He went back outside. “Get the shovels,” he told the platoon commander.
It had been dark for over an hour when Ahmed Mirza announced his arrival with a knock on their door. McColl introduced him to Caitlin.
The detective grinned. “The woman who drives! All of Delhi is talking about you.”
She smiled back. It had been a memorable few minutes.
They got down to business. “All the copies have been delivered by hand,” Mirza told them. “Including the one to Kudsia Road.”
“And the warning was delivered?” Caitlin asked.
“To the three men we have been watching? Yes, but not at that house. They left there . . . but I am losing the logical progression of events. When the Russian arrived back from his appointment with my camera, he told the American something, and the American just laughed. Then the Indian came out, and they all had an argument. After that they went back in and stayed in the house until it got dark. Then they all left together.”
“How? Did they walk?”
“To the Delhi Gate, where they hired a tonga.”
“And you know where they went?”
“Of course. To the room overlooking Chandni Chowk that the Indian rented yesterday morning. That is where the warning was delivered—one of the boys slipped it under their door.” Mirza hesitated. “But there is something else I must tell you. The servants at the first house—they are all dead. Once the three men were gone, the boy in charge took a look through the windows, and he saw the bodies. I have to say, it does not feel acceptable, letting them lie there.”
McColl was less surprised than Caitlin was. “Can you inform the police?” he asked Mirza. “An anonymous tip-off, perhaps.”
The detective looked grateful. “I will do so. And now I await your instructions.”
“You’ve done a wonderful job,” McColl told him, “but I must take it from here.” He reached for the purse he’d bought in the market. “You must tell me how much I owe you.”
Mirza looked disappointed. “I am not to be present at the final conclusion?”
“I’m afraid not. It is a family matter,” he added, which was true enough. “But I promise I will come and see you once everything is settled and tell you the story from beginning to end.”
The Indian gave him a rueful smile. “That is good,” he said. “Not good enough, as you English say, but still good. I believe thirty rupees are outstanding.”
McColl handed him the requisite notes, and the two of them shook hands. After seeing the Indian out the door, he turned to find Caitlin sitting on the side of the bed, hands interlinked on top of her head, bleakness in her eyes.
“What now?” she asked.
He sat down beside her. “I think we have three options.”
“Which are?”
“We could tell Fitzwilliam where they are and let him deal with them.”
“Kill them, you mean?”
He decided not to sugarcoat the pill. “Probably.”
“And you think that’s what they deserve,” she replied. It was more a statement than a question.
“If anyone does. They have just murdered four servants.”
She gave him a despairing look. “I know.”
He threw her a lifeline. “I don’t want to hand them over either.”
“For my sake?”
“Partly,” he conceded. “But I’m also afraid that Five will find some other use for Brady.”
“All right,” she said, as if knowing he had a reason legitimized hers. “So what are the other two options?”
“The easiest one is just to walk away.”
“And not lift a finger to save your prince?”
McColl laughed. “He’s not my prince. And the thought of either of us dying to save him . . . well, it’s too ridiculous for words. If I don’t believe that Jed and Mac gave their lives for anything worthwhile, then why would I want to risk yours and mine?”
She was silent for several moments. “Russia will get the blame,” she said. “The trade deals will collapse, and the famines will go on forever.”
“And we’re still guessing about the target,” he added. “If it is the prince, he’ll be well protected. If it’s Gandhi, we’re his only hope.”
“And walking away never feels right.”
“No,” he agreed, wondering what that might mean for their future. Whatever she decided, she’d be walking away from something.
“So option three is stopping them.”
“Yes. Which won’t be easy.”
“Sparing Sergei complicates matters, doesn’t it?”
“Of course, but . . .”
“Maybe I can talk him around.” She had a sudden memory of Sergei telling her how much cleverer she was than him.
“You really think that’s possible?”
“I don’t know. If we can get him away from the other two . . . then perhaps. But Jack, Sergei knows about you, that I had a long love affair with an Englishman. He never asked any questions—he’s old-fashioned in that way—and I don’t remember whether I ever told him your name. I am sure I never told him whom you worked for, but Brady probably has, and you being there will make it less likely he’ll listen to me. So . . .”
“You’re probably right, but I won’t let you go alone.”
“Sergei wouldn’t hurt me.”
“Maybe, but Brady or Chatterji might.”
She gave him a despairing look. “Couldn’t you hide behind the door or something?” she asked, only half seriously.
“It might work,” he said. “If there’s somewhere close by I can stay undetected, then I needn’t show my face until he makes up his mind.”
“That would work.”
“Then that’s our plan,” McColl said, with as much confidence as he could muster.
She wasn’t fooled. “It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?”
“I can’t think of anything better. And if by some miracle Sergei agrees, we can stick him on a train to somewhere and shop the others. If he doesn’t . . .”
“Then what do we do?”
“We could disable them all. A bullet in the kneecap is very effective.”
She looked shocked, but only for a moment.
“You walk again eventually,” McColl said, far from sure it was true.
