Дэвид Даунинг - The Dark Clouds Shining

Komarov sent her home, issued Maslov with new instructions, and told Sasha to bring him some tea. Above his head the electric fan whirred erratically, doing little more than stirring the torpid air.

Maslov returned after twenty minutes or so, bearing a large stack of reports. “We had four men in the Universalist,” he said, “submitting nightly reports.”

It was Maslov who found what they wanted half an hour later. Three Indians had been drinking in the Universalist on the fifteenth. With four other men. They’d been talking about conditions in India and about the relocation of a military school from Tashkent to Moscow. They’d been expressing disapproval of party policy.

“Was it our three Indians?” Komarov interrupted.

“It doesn’t say.”

“And the other four?”

Maslov read on. “Two well-known anarchists—Aram Shahumian and Ivan Grazhin—”

“Grazhin was the one in the morgue,” Komarov said. “The one who shot himself in the street.”

“The others were an American comrade, Aidan Brady, and”—Maslov looked shocked—“a party member, Sergei Piatakov.”

Komarov looked up sharply. He remembered Brady from 1918, when the man had turned up at the M-Cheka office to report that his fellow American Caitlin Hanley—the woman who had later married Sergei Piatakov—was in touch with a British agent who had once been her lover.

Her taste in partners seemed somewhat at odds with her politics, but she wasn’t alone in that. “Get their files,” he told Maslov.

While his subordinate was doing his bidding, Komarov walked around the desk and read the report himself. On the same evening, another group of anarchists had been discussing the creation of a new language in which letters would be replaced by numbers, and the report’s compiler was clearly unsure whether this was politically acceptable.

Komarov snorted his disbelief.

He returned to his chair. Piatakov, Piatakova. Seeing her at the hospital. What had she been doing there?

He could think of one possibility.

Maslov returned empty-handed. “There are no criminal files on Piatakov or Brady. There were files on Grazhin and Shahumian, but they were destroyed in the fire last year—the one the anarchists were suspected of starting.”

“Piatakov will have a party file,” Komarov said. “I ran into his wife a few months ago,” he added; “she works for the Zhenotdel. She’s on the executive committee. Get her address from them.”

Maslov was gone for only a couple of minutes. “One forty-two Bolshaya Dmitrova,” he reported.

“Take a car,” Komarov told him. “And a couple of men just in case. Bring in whoever’s there. Him, her, whomever.”

The Zhenotdel meeting in Serpukhovskayahad gone on for almost eight hours, and it was virtually dark by the time Caitlin reached home. As she’d feared and expected, no light was showing in their upstairs windows, but there was a Russo-Balt parked outside the building’s entrance, and she was barely out of the Renault when two Chekists appeared to block her path.

“You will come with us,” one of them said.

She sighed. “I’ve had a long day, comrade. Can’t this wait till the morning?”

“Comrade Komarov wants to see you now.”

She thought about making a scene, but what would be the point? She allowed herself to be hustled into their car, and sat in simmering silence as the Cheka driver bullied his way through the still-busy evening streets. The last time she’d taken a ride like this—in far-off Yekaterinburg—her next ten days had been spent in a cell. What did Komarov want with her? She allowed herself a moment’s hope that the summons concerned Rahima, but knew she was clutching at straws. This was about Sergei. The shirt drenched in blood.

When she was finally ushered into Komarov’s office, he was on the telephone. Glancing up, he gave his caller a few instructions before putting the instrument down. “Please take a seat, comrade,” he said. “I apologize for the abrupt summons, but this is an urgent matter, as I’m sure Comrade Maslov informed you.”

“Comrade Maslov didn’t even introduce himself,” she said stonily. The young man was hovering at Komarov’s shoulder, like a butler at a dinner party.

“Oh. Then I must also apologize on his behalf,” Komarov said without even looking at his young subordinate.

She nodded.

“We’re looking for your husband,” Komarov said without more ado.

“Why?” she asked, managing to keep the tremor out of her voice.

“We need to ask him some questions.”

She looked at him, remembering the trembling hand. Tonight it was still. Tonight he was working. “I don’t know where he is,” she said flatly. “Why do you need to question him?”

“That is not your concern,” Maslov interjected.

“He’s my husband,” she snapped back. For better or for worse, she thought. That hadn’t been part of the Soviet ceremony.

“When did you last see him, comrade?” he asked.

She thought back a moment; the last few days seemed all rolled into one. “Yesterday morning,” she said. “He was still asleep when I left for work.”

“What were you doing at the hospital this morning?” Komarov asked.

She looked up quickly. “How… We really do have spies everywhere, don’t we?”

“I appreciate the ‘we,’ comrade, but as it happens I saw you there myself. I was visiting a militiaman who’d been shot in the tram depot robbery.”

“That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”

“That’s part of it. You haven’t answered—”

“I found a shirt covered in blood when I got home last night. I thought there must have been an accident, so…”

“You went to the hospital. But not until this morning.”

“I went looking for him, and I ended up sleeping at the office.”

“Why? Surely your husband would have come back to your room.”

“I… I don’t know. I was upset, and strange as it seems, I feel more at home at work.” Komarov’s face told her that struck a chord.

“But was that all?” he asked. “Did you hear about the robbery while you were out looking for him?”

“No. I didn’t hear anything until this morning. A comrade who came to work early had heard about it.”

“And then you guessed that your husband was involved,” Komarov suggested, stroking his chin.

“You didn’t report these suspicions, comrade,” Maslov interjected.

She gave him a withering look, said nothing.

“That was understandable in the circumstances,” Komarov said. “But now that you actually know he’s committed a serious crime, I expect your full cooperation. Have you heard from him since?”

“No,” she said.

“He left no goodbye message?”

“No,” she repeated. The verse she’d found on the bed that morning when she dropped in to change her clothes was not a message she wanted to share with the Cheka.

“Did he ever mention any future plans?”

She shook her head. “No. He was—is—angry about the way things have been going, but if he had any particular course of action in mind he never talked to me about it.”

“Did he ever speak about India?”

“India?” What mad scheme had Sergei gotten himself involved in? She remembered arriving home a week or so earlier to find him and Aram Shahumian poring over a map of the world. “No, never,” she said. “Comrade Komarov, I think I have the right to know exactly what my husband has done.”

He leaned back in his chair. “Yesterday evening seven men held up the tram depot on Shabolovka Street. A clerk, a Chekist and a militiaman were killed, along with two of the criminals. The five who escaped have been identified as Aidan Brady, Aram Shahumian, your husband, and two Indian comrades who are here for the congress. Last night a man was murdered in the Hotel Lux. He was a Russian, but the room he was found in belonged to one of the missing Indians and one who was killed in the robbery. I suspect that the two events are connected but haven’t as yet been able to establish the connection.”