Дэвид Даунинг - The Dark Clouds Shining

She felt as though she’d been hit in the stomach.

“I believe you know some of these men…” Komarov said.

“I have met Aram several times—he’s a Red Army comrade of Sergei’s, and a friend. As you know, Aidan Brady and I have a long history—he and my brother were both involved in an Irish plot against the British right at the start of the war. I came through Siberia with Brady in 1918—we just happened to meet in Vladivostok—and I saw him a few times after that. He and Sergei met independently, and they’ve remained friends.”

“But not you?”

“No. I haven’t spoken to him since he shot that boy in Kalanchevskaya Square. The incident we talked about three years ago.”

“As I recall, the boy’s death was an accident.”

“In my experience, those sort of accidents tend to happen around Brady.” Until now she had always been on the same side as her fellow American, but she couldn’t remember ever liking him. Even at their first meeting all those years ago, when Brady was still basking in the role of a workers’ crusader, there’d been something not quite right about the man. Something missing.

“And did your husband ever introduce you to any Indian comrades?” Komarov asked.

“No. Never.”

Komarov leaned forward, his elbows on the desk, his chin resting on his interlinked hands. “You said your husband is angry at the way things are going. Why is that? The people he’s involved with—most of them are anarchists, so their resentment is understandable. But your husband is still a member of our party.”

“He is a Bolshevik,” she said simply. A picture of the Universalist clientele crossed her mind, denying the words.

“So are you, Comrade Piatakova, but there are obviously differences of opinion between you.”

“We had—have—different views on who and what we should be fighting.”

“And who do you think the enemy is?” Maslov asked.

She didn’t bother to answer. Where had they gone? Oh, Sergei.

“Answer the question,” Maslov insisted.

“Bureaucrats, careerists, and Neanderthal males,” she said coldly, staring straight at him. “Is that all?” she asked, turning back to Komarov.

“Almost.” He asked her for a description of Aram Shahumian, and then, almost apologetically, for one of her husband. She gave him only the barest of bones, but Komarov made no complaint. “If you hear from him, please inform me,” he said formally. “Your husband has an exemplary record,” he added, “both with the fleet and the army. And I would like to think a tribunal would take that into account.”

Caitlin gave him an incredulous look.

“I heard a joke the other day,” he said unexpectedly. “Not a particularly funny one. The essence of it was that we Bolsheviks consider ourselves magicians but we’ve really only mastered the first half of one particular trick. We’ve managed to saw the person in half but not put him back together again. Well, that’s what we have to do—put Russia back together again. You and your husband are not the only people fighting for beliefs, comrade.”

Several responses came to mind, but none seemed very grown-up. “I assume we’re done,” she said, getting to her feet.

“For the moment, yes.”

Turning on her heel, she strode back across the outer office, down the grey corridors, and out into the moonlit city, where people who didn’t have fugitive partners were happily going about their lives.

“We got a bunch of contradictory sightings at the railway stations,” Ruzhkov said. “Someone who looked like the American at the Kazan Station, people who might have been Indians at the Kursk Station and the Kiev Station. Nothing definite. They found Dzharova’s father, but he’d put her on the train to Tashkent three days before. He knew about her Indian lover—that’s why he sent her home. Caught them at it apparently.”

Ruzhkov’s face clouded over for an instant. Remembering catching his wife, McColl guessed.

“What really enraged him,” the Russian went on, “was the man’s color—it seems the party’s policy on racial tolerance hasn’t taken hold in Turkestan.” Ruzhkov looked up, as if expecting sympathy for this ideological setback. “Anyway,” he continued, “they put a call through to the Samara Cheka with instructions to hold the girl for questioning when the train arrives there. Which might be today, might be in a week’s time—the railways are in chaos.” He snorted with apparent amusement. “Would you believe that five whole trains have been lost since the New Year? They’ve completely disappeared. Vanished off the face of the earth.”

Thirty-six hours had passed since McColl’s first encounter with Komarov, and he was beginning to feel a little more sanguine about his chances of staying free. An optimist might have considered his situation—an unsuspected spy close to the heart of an official investigation into the very matter that had brought him to Russia—close to ideal, but as far as McColl was concerned, that would be overstating the case, and he was determined not to let down his guard. Nerves were good for you, as his school PE teacher used to say, teaching his charges how to dive into an icy loch through the stunningly simple expedient of making them walk the plank.

Wending their way through the galleries of the newly reopened history museum, McColl and Ruzhkov were entering one that housed a Mongol tent or yurt. A selection of yak-tail banners, bows, and quivers hung from the walls; displays of whistling arrows filled several glass-topped cabinets, complete with typed explanations of how the Mongols had used them in battle for transmitting tactical orders.

“Fascinating,” Ruzhkov said, leaning in so close to the glass that his breath formed a circle of steam.

“So they’re just waiting around?” McColl asked hopefully.

Ruzhkov straightened, holding his back. “Oh no. Deputy Chairman Komarov is not the idle sort. He has no other life, so neither do his men. When there’s something big on—and there almost always is—all of them work every hour God gives. And unlike most of them, he’s a real stickler for the rules. His wife died of hunger two winters ago because he wouldn’t bend them to get her an extra ration. At least, that’s the story, and it wouldn’t surprise me. That kind of dedication is frightening.”

Absurdly so, McColl thought. “So what have they been doing, then?” he asked.

“There are three things Komarov wants to know,” Ruzhkov said, ticking them off on his fingers. “Who the Russian was, where the American and his friends were living, and what it’s all about. He grilled all our men who were undercover at the Universalist, but they weren’t very helpful. All the turncoats talked about was India and some new Menshevik named Gandhi. Have you heard of him?”

“I have,” McColl said. He had actually met the man twice, once over twenty years before when Gandhi and another Indian medical orderly had carried him down on a stretcher from the Spion Kop plateau, the second time in 1915 when he’d stopped to visit Gandhi’s ashram in Ahmedabad on his way home from Calcutta. But this didn’t seem the time for reminiscing.

“Well, the men in this group went on and on about him. And they don’t like him one bit. The Indians in particular.”

“Why not?” McColl asked.

Ruzhkov shrugged. “Because he’s a Menshevik, I suppose. You know what they were like—they talked a good revolution, but they didn’t really want much to change.” Ruzhkov rubbed his eyes. “But I wouldn’t rely too much on any of this. The men we had there were not the brightest.”

“We” was now the Cheka—Ruzhkov had trouble with personal pronouns. “So that was all—India and Gandhi?”