The Dark Clouds Shining

by David Downing

  Out on the roof, crouched in the shadow of a large tin chimney, McColl could see Chatterji in the open doorway, his gun gleaming blue in the somber light. Behind the open window off to the Indian’s right, there were three people conversing in Russian: Caitlin, Brady, and a second man, who had to be her husband, Sergei.

  On his reconnaissance earlier that evening, McColl had been tempted to go it alone and simply kill or disable all three men—he hadn’t got around to deciding which. With surprise on his side, his chances of survival would have been much better, and there would have been no need to put her at risk. She would have been furious with him for presuming to know what was best for them both, but that he could have coped with—his problem was, he knew why she wanted to give Sergei a chance. Her husband had been responsible for several innocent deaths over the last few months, but McColl was willing to believe that Sergei was following his conscience. Just as Caitlin’s brother Colm had done; Colm, whose death would always haunt McColl’s relationship with her. Just as he himself had done while working for the Service. You did what you thought was right, and people died. Because you made a simple mistake, or didn’t think things through, or were simply wrong to begin with. It was hard playing God without the omniscience.

  He could see Fedya’s face as the boy told him good-bye.

  The latch clicked as Chatterji pulled the door shut. It was time to get closer.

  She knew she was wasting her breath from the look of amazement on his face.

  “This is insane,” Sergei said. “That you should come all this way . . . it’s . . . Go home, Caitlin. Go back to your work. There is nothing for you here.”

  She met his eyes, knew it was true.

  “You and the party disapprove of our plan,” Brady said, “but you don’t even know what it is.”

  She glanced at the American, now sitting on the edge of his chair, but still outwardly unruffled. “You’re going to shoot the English prince,” she told him. She turned back to Sergei. “I remember when you had nothing but contempt for this sort of terrorism,” she said. “All that killing this prince will do is give the English the excuse they need to cancel the trade treaty. And we cannot afford to be alone in the world. Russia will starve.”

  Sergei stared her straight in the eye, and she could feel the sadness and rage washing around inside him. “It was the party leadership that betrayed the revolution,” he said, grinding out each word. “It wasn’t me.”

  Chatterji reappeared. “Nothing,” he told Brady before taking a seat at the table and placing the gun within easy reach. As far as she could see, neither Brady nor Sergei was armed.

  “Women always say they have more imagination than men,” Brady was saying, a self-satisfied smile on his face, “but I’m afraid you haven’t bothered to apply yours. I’m sure it will be satisfying to assassinate a prince, but as you say, that on its own is hardly likely to set India ablaze.”

  Caitlin just looked at him.

  “We are going to assassinate him, but not only him. While Durga does the honors from the roof outside, Sergei and I will be half a mile away, executing the sainted Gandhi. An Indian killing an English prince, white men killing India’s favorite son. It’s called a double play in baseball, as I’m sure you know.” He grinned at her, relishing the moment. “And India truly will explode.”

  “And Russia will no longer be alone,” Sergei pointed out. “A revolution here will keep ours alive. The party will no longer need to make compromises.”

  She shook her head in disbelief. “What use would India be to us? It’s ten times more backward than we are!”

  “All the more reason,” Brady drawled. “But I think we’ve talked for long enough. The only thing left to decide is what we do with you.”

  McColl was a short step away from the barely open door, trying to pinpoint each man’s position from the sounds of their voices. He still had no idea where Chatterji was, but he might wait forever for the Indian to speak.

  He pushed the door wide, took in the frozen tableau, and let the aim of his revolver come to rest on the Indian, whose hand was inches away from the gun on the table.

  “Push it away from you,” McColl told him in English.

  Chatterji did so.

  “You,” McColl said to Piatakov in Russian, “back against the wall.”

  “Jack McColl,” Brady said, a grin spreading across his face like a mask. “I should have guessed. Are you working for the Cheka, too, or has Caitlin here joined British intelligence?”

  “Neither,” McColl told him, stepping into the room.

  “We’re here together because we want the same thing,” Caitlin told the stunned Piatakov. “An end to this madness.”

  Brady laughed at her. “When the Cheka starts working with the British Crown, there’s no revolution worth saving. But perhaps you’ve been too busy sleeping with the past to notice. Why not go home, as Sergei tells you? Back to your women’s business.”

  “Nothing would make me happier. As long as he comes with me.”

  “At the end of a gun?” Piatakov asked bitterly.

  “If there was another way to save you from this idiocy, I would have used it.”

  He shook his head sadly. “I can’t go back.”

  “So that’s that,” Brady said. “I guess you’ll have to kill us all.”

  She ignored him. “Sergei?”

  “Remember Vedenskoye,” Brady said matter-of-factly.

  “No!” Piatakov cried as Chatterji tipped himself backward.

  Distracted by the Indian’s movement, McColl took his eye off Brady just long enough for the latter to raise his Colt revolver and would probably have paid the intended price if Piatakov, intent on shielding Caitlin, hadn’t thrown himself at the American.

