Back at the hospital, Franz looked ready to kill her. The middle-aged man at his side, face almost purple with rage, was presumably the director.
“You will leave now,” the latter said in English before spinning on his heel and striding away.
The younger nurse whom Caitlin had wanted to interview was standing in the doorway, an expectant look on her face.
“I must use the bathroom before we go,” Caitlin insisted.
Franz rolled his eyes, but, as Caitlin had hoped, he gestured the nurse over and passed along the request.
The nurse smiled and led her inside. When Caitlin came out of the bathroom, the girl gave her a crooked smile, handed across a piece of paper that bore two lines of German writing, and hurried away.
Caitlin stood there for a moment, wondering why the written message. Why not just tell her though Franz? Probably because the nurse didn’t want to rely on one countryman’s honesty. With the words on paper, Caitlin could elicit as many translations as she wanted.
She showed it to Franz in the hotel dining room that evening.
“Where did you get this?” he asked.
“What does it say?”
He shook his head. “It says, ‘Women have always cleared up men’s mess, and now the mess is other men.’”
Caitlin smiled.
“Is it poetry?” Franz asked.
Outside Cuthbertson & Harper
Darkness fell on September 9, McColl, Tindall, Cunningham, and a mixed force of thirty policemen and soldiers were deployed just inside the line of trees that bordered the beach north of Chandipur. They hardly needed the cover—the sky, overcast and moonless, offered no illumination; they could hear the waves and smell the salt, but all they could see was a murky curtain. A blinking light might pierce the gloom if the boat drew close enough to shore, but its captain would not want to ground himself. A sensible man might give it up as a lost cause. Or risk another day out in the Bay of Bengal and try again tomorrow night. Or simply wait for dawn.
In the event, it was almost three in the morning when a fuzzy yellow light glowed through the darkness ahead. Four times.
The man Tindall had selected made the appropriate reply.
“I can’t see a damn thing,” the DCI man said, peering through his binoculars. “But they must be lowering a boat.”
“It’ll suit our boys,” Cunningham added. He was referring to the occupants of the two Royal Navy dinghies, which should now be steering a course for the far side of the probable tramp steamer.
“I’ll go down and say hello, shall I?” McColl said. He’d been given the honor by Tindall, a reward for suggesting they keep the emporium open. He was expecting the dinghy to contain the Indian and a couple of rowers at most, but three Indian officers had been chosen to accompany him just in case.
Reaching the water’s edge, he could make out the dim silhouette of the newly arrived ship—it was smaller than he’d expected, with one funnel set toward the stern and lying around three hundred yards offshore. The dinghy was easier to see, more than halfway to the beach, riding in on the incoming tide. As it grew nearer, McColl could make out only two men, their backs toward him as they pulled on the oars.
His own Indians, all in plainclothes, stepped forward to help drag the dinghy up onto the sand. One man jumped out to greet them, and McColl could see the excitement in his eyes. “Jatin?” he shouted.
“I’m afraid not,” McColl said, stepping forward and raising his gun. “Jatin is dead.”
The man looked wildly round at his fellow Indians, as if he expected them to rush to his aid, then dramatically dropped to his knees in the surf.
His companion, who appeared to be Malayan, was still in the dinghy. He made no attempt to escape, simply shook his head and sat back down on his rowing seat.
It was as easy as that.
The two gunrunners were led away, and two of the Indian officers assumed their places in the dinghy, with orders to take their time rejoining the mother ship. The sight of their craft returning should reassure any watchers and focus their attention away from the navy dinghies closing in behind them.
McColl was joined at the water’s edge by Tindall and Cunningham, and not long after that a single indecipherable shout came from the ship in question. McColl half expected gunshots to follow, but the ensuing minutes of silence were broken only by the thin blast of a whistle—the prearranged signal that the ship had been secured.
