Дэвид Даунинг - The Dark Clouds Shining

She put the letter down again. She should tear it up, she thought. Throw the pieces out of the window.

She believed him. Or would it be more accurate to say that she didn’t think he was telling deliberate lies? The last time he’d appeared like a jack-in-the-box he’d said much the same, only to later admit that he’d been fooling himself. Was he doing that again?

He was right about one thing—it had been a shock. Her life at the moment felt like a stream of unwelcome surprises: Sergei caught up in robbery and worse, the Zhenotdel under threat, Komarov virtually kidnapping her. And now Jack McColl appearing out of the blue, Jack who she’d thought was safely locked in the past.

Russia might be getting a breathing space, but her own life was being turned every which way.

“If it’s drowning you’re after, don’t torment yourself with shallow waters.” Where had that come from? It was something Aunt Orla had been fond of saying many, many years ago, when Caitlin was a child.

A brave heart, her aunt had called her the last time she’d been home. And maybe sometimes she was. But not at this moment. Her first instinct now was to hide herself away, to keep herself locked in the cabin until they reached wherever it was they were going. She had brought along a suitcase full of work, so why not make use of the time?

She opened the case, took a long look at the contents, and clicked the clasps shut once more. For the moment at least, it felt like news from a foreign country, one whose language she could barely speak.

The hours passed slowly, and she kept dozing off, often waking with a start when the train jerked into motion. It seemed to be stopping at every settlement it came to and spending more time stationary than moving. At several of the stops, she caught glimpses of McColl through the gap between her curtains, usually alone but sometimes talking with other passengers. There was something different about him, but she couldn’t put her finger on exactly what it was. There was sadness there; he carried himself as if something were pressing down on his shoulders. Maybe he always had, but it wasn’t how she remembered him.

He was doubtless waiting for her to come and join him, but she wasn’t ready to engage with him again, not over this or anything else. And the thought of seeing him day after day—sharing “the odd cup of tea,” for God’s sake—was more than her not-so-brave heart could cope with.

Nor had she any desire to socialize with Komarov or his wretched assistant. They might be on the same side, they might all agree that Brady and Sergei should pay for their crimes, but relishing the hunt wasn’t something she could share. Caitlin was afraid that she’d be standing over her husband’s corpse before all this ended, and however far apart they’d grown, that would never feel right.

Just see it through, she told herself. And then get back to your job.

McColl took a sip fromhis tumbler of vodka, stared at his reflection in the glass, and realized that the train had stopped yet again. He walked out to the vestibule and pushed his head through the open window in search of an explanation. There was none to see: beyond the orange glow thrown out by the engine fires there was nothing but darkness, no station, no signal, no dwellings.

It had been a long and frustrating day. Earlier that evening one of the drivers had told him that the train had traveled only eighty miles since leaving Moscow almost thirty hours before. Since then, it had probably managed another five. A walker setting off when they had would be quite a way ahead.

He’d seen no sign of Caitlin. At every one of the all-too-frequent stops, he’d strode up and down the platform hoping she would join him, but all to no avail. The good news was that she hadn’t betrayed him—if she had, he’d be in irons. The bad news was that seeing her after all this time had upset him more than he’d expected, awakening thoughts and feelings he’d hoped were dead and buried.

Things would be better, more real, he thought, once a past was not the only thing they had in common. But that could only happen if she came out to talk.

He heard footsteps behind him and knew they weren’t hers.

It was Komarov, bearing a bottle and chess set. “Do you play?” the Russian asked.

“Badly,” McColl replied. Playing chess with the Cheka didn’t seem like the wisest of moves.

“Then we’re well matched,” Komarov said, ignoring McColl’s lack of enthusiasm. He sat himself down in the opposite chair, smoothed out a checkered square of cloth, and began extracting wooden pieces from the lacquered box.

McColl felt bound to acquiesce. He hadn’t played chess for years. His uncle had taught him originally, on winter evenings in the parlor of the Polmadie house, and he had made his first friends at Oxford through the chess club, one of the few university institutions that hadn’t seemed to require a blood certificate as qualification for membership. Most of those friends had been Jews, fellow outcasts at that shrine of good breeding.

Komarov was holding out his fists. McColl picked white and began. As he moved his pawn forward, the train lurched into motion again.

At first they played mostly in silence. McColl was pleased to find that the Russian took the game no more seriously than he did, simply enjoying the mental exercise. He offered grunts of appreciation when McColl made a good move and self-deprecating laughs when it was obvious he himself had made a bad one. He won nevertheless, and offered a rematch. McColl was about to decline when he realized that he was actually enjoying himself. And that more than five minutes had passed since he’d thought about Caitlin.

While setting up the pieces for the next game, the Russian casually slipped in a question. How had McColl come to learn a language like Urdu when so few people spoke it in his native Turkestan?

“More than you might think,” McColl answered calmly, though his heart seemed to be beating a trifle faster. “My father had a large cotton plantation,” he went on, “and his manager was from the Punjab. In India. My mother was ill a great deal, and this man’s wife was like a cross between a nanny and a governess to me. I learned a lot of Urdu from her, and when I went to school in Tashkent, I found I had a knack for languages. So I carried on with the Urdu as well as learning Uzbek and a little Farsi.”

“I see,” Komarov said, raising his eyes after placing the final pawn.

He seemed satisfied with the explanation, and McColl could see no reason why he shouldn’t be.

“My first move, I believe.”

“It is.”

McColl was wondering how wise it would be to inquire after Komarov’s past when the Russian introduced it himself, albeit from a curious angle.

“Have you heard of Sherlock Holmes?” Komarov asked.

“I don’t think so,” McColl said after studying the board for several nerve-steadying seconds.

“He is an English detective. Not a real one, a storybook character. An amateur detective, I should say, not connected with the English police, Scotland Yard. There are many stories, though I believe the author stopped writing them some years ago. If so, a great pity. They are all in Russian translations—you should read them.” He stopped to consider his next move, then brought out his queen’s bishop. “I first read them in, oh, about 1906, when I was a young policeman in Moscow.” He looked up. “And though I shouldn’t say so, they probably influenced me more than Marx.”

McColl showed appropriate surprise. Was the Russian a little drunk?

“The stories,” Komarov continued, “taught me that detection was both an art and a science. Which made me want to be a detective. They also helped my political education, though of course the author had no such intention. You see, Sherlock Holmes is a classic bourgeois creation—a razor-sharp mind for solving problems, a blind eye to the social context in which such problems are bound to arise. And the contradictions revealed by that basic split are wonderfully illuminating. Holmes’s brilliance makes him heroic, and his obtuseness makes him a safe hero for the English bourgeoisie.” Komarov leaned back in his chair and gulped down what remained in his glass.