Дэвид Даунинг - The Dark Clouds Shining

“We’d certainly be conspicuous here,” Piatakov agreed.

Brady sighed. “Yes. But isn’t it fascinating?”

“It is.”

“I wonder how religious these people really are,” Brady mused. “That mosque doesn’t look very well cared for. You remember Dzagin, on the train? He told me about a notice he’d seen in a small town near here; it said something like: the service today is being given by a communist priest, so members of the party are allowed to attend!”

Brady laughed out loud, drawing stares and one or two disapproving murmurs. “He had another story about a Chinese dentist, a traveling dentist, who used to work here in the old town. He told all his patients that toothache was caused by maggots in their teeth, and he’d poke around with a pair of chopsticks in their mouths, bring out the offending maggot, and stomp on it. Then he’d give them a pill and pocket his fee. Of course, the maggot was in a hollow chopstick, and the pill was opium, so the tooth would never get better. But no one seemed to mind. He came back year after year and did a roaring trade. He just had the knack of getting people to believe in him.”

Like you, Piatakov thought but didn’t say.

Brady gulped down the last of his tea. “Come on. Let’s go and find some lodgings.”

They walked on in the direction that seemed most likely, threading narrow streets and small squares until they suddenly emerged beside a wide boulevard, just as an overcrowded electric tram squealed past. The shock of this sudden encounter with modernity was exacerbated by the tram’s occupants, nearly all Uzbeks, the men in white robes and turbans or caps, the women veiled from head to foot.

A hundred yards farther on they found a tram stop leaning drunkenly into the road, bearing information in Russian.

Another tram duly arrived, every bit as full as its predecessor. They found themselves each gripping the rear veranda rail with one hand, their bags with the other, as the tram rolled down the boulevard and crossed a large square boasting two large mosques and the statue of a Russian on horseback. A long bridge over a wide, dry riverbed led into the Russian town, where the buildings were much more substantial. Most were painted in traditional pastel colors, and many had red flags hanging from poles or flying from the roof. The faces on the pavement were mostly European.

They clambered off the tram, and Brady examined the map Ulionshin had drawn for them.

Ten minutes later they were knocking on the door of a mansion in Gogol Street. An attractive middle-aged Russian woman let them in, examined their papers, and copied out the details. “For the Cheka,” she explained, as if they’d just arrived from Mars. Then she showed them up to a first-floor room, the contents of which were half a dozen rolled carpets, a table with one leg missing, and a precarious tower of books.

“The bourgeois family who lived here smashed all their furniture before they fled,” the woman said matter-of-factly. “And they tore out all the wiring, so there’s only cotton oil for light.” She indicated the twists of cotton wool on the table, lying beside a saucer of oil. “Unless you have some candles?” she asked hopefully.

“I’m afraid not,” Piatakov told her. “Thank you.”

“We do have water again,” the woman said. “At the end of the hall. Supper is at nine.”

Piatakov shut the door behind her and joined Brady at the window. A young Russian girl was cycling past on the road below, pieces of blue ribbon streaming out from her bonnet. The sound of running water drifted up from the irrigation stream which ran between the road and the parched grass beyond. In the distance, half-hidden by a line of palms, a string of camels was sauntering along.

Moscow seemed far away. In more ways than one.

McColl stared out through hiscompartment window, something he had been doing for much of the previous twenty-four hours. The train was stabled a few hundred yards south of Orenburg station, close to where a dirt road from the east crossed the tracks and entered the town.

The view from the window rarely stopped shifting. A steady stream of carts trundled into the town, emerging from behind a derelict warehouse like one of those endless strips of bunting magicians drew out of their sleeves. Each was driven by a peasant with an anxious expression; each carried a high pile of decrepit-looking furniture, upon which a varying number of children precariously perched. And there was often a scrawny mongrel chasing its tail down among the trundling wheels, as if survival itself wasn’t hard enough.

And then there were the soldiers. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of them. Columns marched into town and columns marched out, none of them showing much in the way of enthusiasm. There were solitary soldiers, groups small and large, all milling wherever space allowed, picking up rifles and putting them down, passing around cigarettes, pissing against anything that rose out of the ground.

It reminded McColl of the Boer War. Take away the distant onion domes, and Orenburg could be any small town in the western Cape, dry and dusty, full of purposeless motion, and reeking of troop disaffection. Each time a new column appeared on the track he half expected a dolorous chorus of “Goodbye, Dolly Gray.”

He had wanted to explore the town, but the passengers had all been warned—effectively ordered—not to leave the safety of the train. The only exceptions were Komarov, Maslov, and Caitlin, who’d ridden off in a droshky flanked by a mounted military escort, the Chekists intent on collecting and sending messages from their local office, Caitlin the same from hers. McColl had no idea how she’d persuaded Komarov to take her along, but perhaps the Cheka boss was offering some small compensation for dragging her all this way from Moscow. Perhaps.

There’d been no audible gunfire since their departure several hours earlier, but McColl was relieved to see their droshky appear in the distance. Soon the three of them were picking their way across the weed-infested tracks, Caitlin looking none too pleased, Komarov and Maslov chatting behind her. The two Chekists were getting on better, McColl thought; they seemed to have settled into an uncle-nephew relationship during the journey, and there was less of the abrasiveness that McColl remembered from Moscow.

Once they’d all climbed aboard, and Caitlin had disappeared in the direction of her compartment, McColl asked Komarov if he had any news. McColl meant about the train, and was more than a little surprised when the Russian delved in his pocket for a crumpled telegraph form and told him to see for himself.

McColl smoothed it out. Fugitives left train at Saryagash. Likely now Tashkent. Search underway . He wondered if Caitlin knew. “It’s a big enough town to hide in,” he said in response to Komarov’s questioning look, forbearing to add that he himself had successfully done so in 1916. “Any news of when we leave?”

Komarov snorted. “God only knows.”

“I’ll go and ask the drivers,” McColl volunteered, glad to have something to do.

He walked up the train and found that a third locomotive had joined the original pair. A driver was sitting in the cab of the new arrival, patiently splitting sesame seeds and inserting the kernels into his bushy mustache. McColl swung himself up onto the footplate. “Any sign of movement?” he asked.

The driver laughed. “Someday soon,” he said. “We’re waiting for a train coming this way to clear the next section. Then, maybe, we’ll be on our way.”

“Why three engines?” McColl asked, seating himself on the fireman’s put-up. The train had been shortened in Samara.

“Because there’s a fair chance that two of them will fail in the middle of nowhere.” The driver grinned. “Come to that, there’s a fair chance they all will.”