Komarov asked.
“A Russian. But he was found under a bed in one of the Indians’ rooms.”
Which had to be more than a coincidence, Komarov thought. He looked at his watch. Dzerzhinsky had asked him not to pull the Indian delegates out of the conference before the day’s business was concluded unless he considered it absolutely necessary. He decided he did. He would wait for the morning session to finish, but no longer.
McColl spent the morning at his new job, translating speeches for the Indian delegation among the splendors of the Kremlin’s old imperial throne room. The first speaker was Lenin, who devoted two hours to a reasoned defense of the NEP, standing between the large gilded columns and beneath a huge sheet of scarlet velvet emblazoned with a golden hammer and sickle. His speech was matter-of-fact, like a kindly uncle’s address to a gathering of favorite nephews, and compelling in its simplicity. The Bolshevik leader’s preeminence was easy to understand.
Translating from Russian to Urdu was a touch on the tricky side, particularly where Marxist terminology was concerned, but McColl just about kept pace, and shamelessly précised the more difficult passages. The Indians hung on his every word, and several took copious notes.
After his presentation, Lenin sat himself down on the steps leading up to the platform, notepad in hand, and offered occasional asides that made everyone laugh. McColl’s translations were eagerly anticipated and usually greeted by a joyful clapping of hands.
As they all filed out at the session’s end, McColl saw the posse of leather-clad Chekists waiting at the exit and, for several dreadful seconds, thought they were waiting for him.
They were, but only for his services as an interpreter. The whole Indian delegation was needed back at the Hotel Lux.
There were no protests, only a slight air of bewilderment, as McColl and the twelve Indians were walked to their destination. At the hotel they were shown into a large, luxuriously furnished room on the ground floor; the smoking room in czarist days, McColl guessed. A tall, greying man in a suit was standing with his back to them, gazing out of the window. He turned to reveal a long face, steel-grey eyes above an aquiline nose.
His name was Komarov, and unless there were two men of that name high in the Moscow Cheka, this was the man that Ruzhkov had mentioned as being in charge of the hunt for McColl. Which made his heart beat a little faster.
After introducing himself as the deputy chairman of the Moscow Cheka, Komarov asked everyone to sit down, then described the tram depot robbery and Nasim’s subsequent death. He made it clear that those assembled were not, in any way, being held responsible for the actions of their comrade Nasim, but he was sure that they would realize the need for questions. One or more of them might be able to throw some light on the motivation of their dead comrade, give some clue, however small, that would help with the apprehension of his fellow robbers.
McColl interpreted all this into Urdu, absorbing the information as he did so. He’d heard snatches of conversations about a big robbery over breakfast that morning, but there’d been no reason to connect this news with Cumming’s plotters.
Komarov’s first question was the obvious one—were there any Indian comrades missing?
There were. Neither Durga Chatterji nor Muhammad Rafiq had been seen since early the day before, and according to the former’s roommate, Chatterji hadn’t slept in his bed. Rafiq had shared with Nasim, so no one could say whether he had slept in his or not.
Komarov then dropped another bombshell—the body of an unidentified Russian had been discovered in Rafiq and Nasim’s room. After each Indian had been separately questioned, Komarov went on, Comrade Maslov would escort him down to the basement for a viewing of the corpse, in the hope that one of them knew whose it was.
McColl and the first Indian were taken into the adjoining room, and the interrogations began. Komarov showed no signs of impatience as the questions and answers were carefully translated, and no sign either that he had any reason to suspect the translator, but the twin imperatives of doing a decent job and making sure that his mask stayed firmly in place took all of McColl’s concentration.
Komarov asked each man for his opinions of the dead Nasim and the missing Rafiq and Chatterji. One by one they all said much the same—that all had seemed fully committed to the struggle against imperialism. The notion that the threesome might have been working for the British was politely but firmly dismissed; indeed, if any political wrongheadedness could be attributed to them, it would be of the opposite type. All three men had expressed their anger at the recent closing of the Tashkent school for Indian revolutionaries.
Their social lives had given cause for concern. Both Nasim and Rafiq had been seeing Russian women—not, of course, that there was anything wrong with Russian women, but . . . Nasim’s girlfriend was a teacher at the Toilers of the East University, one Anna Kimayeva. Rafiq’s was a girl he’d met on the train to Moscow, Marusya Dzharova, the daughter of a railway union official from Tashkent.
When the last Indian had been interviewed, McColl was left alone with Komarov. The Russian hadn’t taken any notes, but McColl suspected he remembered every word. His questioning, though diplomatic, had been thorough and forensic. McColl had no previous experience of Cheka bosses at work, but this wasn’t how he’d imagined one. He realized he was sweating copiously, but it was atrociously humid.
