Дэвид Даунинг - The Dark Clouds Shining

“Yuri Vladimirovich, we have two imperialist agents on the loose.”

Only two? Komarov thought but didn’t say. If Baranov had a sense of humor, he had always hidden it well.

“Yesterday morning they attacked two of my men. On the train from up near the Finnish border. Killed one of them, threw the other off the train. He had to walk ten miles with a broken ankle!”

Baranov sounded more offended than distressed, so Komarov refrained from offering sympathy. “So they could be in Moscow by now?”

“This is why I called you. Two trains left here yesterday evening. I don’t know if they’ve reached you yet.”

“Descriptions?”

“Both dark, average height, bearded, rough clothes.”

“Is that all?” Komarov said, writing it down. These days half the men in Moscow looked like that.

“My man was too busy fighting for his life to draw pictures! He didn’t get a good look at either of them.”

“I understand…”

“We are still searching for them here, but if they’re headed your way…”

“Yes, thank you. If we find them, I’ll let you know.”

“And I will do the same.”

“Thank you, Pyotr Vasilyevich,” Komarov said, and hung up the phone. “Sasha!” he called out.

The young man appeared in the doorway. “Yes, comrade.”

Komarov passed him the description. “Phone this through to our office at the Petrograd station. One or both of these men may have left Petrograd yesterday evening, in which case they should be arriving today. Or have done so already.”

Sasha disappeared.

Komarov sat back in his chair and stared at the pattern of stains on the ceiling. Two foreign agents. Like a couple of fleas on a bear, he thought. Hardly worth the bother, even with decent descriptions. As it was…

He pulled the appeals for clemency in front of him and studied the one on top of the pile. A woman in Tula explained how her son had fought in the Moscow uprising, how he… Komarov put the letter down. It was amazing how so many people thought their actions in 1917 granted them exemption for life. It was like claiming that being a good child gave you carte blanche as an adult.

He saw his hand begin to flutter.

Why did he read them?

“Comrade,” Sasha said from the door. “Two trains arrived from Petrograd in the last hour, and the next one isn’t expected until this evening.”

“Right. Thank you.” That was that. If the foreign agents had been aboard either train, they wouldn’t have hung around waiting for taxis. Whatever it was they’d come to do, they’d have to be caught in the act.

Alexandra Kollontai had acquired asecond room at the Hotel National since Caitlin’s last visit. Secretaries were working on either side of a round table in the old one, Kollontai dictating a letter in the new addition. The Zhenotdel director raised a hand in welcome, and then a single finger to say she’d be only a minute. Some hope, Caitlin thought, moving a pile of papers off the one available seat. She knew from long experience how elastic a Kollontai minute could be.

This one wasn’t much more than five. “So I thought we could eat downstairs, then go for a walk,” Kollontai suggested once her typist had left. “It should be cooler by then.”

“I’d like that,” Caitlin said. Over the last three years, she and Fanya had become quite close, but Kollontai was still the only woman in Russia with whom Caitlin felt able to share her emotional life.

The canteen downstairs was smoky and loud, the food its usual pedestrian self. Several party leaders were tucking in to meals at the heavy oak tables—Bukharin and a group of his young disciples, Radek with one of the German comrades, Cheka boss Felix Dzerzhinsky sitting alone. Molotov even gave Caitlin a nod as she walked past his table. The presence of such men was reassuring. These days many like Sergei were eager to damn the Bolshevik elite, but living in luxury was one vice they hadn’t succumbed to. The men below them were another matter, but they could still be brought to heel provided the leaders stayed true.

Caitlin found the looks that followed Kollontai a great deal more worrying. Three years ago these would have been mostly admiring, on occasion almost worshipful. Now they were wary, uncertain, on some faces downright hostile. These men didn’t see Kollontai’s support for the Workers’ Opposition as a valid difference of opinion; they saw it as betrayal.

Kollontai seemed oblivious. “Let’s walk around the Kremlin,” she suggested once they had eaten.

Outside it was still pretty hot. “How are you these days?” Kollontai asked as they walked up the slope toward Red Square. “How are you and Sergei?”

Caitlin grimaced. “You remember your notion of ‘erotic friendship?’” she asked. “Well, we’re not having sex, and we’re not very friendly.”

Kollontai laughed and apologized for doing so.

“I don’t know what happened,” Caitlin said. “It seemed to work, and then it didn’t. I know he saw and did things in the Antonov rebellion that he hasn’t come to terms with—he still wakes up screaming or crying or both. I tried talking to him when he came back the first time, but it didn’t help. And then there was Kronstadt and the NEP, and that sense of betrayal that a lot of the comrades felt. And the pain and the grief all turned to anger. Like a knot in his stomach he can’t untie. He just seethes. Sometimes it makes a bizarre sort of sense, but at others it feels like he’s gone a little crazy. Not all the time—he can be his old sweet self for a while, but then he slips back. I don’t know what to do with him.”

“Let him go?” Kollontai suggested as the two of them swerved to avoid a group of foreign comrades, most of them posing for pictures in front of St. Basil’s.

“I sometimes think I should,” Caitlin said. “But then I feel I’d be letting him down. He’s like an angry child, and who would let one of those loose on his own?” As she’d done with her brother Colm.

Kollontai shook her head. “You’re not his mother. And he would hate you thinking him that helpless.”

“I know. But enough of my troubles. How are you?”

“Physically? Better than I was a few months ago. My heart’s too weak for the life I live—that’s all there is to it—but a few weeks in bed always seems to put me right.”

“And emotionally?”

“Not so good. Dybenko and I—well, we’re finished and both of us know it, even though we sometimes pretend that we aren’t. We had wonderful times, and I have no regrets whatsoever. The man I truly miss is my son. Misha is still buried in his studies in Petrograd. I doubt if he even knows there is a Workers’ Opposition.”

“So how’s your political health?” Caitlin asked pointedly.

“I like it!” Kollontai said, clapping her hands. “The three types of health—physical, emotional, and political. You should write a pamphlet!”

“You haven’t answered the question,” Caitlin reminded her. The river was in front of them—away to the left was the towpath where she’d told Jack about the czar’s execution. Three long years ago.

“Probably because I don’t much like the answer,” Kollontai said, glancing up at the Kremlin wall to her right. “They see us as a direct threat,” she said. “And they should because we speak for those who they always claimed were the ones who mattered. Ours was a workers’ revolution. It only makes sense as a workers’ revolution. It can only blossom as a workers’ revolution.”

Caitlin considered her response. “When it comes to things like this,” she said, “I trust your judgment more than I trust my own. But in this case that doesn’t mean much because I can’t seem to work out what I think. So what I and most of the women at the office do is just get on with our work. But of course we all know that this other stuff matters because your standing in the party will influence the way the party sees the Zhenotdel.”