Дэвид Даунинг - The Dark Clouds Shining

What had he been doing in Rafiq’s room?

And had he known whom he was attacking?

McColl could ponder such questions later. He went to the door and put an ear against it. He couldn’t hear movement or voices, and if no one had turned up by now, it seemed unlikely that they would. If his struggle with Suvorov had been overheard—and it beggared belief that it hadn’t—then the listeners had decided it wasn’t their business. Which, McColl decided, wasn’t that surprising—the foreign delegates in the surrounding rooms would consider any investigation the prerogative of their hosts.

Repressing a keen desire to get out while the going was good, he embarked on a search of the room.

A jacket hung on the back of the door yielded some Kerensky notes, a few kopek coins, and an unopened packet of Russian cigarettes. On the small table between the beds, there were piles of Congress literature and three books, all in English: Dickens’s Bleak House , a compendium of Gokhale’s speeches, and H. G. Wells’s Kipps . McColl flicked through the pages in search of handwritten notes, but there were none.

The only suitcase was Rafiq’s—his name was stenciled inside the lid, along with a Lahore address. Inside it McColl found a pair of opera glasses, a small wooden Ganesha, and a crumpled map of Tashkent. The rest was clothes. There was nothing to suggest that Rafiq wasn’t the foreign comrade the Russians thought he was.

McColl put the map in his pocket, thinking it might help bolster his cover, and turned his attention back to the dead man. If neither Rafiq nor Nasim returned that night, a housemaid would probably find the body next morning—the Bolsheviks, as far as he knew, still employed such people. Later, of course, would be better: the longer the corpse stayed undetected, the longer the Cheka would take to identify its owner.

So what should he do? Removing the corpse from the room would cut the connection between Rafiq and Suvorov, and help to muddy the waters, but where could McColl move it to? A bedding cupboard? The out-of-order lift?

And why take the risk? Dragging a corpse down hotel corridors was the sort of behavior that got you noticed.

The only thing he could do was hide it in the room, which meant under one of the beds. He dragged it between the two, then rolled it under the one that stood against two walls and bent the legs away from the open end. It was now invisible to anyone standing, which was probably the best he could hope for.

Standing once more with his ear to the door, he could hear nothing stirring outside. A quick silent prayer to whatever God looked after spies, and he was quietly stepping out of the room and into a gratifyingly empty passage.

A few seconds later, back in his room, he found himself starting to shake.

Rafiq was dead when Piatakovgot back to Brady’s room.

“I didn’t think he’d make it,” Brady said as he finished packing his bag.

“Are we just going to leave him there on the bed?” Piatakov asked. Was he imagining it, or had both pillows been under Rafiq’s head when he left?

“Why not?” Brady replied.

Piatakov grunted his agreement and asked himself whether it mattered if Brady had hastened the Indian’s death. Not a lot, he decided. Spies and traitors knew the price of failure.

“Those coins on the table are yours,” Brady told him.

Piatakov tipped most of them into his shoulder bag, saving just a few for his pockets. With their small denominations, they wouldn’t last long—a half-decent fortune-teller might see further robberies in their future. If they had one.

But the walk to the yard was less fraught than he expected, the silence of the postcurfew streets offering plentiful warning of Cheka or militia patrols, either motorized or on foot. As they passed a billboard bearing the slogan let those who are not for us leave russia, Brady murmured, “We’re trying.”

An hour after leaving the house, Piatakov was sitting in a boxcar doorway, his legs dangling over the side, as the train threaded its way out of the vast Paveletsky yards. Brady was already asleep inside.

Another departure, Piatakov thought, another moment like the one in 1916, when he’d known in his heart there was no going back.

After that leave-taking, there’d been several months when he’d doubted the choice and his reasons for making it. His father, who’d pressed Sergei in vain to join the service after his older son was lost at sea, had died only a few weeks before, and Piatakov sometimes feared he had joined up when he did mostly to spite the old man.

They certainly hadn’t gotten on in those last few years. As a child Piatakov had worshipped this large overbearing man, who appeared out of nowhere with his tales of other worlds, but he had gradually come to know his father for who and what he was. Or perhaps not gradually—something fundamental had changed after he listened in on one particular conversation between his parents. He couldn’t remember what it was about, but he knew that his mother had been right and his father wrong, and that her way of seeing the world was the one he instinctively shared. His father had the practical intelligence, but he’d barged his way through life, seeing little and closing doors behind him. His mother had been too generous for her own good, but the world had been a better place for her presence.

Piatakov had been about fourteen when he’d overheard that exchange, the age at which boys usually swap their affections in the other direction. But then, he’d always been a misfit, like the man now snoring behind him.

His mother hadn’t wanted him to go—which was hardly surprising given that she’d already lost a husband and son to the Baltic’s icy waters—but she hadn’t tried to stop him. The reason he’d given her—that someone who aspired to teach literature and history had to know more of the world than the town he was born in—was one she had understood.

In the event he hadn’t seen much of the world in a geographical sense, but he had seen one world give birth to another. And not just seen: like many of the fleet’s junior officers, he had sided with the men and helped make it happen.

He had still been walking on air when he’d finally found the time to visit home, only to discover that he’d left it too late. A sudden illness had taken his mother, and Olesya’s parents had whisked their daughter out of Russia, beyond the reach of godless Bolsheviks like himself. If she’d ever written expressing regret, he’d not received the letter.

After donating the family house to the local soviet, he had headed back to Petrograd. It was only a few weeks later, at the sailor-leader Dybenko’s wedding to Alexandra Kollontai, that he’d first laid eyes on Caitlin, and only a few months after that that he’d left Moscow on a similar train to this one, heading south and east to fight for Trotsky’s newly formed Red Army on the banks of the Volga.

Now here he was again, watching the last moonlit roofs of the city recede, this time with Lenin and Trotsky’s Cheka on his trail, and the city soviet’s money weighing down his breeches.

There was sadness and bitterness, a sense of ill fate lodged in his heart. And yet, still, for the first time in months, he also felt at one with himself. He had climbed off the fence at last. The die had been cast.

For better or worse, he was a revolutionary.

And revolutionaries made revolutions.

It had been light for about an hour, but most of the depot still lay in shadow. This was the best part of the day, Komarov thought, as he followed the official down the tramlines: a few hours of merciful freshness between a sweat-inducing night and a broiling day.