He walked down to the lobby and noticed the men on either side of the door. So far, so good. He called the reception clerk over and loudly asked to be woken in three hours’ time, then hurried back up the stairs. The window at the end of the corridor looked out over a small yard. He straddled the sill, then swung the other leg out, gripping whatever he could until he hung by his fingers and was able to let himself drop. The entrance to the yard gave out onto the street some thirty feet from the hotel door. He walked off briskly, glancing back every so often to check there was no pursuit.
High to his left, a large fortress gazed loftily down. Up ahead the road crossed a wooden bridge and deteriorated into a track, before burrowing into the old town’s maze of alleys and narrow streets. McColl stopped on the bridge to light a cigarette and watched the meagre water trickling across the stones.
“Taxi, mister?” a young voice shouted in heavily accented Russian. McColl looked up to see a grinning Uzbek boy, about twelve years old, in the circle of light thrown by the lamp on the bridge. He was sitting in the driving seat of an old, much-repaired droshky, holding the reins of an even-older-looking mule.
“Tashkent Street,” McColl told the boy as he climbed aboard the creaking contraption.
Motion seemed to suit it, and they were soon rattling along a potholed Registan Street, receiving raucous cries of encouragement from the denizens of the chaikhanas that spilled their light across the road. They skirted around the Registan, just three huge shapes against the sky, and entered Tashkent Street. Throwing caution to the winds, McColl asked the boy to take him to Biruni’s carpet shop. The mule snorted.
They passed a large mosque with a cloven arch, and a few minutes later clattered to a halt outside Biruni’s shop. Two Uzbeks were busy carrying rolls of carpet into the dimly lit interior.
When McColl handed over a Kerensky note, the boy’s face dropped. “Coin,” he demanded. McColl fished in his pocket and found one, restoring the habitual grin. “I wait,” the boy announced.
“No,” McColl insisted, handing over another coin, “no wait.” He asked one of the carpet-bearers for Ali Zahid and was pointed through the door. He went in, down a short passage, and out into a yard. An Indian was sitting on a wooden bench beside an open door. “Ali Zahid?” McColl asked.
The Indian nodded warily.
“I come from your brother-in-law,” McColl said.
The Indian’s eyes widened fractionally, but he said nothing.
McColl sat down beside him. “He said to tell you that your new niece’s name is Benazir and that your sister now has three gold teeth.” This had been the standard introduction in 1916—swapping Indira for Benazir when the agent was a Hindu—and McColl was hoping it hadn’t been changed.
Ali Zahid was smiling now, albeit anxiously. “What do you want?” he asked in a whisper.
“The wireless. I must talk to Delhi.”
“It is far away, hidden. Perhaps tomorrow.”
“No, now.” Why had the man been surprised to see him? And why was he trying to put him off?
“Tomorrow no problem, sahib,” the Indian said ingratiatingly.
“Tomorrow I may be in the hands of the Cheka. And they may force me to name my contact in Samarkand.”
Ali Zahid seemed to digest this information quite literally, making chewing motions with his mouth as he stared at the ground. “Very good,” he said at last. “Wait here.” He disappeared inside, and McColl could hear him and a woman talking. A few minutes later the Indian reappeared at the door, beckoning. McColl followed him into a richly decorated room and was handed a set of Uzbek clothes.
“You must wear these,” Ali Zahid said. “I will wrap your turban.”
Ten minutes later they were working their way through another maze of narrow streets, the delicious mélange of cooking smells offering McColl an acute reminder of how long it had been since he’d eaten. Another few minutes and they arrived at the foot of a low cliff. Worn steps led diagonally up the face; at the top there was only the darkness of open country.
“It is not so far,” Ali Zahid said encouragingly, almost disappearing from sight as he strode off down a near-invisible path. McColl’s eyes slowly grew accustomed to the dark: they were making their way through a cemetery that sprawled across acres of undulating bare earth. A copse of trees loomed in front of them, and beyond it a dry riverbed. Behind them the meager lights of the town had faded completely from view.
