Fifteen minutes later one of the sepoys appeared in the distance, walking back toward him.
“Where is he?” McColl asked when they met.
“He went into a shop,” the sepoy told him. “Harry & Sons—it sells bicycles and gramophone records.”
A few minutes later, the two of them strolled past the premises in question. After sending Sanjay back, McColl lingered as long as he dared in the near vicinity, calculating angles of sight. Narrow alleys separated the two-story building that housed the shop from its neighbors, but the street in front was reasonably wide and the yard at back was spacious and almost empty. As far as he could tell, both front and back entrances would be visible from the roof of the government waterworks, which stood behind a high brick wall around a hundred yards away.
Risking one quick glance up at the shop’s upper story, he saw a line of shuttered windows and smoke belching out of a makeshift chimney—someone was cooking something. It had the air of a fortress, he thought, perhaps a tad fancifully. Or perhaps not. But one thing was certain—this wasn’t the sort of place that a young man like Chaudhuri’s visitor would normally call home.
Early next morning McColl and Tindall arrived at the waterworks manager’s home, a sprawling white villa in Alipur surrounded by towering palms. Alan Huckerby was already up, as the sounds of shouting made abundantly clear. A friend had seen the manager’s wife flirting outrageously with her tennis partner, and he absolutely insisted that she end their association—he didn’t give a damn that they were only one game away from the trophy.
His wife screamed back that he could drown himself in the Hooghly for all she cared.
As McColl and Tindall approached the open doorway, the servants standing on either side suddenly became aware of them. The glee vanished from their faces, leaving only the usual mask.
“Please tell the sahib that he has visitors,” Tindall told the one who looked like the bearer.
The two of them waited on the veranda, staring out at the rain-soaked lawn and enjoying the lack of heat, until Huckerby joined them. Tindall knew the man slightly and introduced McColl. “We have a favor to ask you,” he told the manager before explaining their need to use his works as an observation platform. Huckerby didn’t even ask who or what it was they planned to observe—he was, McColl noticed, still trembling with anger. “As long as your chaps don’t get in our way,” was the manager’s only comment. He offered one resentful glance back at the house, then ushered them over to the bougainvillea-draped garage, where a gleaming Fiat Brevetti was lurking.
Automobiles were Huckerby’s not-so-secret passion, and McColl’s ability to more than hold his own when it came to discussing them proved useful that morning, in both raising the manager’s spirits and ingratiating himself. After picking up Sanjay and Mridul at their barracks, they all drove to the waterworks, where Huckerby helped them find a perfect spot for surveillance, on a platform behind a louvered opening high up inside the main building. No one could enter or exit Harry & Sons by either door without being visible to the naked eye, let alone to men with field glasses. The latter, McColl knew, should not be used after a certain point in the afternoon, when those under surveillance might notice a reflected glint from the setting sun.
As he watched, two Indians emerged from the shop’s back door, chatting away and carrying tin cups. They walked across to the outside well, raised a bucket and filled the cups, then picked their spots, lifted their dhotis, and squatted down for their morning crap. One was the man they’d followed from Chaudhuri’s offices.
Was one of these two men Jatin Mukherjee? The only photograph in the authorities’ possession had been taken almost ten years earlier, when the future Jugantar leader hadn’t been more than sixteen. Scanning the two faces through the field glasses, McColl decided that either or neither might belong to the man they most wanted. Which wasn’t much of a help.
As the two men washed themselves, McColl caught the distant strains of “Ave Maria” on the morning breeze. It was Caruso’s record from the year before, playing, presumably, on one of Harry & Sons’ gramophones.
After making sure that Huckerby realized how important it was that word of the surveillance didn’t leak out—Tindall suggested he tell his employees that the government was counting the traffic on the Upper Circular Road—the two of them left Sanjay with the glasses and hailed a tonga to take them back to police headquarters. A meeting of the liaison group was scheduled for that morning.
“I know Huckerby,” was Cunningham’s first response to McColl’s account of the day’s events. “He once told me he preferred automobiles to horses. But I can’t see the point of waiting around. Why not just bag the bastards? We don’t want another Bhattacharyya fiasco.”
McColl shook his head. “We were only guessing about Bhattacharyya. We know that this man belongs to one of the movements—he told Chaudhuri so.”
“He wouldn’t be the first to wrap up simple theft in a rebel flag.”
“He wouldn’t, but Chaudhuri was convinced by this one, and so am I.” Though why he was so sure was hard to put into words. How could he explain to Cunningham that the young man’s walk and his double-sided wardrobe reeked of rebellion rather than crime? He didn’t try. “If we take them in, they’ll just clam up. We agreed that unless they get their hands on a lot more guns, these people can’t really hurt us. It’s their German contact we need to find, and he won’t visit them in prison.”
“A week,” Cunningham offered grudgingly. “But a joint operation. Your two men and two of mine on six-hour shifts. Reporting to us each day.”
