“Three in Calcutta, two here in Delhi.”
“Then you know what we’re up against.”
“I hope so, sir.”
“Good, good,” the colonel said, finally signaling the end of the interview with a limpid wave of the wrist. A muttered “desperate remedies” floated after Cunningham and Morley as they reentered the bungalow.
Two short passages brought them to a small and untidy office. The walls were covered with maps, the desk with papers; a line of papier-mâché elephants sat atop a display cabinet packed with handguns that went back a century or more. Morley moved a pile of files onto the floor and offered Cunningham the newly empty chair.
It seemed hotter than it had outside, despite the fan whirring erratically overhead.
One of the maps was peppered with colored flags representing various expressions of political dissent. There seemed to be a lot of them, and more than half were red, depicting the highly serious kind. “How bad are things?” Cunningham asked.
Morley followed his gaze and shrugged. “Who knows? I think London’s been getting a trifle complacent lately. No offence, old boy,” he added with a crooked smile.
“None taken. There’s no money to spare, and complacency’s a damn sight cheaper than panic.”
Morley was rummaging around in a desk drawer. “Right,” he said, extracting a bulging folder, “I’ll give you the news as we got it ourselves. Seventh August—we had the first report of a gun battle in Kerki . . .” He turned and reached an arm toward the large map behind him. “Which is here,” he added, tapping with a finger. “There were Europeans involved, but we didn’t find out who until”—he moved on to the next message—“the eleventh. The battle took place on the twenty-eighth of July. The local Russian authorities—led, incidentally, by some high-ranking Cheka boss from Moscow—tried to stop a riverboat heading upstream past the town. Several men were killed, including the Cheka boss. There were two Europeans on the boat, who turned out to be members of the Good Indian team. By the time we heard about all this, they were halfway across Afghanistan, on their way to Kabul.”
“And McColl?”
“We had that message you know about, the one from Samarkand on”—he checked through the file—“on the twenty-fourth of July, and nothing since. According to our source in Kerki, the Cheka boss was already holding an Englishman, who might have been McColl. If so, he was probably taken to Tashkent, questioned, and shot. Which will save us the trouble.”
“Was there really no way of bringing him back on board?” Cunningham asked.
“When?”
“I don’t know. There must have been almost a month between his arrival in Moscow and his reaching . . . wherever you said the battle was.”
“Kerki.” Morley shrugged. “Maybe. But once Suvorov had taken the ‘need to know’ directive as literally as he did . . . well, the colonel decided we couldn’t take the risk.” He looked at Cunningham. “You knew McColl, right? I’ve talked to others who knew him in Calcutta during the war, and they all said much the same thing, that they never really thought of him as one of us.”
“No, he wasn’t.” Cunningham couldn’t say he’d ever liked the man’s holier-than-thou approach when it came to dealing with Indians, but he had been annoyingly proficient.
Morley turned to another page in his file. “Brady made contact in Kabul on August nineteenth and collected all the papers he and the others needed. He was told about Gandhi’s plans to visit Delhi in the third week of September.” Morley looked up. “Our loin-clothed friend is planning to stir up trouble during the Prince of Wales’s visit,” he explained. “And Brady was pleased to hear that—he thinks the local police will be stretched to the limit while the prince is here. Oh, and we did ask him about McColl. Brady said he hadn’t run into him in Russia.”
Morley consulted the next cable. “August thirty-first. They didn’t want to spend more than three weeks in Delhi, so they stayed a fortnight at Flashman’s Hotel in Peshawar and only arrived here a couple of days ago. We’ve put them up at Sayid Hassan’s . . .”
“Who’s he?”
“Ah, since your time. He’s from some tin-pot royal family or other—somewhere in Rajasthan, I think. Fortunately for us, he has some rather disgusting habits, and last year he got a little carried away with one of his little boys. We helped him out of the mess, which rather put him in our debt. He’s gone off to the hills for a holiday while this business is completed.” Morley grinned. “We’ve provided the Good Indian team with servants, a genuine one and three of our men. The real one’s there to show the others how it’s done. The team has been asked not to stray—we told them it’s for secrecy’s sake, but really it’s because it makes the surveillance that much easier. If and when they try to twist things around, we’ll be on them like a ton of bricks.”
“If? I don’t think there’s any doubt that Brady will try.”
“When, then.”
“Desperate remedies,” Cunningham murmured to himself.
“You don’t sound too sure about all this.”
“I’m sure enough. Whichever way it goes, they’ll be dead. And with any luck, Gandhi will be, too.”
“We certainly won’t be sorry to see the back of him. He can’t be ignored, he can’t be arrested without making things worse, and he can’t be killed by any obvious friend of ours without turning him into a martyr . . .”
“I know the rationale,” Cunningham said dryly.
The shadows were lengthening on Chandni Chowk, but the offices on one side of the street were still bathed in dazzling sunlight. On the other, leaning in a derelict doorway, McColl idly wondered what the street had looked like before the bomb attack on the viceroy had prompted the authorities to cut down all the trees.