“We are almost there,” Ali Zahid said. He now seemed as eager to please as he had been to thwart.
They traversed a rock-strewn gully and emerged onto a wide shelf, beyond which the land dropped away again. The gnarled trunk of an ancient tree stood in splendid isolation.
“See here,” Ali Zahid said, pointing. A low sarcophagus lay in the sandy earth; at its head two long poles bearing horsetail emblems fluttered uneasily in the breeze.
“The wireless?” McColl asked.
“No, that is a little farther. This is the grave of Daniel.”
“Daniel who?”
The Indian smiled, his teeth flashing. “In your Christian book, he fought lions, I think. See these stones—they move a little each year as his body grows.”
“What?” If there was one thing McColl hadn’t expected that evening, it was a Bible class.
“He grows, about one half inch in every year. And that,” he added, pointing at the trunk, “is the sacred tree. Its touch cures leprosy.”
McColl looked at the tree, then the Indian. Which of them was crazier? “And the wireless?” he asked patiently.
“A little farther,” Ali Zahid repeated. “I thought you would be interested,” he added, sounding slightly indignant. “Come.”
McColl followed, doing the sums in his head. By his reckoning Daniel should have been around a hundred feet long by now.
They clambered down onto the desert floor, and had been walking for only a couple of minutes when dark shapes loomed ahead—the broken walls of abandoned houses. The Indian threaded his way between them, stopped at the side of a disused well, and started removing loose bricks from the base of the wall. The hole that someone had dug in the space beneath contained a bulky package wrapped in sacking.
His Majesty’s wireless in Samarkand.
McColl looked around as Ali Zahid unwrapped it. The moon would soon be rising in the east; a silver glow was already seeping above the distant hills. The night was silent save for the murmur of the town to the north. A train whistle blew, a long way off.
The Indian was fiddling with the dials, the headphones clamped against his turban. “Calling Red Fortress. This is the City of Gold calling Red Fortress. Come in, Red Fortress.” He repeated it several times. McColl could imagine some Indian dashing down from the IPI communications room to tell the former public schoolboy on duty that Samarkand was sending a message. He felt a wave of disgust with the whole business. With himself.
Ali Zahid was handing him the headphones.
“. . . is Red Fortress, City of Gold,” a voice was saying, in exactly the accent McColl had expected.
“This is Bonnie Prince Charlie in the City of Gold,” he said slowly. Bite on that one, lads, he thought maliciously.
The silence at the other end seemed to last a long time. “We’ve been expecting your call, Bonnie Prince Charlie,” the voice said eventually.
Like hell you have, McColl thought. The moon was easing itself out of the hills, washing the plain with spectral light. It was all absurdly beautiful. “Agent Akbar is dead,” he said. “The Good Indian team is headed your way.”
“Understood,” the voice in Delhi said.
Almost smugly, McColl thought.
“Where are they now?” the voice asked.
“Unknown. Probably still on Russian territory.”
“Understood. Does the opposition know of their plans?”
Which opposition? McColl wondered. Presumably the Cheka. “In general, yes.”
“Is the opposition attempting to interfere?”
“Yes.”
“Understood. You must facilitate their escape from enemy territory if possible, Bonnie Prince Charlie.”
“Please repeat that instruction.”
“You must facilitate their escape from enemy territory—”
“Understood.” Only too fucking well. “Over and out,” he said coldly, losing his turban as he ripped off the headphones. He hadn’t really expected anything else, but had, he realized, still felt a flicker of hope.
Not anymore.
Ali Zahid was looking at him anxiously, even fearfully. “Are there troubles to come?” he asked.
“Facilitate,” McColl muttered. “You speak better English than that bunch of bastards.”
The Indian’s smile was doubtful.