“Fair enough,” McColl said—when the week was up, he could always ask for more. Cunningham didn’t have the temperament for this sort of work, he thought. They both knew that conspiracies were a maze of connections and that the only sure way of finding the people who mattered most was to track every last lead down, but the Section Five man lacked the requisite patience.
The rest of the day was spent in finding and briefing a posse of sepoys and creating a roster of duties. The operation was officially scheduled to start the next morning, but the waterworks observation post would be manned overnight. McColl went back for another look after dark, joining Sanjay’s partner, Mridul, at the louvered opening. An invisible moon behind them flooded their vista with pale light, and the four men in the backyard were further lit by the fire they had started. Every now and then a murmur of voices carried on the breeze, and McColl was tempted to see if he could get himself within earshot. One thing that dissuaded him was the near certainty that some local would see him skulking by and raise the alarm. The other was the glint of a gun he thought he saw in one of the talkers’ hands.
Kollontai
Caitlin spent the early summer in London, settling into her new job as the New York Chronicle’s European correspondent. The paper’s only other employee on this side of the Atlantic was its military correspondent in France, a retired soldier from Virginia whose dispatches suggested—to Caitlin at least—a pronounced preference for Parisian delights over those of the front. His articles were long on strategy and short on the actual fighting, great for armchair generals back home but somewhat inadequate when it came to informing America what this particular war was really like. This, Caitlin rapidly discovered, could be better researched in the pubs and cafés close to the London termini where recovered soldiers gathered for a final fry-up before returning to France.
Her first piece on the subject drew predictable objections from “the man on the spot” that she was poaching his territory, but their editor back home was sufficiently shocked and impressed by what she had written to ignore his protests. Although no one spelled it out, she felt she’d been given a green light to write about anything she considered relevant. Which was wonderful. She had every intention of being a real European correspondent, unlike some of her peers in London who seemed to think their remit ended at Dover and most of whom relied on the
same agency reports for anything that happened on the dangerous side of the Channel.
Caitlin hadn’t yet broached the matter of a visit to the fighting front with the authorities or with her editor, neither of whom were likely to view such a prospect with favor. But it seemed to her that she was ideally suited for such a task—as a woman and as an American. Any fool could pass on official statistics, whether of the dead or the meager yards their sacrifice had won, but someone neutral was more likely to see through patriotic delusions and a woman more likely to uncover the real experience behind all the male posturing.
In the meantime there was no shortage of worthwhile stories in London. One of the first pieces she sent home was on Sylvia Pankhurst’s work in the East End, which war conditions had rendered even more vital. Caitlin’s new friend was still campaigning for the woman’s vote, but that was the least of her efforts. Sylvia was spearheading the opposition to the new National Register, which everyone knew was the first step on the road to conscription, and the new Defence of the Realm Act, which seriously curtailed civil liberties. Besides banning a wide variety of activities, from building bonfires to feeding birds with bread crumbs, the latter dealt a crushing blow to freedom of speech. According to the new act, no person was allowed “by word of mouth or in writing” to “spread reports likely to cause disaffection or alarm among any of His Majesty’s forces or among the civilian population.”
Sylvia was also looking to the future, imagining an East End with centrally heated homes and nursery schools for all children, while starting up a “cost price” restaurant for those struggling to pay wartime’s rising food prices. She always had new stories of families in trouble, some feeding themselves on boiled bread, others starving for days at a stretch.
It was in the restaurant that Caitlin occasionally managed to get her friend alone for a few minutes. With the war a year old, women were doing so much more, Sylvia told her one day. They were driving buses, running libraries, even joining the police force. And even if they were all sent back home once the fighting was over, the experience would stay with them.
She said this matter-of-factly, without her usual bubbling enthusiasm, and within a few minutes seemed close to tears. Later, talking to Sylvia’s American friend and colleague Zelie Emerson, Caitlin asked when Sylvia had last taken a holiday—or even had a few hours’ rest.
“I’ve no idea,” Zelie said, adding that it wasn’t just work that was wearing her down. “Keir Hardie is probably dying.”
“Oh,” Caitlin said. She knew that Sylvia had been in a relationship with Britain’s most famous socialist but thought it had long been over. She said as much.
“It is and it isn’t,” Zelie said. “No one really knows what they mean to each other. Not even Sylvia, I sometimes think. But he’s still important to her. She’ll be devastated when he dies.”
But when Caitlin next saw her friend, she seemed in better spirits and full of hope for the future. When Caitlin said she was probably going to Norway and Germany, Sylvia seemed truly excited for her and wistfully lamented that she was too busy to come along, too. Arranging the trip took much longer than Caitlin expected. The war had made travel between countries more difficult, even for neutrals. Suspicion was rife, and all the countries she planned to visit insisted on knowing her reasons for doing so before they would even consider letting her across their thresholds. In July she spent an inordinate number of hours in embassy reception rooms waiting to present her credentials and make her explanations, only, in many cases, to be told that these had to be assessed in the home country.