Maslov returned from the basement. “None of them admitted to seeing the man before,” he reported.
Komarov grunted and turned to McColl. “Are you also staying in this hotel?” he asked.
“Yes, comrade.”
“Did you notice anything suspicious in the way any of them answered my questions?”
“No, comrade.”
“And you haven’t overheard anything relevant in the last few days?”
“I only arrived from Tashkent yesterday.”
“Ah.” Komarov stood. “Well, keep your ears open from now on. And as I may have need of your services again today, stay with the delegation, either at the conference or here at the hotel. Understood?”
It wasn’t a request. “Yes, comrade.”
Trudging back to the Kremlin for what remained of the afternoon session, McColl felt relief at escaping the Cheka’s embrace but not much wiser as to what was going on. As he and the Indians passed through the Kremlin gate, he tried to take stock of what he did
and didn’t know. Had Suvorov known who he was? If he had, then who had told him? What had he been doing in Rafiq and Nasim’s room several hours after Nasim had been killed in the robbery? And where the hell was Rafiq?
It looked as if all three Indians had been recruited by Brady on Five’s behalf. But had Brady known that Rafiq was already working for Cumming? There seemed little doubt that all four had taken part in the robbery, along with sundry others. Why? For money, presumably. Money to pay their way south, if Cumming was right. If they weren’t still lying low in Moscow, they were probably on their way.
Should he head that way himself or stay and follow the investigation? Keeping close to Komarov felt like a daunting proposition, but seemed to offer more than a headless-chicken rush to India. And if it was personal safety he wanted, he should have stayed in the London prison.
He did have another—safer, he hoped—lead to follow up: Suvorov’s Moscow address, which Cumming had given him in London, “for emergency use only.” Not tonight—he had no intention of defying Komarov’s instruction to stay put. But tomorrow should be fine. The Cheka had nothing to go on when it came to identifying Suvorov, so searching the Five agent’s room should still be a relatively risk-free endeavor.
Komarov walked out to his car. “Any news of the Englishman?” he asked the waiting Yezhov.
“None. He hasn’t come back to the dormitory.”
Komarov took a deep breath of the early evening air. “Start going through the others again. And the hotels.”
He and Maslov climbed into the Russo-Balt’s rear seat, and the driver set off for headquarters. As the city center streets rolled by, Komarov went through what he suspected. The robbery itself was unimportant; what mattered were the future plans of the men involved. This wasn’t just another mindless outrage; it was, he was sure, a threat that needed taking seriously. But why did he feel that? It wasn’t as if the revolution’s survival was at stake.
Maybe its soul was.
He gazed down at his hands, which were steady as a rock. Real police work suited him.
At the M-Cheka offices he barked out rapid-fire orders to a clutch of subordinates: bring in Kimayeva; seek out photographs of Chatterji and Rafiq, bring back the tram-depot witnesses to see if any recognized the body from the Hotel Lux.
The subordinates scattered.
Komarov sat in his inner sanctum, awaiting their findings. Maslov was the first to return. “We have no photographs of Rafiq or Chatterji,” he reported. “They probably don’t have passports, but if they do, we haven’t found them. And there are no other records: the International Executive asked the commissariat not to ask for photographs. They were worried the foreign delegates might interpret the request as a lack of trust.”
Komarov smiled wryly. “Kimayeva?”
“Borin’s on his way.”
He appeared a few minutes later with the woman. She was about thirty, blonde, fairly attractive in a sharp-faced way. As Komarov questioned her, anger gave way to evasion, then finally to tears. Komarov sent Maslov out on a pretext and patiently extracted a confession that she’d been sleeping with Nasim. If her husband found out, he would kill her, she said. And the affair was over anyway: she hadn’t seen Nasim for more than a week. He’d said he was too busy, but the bastard had been lying—a friend had seen him drinking in the Universalist Club four or five nights ago. Not with a woman; it was true. With a group of men.
Komarov sent her home, issued Maslov with new instructions, and told Sasha to bring him some tea. Above his head the electric fan whirred erratically, doing little more than stirring the torpid air.
Maslov returned after twenty minutes or so, bearing a large stack of reports. “We had four men in the Universalist,” he said, “submitting nightly reports.”
It was Maslov who found what they wanted half an hour later. Three Indians had been drinking in the Universalist on the fifteenth. With four other men. They’d been talking about conditions in India and about the relocation of a military school from Tashkent to Moscow. They’d been expressing disapproval of party policy.
“Was it our three Indians?” Komarov interrupted.
“It doesn’t say.”
“And the other four?”
Maslov read on. “Two well-known anarchists—Aram Shahumian and Ivan Grazhin—”
“Grazhin was the one in the morgue,” Komarov said. “The one who shot himself in the street.”
