The Dark Clouds Shining

by David Downing

  “It’s huge. And probably home to at least twenty people once you include the servants. Both of Harry’s parents died in the flu epidemic in 1919, and he’s the eldest of four brothers. They all live there, and at least three of them are married with children. As head of the family, Harry’s like a minor dictator—what he says goes, and no one would question his authority. Men or women.” McColl gave her a sideways glance. “I hope you’re not planning a full-scale agitation.”

  “Not immediately,” she told him with a smile.

  They drove past the Town Hall and into the bedlam of Chandni Chowk. On Caitlin’s side of the street, a line of customers in various stages of lathering, like frames from a moving picture, were awaiting a barber’s further attention. A man walked across the street in front of their tonga, holding two children with great delicacy, just a finger and thumb on each child’s wrist, guiding rather than pulling. She watched as they were swallowed by the throng on the sidewalk, fascinated. Such gentleness seemed more alien than any sight or smell.

  “Your friend,” she asked McColl, “is he a member of the Indian National Congress?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he is rich. A lawyer, you said. Educated at an English school?”

  “Winchester.”

  “This National Congress party—is it an anti-imperialist party?”

  “That depends on what you mean by anti-imperialist. They don’t like the empire they’re in.”

  “Mmm. And are all the leaders rich people educated in England?”

  “I don’t know,” McColl replied. “I don’t suppose there are many peasants and workers in the leadership, but most of those will be far too busy trying to keep their heads above water to attend conferences. From what I saw in Moscow, the Asian delegates at the Hotel Lux were mostly intellectuals from well-to-do families.”

  “I suppose so,” she agreed. They had turned down a narrower street, past a row of shops whose insides glittered and shone.

  “Goldsmiths,” McColl explained unnecessarily. “This is the Dariba Kalan.”

  The name meant nothing to her. Their driver edged the tonga past a cow that was idly nosing through a pile of refuse, then continued down the narrow lane with its high walls and carved wooden doorways. Bright eyes in dark faces lifted to watch them go by, then returned to the business at hand.

  McColl stopped the tonga at the end of the cul-de-sac and paid off the driver. Sinha was waiting in the outer courtyard, still dressed in the European suit, looking more than a little anxious. He was, Caitlin thought, extraordinarily handsome.

  He closed the gate behind them before going through the process of a formal greeting, shaking McColl’s hand and offering Caitlin a namaskar, hands held together as if in prayer. “Some supper is being prepared,” he said. “But first let me show you your room.”

  He led them through the archway, and up some winding stairs to a veranda that overlooked another courtyard, in which several seats were surrounded by a circle of tropical plants. An oil lamp above one doorway suffused the space with golden light, turning it into a mysterious grotto.

  “What a lovely place,” Caitlin murmured.

  “That is the women’s courtyard,” Sinha told her.

  They reached the room. It was large, but the only items of furniture were a huge double bed and an old chest of drawers. A basin of water sat on the chest, and two towels had been laid out on the embroidered coverlet. Overlapping rugs in Asian styles covered the wooden floor.

  “If there’s anything else you want . . .” Sinha said, looking first at McColl and then at Caitlin.

  “Nothing,” Caitlin told him. “And thank you for taking us in.” If you’re ever in Brooklyn, she felt like adding, but first she had to be there herself. “I would be honored to meet your wife,” she added. “Whenever it is convenient.”

  Sinha smiled and said he thought that would be possible on the following day.

  Another thing occurred to her. “Have you any objections to my wearing Western dress while I’m here?”

  “None at all,” Sinha said. “As you see, I wear it myself. Caitlin . . . I’m sorry, but Jack hasn’t told me your surname.”

  “Hanley,” she said, because it required no explanation. And, she knew, because that was who she was again.

  “Well, Caitlin. There are those in my country who wish to beat the English at their own game, and there are those who would rather go back to the game we played before they came. I am in the former camp,” he concluded with a smile. “And much as I like my wife in a sari, I also like her in a dress.” He turned to McColl. “Perhaps we could talk in the morning, before I leave for work?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then I’ll leave you to get settled in.”

  Soon thereafter, food arrived: an enormous tray with at least a dozen different dishes. Once they’d eaten, different servants showed them to the bathing quarters. Caitlin threw water over herself with more energy than she’d known she had, and returned to their room to find a gorgeous red-and-blue sari draped across the bed.

  Having slowly but surely mastered the art of putting one on over the last few weeks, she couldn’t resist the temptation.

  “You look like a princess out of the Arabian Nights,” McColl said from the doorway.

  She raised her eyebrows. “You wouldn’t be thinking yourself a sultan?”

  “I wouldn’t presume.”

  “Very wise,” she said. “If you think of yourself as a servant, you could come over here and unwrap me.”

  Some time later she snuggled up into his shoulder, one arm draped across his stomach. “Jack,” she began, “tell me again—why are we here?”

  “In this house? I thought—”

  “No, in Delhi. In India. I know we’ve talked about this,” she said. “I just need to be clear.” Though whether it was clarity or certainty she needed, she wasn’t sure. Perhaps, in this instance, they were one and the same.