But finally, in the first week of August, she had all the permits she needed, at least to reach Berlin. Early on the eighth, a taxi carried her and a bulging suitcase across a sunlit but still-sleeping London and disgorged them both outside King’s Cross. With an hour to wait for her Newcastle train, she ate breakfast in the buffet and watched a stream of Indian soldiers march past on the platform outside. In their puttees and turbans, they looked a strange amalgam of East and West, exotic and somehow sad.
She bought newspapers for the train and a copy of the popular Woman’s Weekly. She was done with the former by the time they reached Hitchin. The battle news might be important, but the way they wrote it both angered and bored her. It was full of names—of towns, villages, hamlets—that she hadn’t heard before and never would again. After reading the reports, the only thing she knew about these places was that space in their graveyards was now at a premium.
She had heard of Warsaw, which the Germans had just taken from the Russians, but no one seemed interested in whether the Poles felt liberated or conquered anew. And the report of more landings in the Dardanelles just filled her with rage—even her landlady in Clapham knew that that campaign was dead in the water.
The Woman’s Weekly was more informative, though not always by design. There were several recipes for gooseberries, which would allow their adoptees to hold apples in reserve for the winter months, and an advertisement from Nestlé urging people to send tins of the firm’s milk to the soldiers at the front. “I’m doing my bit, save me from milkless tea,” the tagline read. The idea of sending the milk themselves had apparently not occurred to Nestlé, but such profiteering was becoming common. While many were dying, some were raking it in.
Mrs. Marryat’s advice page was highly entertaining. There was a long discussion as to whether a woman should insist on marrying her betrothed when the latter had lost a limb and offered to set her free. It was the man’s decision to make, Mrs. Marryat decided. She was inclined to allow a hostess to pass the vegetables if no maid was at hand, reluctantly revealed that there was no treatment by which thick ankles could be quickly reduced, and offered a detailed prescription for whitening one’s neck. All of which seemed much more interesting than the news that the Battle of Biskupice had ended, wherever Biskupice might be.
The train reached Newcastle soon after four that afternoon, and, much to Caitlin’s surprise, her ship left on time a few hours later. It was flying the Norwegian flag, but most of the passengers seemed anxious—no one had forgotten the Lusitania. She slept better than she expected and emerged on deck the following morning to a reassuringly empty sea. A couple of British destroyers were sighted later that day, but that was all, and after another peaceful night they docked in a still-sleeping Bergen.
The journey to Christiania was beautiful. The train climbed slowly away from the coast, up onto a broken plateau, where isolated farms sat deep in the valleys and huge forested slopes reared up toward the summer snow line. Apart from a short break for lunch in the busy restaurant car, Caitlin spent the whole day soaking up the views and felt almost cheated when darkness finally fell.
It was almost midnight when the train arrived, and the search for a vacant hotel room took another exhausting hour. When she woke the following morning, breakfast was already over, and she had to search out a meal on Christiania’s strange-feeling streets. It was only later, sitting with her coffee and staring out the café window, that she realized what made them seem so different—the absence of uniforms.
The address for Alexandra Kollontai that Sylvia had given her was a hotel in Holmenkollen, a village in the wooded hills that overlooked the city. She took a horse-drawn cab, not knowing what to expect. The Russian might be away, or she might be busy and less than enthralled at having to deal with a stranger. In the event, she couldn’t have hoped for a warmer welcome.
“This is wonderful,” Kollontai said after reading the letter from Sylvia. “I’ve just been invited to speak in America. You can tell me what to expect!”
She spoken English well, albeit with a heavy Russian accent. According to Sylvia, she was over forty, but she certainly didn’t look it. The long, dark hair framed a beautiful face, and the sprightly way she moved suggested someone half that age.
She insisted on making tea. “And you must stay here with me while you’re in Christiania.”
W
hile Kollontai was in the kitchen, Caitlin cast her eyes around the room, taking in ramshackle towers of books and a desk wildly strewn with papers. After she’d answered the Russian’s questions about Sylvia and the situation in England, Caitlin asked what her host was working on.
“Oh, several things. I’ve been working on a book on society and motherhood for years now, but it should be finished soon. And there’s a pamphlet called Who Needs War? which I sent to a comrade in Switzerland, who sent it back covered in critical comments and exclamation marks, just the way my old headmaster used to do with my essays.”
“You must have regretted sending it.”
Kollontai laughed. “Oh, no, most of the comments were sensible enough, and Lenin’s a kind enough headmaster. Have you heard of him?”
“I’ve heard the name, but that’s about all.”
“He’s the leader of the Bolsheviks. They’re the rougher half of the old Social Democrat Party—most of the leaders are in exile.”
“And they’re against the war?”
“Oh, yes. Though not all war, as Lenin was at pains to point out. Civil wars and wars of liberation are another matter.”
“And you agree with that?” Caitlin asked. Talking to Kollontai, she was becoming increasingly aware of how little she knew about European politics.
“His arguments are convincing. The fact that so many socialists supported the war turned me into a pacifist for a while, but I think I’m over it now.”
“Ah, I wanted to ask you about that. Not for publication,” Caitlin added quickly. “For myself. Why do you think so many abandoned their principles when the time came?”
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