A captain and four more crewmen had been added to their bag. All were Javanese, and none even tried to complain at the seizure of their ship, let alone put up a fight. McColl assumed they would be sent back to the Dutch authorities in Batavia—there seemed no point in feeding and housing them at the Raj’s expense. The ship would probably be confiscated.
As dawn soon revealed, the rusty old coaster wasn’t much of a prize, but its cargo lived up to expectations. It took them most of the daylight hours to inventory the arsenal stacked in the hold, which consisted of more than seven thousand Springfield rifles, almost two thousand pistols, ten Gatling guns, and around three million cartridges. It was more than enough to mount a sizable rebellion, McColl thought, surveying the lines of open crates that covered the coaster’s deck. Standing there, he found himself imagining the immediate future that Jatin and the Germans had conceived—the dispersal of guns to the waiting followers, the railway lines cut, the rising in Bengal that would, at the very least, keep half the Indian army at home and might even require a fresh infusion of troops from elsewhere in the empire.
A bold plan, now happily stillborn.
Next morning, with Tindall and Cunningham already returned to Calcutta and the emporium finally closed for business, McColl saw to Barun Ray’s release and escorted him down to the station. En route the Indian repeated his promise to abstain from political activity until after the war was over and insisted on shaking McColl’s hand when they parted. McColl hoped he was lying, but initially at least Ray proved true to his word. Sanjay and Mridul, who followed him home from Howrah station, spent several days waiting in vain for the man to even venture out.
A fortnight passed, and the bosses in London made clear their annoyance at Calcutta’s failure to find any white-skinned enemies. McColl waved Cumming’s latest cable at Tindall. “If there ever was a German agent in Calcutta—and I really am beginning to doubt it—he’d be far gone by now. But no, as long as there’s trouble, he has to be here. They just can’t imagine Indians causing all this mayhem on their own—there has to be a German lurking in the background, giving them instructions. Some evil mastermind with a sinister deformity like that ridiculous character in the serial that Blackwood’s is running.”
“The Thirty-Nine Steps? I think it’s rather good.”
“It’s fiction,” McColl said bitterly.
Tindall grunted. “Speaking of Indians doing it on their own, your friend Bhattacharyya has escaped from Cuttack Fort.”
“Has he really?” McColl felt rather pleased for the Indian. “When?”
“A week ago. No one’s seen hide nor hair of him since. I only heard about it this morning.”
“Well, good luck to him.”
“I shouldn’t be so pleased if I were you. He’s one of the few Jugantar people who know how big a part you played in getting their leader killed. And they’ll be out for revenge.”
“True,” McColl agreed, though he couldn’t help thinking the threat was exaggerated. He did try to be more careful than usual over the next few days, but there was no way of avoiding the young man outside the Cuthbertson & Harper shoe shop, who calmly drew a gun from his pocket, aimed straight at McColl’s heart, and pulled the trigger. When nothing happened, they stood there face-to-face for what seemed several seconds, mirroring each other’s shock.
The Indian took flight, and McColl was again agonizing over whether or not he should try a shot on a crowded street when his wou
ld-be assassin ran headlong into the constable who was always on duty outside the Great Eastern.
“It was a Webley & Scott automatic,” Tindall told the still-shaken McColl an hour or so later. “God knows where the little blighter got hold of one—they’re only about two years old. And prone to jamming, I’m informed, which was lucky for you. If he’d been carrying something less fancy, we’d have been loading you onto a ship in a box.”
That night, unable to sleep, McColl sat at his hotel window staring down at the quiet street below and wondering how many of Cumming’s agents would survive the war. If they were faring as well as he was, probably not very many. In the last six months, he’d been shredded with glass, almost blown up, and been fired on by any number of people. On the two occasions that still brought him out in a sweat, he had literally stared down the barrel of his own mortality.
Down to his left was the stretch of pavement where his latest would-be nemesis had materialized. By all accounts he should be dead.
