Дэвид Даунинг - The Dark Clouds Shining

His name was Komarov, and unless there were two men of that name high in the Moscow Cheka, this was the man that Ruzhkov had mentioned as being in charge of the hunt for McColl. Which made his heart beat a little faster.

After introducing himself as the deputy chairman of the Moscow Cheka, Komarov asked everyone to sit down, then described the tram depot robbery and Nasim’s subsequent death. He made it clear that those assembled were not, in any way, being held responsible for the actions of their comrade Nasim, but he was sure that they would realize the need for questions. One or more of them might be able to throw some light on the motivation of their dead comrade, give some clue, however small, that would help with the apprehension of his fellow robbers.

McColl interpreted all this into Urdu, absorbing the information as he did so. He’d heard snatches of conversations about a big robbery over breakfast that morning, but there’d been no reason to connect this news with Cumming’s plotters.

Komarov’s first question was the obvious one—were there any Indian comrades missing?

There were. Neither Durga Chatterji nor Muhammad Rafiq had been seen since early the day before, and according to the former’s roommate, Chatterji hadn’t slept in his bed. Rafiq had shared with Nasim, so no one could say whether he had slept in his or not.

Komarov then dropped another bombshell—the body of an unidentified Russian had been discovered in Rafiq and Nasim’s room. After each Indian had been separately questioned, Komarov went on, Comrade Maslov would escort him down to the basement for a viewing of the corpse, in the hope that one of them knew whose it was.

McColl and the first Indian were taken into the adjoining room, and the interrogations began. Komarov showed no signs of impatience as the questions and answers were carefully translated, and no sign either that he had any reason to suspect the translator, but the twin imperatives of doing a decent job and making sure that his mask stayed firmly in place took all of McColl’s concentration.

Komarov asked each man for his opinions of the dead Nasim and the missing Rafiq and Chatterji. One by one they all said much the same—that all had seemed fully committed to the struggle against imperialism. The notion that the threesome might have been working for the British was politely but firmly dismissed; indeed, if any political wrongheadedness could be attributed to them, it would be of the opposite type. All three men had expressed their anger at the recent closing of the Tashkent school for Indian revolutionaries.

Their social lives had given cause for concern. Both Nasim and Rafiq had been seeing Russian women—not, of course, that there was anything wrong with Russian women, but… Nasim’s girlfriend was a teacher at the Toilers of the East University, one Anna Kimayeva. Rafiq’s was a girl he’d met on the train to Moscow, Marusya Dzharova, the daughter of a railway union official from Tashkent.

When the last Indian had been interviewed, McColl was left alone with Komarov. The Russian hadn’t taken any notes, but McColl suspected he remembered every word. His questioning, though diplomatic, had been thorough and forensic. McColl had no previous experience of Cheka bosses at work, but this wasn’t how he’d imagined one. He realized he was sweating copiously, but it was atrociously humid.

Maslov returned from the basement. “None of them admitted to seeing the man before,” he reported.

Komarov grunted and turned to McColl. “Are you also staying in this hotel?” he asked.

“Yes, comrade.”

“Did you notice anything suspicious in the way any of them answered my questions?”

“No, comrade.”

“And you haven’t overheard anything relevant in the last few days?”

“I only arrived from Tashkent yesterday.”

“Ah.” Komarov stood. “Well, keep your ears open from now on. And as I may have need of your services again today, stay with the delegation, either at the conference or here at the hotel. Understood?”

It wasn’t a request. “Yes, comrade.”

Trudging back to the Kremlin for what remained of the afternoon session, McColl felt relief at escaping the Cheka’s embrace but not much wiser as to what was going on. As he and the Indians passed through the Kremlin gate, he tried to take stock of what he did and didn’t know. Had Suvorov known who he was? If he had, then who had told him? What had he been doing in Rafiq and Nasim’s room several hours after Nasim had been killed in the robbery? And where the hell was Rafiq?

It looked as if all three Indians had been recruited by Brady on Five’s behalf. But had Brady known that Rafiq was already working for Cumming? There seemed little doubt that all four had taken part in the robbery, along with sundry others. Why? For money, presumably. Money to pay their way south, if Cumming was right. If they weren’t still lying low in Moscow, they were probably on their way.

Should he head that way himself or stay and follow the investigation? Keeping close to Komarov felt like a daunting proposition, but seemed to offer more than a headless-chicken rush to India. And if it was personal safety he wanted, he should have stayed in the London prison.

He did have another—safer, he hoped—lead to follow up: Suvorov’s Moscow address, which Cumming had given him in London, “for emergency use only.” Not tonight—he had no intention of defying Komarov’s instruction to stay put. But tomorrow should be fine. The Cheka had nothing to go on when it came to identifying Suvorov, so searching the Five agent’s room should still be a relatively risk-free endeavor.

Komarov walked out to hiscar. “Any news of the Englishman?” he asked the waiting Yezhov.

“None. He hasn’t come back to the dormitory.”

Komarov took a deep breath of the early evening air. “Start going through the others again. And the hotels.”

He and Maslov climbed into the Russo-Balt’s rear seat, and the driver set off for headquarters. As the city center streets rolled by, Komarov went through what he suspected. The robbery itself was unimportant; what mattered were the future plans of the men involved. This wasn’t just another mindless outrage; it was, he was sure, a threat that needed taking seriously. But why did he feel that? It wasn’t as if the revolution’s survival was at stake.

Maybe its soul was.

He gazed down at his hands, which were steady as a rock. Real police work suited him.

At the M-Cheka offices he barked out rapid-fire orders to a clutch of subordinates: bring in Kimayeva; seek out photographs of Chatterji and Rafiq, bring back the tram-depot witnesses to see if any recognized the body from the Hotel Lux.

The subordinates scattered.

Komarov sat in his inner sanctum, awaiting their findings. Maslov was the first to return. “We have no photographs of Rafiq or Chatterji,” he reported. “They probably don’t have passports, but if they do, we haven’t found them. And there are no other records: the International Executive asked the commissariat not to ask for photographs. They were worried the foreign delegates might interpret the request as a lack of trust.”

Komarov smiled wryly. “Kimayeva?”

“Borin’s on his way.”

He appeared a few minutes later with the woman. She was about thirty, blonde, fairly attractive in a sharp-faced way. As Komarov questioned her, anger gave way to evasion, then finally to tears. Komarov sent Maslov out on a pretext and patiently extracted a confession that she’d been sleeping with Nasim. If her husband found out, he would kill her, she said. And the affair was over anyway: she hadn’t seen Nasim for more than a week. He’d said he was too busy, but the bastard had been lying—a friend had seen him drinking in the Universalist Club four or five nights ago. Not with a woman; it was true. With a group of men.