She looked unusually waiflike in her uncertainty. He pulled her head onto his shoulder, and they sat like that in silence for more than a minute. “I sometimes think of Sergei as a grown-up boy,” she said eventually. “And in some ways he is. But he’s been at war for years, and he knows how to fight.”
“I guessed as much.”
“And in case you don’t know—what worries me most is the thought of losing you.”
He held her a little tighter and wished they could stay where they were.
“So when do we go?” she asked.
“Later this evening, but I’ll need to do a reconnaisance first. The more we know, the better our chances.”
Cunningham found the colonel sitting in his usual chair, the tip of his cigarette glowing in the darkness as he gazed out into the wind-twisted shadows of the garden. Cunningham expected a tongue-lashing, but Fitzwilliam listened to his report with a faint smile and then offered him a cigarette.
The Turkish tobacco seemed, as ever, faintly redolent of decadence.
“Any sign of McColl?” Fitzwilliam asked.
“No.”
“He’ll have made a run for it,” Fitzwilliam said confidently. “He’s thrown his spanner in the works. Why would he hang around?”
To make sure, Cunningham thought. “You’re probably right,” he conceded out loud. “And the Good Indian team must know we’re scouring the city for them.”
“You think they’ve made a run for it, too.”
“Probably,” Cunning
ham said carefully. “Their plan may have failed, but Brady can congratulate himself on cheating the hangman, at least for a while. If they haven’t, and they do stick around for a crack at Gandhi, then we’ll have some questions to answer.”
“The photograph?”
“Precisely.”
“Maybe it’s not such a problem. You’re the one in the picture, and once you’re on the boat home, we can deny all knowledge of you. Or better still, find someone willing to testify that you’re another Russian. It’ll be a hard job proving otherwise.”
Cunningham took a last drag on the cigarette and stubbed it out in an ashtray. “One other thought occurred to me.”
“That the Prince of Wales might have been their target?”
“Might still be. I think we have to consider the possibility.”
“I already have. Our usual security arrangements have worked well enough in the past. And I don’t think it would help to confuse matters at this late hour.” He turned to take another cigarette from the case on the table and lit it from the stub of the last. “Good Indian was authorized by London,” he said, meeting Cunningham’s eyes for the first time that evening. “They can hardly hold us responsible if anything goes wrong, can they?”
“But . . .”
“You see, I’ve been giving this matter a great deal of thought. If Brady and his friends do nothing, then no harm’s done. And if they do make use of the guns, then we’ll have the excuse we need to nail down the lid on this country.”
“And the prince?” Cunningham heard himself ask.
“Oh, there’s always another one waiting in line.”
Waiting on their balcony, half-lost in the street’s mosaic of lamps, Caitlin was brought back to earth by the voice calling up from below and felt for one beautiful moment like someone’s misplaced Juliet, a rose by any other name.
Or had she gotten that the wrong way around?
She walked down the stairs, adjusting her veil, thinking that here it was—the moment she’d been dreading.
The source of her trepidation was harder to pinpoint. Why should the prospect of seeing Sergei and his murderous friends evoke this hideous sinking sensation? Wisely or not, she felt no fear for her life, but she was afraid of something. Her sense of who she was seemed far too fragile, as if she’d spent the last few years pretending to be someone she wasn’t. A broken future could be repaired; a broken past could not.
McColl helped her into the tonga and, after climbing aboard himself, gave the boy driver their destination. As they rattled down the street toward the station, the boy let loose a string of shrill exhortations to clear their passage through the knots of evening strollers.
A glance at her companion confirmed Caitlin’s feeling that he was—if not quite in his element—much more at home in such situations than she was. She could see why he’d kept that job for all those years, despite a growing disenchantment with the cause it served. He loved thinking on his feet; as she’d now seen on more than one occasion, he functioned well in a crisis.
Well, he had one here.
The boy swung them around a corner and into an even busier street. Even in summer Moscow’s streets would have been practically deserted at this time of night—just a handful of drunks and Cheka patrols. As they rode between lines of still-open stalls, she remembered the last time she’d gone looking for Sergei, driving past the futurist flower stalls on Bolshaya Dmitrovka.
Moscow—Russia—seemed a long way away. Fall would be almost half-done, winter already looming. So much energy spent in simply keeping warm, so little light to live by. Yet so much warmth in people’s hearts, so much brightness in their eyes. A whole other world.
She found herself thinking how utterly Russian the revolution had been, how thin its subsequent claims to internationalism, no matter how sincerely meant. People like her and Brady, who came from a similar political tradition, could lend the Russians a helping hand, but what were he and she and Sergei doing here, far from any way of life they really understood? Scratching an itch until it bled?
Their tonga should have been a troika, she thought. Plowing through snow rather than dust.
She hugged herself against the sudden chill.
Her silence was slightly unnerving, but also hardly surprising. McColl hoped she was gathering focus and strength, like a last man waiting to bat, and not already saying good-bye.