But he wasn’t. Look on the bright side, he told himself, raising his head to watch the moon slip out from behind a cloud. All the near misses could mean somebody up there liked him. And when it came down to it, he’d been no closer to death than had his brother, or others fighting the war.
And he could choose to walk away.
As things turned out, the failed assassination attempt became his ticket home. McColl was no longer safe in Calcutta, and Cumming had realized as much. Either that or a new job had come up somewhere else. In the first week of October, as the local weather finally took a turn for the better, he received the cable he’d been hoping for, ordering him back to England on “the fastest available ship.”
The journey home began at Howrah station late the following evening. According to the man at Thomas Cook, taking a train cross-country and a ship from Bombay was not only quicker than sailing straight from Calcutta but would also provide McColl with two spare days to indulge a whim and visit Mohandas Gandhi in his ashram outside Ahmedabad. If his old stretcher-bearer was away from home, then at least he’d have seen some more of India.
He wouldn’t miss Calcutta, he thought, standing by an open window as the train rumbled out, the torpid night air clinging to his skin. He would miss Tindall and the billiards room at Spence’s Hotel, but precious little else. His near encounter with death outside the shoe emporium seemed almost dreamlike in retrospect. Perhaps he’d been close to death so many times that his psyche had learned to absorb such shocks. Would that be good or bad? He couldn’t tell.
The journey was long—thirty-six hours according to the ever-optimistic timetable—but he slept well enough through the nights and enjoyed the twelve hours at his window. His first impression of Ahmedabad, as the train slowed to enter the station, was of minarets and mill chimneys competing for sky and a dry heat so welcome after Calcutta’s steam bath. His tonga from the station passed through an impressive gateway in the city wall and on down a long street lined with all the usual tradesmen. According to his Baedeker, the city had no resident Europeans, which no doubt explained the curious stares.
He had chosen the Empire Hotel for its central position, just outside the walled citadel that rose above the Sabarmati River. His room seemed clean enough for a one-night stay, and the desk clerk was happy to recommend a restaurant for lunch, if “much less dirty than the others, sahib” counted as a recommendation. The vegetarian curry was tasty and hopefully benign.
Once fed, he set out for Gandhi’s new home on the western bank of the Sabarmati. The iron bridge across the quarter-mile-wide river offered picture-postcard views of the town behind him, but the sights below were rather more interesting. The riverbed was mostly dry, but people washed, swam, and bathed in—and cows contentedly drank from—the channels that carried the last of the summer rains. On the far side, the huge bats known as “flying foxes” were hanging asleep in the trees, apparently oblivious to the chattering monkeys all around them.
Gandhi’s Satyagraha Ashram was about half a mile to the south, a beautiful house set back from the river. The young acolyte who greeted McColl was reluctant to disturb the boss, but McColl’s description of their previous meeting on Spion Kop was dramatic enough to persuade him otherwise. Gandhi, who was reading in the shade of a colonnaded terrace on the other side of the house, recognized him immediately and almost leaped from his chair to shake hands.
The last time McColl had seen him, the Indian had been wearing a Red Cross uniform, and the minimal loincloth came as something of a shock. Fifteen years later Gandhi had to be into his forties, but there was no sign of added weight—if anything, he was wirier than he’d been before. Neither hair nor mustache showed any sign of graying.
Tea was brought and the two men left alone to reminisce about their meeting in South Africa. Gandhi was easy to talk to and even seemed interested in McColl’s later life as an automobile salesman. McColl had heard that the Indian hated machines, but he now discovered there were exceptions—according to Gandhi, the Singer Sewing Machine was “one of the few useful things ever invented.” It took a while for the conversation to reach politics and the war, and when it did, McColl felt obliged to admit that he worked for the government, quickly adding, “But not today.”
An hour or so into the conversation, he felt sufficiently at home to ask Gandhi a personal question. “In South Africa you insisted on using nonviolent tactics against the authorities, but when the war began, you offered the British government your support. How could you do that if you believed in nonviolence?”