  He was silent for several moments. “To stop them is the obvious answer.”

  “And why is that important to you?”

  Another pause. “Because I like and admire Mohandas Gandhi and because saving his life seems a thing worth doing. Because I loathe the people who set this thing in motion. The sort of people who thought naming this operation after some homicidal general’s remark was a clever joke.” He sighed. “And, I suppose, because I feel I owe it to Cumming and Komarov,” he added, thinking how appalled the two men would be to find themselves sharing a cause.

  “And that’s all?” she asked once he had fallen silent.

  “No,” he admitted. “It isn’t. I want revenge—justice—for Fedya. And for all the others: that mounted cop in Paterson, the constables in Hampshire, the night watchman at the quarry. Not to mention all the people he’s killed in the last three months.”

  “And revenge for what he did to you?”

  “For trying to kill me in Dublin and Moscow? No, I don’t hold a grudge over that—I wasn’t an innocent bystander.”

  She twisted onto her back, eyes on the slow-moving fan. “This is all about Brady. What about Sergei?”

  “I don’t know him,” McColl said simply. “But they all have to be stopped.”

  She turned to look at him, her head supported on one arm. “You don’t resent him for what he meant to me?”

  “Not enough to kill him. What about you? Are you only here to save him from himself?”

  She ignored the flicker of anger. “I’d like to, but it’s not why I’m here.”

  “Then why?”

  “Because I want to stop them, too. I don’t know about Gandhi—maybe he’s what you say; maybe he’s the Menshevik that Sergei thinks he is. But assassinating anyone is just plain wrong. It’s the opposite of politics, a way of avoiding the necessary work, a lazy thinker’s shortcut. And this particular assassination would gi
ve the revolution a bad name here in India and all over the world. It would demean us and make us think less of ourselves. Komarov was right—without the rule of law, everything else will turn to dust.”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you?”

  “There has to be something better. Brady’s small-fry compared to the bastards who run countries, but they both think stepping over corpses is the only way to get anywhere. Komarov stepped over them, too, but at least he noticed what was under his feet. He knew that killing should hurt the killer and that, when it didn’t, no good would come of it. Which is Gandhi’s philosophy in a nutshell. The world can’t afford to lose him.”

  She moved her head back onto his shoulder, feeling a sudden surge of love. They lay there for a minute and more, the sounds of their breathing underlining the silence.

  “So what’s the plan?” she asked at last.

  “There are things we need to know before can we make one.”

  “The first being where they are. We’re not even sure they’re in Delhi.”

  “No, but it’s a very good bet. According to Komarov it was the only Indian city that Brady researched in the Moscow library.”

  “How are we going to find them?”

  “I don’t know yet. First I want to know who authorized the whole business. If this is some lunatic scheme thought up by a small group of mid-ranking hotheads, then all we need to do is alert their superiors. Either with the help of my old boss in London or more directly.” He smiled. “I could climb in through the viceroy’s bedroom window and tell him in person.”

  Caitlin tried to ignore the mental picture his suggestion evoked—the viceroy and his wife in matching nightcaps, spluttering indignation. “But you don’t believe this is some small cabal.”

  “No, but I’ve been wrong before.”

  “So how do we find out?” she asked, idly stroking his belly.

  “That’s easy. I ask someone who’ll know. At gunpoint.”

  “And if that person tells you it goes right to the top?”

  “Then it’s up to us.”

  Her hand came to rest. “How long do we have?”

  “According to the newspaper I read today, Gandhi arrives in Delhi a week from tomorrow.”

  The Women’s Courtyard

  The morning sun was still peering through the mist above the Yamuna River as they drove south through the half-completed new city. The road, never good, rapidly deteriorated as they headed out into open country, causing Sergei Piatakov to bounce up and down on the leather-upholstered back seat.

  The Ford belonged to their absentee Indian landlord, and the three of them—ostensibly two Europeans and an Indian acquaintance interested in tiger hunting—were being chauffeured to a suitable spot for testing the three modern German rifles that their British hosts had supplied.

  The guns weren’t the only thing they’d found waiting for them at Sayid Hassan’s luxurious villa. The four servants’ eagerness to please their foreign visitors had done nothing to allay Brady’s suspicions, and he had instructed Piatakov and Chatterji to search their quarters while he lectured the servants on their duties. Copies of the same neatly typed instructions had been hidden under three of the mattresses.

  As Aram had said more than once, if it occurs to you, it has probably also occurred to them.

  In the seat beside the driver, Brady turned to ask Chatterji if he’d ever been on a tiger hunt.

  “Yes, many times when I was a boy.” The Indian began recounting a long anecdote, the obvious purpose of which was to distance himself from his privileged upbringing. Piatakov’s attention soon wavered. He had once had a Siberian tiger in his sights but hadn’t been able to pull the trigger—the animal had seemed so full of life and grace.

  He allowed himself a rueful smile. After the last three years, he no longer had that problem where humans were concerned.

  They motored on through several villages and stretches of semijungle, the day warming, dust rising in a long cloud behind them. Almost two hours after leaving the city, the car turned in through a ruined stone gateway, drove down a tree-shaded avenue, and emerged at the top of a large open space. The slope before them was littered with pieces of brick.

