Дэвид Даунинг - The Dark Clouds Shining

The tender was full of what looked like broken furniture. “What about fuel?” McColl asked.

“You are an innocent. Once we’re out in the desert, we collect it as we go. The engine burns saxaul roots, and when the supply runs low, everyone volunteers to get out and cut some more. It takes hours, but it could be worse. In Tashkent they’ve converted two locos to burn dried fish from the Aral Sea. They burn great, but the stink!”

McColl could imagine. He wished he could tell the Russian about the porter on Glenfinnan Station who’d decided to check a fish van door, inadvertently pulled it open, and buried himself in an avalanche of herring. Euan McColl had never tired of that story, but then other people’s misfortunes had always made the man laugh.

The train they were awaitingarrived the following morning. It was the “Red Cossack,” an Agitation-Instruction train, a long line of bright red cars covered in huge yellow flowers and exhortatory slogans: women, learn to read and write! from darkness to light, from battle to books, from sadness to joy! Caitlin watched it pull in as she ate breakfast in her compartment, and found herself seeing it through the eyes of those farther up the line. In a day or so, this gaily colored messenger of hope would be rattling through the legions of the dying, a circus for those whose thoughts went no further than bread.

Minutes later her own train was on the move, clanking across the bridge that spanned the Ural River. This, as Maslov had told them yesterday, was the boundary between Europe and Asia, but as time went by, the view through Caitlin’s window showed no sign of changing—just steppe and more steppe, nothing but straw-colored grass as far as the eye could see.

Piatakov spent most of themorning by their hotel room window, enjoying the sunlight and trying to imagine how things must have been in prerevolution days. A typical colonial society, he thought, ludicrous gentility masking all the usual brutality. All the mansions taking turns holding balls, all swishing gowns and string quartets while the native servants were treated like slaves.

Brady had gone out early, intent on discovering Rogdayev’s home address. Piatakov was not particularly looking forward to seeing their old anarchist comrade again. He and Brady had fought alongside Rogdayev in 1918, had shared many hardships and arguments with him, but Piatakov had never really liked him.

Why not? In those days Rogdayev had been the pure anarchist, forever mocking Piatakov’s faith in the party. Now Rogdayev was the party’s propaganda chief in Turkestan, and Piatakov wondered how the man would cope when confronted with his past. He understood the political arguments for Rogdayev’s change of course—had heard them often enough from ex-anarchists in Moscow—but doubted that political arguments had influenced the man very much. Perhaps he was being unfair, and Rogdayev had actually had a real epiphany. But when it came to politics, the mind needed help from the heart, and Piatakov wasn’t sure that Rogdayev had one.

It was early in the afternoon when Brady returned, mopping his brow.

“We’ll be gone tomorrow,” he announced. “I got his address from a charming young typist in the Cheka office. We can renew our acquaintance this evening.”

Caitlin was half-dozing in oneof the saloon car armchairs when she suddenly realized that Komarov had joined her.

“May I?” he asked, indicating the chair closest to hers.

“Of course,” she said, wondering what excuse she could make to leave in a couple of minutes.

He sat down. “Given how long you’ve known the man, I thought I should ask you about Aidan Brady.”

She felt surprised and slightly alarmed. “What do you want to know?”

Komarov leaned back in the armchair and interlinked his hands, looking for all the world like a cop ready to question a suspect. “Where did you first meet?”

“In a town called Paterson—it’s in New Jersey, an hour on the train from New York City. There was a famous strike there in 1913 and a rally the following year to show the bosses we wouldn’t accept any reneging on their promises. I met him at the rally. He was an IWW man at the time—that’s the Industrial Workers of the World union—”

“The Wobblies,” Komarov said, pronouncing the English word with a capital V . “Quite a few of them came here as volunteers in 1918. Brady among them.”

“I traveled across Siberia with him,” she offered, hoping to make their discussion more of a two-way street. “We arrived in Vladivostok within a few days of each other, and we were both heading for Moscow. But I expect you know all this.” What, she wondered, was he really after?

“You traveled together as far as Yekaterinburg,” he noted. “Then he went on while you—”

“I got myself arrested for trying to catch a glimpse of the czar through his prison windows,” she said wryly. “Not my finest hour.”

He ignored that. “But you ran into Brady again in Moscow.”

“He came to see me at the house where I was living then. But how could you know that?” she asked, allowing a little indignation to enter her voice.

“He told me,” Komarov said simply. “After he reported seeing you with a known English spy, I asked to see him in person, and he told me then. You never asked me who informed on you that summer, so I assumed you knew it was him.”

“I guessed.”

“But Brady was telling the truth—you admitted as much.”

“I did,” she agreed, wondering, with another frisson of panic, where all this might be going. His tone was matter-of-fact, but it was taking all she had not to betray her growing anxiety. “He wanted help finding a home for an orphan boy he’d rescued,” she said, trying not to sound like a supplicant.

“So you said at the time. And I believed you.”

“And the last three years have proved you right,” she retorted.

“I never regretted it,” he said, leaving the impression that he might still do so at some point in the future. “But getting back to Brady—have you seen him at all in the last three years?”

“Once, I think.” She hesitated. “He and Sergei met on the Volga front that summer and discovered they both knew me. After Sergei and I became… well, he turned up with Brady on one of their leaves, and I told Sergei never again.”

“Because you knew he’d informed on you?”

“It was more than that. People die around Aidan Brady, and I’m not talking about other soldiers. He was partly responsible for my brother’s death in England. I know he knifed a policeman in Paterson, and he probably shot two in England. I’d bet money it was him who shot the boy in Kalanchevskaya Square, and now he’s murdering men during robberies. Wherever he goes, people die, and he always gets to walk away.” She looked Komarov straight in the eye. “I know the revolution needed killers like him to win the civil war, but it’ll all have been for nothing if we don’t find a way of taking their guns away.”

Something flickered in his eyes and was gone. “I agree,” he said shortly. “And the English spy—did you ever see him again?”

“He went back to England, as far as I know.” Her heart was suddenly racing, but at least to her, her voice seemed commendably calm.

“I always wanted to go there,” Komarov said unexpectedly.

“To see Marx’s grave?” she asked with a smile, just about managing to ride the wave of relief.

He smiled. “I’ve had enough of graves. I was thinking more of the white cliffs of Dover and Holmes’s flat on Baker Street. Maybe a tour of Scotland Yard.”

“I don’t think they do tours,” she said. This interrogation was apparently over, but she doubted it would prove the last.