Few in the throng gave him more than a passing glance. Those who did saw a tall, dark-skinned figure with a thick mustache and beard wearing a large floppy turban, an embroidered waistcoat over a white kurta, and matching cotton trousers. In the shadows he convinced as a Pathan, and even in full daylight, most would take him for one of the half-caste unmentionables fathered by British soldiers and administrators over the previous century.
The door across the street opened, and two men emerged, one in Indian dress, the other in a smart European suit. Harkishen Sinha was the latter.
Almost a decade had passed since their paths had last crossed, here in Delhi during McColl’s last visit as an automobile salesman. That meeting had not gone well. Sinha had suspected, quite rightly, that his old friend was also involved in intelligence gathering for the British government, and McColl had found the Indian’s views on British rule both glib and judgmental. Their prewar years at Oxford, and the friendship they’d forged as outsiders at the shrine of English breeding, had felt like a distant memory. In the intervening years, both men had written a few stilted letters, as if reluctant to accept that their friendship was actually over.
A situation like this one, McColl thought, could hardly have been foreseen by either of them.
Their conversation over, the two Indians went their separate ways, the stranger heading west, Sinha crossing the street on a diagonal and walking south. McColl started after him, keeping a fifty-yard gap between them, and remembering a summer day almost twenty years before. They’d been sitting outside a pub by the river, and Sinha had suddenly exclaimed, in his perfect English, how muted everything was. “The sounds, the colors, the smells—everything. I feel like I’m wrapped in cotton wool.”
His old friend turned down a twisting street that McColl remembered came out in front of the Jama Masjid mosque. But after a couple of hundred yards, the Indian turned left into what appeared to be a dead-end alley, and McColl reached the corner in time to see Sinha vanish through a gateway.
A few seconds later McColl let himself through the gate and into a pleasant courtyard, where a servant moved to intercept him. Sinha, glancing back,
saw only the costume. “What do you want?” he asked curtly in Urdu.
The servant was trying to push him back, but McColl stood his ground. “Hello, Harry,” he said.
Sinha’s mouth gaped open. “Jack?” he asked, as if he could scarcely believe his ears.
“In person.”
“What . . . ?” Sinha noticed his servant watching with interest. “Nikat, shut the gate,” he told the man abruptly. “Jack, come this way,” he urged, hustling McColl through an archway, across another courtyard, and into what looked like his study. Legal briefs were neatly stacked along one wall.
“How are you, Harry?” McColl asked.
“I’m well, thank you. But . . .”
“And the children?”
“They are well . . .”
“I—”
“Jack, what is this?” Sinha almost shouted. “Why have you come to my house dressed like a Punjabi bandit? Is this some stupid trick of your political police?”
McColl put a hand on the Indian’s shoulder. “No,” he said calmly. “I have come for your help.”
“But why this fancy dress, as you English call it?”
“Because it would be dangerous for both of us if I was seen visiting you. Even this is risky, but . . . well, I have no other choices.”
“I do not understand. Who is looking for you?”
“My own people. The ‘political police’ you were just talking about, I suppose.” It crossed his mind that using the same words to describe the Cheka and Five seemed less ludicrous than it would have a couple of months ago.
“But why?” Sinha wanted to know. “Why are your people after you? Have you stolen a polo trophy or something?”
McColl laughed. He was, he realized, really pleased to see Harry Sinha again. Whatever happened.
Sinha looked at him, then burst out laughing himself, and for a moment it felt as if the last twenty years had evaporated, and they were back in one of their college rooms, finding a shared hilarity in the farcical vagaries of Oxford life.
Could he tell his friend the whole story? McColl asked himself again. He could but he wouldn’t. Or at least not yet. It wasn’t just a matter of trust: Sinha would feel he had to tell others, to warn Gandhi, and who knew where that might lead? It would increase the danger to Sinha himself, and it would put both McColl’s and Caitlin’s freedom at risk. And, as McColl was prepared to admit to himself, it would take matters out of his hands. Somehow, deep down, absurdly or not, this had become an intensely personal business in so many different ways, between him and Brady, between Caitlin and Sergei, between her and himself.
“I can’t tell you much, Harry,” he said. “Only that I am not working for British intelligence anymore.”
“Then whom?”
McColl smiled inwardly at his friend’s perfect grammar and at the question. Who was he working for? Cumming? The dead Komarov? “Harry,” he said, “I know you want self-government.”
“More than that. Swaraj. Complete independence.”
“Okay. I can only promise that we’re on the same side and that if you knew the whole story, you would support me in what I’m doing. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be asking you for help.”
Sinha gave him a long, hard look, sighed, and finally smiled. “I believe you,” he said. “But how can I help?”
“I need to borrow a little money.”
“That presents no difficulty.”
“And I need somewhere to stay. In the Indian part of the city. For a week, perhaps two.”
“You are welcome here.”
“I have someone with me.”
“Oh . . .”
“A woman. I think it would be better, in the circumstances, to say she is my wife.”
“She is English?”
“American. But she has been living in Russia for the last three years.”
“Russia?” Sinha exclaimed.
“As a journalist at first, and since the revolution she’s been working for the Bolsheviks’ women’s department.”