Gandhi raised his eyebrows. “How could I not? In the years of peace, I paid my taxes, knowing that they would be used to buy weapons; I accepted the benefits and protection they offered. I was a law-abiding citizen of the British Empire before war was declared, so how, in all conscience, could I abandon that empire in its hour of need?”
“But do you actually believe that a British victory will be better for the world than a German one?”
“I do not know. I know little of Germany, though it has to be said that some Germans have behaved very badly in Africa. But the British Empire has certain ideals with which I have fallen in love, and one of those is that every subject of the empire has the freest scope possible for his energy and honor and whatever he thinks is due to his conscience. I believe that is true of the British government as it is true of no other government, and I am convinced that one day, with a little encouragement, the British will set us Indians free to be the people we truly are. But first we must convince them that we are fit to be their partners, in the same way that their brethren in Australia and Canada have. And part of that is being prepared to lay down our lives for the empire we are all a part of.”
McColl must have looked unconvinced.
“What is the alternative?” Gandhi continued. “Should we refuse to support the war, say it is not ours? That is what a people condemned to perpetual servitude would do, because they would leave their defense to their masters. How could such a people ever hope to deserve their freedom?”
McColl sighed. What Gandhi was saying made some sort of sense, but surely nonviolence was a sacred principle, not a tactic to be discarded when it ran counter to other principles. He suggested as much.
Gandhi laughed. “You are saying I contradict myself? I plead guilty. Some people say that consistency grows with age and wisdom, but my experience thus far has not supported this view.”
After their conversation McColl walked back across the river with another ashram resident, an English-speaking young man from Bombay who seemed like a refugee from rich parents. Still wondering whether he lacked the imagination to understand Gandhi’s ideas, McColl asked his companion whether he found them easy to follow.
“Not always,” the young man admitted.
“I accused him of inconsistency, and he just laughed,” McColl told him.
“Many have told him the same. We had a terrible row here last week. Ga
ndhi insisted on taking an Untouchable family into the ashram, and several others left in protest. Supporters have told him they will not give any more money, but he won’t change his mind.”
“That sounds admirable to me.”
“Yes, yes, it is. But this man who insists on sharing his home with Untouchables won’t even share a meal with his wife. He insists that eating and shitting are equally disgusting and that both should be done alone. Now, doesn’t that sound inconsistent to you?”
“I suppose it is.”
“But it doesn’t matter. He is a great soul. He will save India.”
Which should have sounded ridiculous, McColl thought, but somehow it didn’t.
Two days later he was standing in the stern of the steamship Marmora watching Bombay recede beneath a rapidly darkening evening sky. He was glad to be going home, back to the real war and enemies that had chosen to be so. If he’d been an Indian, he’d probably have seen things much the way his friend Chaudhuri did, but he could understand what made young men like Bhattacharyya and Mukherjee choose the paths they had. And thwarting them, while necessary, had brought him no real pleasure. Defending the empire against the Germans was one thing, defending it against its own subjects quite another, and the latter, in McColl’s mind, was acceptable only if the subjects had willingly taken the Kaiser’s shilling.
Which, he realized, raised any number of questions about how he would see his job once the war was over.
First they had to win it. And whatever it was Cumming had in store for him, he hoped it involved fighting Germans, not other rebels bent on using the war to sever their ties with the empire.
Bags Made of Skin
Leaving Germany was less straightforward than arriving had been. Caitlin was not required to take off her clothes at the Swiss border, but a female official was brought forth to check likely hiding places with vigorously probing fingers, and the male counterpart who spread the contents of her bags across two tables seemed overly interested in her underwear. It was an unfortunate end to her three weeks in the Kaiser’s realm, three weeks in which she had garnered a better-than-expected impression of “the dreaded Hun,” one she honed into a couple of articles over the next thirty-six hours as she waited in Berne for the conference that Kollontai had advised her to attend.
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