Дэвид Даунинг - The Dark Clouds Shining

Peters nodded. “Things are more clear-cut here; that’s for sure. I don’t keep bumping into old friends in the interrogation room.”

“Why is Vladimir Ilych up on the wall?” Komarov wanted to know. Lenin was notoriously averse to that sort of idolatry.

“That was put up before my time. I was told there used to be one of the czar,” Peters explained, “and that when it was taken down people used to stare at the patch on the wall. So someone decided to replace it.”

“A new father figure.”

“Exactly. People down here seem to want one.”

The tea arrived, two steaming glasses and a bowl of lemon slices.

“It’s a long journey from Moscow,” Peters said, condemning one cigarette and lighting another. “And I still don’t know why you needed to make it,” he added with a smile.

“Ah.”

“I have my suspicions, of course.”

It was Komarov’s turn to smile. “Which are?”

“Felix Edmundovich is trying to tangle himself up in laws again. ‘Please, Vladimir Ilych,’” Peters said in a fair imitation of Dzerzhinsky’s breathless voice, “‘let me capture a real murderer or two.’”

Komarov laughed. “Something along those lines. But it’s more than that. These really are dangerous men.”

“And hard to catch. Ignore my cynicism, Yuri Vladimirovich.”

“You haven’t caught them, then?”

“No.” Peters didn’t sound that apologetic. “We had some bad luck. The two of them left the train at Saryagash—you know that—and they must have come into Tashkent by road. Unfortunately, the train they abandoned broke down ten miles short of here, and we only got to check and question the passengers on the following afternoon. By which time they must have passed through the guard posts. We started a city search at once, but… well, you have to understand the situation here: I don’t have many men, and half of those I have are worse than useless. This is not Petrograd. The party and Cheka are almost a hundred percent European, but Europeans are less than half the population. The other ninety percent, well, they don’t fight us in the cities the way the bandits, the Basmachi, fight us in the countryside, but few lift a finger to help us. They’re waiting to see if the next wind blows us away.”

He grimaced. “And then there’s our side. I’ve got the usual quota of zealots who want to revolutionize Turkestan overnight—shut the bazaars, free the women, shoot the Muslim priests—and the usual quota of timeservers who don’t want to revolutionize anything in case we all end up being roasted on some tribal spit out in the desert. And as if that wasn’t enough, I’ve had three Zhenotdel women murdered in the villages in the last fortnight and the local delegates ringing me every ten minutes. First they won’t have anything to do with the brutal Cheka; now they’re demanding that we shoot the Muslim men in batches!”

Komarov smiled. “I’ve brought one with me,” he said, and went on to explain Piatakova’s presence.

“She’s the American, yes? I met her several times in Petrograd after the revolution—she took a letter to my family in London. And I saw her again in Moscow, during the LSR uprising. She never struck me as a man-hater.”

“I don’t think she is. But she’s certainly committed. Anyway…”

“Yes, where was I?”

“Shooting men in batches. What about the other two, the Indian and the Armenian? Any news of them?”

“None. But getting back to Piatakov and the American: the first we heard of their arrival was a telephone call from Vladimir Rogdayev. I’d spoken to him after getting your wire—he was the only ex-anarchist we knew of down here—and it turned out he did know Piatakov and Brady. We agreed that they might try and contact him, but he thought it was pointless to keep him under surveillance—that it would just scare them off. At the time I thought he was right, so we arranged a coded telephone message instead.

“Unfortunately, I was out dealing with the murder of the third Zhenotdel woman when the call came, and it was taken by a man named Dubrovsky. Not the cleverest of men. And not the most mobile these days,” he added as an afterthought. “Dubrovsky took three men to Rogdayev’s apartment at around ten in the evening. And that was the last time anyone gave them a thought until the next morning, when one of my abler assistants realized they hadn’t come back.

“We found them there, all tied up. Rogdayev was dead, shot in the head, and Dubrovsky had been shot in the foot trying to disarm them, or so he said. The car was gone, and we later discovered that it passed through the Salarsky Bridge guard post at four minutes past eleven.” Peters sighed. “The idiots were so busy recording the exact time that they neglected to check the men’s papers.”

“That probably saved their lives,” Komarov murmured.

“A small consolation,” was Peters’s rejoinder. He lit another cigarette; the smoke curled away out through the window. “We found the lodging house where they’d stayed the night before—as party members—road inspectors, would you believe! Their stuff was still there, including a map on which a route was marked out, south from here to Khodjend, then east to Andijan and over the border to Kashgar.”

Komarov smiled.

“Exactly. It felt like a deliberate deception, even before we discovered that they’d returned to their room after killing Rogdayev. Some nerve, though, hanging around like that. Most people would have headed straight for the hills.”

“Oh, they have nerve, all right. Which direction is that bridge you mentioned?”

“South. So maybe a bluff within a bluff.” Peters got up trailing ash and walked across to the map. “These are the possibilities,” he said, and went on to outline the various permutations of road, rail, and river travel.

“You’ve done your homework,” Komarov concluded.

Peters took a bow. “We provincial policemen do our best,” he said mockingly. “And,” he added more seriously, resuming his chair, “I want them caught. The alternative sticks in my throat.” He rummaged around in a desk drawer and pulled out a crumpled telegraph message.

It was from Dzerzhinsky and, for him, unusually terse. “If necessary, alert British,” Komarov read aloud. “I don’t like it either,” he said, passing the message back, “though,” he added thoughtfully, “I think the British know more about this business than we do. By the way, I have one of their agents in my party.”

Peters looked astonished, then burst out laughing. “I assume he doesn’t know you know.”

“No. Nor does my assistant.” He explained about Maslov. “He’s better than I expected, but he can’t control his face. As for the Englishman, I’m hoping he’ll help me untangle this mess, without of course knowing that that’s what he’s doing. And as a bonus, he should lead us to all the agents they have down here. So we must put some men on him immediately—the best you can spare. He’s not a fool.”

No one seemed to bepaying him any attention, but Piatakov kept to the shadows as he walked south along Tashkent Street. The previous day they had decided that only one of them should attend the Registan on each appointed day and had drawn cards to see who would go first. Piatakov had “won,” much to Brady’s annoyance—their enforced seclusion was denying him Tamerlane’s city and all its wonders.

There were many people on the street and much activity. Piatakov walked past richly carpeted chaikhanas full of gossiping men, and eating houses with large open windows, through which he could see, hear, and smell large chunks of lamb sizzling on skewers above the glowing charcoal braziers. Farther on, stall after stall was selling rice, then melons, then sheets of silk in an amazing variety of patterns and colors. In the square where they’d met Bertolt, several camels were tied up outside the chaikhana , presumably waiting for their owners to finish their teas. On several stalls Piatakov noticed a mélange of objects from distant Russia, presumably loot from the long-fled local bourgeoisie.