  McColl had braced himself for the bullet, but when the Colt boomed, it was the Russian who took it, staggering forward and then collapsing in front of his shocked-looking partner.

  As Piatakov toppled, McColl fired over him, slamming Brady into the wall.

  McColl fired again, blowing a hole through the side of Chatterji’s head as the Indian lunged for his gun.

  Caitlin was on all fours, leaning over the now-prone Piatakov. “Oh, Sergei,” she whispered, but there was no answer, only a dark patch spreading on the white linen shirt.

  Brady was slumped behind them, clutching his upper side, the fallen Colt beyond his reach.

  McColl kept him covered, ears cocked for the sound of feet on the stairs. The other people in the house would have heard the shots, but would they do anything more than lock their doors and remind one another that white people’s business was better left to them?

  So far, apparently not.

  Chatterji and Caitlin’s husband were dead, so the obvious thing to do was finish Brady off and leave the building as fast as they could.

  He looked at the wounded American and wished the man would give him the excuse he needed. It was doubtless to humanity’s credit that most people found it hard to kill in cold blood, but sometimes it was most inconvenient.

  He didn’t think he could do it, not even when the man in question was Aidan Brady.

  Caitlin stared at her fellow American. He had led her brother and Sergei to their deaths, and it made no difference to her that both had been willing disciples. He had murdered Yuri Komarov, whom she’d come to respect and almost cherish. Three times now, he had tried and narrowly failed to kill Jack.

  What sort of monster was he? The five words that came to mind were hackneyed as hell but seemed bizarrely appropriate: an enemy of the revolution.

  The gun that Chatterji had knocked off the table was lying a foot from her hand.

  As she picked it up, Brady must have seen the look on her face. “No,” he said, trying to rise. There was more disbelief than fear in his voice, as if he couldn’t quite believe in a world without himself.

/>   After only the briefest of hesitations, she aimed at that place where most men had hearts and firmly squeezed the trigger.

  Brady’s head slumped to the floor, his mouth twisting into a final snarl.

  Footsteps sounded on the stairs, then stopped. The shooting hadn’t gone unnoticed.

  McColl tried to gently pull Caitlin away, but she shook him off. Back on her knees, she closed the dead Piatakov’s eyes and kissed him on the forehead.

  McColl could hear voices below. Arguing, probably over what to do. “We have to go,” he told her. “He didn’t save you so you could end up in an Indian prison,” he added when she failed to respond. “He’d want you to go on with your work.”

  She looked up, eyes full of tears. “I know.”

  “Then come on. We’ll go out the way I came in.”

  She got back to her feet, wiping the tears away on her sleeve.

  He scanned the room for anything they might have left behind, then turned down the lamp. When he took a last look back from the door, the room seemed full of corpses, but for once in his violent life, he could see no cause for remorse. His only regret was that he hadn’t shot Brady himself because Caitlin seemed in a state of shock.

  She let him lead her across a succession of adjoining roofs and down the rickety fire escape that a progressive landlord had provided for his tenants. As they reached the bottom, a rickshaw came out of the darkness and stopped right beside them, the boy driver beaming with pride. McColl helped her into the seat, thinking that Komarov’s ghost had to be working overtime.

  McColl told the boy where to take them and asked for a back-street route. Soon they were speeding down narrow, dimly lit alleys where the rickshaw often scraped along one of the walls.

  “You tried,” he told her, conscious of how empty the words sounded.

  She just looked away.

  He had never seen her like this before, but then as far as he knew, she’d never shot a man before. Nor seen a husband die.

  The shock would wear off, but until it did he’d have to think for them both. Would Five and the IPI be after them? By rights they should be grateful—he and Caitlin had succeeded where Cunningham and his helpers had failed—but McColl wasn’t holding his breath. He and Caitlin knew too much.

  They had to get out of Delhi, but where should they go? He knew Calcutta much better than Bombay . . . He suddenly thought of Darjeeling, largely empty of Brits at this time of year, and close enough to the Chinese border should they need a place to run to. One of those hotels high on the hill with their stunning views of the Himalayas. Next morning he could go to see Mirza, tell the detective the story as promised, and ask for the help of his old railway comrades in getting them out of the city.

  A glance at Caitlin’s expression brought McColl back to earth. Here he was planning their future, and only twenty minutes before she’d been begging Sergei to come home. Had she been lying to coax him away from the others, or had she really meant it? Even if she hadn’t, why was he assuming that she wouldn’t return on her own? Because she loved him? She’d loved him in 1918, and that hadn’t stopped her from saying good-bye.

  They were, he suddenly realized, drawing up outside the serai. It was gone midnight, and their feet on the stairs sounded loud in the sleeping building. Once they were safe in their room, he tried to take her in his arms, and after an initial flinch, she allowed him to do so. “Thank you,” she said when he let her go, but he had no idea what for.

  She lay herself out on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

  Things would look better after they slept, he told himself, lying down beside her. He felt exhausted but was determined not to drop off before she did.