  They all got out and walked a short distance, the servant-chauffeur carrying the three rifles, Brady their box of shells.

  “Must have been a temple,” the American said, stopping to pick up a lump of brick that showed traces of faded red paint. He looked up. “How about down there?” he suggested, indicating a group of strange-looking trees some two hundred yards away. “That’s farther than we’ll have to shoot.”

  The servant walked off down the slope to place the targets. He looked somewhat nervous, Piatakov thought. A premonition, perhaps.

  Brady was helping Chatterji with the loading. The two of them had grown closer since the gunfight at Kerki, the American teaching the young Indian all the gun tricks he’d learned in his years as a rebel. Piatakov wasn’t sure he believed even half of Brady’s stories, but there was no doubting the man’s love affair with the fabled American West or his proficiency with the heavy Colt revolver. The Indian seemed enthralled, and probably was. Like a child who’d found a more suitable father.

  Piatakov had been fond of Brady himself in the early days, and could understand the attraction. But he and the American had been drifting apart for quite a while. They were still allies, still comrades in the way that soldiers often were, but it no longer felt like a friendship. Perhaps it never had been. Perhaps Aram had been the glue that held the two of them together. Or perhaps they’d been more like people falling in love, seduced by the thought of a fresh beginning, the prospect of a new and better life.

  As with lovers, the excitement had slowly worn off.

  He thought of Caitlin thousands of miles away in Moscow, banging heads together, getting her work done. He smiled, just at the moment the first shot crashed out, pulling silence down across the jungle in the wake of its echo.

  After searching in vain for any Russian news, Caitlin put aside the Eastern Mail, which a servant had brought with breakfast. She stared at the ceiling for a minute or so, then abruptly swung herself off the bed and started pacing to and fro. It couldn’t have been more than an hour since Jack had left, which meant it was only midmorning. Lunch, the next item on her sparse agenda, was still a long time ahead.

  When Jack wasn’t with her, the reality of her situation quickly reasserted itself. The frustration and boredom that came with enforced seclusion was bad enough without the knowledge that what followed might well be worse. When she did get to leave the house, it would probably be to see Sergei, and since she doubted that anything good would come from the meeting, that prospect was far from enticing. She didn’t want anyone killed—Jack, Sergei, even Brady—but a peaceful resolution was hard to imagine.

  She thought about their conversation of the night before. Jack had been honest, she thought, probably more so than she had. She still wasn’t sure why she’d come all this way, or which of the reasons she’d given were half-truths and rationalizations.

  It was certainly true that she felt an obligation to Sergei and, rather more surprisingly, one to Komarov as well. What she hadn’t mentioned to Jack was her reluctance to leave him again.

  All feelings, of course. A cold appraisal told her that Sergei and Komarov had respectively abandoned and kidnapped her and had thereby forfeited any claim to loyalty. And if her work in Moscow wasn’t more important than her feelings for Jack, why had she given him up in the first place? With the Zhenotdel facing a probable crisis, getting home to the capital should have been her top priority.

  She told herself things might have been different if there’d been an easy way to return, if trains had been running to Kerki, if it hadn’t seemed certain that Brady and her husband would disable the Red Turkestan. She could have insisted that the soldiers take her back
across the desert, but memories of the way some had looked at her on the outbound trip had been enough to quash that idea. Being raped, murdered, and left for the vultures hadn’t seemed like much of a future. So going on with Jack had hardly been irrational.

  Trouble was, she knew she’d have done it anyway.

  And even more disturbing than the knowledge that she wanted to go with him was the realization that she had no burning desire to go back. Or at least not yet. She remembered telling Jack, on the day they left Kerki, that as far as each other was concerned, they would have to learn to live in the present. And for seven wonderful weeks, they’d given a good impression of doing so. But she’d known it couldn’t last forever, that sooner or later the future would come banging on her door.

  Did she just need a break? Her life over the last three years had been a damned sight easier than the lives of most Russians, but it had still been a great deal harder than anything she’d ever known before. Ten-hour days and six-day weeks without any breaks in a country whose economy had virtually collapsed and whose people were dying in droves. It might have been worth it—she still thought it had been—but the cost had been high. Almost everyone she knew seemed physically and emotionally drained, herself included. So why not take the long way back—leave India with Jack, visit her family in Brooklyn, and only then return to her desk in Moscow?

  Or was that also self-deluding? Over the last few months, other people’s doubts and worries about the state of the revolution had felt like constant companions. Sergei’s sense of betrayal, Komarov’s fear of where all the killing would lead them, Kollontai’s pessimism, and Arbatov’s gaping chasm—only four years had passed since all these people had ecstatically welcomed the revolution, and now the only thing they had in common was the sense that it was all going wrong.

  The revolution had certainly lost its soft edges, its warmth and comradeship. And, she thought, its outlandishness, its impudence and cheek. It had become less Irish, more English. Lenin might look like a leprechaun, but these days he felt more like an irascible principal whose pupils had let him down.