Дэвид Даунинг - The Dark Clouds Shining

“That was all.”

They were now perusing an intricate re-creation of a battle—the one fought beside the Kalka River in 1223, according to the inscription. The model river itself was full of finely crafted corpses and patches of red staining. “The Mongols never shed the blood of princes,” Ruzhkov said. “So they rolled the Prince of Kiev in a carpet and suffocated him.” He giggled.

India and Gandhi, McColl was thinking. What were these men planning?

“Last night our men raided the Universalist,” Ruzhkov was saying. “Took about fifty people in. They’re still interrogating them,” Ruzhkov said. “They’ve found out the American lived in Serpukhovskaya, but no one seems to know exactly where. They’re making street inquiries as well.”

“They haven’t discovered anything about the Russian who died at the Lux?”

“Not a thing. He could have come from the moon.”

“And the others in the group?”

“They know who they are. An Armenian named Aram Shahumian and a Russian named Sergei Piatakov. Both served with Brady in the Red Army back in 1918.”

“What else can you tell me about Komarov?”

“He’s a really big wheel, very close to Dzerzhinsky. Komarov was a policeman before he joined the Bolshevik underground, and it’s said that the two of them met in Yauzskaya police station when Dzerzhinsky was brought in under arrest. Komarov’s father was a minor clerk in some ministry, nothing grand. His wife died a year or so ago, and they never had any children. They say only Dzerzhinsky and Yakov Peters have signed more death warrants, but Dzerzhinsky and Komarov have been trying to persuade the party leadership to abolish the death penalty again. Maybe they both have writer’s cramp. Maybe… It’s a madhouse, you know, an absolute madhouse. Do you know what I had to arrange yesterday? There’s some idiot wandering around the city at night painting white flowers on doors, and we can’t catch him. So my boss decided we should get a painter of our own, and have him go around and overpaint them in red. If that isn’t crazy, what is?”

She was alone and hardat work when he entered the office, and so absorbed that she became aware of his presence only when a shadow loomed across the desk. She looked up, felt a lump in her throat.

“No, we haven’t found him,” Komarov said, searching for somewhere to sit. He chose the edge of Fanya’s desk, perching there like a vulture, she thought. Since their last meeting she’d asked several comrades about him, but only one had met him, more than seven years earlier, at a clandestine meeting in 1914 of the Bolshevik underground network in Moscow. According to the witness, Komarov hadn’t said much, but those that did had often looked his way, as if seeking his approval.

He had a way of making Caitlin feel out of her depth, which both intrigued and annoyed her. “What do you want then?” she asked briskly. “I’m very busy this morning.”

“This won’t take long. Have you remembered anything since we spoke that might help us locate your husband?”

“No.”

“Would you tell me if you had?”

The question threw her for a moment, partly because it seemed absurdly playful, partly because she wasn’t sure of her answer. “Of course,” she said, with only the faintest hint of sarcasm.

He smiled and changed tack. “Would you say your husband was a believer in permanent revolution, comrade?”

She considered. “We’re all waiting for new revolutions to help make ours more secure,” she said primly.

“Some of us are getting used to the idea that we shall have to survive on our own,” Komarov responded dryly, “but that is not what I meant. There are some comrades, respected comrades, who argue that we can only avoid going into reverse by running faster and faster.”

“What a strange image,” she said, finally putting down her pen. “Did you come here for an ideological discussion, comrade?”

“Not really. Enlightenment perhaps.” He kneaded his jaw with his thumb and forefinger. “I like to understand the crimes I investigate. And why they are committed.”

“To help you catch the criminals?”

“In part. But I also just like things explained. Though as someone reminded me recently, to explain is not to excuse.”

“Could there be any excuse for what Sergei and his friends have done?” she asked. “You told me that five men had died already, three of them innocent. And heaven knows how many more will if Aidan Brady’s the one in charge.”

“Our Russia’s knee-deep in dead men,” he said.

“Does that make any difference?”

He looked at the floor for several moments. “I really don’t know,” he said. “It shouldn’t, but it has to. Groups of Bolsheviks committed crimes like this in the years before the revolution and probably for much the same reason—a need of funds to further their political ends. And though we said we regretted any loss of life, we saluted the deed and welcomed the money and half-believed that no one who got in our way could be completely innocent. These men—your husband and the others—I assume they feel the same. And, if by some miracle they overthrow the party and set up their own government, the crime they committed the other day won’t just be excused—it’ll become a glorious chapter in their new revolution’s history.”

“But they won’t succeed,” Caitlin said.

“No, they won’t. But losing doesn’t make them wrong, merely on the wrong side of the law.”

“Your law.”

“The party’s law, comrade. Someone has to decide what is permitted and what is not,” he said matter-of-factly, easing himself off the desk, “and for us it can only be the party.”

The telephone rang. It was for him. She walked across to the window, looked out on the sunlit street, listened to him repeat an address in Serpukhovskaya.

“We’ve found the room where your husband’s comrades were living,” he told her. “And the five are now six. An Indian,” he added quickly, obviously noticing her alarm. “I am sorry. I will inform you myself if your husband is found.”

Before or after having him shot? she wondered, as the click of Komarov’s heels faded on the stairs.

The house in Serpukhovskaya wasan old one, and the single bourgeois family who’d occupied it before the revolution had given way to ten or more families living in single or paired rooms. The children playing in the stairwell fell silent as the Cheka men climbed, then burst back into noisy life the moment they reached the room at the top. Komarov could smell the corpse from outside the door; the Indian was laid out on one of three old mattresses.

This face was locked in terror.

“Take him to the morgue,” Komarov told two of his subordinates after taking a long look. He went to the window for a gulp of fresh air and stood there for a moment, enjoying the view across the rooftops, before turning to examine the room.

There was a three-legged table and a homemade brick stove, its ramshackle pipe chimney disappearing through a rough-hewn gap in the roof. A rusty typewriter sat on a cupboard that had lost all its drawers. Taken for fuel, Komarov assumed, like the missing floorboards in the corner; over the last three winters Moscow rooms had been turned into stage sets by the hunger for wood. On one raid earlier that year, they’d found a room with three armchairs, each positioned over a neatly cut hole in the floor.

He stirred the ashes in the stove—nothing. He lifted each mattress, and under the third found a scrunched-up piece of paper bearing the words Gone to Library . The American, Komarov decided. There was something about the large scrawl that suggested a foreigner.

“Nothing,” Maslov muttered.