  She seemed to sense as much. “Go to sleep,” she told him. “I don’t think I’ll be able to.”

  “Do you want to talk?” he asked.

  “No.”

  In the hour before dawn, McColl awoke with a jerk, a sheen of cold sweat on his forehead. His mind reached for the fading dream, but it was already gone, leaving only the feeling that somehow he had gotten everything wrong.

  He levered himself into a sitting position and stared down at her sleeping face, shadow drawn in the dim light: the dark pools of the shuttered eyes; the strong, graceful line of the jaw. The new Russia, he thought. Humanity’s best hope, where the best of people ended up as executioners.

  One day maybe, far in the future.

  When he woke up again, the sun was streaming through the window, and she was gone. So was her suitcase and, as he quickly discovered, half of their money. She was going back to Russia.

  There was a note on the table. “I love you, Jack, and that makes this the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. Forgive me, Caitlin.”

  He read it through again, and again, examining each pencil stroke as if there was some way he could release the feelings they had imprisoned, then sat staring into space for several minutes, before running a hand through his hair and walking out onto the balcony.

  “I can give myself to you,” she had once said to him, “because I know I can take myself away.”

  Outside, the familiar sensory palette presented itself: the smells, the noise, the ache of color. Across the street a man in a turban was sitting on a stool, a cobbler’s last between his knees, hammering away at a long black boot. A rickshaw went past, carrying a pasty-faced European toward the Red Fort. Above the roofs the sky seemed blue as the dome over Tamerlane’s tomb.

  Had he always known she would go back?

  He had to admit the answer was no. The fear had always been there, but he hadn’t really believed that she would.

  What could he do now? Go home, he supposed, if only for his mother’s sake. To a country awash with anger and bitterness, to the half-dead life he’d left behind, to grieving her loss all over again.

  He walked back into the room and wearily gathered his possessions together.

  The map of Tashkent he’d taken from Rafiq’s room at the Hotel Lux was still in his bag, and seeing it there he remembered the courtyard of women, the flickering film on the wall, all those eyes in search of a better world.

  Her place of hope. He seemed no nearer to finding his own.

  The plumes of smoke in the distance presumably marked the station. After she’d found a place there to change back into her Russian clothes, she would buy a ticket to somewhere. She had no idea how she would get back to Moscow and suspected it might take months, but there had to be a way. For someone like her—young, clever, and white—there would always be a way.

  So why did the smoke in the distance seem too close? She had done the hardest part, done it because she knew she wouldn’t have the strength to do it again. So why was she crying inside?

  What in God’s name was she doing?

  They were passing through the Queen’s Gardens. “Pull over,” she told the driver, pointing him toward the curb when he turned to see what she wanted. He looked around again once they were stationary, and she held up five fingers.

  He muttered something and climbed down from his seat. “More annas,” he warned her, before lighting a cigarette and ambling into the garden.

  She sat there, absurdly exposed, watching the palm fronds sway in the morning breeze.

  Was she returning to something that was no longer there?

  In 1918 she’d been closer to joy than she’d ever expected. She remembered trying—and failing—to convey the strength of that feeling in a letter to her aunt Orla. What had happened in Russia was probably a once-in-a-lifetime thing, maybe rarer than that. A sense of togetherness, of social happiness, that had left her and all the people she knew drunk on hope and fellow feeling. The world had opened up, and things that had once seemed carved in stone—the poverty and exploitation, the never-ending wars, the subjection of women—were suddenly seen to be written only in sand, so swiftly erased, so easily rewritten. And she had been
part of the change, one of so many making a difference.

  Wordsworth had put it well: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.”

  The years that followed had not been so joyful—the civil war and the hardship it brought in its wake had seen to that. Some had thought victory would rejuvenate the revolution, but the opposite seemed to have happened. The magic was gone, the world closing down, the sand reverting to stone.

  They found it hard to admit, to themselves as much as to one another, but all of them knew. Sergei and Komarov had railed against it in their very different ways; Kollontai was doubtless still tenaciously fighting her corner. But deep in their hearts, they all knew that the odds were against them, that the brand-new world they thought they had glimpsed was fading like a dream.

  Caitlin sighed and watched as a pair of young Indian men in suits strode past, presumably bound for some office. She could go back to hers in Moscow and do that work that could still be done. Part of her wanted to; part of her thought she should.

  But other voices demanded a hearing. The one that said, “Cut your losses, and find a new country where doors are waiting for someone to break them down.” The one that just said, “Jack.”

  In 1918 she’d had to choose between love and ideals because he was a wanted man where she most wanted to be. But even then, setting him loose, she’d hoped that they might meet again, that she wasn’t burning her bridges completely. And miracle of miracles, she’d been right.

  If she left him again, she knew there’d be no way back.

  Passionate love wasn’t everything, but it sure as hell was something. And though for women it often seemed to crowd out everything else, that didn’t have to be the case. Maybe winning that particular battle was the hardest thing she’d ever have to do.