“My God,” Sinha said. “How long have you known this ‘wife?’”
“Eight years. It’s a long story, and I hope to bore you with it later. But for the moment . . . well, the less you know, the better for you.”
Sinha shook his head, but more in amusement than disbelief. “I am pleased you came to me, Jack. But I am not surprised by all this. You were always—how do you say it?—the stranger at the feast? That is why you became my friend at Oxford and why you became a spy, and it seems to me most likely that this is why you finally came to realize that your empire is not worthy of you.”
“Perhaps,” McColl said, remembering what someone had told him once—that old friends were always the best mirrors.
“So when will you bring your wife here?”
“This evening, if that’s okay?”
“I will be waiting for you.”
Half an hour later McColl ducked out of a busy street, passed through the narrow doorway of a serai, and walked across its inner courtyard. The proprietor’s wife looked up from her spinning wheel and gave him an uncertain smile—Pathans were not universally popular in Delhi. He wished her a good evening in Urdu and headed up the creaking stairs.
In their room two geckos were contemplating each other on the ceiling. Caitlin was out on the balcony, dozing on the mattress. He stood and gazed down at her, the hair half hiding the face he knew so well, the white cotton robe wound tightly around the body that never failed to arouse him.
Seven weeks had passed since that day beside the river, since Komarov’s death and their decision to continue the pursuit together. She was thinner now, browner, the lines of her face drawn a shade harder. He found it difficult to believe that he could ever love anyone else.
It had taken them more than a month to cross Afghanistan, eking out McColl’s emergency supply of silver coins. They had sometimes journeyed alone, sometimes with caravans, once even with a traveling cinema, rarely covering more than ten miles a day, but knowing that their quarry would be moving little faster. No one hurried in Afghanistan, a land where time was kept by the rivers and mountains, where humans still recognized forces greater than themselves. It had felt like time on loan from the rest of their lives, doing what humans had always done: eating, drinking, traveling, sleeping, and making love.
Then, one night in September, they had passed between the jaws of the Khyber with a Pathan caravan and seen the plains of the Punjab laid out below, a patchwork of greens fading into the east. Two evenings later they had boarded the train in Peshawar like people stepping back into civilization’s dream, with hardening faces, touches that felt merely physical, words that seemed bogged down in consonants.
Another three dawns had brought them to the Delhi station. McColl, turbaned and bearded, had walked out past a DCI man he recognized from 1915; Caitlin, tanned and veiled, had attracted even less attention. They had taken this room in a nearby serai. From its balcony they could see, in one direction, the station itself, forever smoke-signaling arrivals and departures, and in the other, looming above the ancient city, Shah Jahan’s Red Fort, stone at the heart of the British Empire.
McColl’s insistence that they rest for a day had less to do with physical need than his acutely felt reluctance to raise the curtain on the final act. That night, as they’d moved together in such effortless harmony, he’d had the sudden terrifying feeling that the two of them had crammed a lifetime’s love into only a couple of months.
And now the curtain was going up.
Until he met her, he had always thought people in love arranged their lives around that emotional fact. But Caitlin took the opposite view, that people should decide what they wanted from life and adjust their love lives to fit. This, she said, was what men did anyway, usually at the woman’s expense.
He could see her point, but . . .
He still had no idea whether or not she was going back to Russia or how he could live without her if she did.
As if in response to this thought, Caitlin opened her eyes. “Hello,” she said sleepily. For a moment she looked vulnerable, but the world soon took her back. She pulled herself up into a sitting position, her back against the balcony wall, and gave him a questioning look.
“Yes,” he told her. “We can stay with Harry. He’s expecting us in an hour or so.”
“I’ll get ready.”
Darkness had fallen by the time they started the short journey across the city. Caitlin still felt uncomfortable—not to mention vaguely ridiculous—wearing the veil, although after a month of doing so, she supposed she should be used to the damn thing. It wasn’t just the political insult it reflected; the cloth itself felt physically restrictive, as if it stopped her from breathing properly.
“It’s all in your head,” McColl had told her half seriously when she first mentioned it.
She had felt like kicking him, and apparently it had shown.
“When all you can see is the eyes,” he’d remarked, “it’s amazing how expressive they are.”
They were passing through the Queen’s Gardens now, gigantic palm fronds swaying above the tonga. “This is beautiful,” she murmured in Russian. As McColl had pointed out, two many Indians understood English for them to use it in public.
“Make the most of it,” he replied. “You may be stuck indoors for several days.”
“I know,” she said tersely. He had already explained that here in Delhi women—whether Hindu or Muslim—rarely went out alone. Even veiled, she would stick out like a sore thumb. “I sometimes think,” she added tartly, “that there’s a man inside you that likes the idea of the woman imprisoned at home.”
“You don’t believe that,” he said equably. “I just know how much trouble you have pretending to be someone you’re not. An admirable trait in itself but not a very useful one in these circumstances.”
“All right,” she said grudgingly. “Tell me more about where we’re going. Is it a big house? Who else lives in it?”
The Dark Clouds Shining Page 32