They returned the wireless to its hiding place and walked back to the city. Boy, mule, and droshky were still waiting patiently outside the carpet shop. “You should be in bed,” McColl said as he climbed aboard for the return trip. And so should I, he thought. Tiredness, hunger, and anger were congealing into a dull despondency.
He lit a cigarette as they rattled slowly up Tashkent Street, and recalled the impression that Gandhi had made on him all those years ago. And again, in 1915, when McColl had stopped to see him at the ashram outside Ahmedabad. Everything he’d learned firsthand about Gandhi, everything he’d read about him in the mostly hostile British press, told him that this was one of nature’s better men, a force for good in a world so full of the opposite. A troublemaker where trouble needed making.
But as far as the powers-that-be were concerned, the only good Indian was a dead one.
“Shashlik, mister?” The boy’s face was turned to his; they were outside an eating house. Probably the boy’s father’s.
McColl looked at his watch. Two hours had already passed, so what difference did it make? “Yes,” he said, his mouth suddenly watering at the prospect. He flicked his cigarette end into the street, and three young boys appeared out of nowhere to fight for its possession.
Caitlin lit another cigarette—she was smoking far too much—and accepted another inch of whatever the local liqueur was. It had a kick like a mule, as her father might have said, and the hint of apple reminded her of Arbatov, who would now be commencing his five years of exile in apple-growing Verny.
She and Komarov were sitting in the otherwise empty hotel dining room. Her lack of sleep the previous night had left her tired enough for bed, but when he had suggested a drink, she had thought it prudent to accept. With enough of whatever it was inside him, he might let something slip.
Or not. The more shots Komarov put away, the more he seemed drawn to the past. “I once worked with a man named Dvoretsky,” he said. “Pyotr Dvoretsky. I was his immediate superior in the Investigation Department, and I knew him quite well. A good man, all in all. Kind to his family, always generous when the charities came to the office. No politics to speak of. The revolution didn’t fill him with joy, but it didn’t make him angry either. He was more bewildered than anything else, like many ordinary people.
“Then, at the end of 1918, his wife became ill. All four parents were still alive and all dependent on him. He convinced himself that he needed the extra rations, and from there it was a short step to buying coupons he knew were forged. Which made him an enemy of the revolution.
“He was caught almost immediately. And he sat there in my office, frightened of course, but not without dignity, and he said, ‘What would you have done in my place?’ And I had no answer for him. Or rather, no answer that would have been relevant. It didn’t matter what I would have done—how could my principles as an individual determine the rightness of his actions? He’d done what he thought was right.”
As Komarov paused and reached for his glass, Caitlin felt sure he could still see the man in question on the other side of his desk. “What happened to him?” she asked after several moments of silence.
“Oh, he was shot that evening. My duties as a Chekist were clear. That is the point. For a long time, I carried on interrogating prisoners like a policeman, treating them as people, because only in that way can you begin to understand their motivation. I hadn’t realized that motivation was now beside the point and that I could no longer afford to treat our enemies like people. The strain was just too much. Because they had principles, too, and theirs often seemed as consistent with who they were and where the revolution had taken us as mine were with who I was. It was impossible. We could have turned the prisons into endless seminars on political philosophy. Everything seemed arbitrary. Everything but power.
“I had the power, so my truth was the one that counted. I believed in that truth; I believed I was right, and that had to be enough.”
“We can never be certain,” she said tentatively.
“No, but we must act as if we are. So many comrades refuse to take that responsibility. ‘Power is the only truth’—that’s what they say. It sounds convincing if you say it loud and often, but it’s nonsense. Power may be essential, but it isn’t a truth. If we want a victory that lives up to our dreams, we can’t afford to forget the truth, so we simply have to suspend it. We have to split ourselves, keep the truth—in all its complexity—safe in the back of our minds, while we act as if there’s only the one simple gospel and one right way to do things. And since, when we choose our one and only truth, we are also choosing to condemn those who think differently, we must take the responsibility on our own shoulders and not pretend that history is making our choices for us. That’s one form of cowardice. The other is refusing to choose because all that means is that you’re passing the burden of choice to someone else.”