“The others were an American comrade, Aidan Brady, and”—Maslov looked shocked—“a party member, Sergei Piatakov.”
Komarov looked up sharply. He remembered Brady from 1918, when the man had turned up at the M-Cheka office to report that his fellow American Caitlin Hanley—the woman who had later married Sergei Piatakov—was in touch with a British agent who had once been her lover.
Her taste in partners seemed somewhat at odds with her politics, but she wasn’t alone in that. “Get their files,” he told Maslov.
While his subordinate was doing his bidding, Komarov walked around the desk and read the report himself. On the same evening, another group of anarchists had been discussing the creation of a new language in which letters would be replaced by numbers, and the report’s compiler was clearly unsure whether this was politically acceptable.
Komarov snorted his disbelief.
He returned to his chair. Piatakov, Piatakova. Seeing her at the hospital. What had she been doing there?
He could think of one possibility.
Maslov returned empty-handed. “There are no criminal files on Piatakov or Brady. There were files on Grazhin and Shahumian, but they were destroyed in the fire last year—the one the anarchists were suspected of starting.”
“Piatakov will have a party file,” Komarov said. “I ran into his wife a few months ago,” he added; “she works for the Zhenotdel. She’s on the executive committee. Get her address from them.”
Maslov was gone for only a couple of minutes. “One forty-two Bolshaya Dmitrova,” he reported.
“Take a car,” Komarov told him. “And a couple of men just in case. Bring in whoever’s there. Him, her, whomever.”
The Zhenotdel meeting in Serpukhovskaya had gone on for almost eight hours, and it was virtually dark by the time Caitlin reached home. As she’d feared and expected, no light was showing in their upstairs windows, but there was a Russo-Balt parked outside the building’s entrance, and she was barely out of the Renault when two Chekists appeared to block her path.
“You will come with us,” one of them said.
She sighed. “I’ve had a long day, comrade. Can’t this wait till the morning?”
“Comrade Komarov wants to see you now.”
She thought about making a scene, but what would be the point? She allowed herself to be hustled into their car, and sat in simmering silence as the Cheka driver bullied his way through the still-busy evening streets. The last time she’d taken a ride like this—in far-off Yekaterinburg—her next ten days had been spent in a cell. What did Komarov want with her? She allowed herself a moment’s hope that the summons concerned Rahima, but knew she was clutching at straws. This was about Sergei. The shirt drenched in blood.
When she was finally ushered into Komarov’s office, he was on the telephone. Glancing up, he gave his caller a few instructions before putting the instrument down. “Please take a seat, comrade,” he said. “I apologize for the abrupt summons, but this is an urgent matter, as I’m sure Comrade Maslov informed you.”
“Comrade Maslov didn’t even introduce himself,” she said stonily. The young man was hovering at Komarov’s shoulder, like a butler at a dinner party.
“Oh. Then I must also apologize on his behalf,” Komarov said without even looking at his young subordinate.
She nodded.
“We’re looking for your husband,” Komarov said without more ado.
“Why?” she asked, m
anaging to keep the tremor out of her voice.
“We need to ask him some questions.”
She looked at him, remembering the trembling hand. Tonight it was still. Tonight he was working. “I don’t know where he is,” she said flatly. “Why do you need to question him?”
“That is not your concern,” Maslov interjected.
“He’s my husband,” she snapped back. For better or for worse, she thought. That hadn’t been part of the Soviet ceremony.
“When did you last see him, comrade?” he asked.
She thought back a moment; the last few days seemed all rolled into one. “Yesterday morning,” she said. “He was still asleep when I left for work.”
“What were you doing at the hospital this morning?” Komarov asked.
She looked up quickly. “How . . . We really do have spies everywhere, don’t we?”
“I appreciate the ‘we,’ comrade, but as it happens I saw you there myself. I was visiting a militiaman who’d been shot in the tram depot robbery.”
“That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”
“That’s part of it. You haven’t answered—”
“I found a shirt covered in blood when I got home last night. I thought there must have been an accident, so . . .”
“You went to the hospital. But not until this morning.”
“I went looking for him, and I ended up sleeping at the office.”
“Why? Surely your husband would have come back to your room.”
“I . . . I don’t know. I was upset, and strange as it seems, I feel more at home at work.” Komarov’s face told her that struck a chord.
“But was that all?” he asked. “Did you hear about the robbery while you were out looking for him?”
“No. I didn’t hear anything until this morning. A comrade who came to work early had heard about it.”
“And then you guessed that your husband was involved,” Komarov suggested, stroking his chin.
“You didn’t report these suspicions, comrade,” Maslov interjected.
The Dark Clouds Shining Page 13