The world had always divided them, he thought, as their tonga skirted the chaos of the station forecourt. In a room, a bed, there were no borders. Traveling across the Pacific, America, and Afghanistan, they had been like Lenin in his famous sealed train. But now that their lives were bound up with those all around them, the boundaries were slowly materializing, like invisible writing exposed to the sun.
In his more optimistic moments, McColl believed that things had improved, that during the years apart, their approaches to life had actually grown more similar. Their politics were certainly less incompatible, mostly because of the distance he had traveled. Her opinions had hardly changed in seven years, but then, events hadn’t proved her wrong. The future he’d been hoping for had died in the Flanders mud.
She had changed, though. The questing intelligence and almost reckless determination that he’d first encountered in China were still there, but they’d been tempered by age, work, and unhappy knowledge. All the brittleness was gone, leaving her stronger and surer of herself. She had come into her own in Russia.
Was that reason enough for her to go back? Over the last few weeks, they’d discussed the situation in Russia almost daily, and sometimes she seemed to be saying it was. At others she didn’t seem half so sure. Lenin’s Russia was changing, she said, and people like her might soon find it hard to get anything useful done.
But she had never said that she wanted to leave that country behind. Not once. Not for political reasons and not for love of him.
As he turned to look at her, she wrapped herself up in her arms.
“Are you cold?” he asked, surprised.
“No. How much farther is it?”
“Not far.”
“I just want it over. I expect you do, too.”
Part of him did, though what came after might be worse.
Assuming they survived. Going up against three armed men—at least two of whom were seasoned fighters—felt like a real roll of the dice.
They were passing the Queen’s Gardens, heading up toward Chandni Chowk. The town hall clock struck eleven as they turned onto the wide thoroughfare, too British a sound for such a hot night. The number of people still in motion was rapidly diminishing, the pavements filling with would-be sleepers and more than a few crying babies.
A hundred yards short of their turnoff, McColl leaned forward and tapped their driver’s shoulder. “This will do.”
The boy hauled back on the reins and guided them into the curb. A man on the nearby pavement raised his head in surprise, then gently laid it back on his makeshift pillow.
McColl paid off the boy and pulled Caitlin into the shadows of a shop front. “See that side street?” he said, pointing it out. “Number four is about twenty yards in. You can just see the corner of its roof from here,” he added. “Take the staircase right to the top—”
“And it’s the door on the left. I haven’t forgotten.” Farther up Chandni Chowk, the dark outline of a huge fortress was visible. “Your prince will come this way?” she asked.
“Yes.” He tried to picture it. Soldiers and elephants, rajas and banners. Presumably the homeless would be moved out first.
The veil was now a neck scarf. “So this is where we part.”
“Yep. But I won’t be far away. You just keep them talking.”
“Oh, I don’t think the conversation will flag,” she said drily.
“You are sure about this?”
“As sure as I can be.” She gave him a farewell
kiss and was halfway across the street by the time he realized she was gone.
McColl pulled his service revolver from his waistband and checked it. “Time to be myself again,” he murmured, unwinding the turban and hanging the doubled-up strip around his neck.
She found the house without difficulty. Her knock on the door brought an Indian, so she pointed upward. The Indian smiled, said something incomprehensible, and gestured her toward the stairs. She climbed to the top and found a door with a strip of yellow light beneath it.
She rapped on it softly, and after a few seconds, the light all but disappeared.
“Sergei, it’s me,” she said loudly, the words sounding strangely inadequate.
The door edged opened, and the familiar features stared out of the gloom. His face was a picture.
“Caitlin! What—”
“Get inside,” Brady said, bustling past them onto the landing, clearly intent on making sure that she was alone.
She followed Sergei into the room and watched as he turned the lamp back up. Their Indian comrade was staring at her, a gun hanging loosely in his hand.
“What in God’s name are you doing here, Caitlin?” Sergei wanted to know.
He sounded so distressed, as if her appearance was the worst thing he could have imagined. Which might even have been a good sign. “I—”
“First things first,” Brady said, striding back in and leaving the door slightly ajar. “Durga, check the roof. And you,” he said, turning to Caitlin, “will explain how you found us.”
She and Jack had expected the question. “With Indian comrades’ help,” she said curtly. “We knew the British would want to keep you at a distance, and finding two white men in the Indian town isn’t so difficult.”
“What were you trying to achieve with that business at the station?” Brady asked.
“That was aimed at the British,” she patiently explained. “We thought you might be playing into their hands, so we had to make sure they didn’t come out on top.”
Sergei looked like he might explode. “But who is this we? And what does this have to do with you?”
“I am here on behalf of the Cheka,” she told him, noting in passing that this wasn’t a sentence she’d ever expected to hear herself say. “The Cheka that your friend here once served,” she added with a contemptuous glance at Brady. “But I know I won’t change his mind. It’s you I’ve come to plead with,” she told Sergei. “The party—your party—the one you made the revolution with, the one you served for all those years. It opposes this. It asks you to think again.”
The Dark Clouds Shining Page 38
