Дэвид Даунинг - The Dark Clouds Shining

Ten minutes later she was back in the familiar room. After lighting the candle on her desk, she took a chair to the open window and sat there wondering why the tears wouldn’t come.

She heard movement behind her and looked around. Rahima was standing in the doorway in a cotton shift, watching her. “Madame Piatakova?” she asked tentatively.

“Comrade Piatakova,” Caitlin said automatically.

“Yes, I am sorry…”

“It’s nothing. Go back to sleep, Rahima.”

But the girl had joined her at the window. “You are sad,” she said, as if surprised to find such a commonplace emotion afflicting someone so exalted. Rahima held out her arms, and suddenly Caitlin felt herself enclosed, sobbing, the tears running down her cheeks and onto the girl’s bare shoulders.

It wasn’t a long walk,but the frequent need to huddle in doorways made it seem so. As Brady had said, the Cheka was out in force, cars, lorries, and foot patrols combing the city for him and his companions.

Like Caitlin two hours earlier, Piatakov found their room in darkness. He lit their candle, noticed the bucket, the shirt. “Hell,” he muttered.

After pouring away the bloody water and stuffing the rolled-up shirt in his trouser pocket, he sat wearily down on the bed.

The familiar room reached out for him on her behalf, but he knew there was no going back. Not now, not after Grazhin had given his life for their traveling money. And Aram was right. You couldn’t always choose who your comrades were. As long as they were committed, and Brady was certainly that. Even Chatterji, in his own way. Maybe the Indian had just panicked—it was easy to do. He and Aram would keep things… What was the word he was looking for? Decent? His laugh sounded eerie in the candlelit room. After the last few years?

He got up and walked around. Where the hell was she? He wanted to part as friends, to wish her well, to know she understood.

The last six months had been hell, but the two years before that had often been wonderful, and he wanted her to know that the one hadn’t wiped out the other. The good times had been something to cherish and, despite all else, still were. He remembered a stroll in the snow-covered forest outside Petrograd when their paths had crossed again in that city and several walks in the summer woods around Moscow. She had always been impressed by his knowledge of the natural world, his ability to name the trees and birds and flowers that crossed their path. She was a city girl, she said—all she knew about nature, she had learned in a park near her home. Prospect Park, he seemed to remember.

They’d sometimes gone boating on the Moscow River with her friend Fanya and Fanya’s boyfriend, who had shared Piatakov’s own taste in poetry but whose name he couldn’t remember.

In the early days, he and Caitlin had read each other poetry lying in bed in their candlelit room. They both admired the new revolutionary poets, but the ones they loved, and could quote verbatim, were from further back—Pushkin for him, a woman named Sara Teasdale for her.

They had talked about their families—something he’d never done with anyone else—and their respective passions for teaching and journalism. All the men he’d known, starting with his father, had scoffed—gently or otherwise—at the thought of finding one’s vocation in a room full of children.

And then there was the lovemaking, which had seemed so glorious at first, but had turned into something difficult, loaded down with emotions he couldn’t begin to understand or control. Once you’d watched enough human bodies ripped asunder, it was hard to see them as a way of expressing love.

But they had. In the early days, they had.

He grabbed a pencil and one of the Zhenotdel flyers from her desk. How did you say good-bye to the love of your life?

The words wouldn’t come, but looking up, he spied his own battered volume of Pushkin’s verse. Leafing through, he found the poem he wanted and left the book open at the page in question.

She would understand.

As he descended the stairs to the street, he softly spoke the first few lines out loud:

As midnight approached McColl washaving trouble staying awake. But he needed to establish contact with Muhammad Rafiq, and the later he knocked on Rafiq’s door, the better his chances of finding the Indian home, and doing so unobserved. So he paced his room for another thirty minutes, until the traffic in the corridor had more or less withered away, and only then put his head around the door.

There was no one in sight.

He tiptoed down the threadbare carpet, seeking out room 467, which his list said belonged to Rafiq and Nasim. If both men were there, or only Nasim, McColl would say he’d come to introduce himself and try to catch Rafiq on his own the next day.

A strip of light under the door suggested there was someone home, and its sudden disappearance confirmed as much.

McColl rapped softly on the door.

There was no response. He briefly wondered whether he might have imagined the light—some sort of reflection perhaps…

Then he heard the faintest of sounds on the other side of the door.

Not wanting to knock any louder, he tried the doorknob instead, and rather to his surprise, the door swung open with a loud creak. The room beyond, now dimly lit from the corridor, was unexpectedly empty. Suspiciously so, McColl realized, just as someone else’s breath almost tickled his ear.

McColl threw himself forward, shoving the door as he did so. Something swished past his head, and the room fell back into darkness.

“Rafiq!” McColl whispered loudly as he struggled to his feet. “Akbar,” he added more softly, using the Indian’s code name.

The response was an attack. Something flailed through the air and crashed into McColl’s left shoulder, sending spasms of pain through his upper arm. He threw a punch into the darkness and felt it connect, but the something hit him again, on almost the same spot, and he went down.

A black shape loomed over him. McColl lunged forward, grappling for a hold, and they both fell across a bed, before tumbling onto the floor beyond. A foot dug into his stomach, pushing him into a wall, and suddenly a hand was at his throat, a shadow rising and falling against the ceiling. He squirmed aside, trying to knee his assailant in the balls, but managed only to lever him sideways.

McColl rolled free across the bed and back down onto the floor. As the other man came around the end of the bed, McColl threw out both legs, aiming at the shins. The man stumbled, tried and failed to keep his balance, and fell through the curtains, striking the frame of the half-open window with a soft, sharp crack.

It was a sound that McColl had heard only once before, and guiltily remembered ever since: playing for the school football team, he had wildly thrown himself into a tackle, and badly broken another boy’s leg.

With the curtains now divided, he could see the prone body arched across the sill. Was the man dead or merely unconscious?

Still breathing heavily from all the exertion, McColl grabbed hold of the feet, pulled his attacker back into the room, and drew the curtains. Grabbing a sheet from a bed, McColl rolled it up and laid it across the foot of the door before turning on the light.

His assailant had been a short, powerful-looking man with thinning blond hair and a wide, typically Russian face. His head was now at an unnatural angle; the crack had been his neck. McColl turned him over to get a better look at his face, and received another shock. The last place he’d seen these features was on a photograph in Cumming’s office. The man’s name was Pitirim Suvorov, and he was one of Five’s men in Moscow.