She gazed at him through the smoke from her cigarette. Was he testing her? she wondered. Did she deserve to be tested? “I understand,” she said. And she thought she did. “But what if the cost is too high?”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
He wanted to hear her say it, she thought. For her sake or his?
“Take men like Arbatov and my husband,” she said. “They supported and fought for the revolution, but now even people like them refuse to abide by your simple gospel. Doesn’t that make you wonder whether we’ve narrowed the path too much, whether we’re closing the door on too many people? On too many ideas?”
“That is the danger,” he agreed.
“Well, how do we avert it? When I’m working at the Zhenotdel, I feel positive. There are plenty of days when it feels like one step forward, two steps back, but generally speaking, I feel that we’re still breaking ground, that month by month we’re still opening doors.” She paused to stub out her cigarette. “But lately I’ve begun to feel that all this is happening in some sort of cocoon. And that when the day comes for us to break out, we’ll find that the rest of the party has been moving in the opposite direction. And the rest of the party, being much stronger than us, will first set aside our work and then forbid us from spinning any more cocoons.”
His grunt sounded appreciative.
“But giving up won’t get us anywhere,” she went on. “So we put our fears aside and go back to work. What else can we do?”
“You could walk away,” Komarov suggested.
“Because this isn’t my real home?”
“Because you seem to believe—wrongly I hope, but maybe not—that the struggle for women’s rights in Russia over the next few years won’t get the priority you think it deserves. Maybe somewhere else it will.”
“Maybe.” Was he giving her some sort of warning? Or just being honest? “But leaving would feel like failure,” she said. “This is where we made the breakthrough, where the future seemed so full of hope.”
“Seemed?” he said. There was more sadness than accusation in his tone.
“Sometimes
I fear so,” she conceded. “Sometimes I don’t.”
He gave her a wry smile. “I know what you mean.”
Piatakov opened his eyes to see Chatterji squatting by his side. “It is time to go,” the Indian told him.
He half-walked, half-slid down to where Brady was gazing through his telescope. The moon was high now, the lights of Charjui on the western bank mostly extinguished. The width of this river still astonished Piatakov; the Moskva, the Neva, were streams by comparison. Above their heads the iron bridge blocked out half of the star-filled sky.
“Stealth or force?” he asked the American.
“Stealth, I hope. There have been four or five Chekists sitting around on the quay all day. There’s at least one there now; someone lights a cigarette every so often. But the way I see it, with the moon over there, this bank will mask us for most of the crossing. Once we get nearer, we’ll have to play it by ear.” He stood. “Ready, Durga?”
They slid the boat into the water and clambered in. The hull creaked, but the bottom was bone-dry; Chatterji had stolen well.
The Indian sat in the bow, Brady in front of him at the oars. Piatakov lolled in the stern, wondering how Czar Alexander had felt on his way to meet Napoleon in the middle of the Neman River.
A slight breeze seemed to be following the water downstream. “The mighty Oxus,” Brady drawled softly.
The current was stronger than it looked, but the American’s shoulders were equal to it. He kept the boat close to the bridge on the downstream side, counting off the piers as he passed them in a satisfied murmur. The moon was hanging directly above the upper reaches of the river, loosing a cascade of silver toward them. Like a magic carpet, Piatakov thought.
Soon they were roughly halfway across, both shores looking distant. Piatakov aimed the telescope at the bank they were moving toward. There were several boats at the quay, but they were still too far away for him to pick out theirs.
“Fourteen,” Brady muttered. “Eleven to go.” He was breathing heavily now, and stopped rowing for a minute or so to flex his shoulders and massage his forearms. “Your turn, Sergei,” he said, just as they heard the fast-swelling drumbeat.
The Dark Clouds Shining Page 27
