Дэвид Даунинг - The Dark Clouds Shining

Four rooms had been requisitioned, apparently at rather short notice: the previous occupants were still disputing their eviction in the lobby when Caitlin and McColl arrived. He asked the clerk for directions and was swiftly besieged by an angry mob. For a second he looked for someone to hit—it had been a stressful day. The thought must have shown on his face—the complainants went back to work on the clerk.

Their rooms were on the upper floor. Caitlin disappeared into hers without speaking, closing the door behind her. His was next door, the usual white-walled square with its soiled mattress and jug of dirty water. He folded back the shutters to reveal the boulevard. Across the way an ex-bank was boarded up behind a row of ragged trees. The soft clatter of typing drifted up from a room below.

It would be dark in an hour and easier to lose whomever Komarov would have on his tail. And that would still have to look accidental, or Komarov might decide there was no point in leaving him free.

He felt tired, incredibly tired. But there was no knowing how long they’d be in Samarkand or how long he’d be at liberty. It might be days, might be hours. He paced up and down, willing the light to fade, wondering how to do it. Nothing clever occurred to him, but then the old tricks usually worked.

He walked down to the lobby and noticed the men on either side of the door. So far, so good. He called the reception clerk over and loudly asked to be woken in three hours’ time, then hurried back up the stairs. The window at the end of the corridor looked out over a small yard. He straddled the sill, then swung the other leg out, gripping whatever he could until he hung by his fingers and was able to let himself drop. The entrance to the yard gave out onto the street some thirty feet from the hotel door. He walked off briskly, glancing back every so often to check there was no pursuit.

High to his left, a large fortress gazed loftily down. Up ahead the road crossed a wooden bridge and deteriorated into a track, before burrowing into the old town’s maze of alleys and narrow streets. McColl stopped on the bridge to light a cigarette and watched the meagre water trickling across the stones.

“Taxi, mister?” a young voice shouted in heavily accented Russian. McColl looked up to see a grinning Uzbek boy, about twelve years old, in the circle of light thrown by the lamp on the bridge. He was sitting in the driving seat of an old, much-repaired droshky, holding the reins of an even-older-looking mule.

“Tashkent Street,” McColl told the boy as he climbed aboard the creaking contraption.

Motion seemed to suit it, and they were soon rattling along a potholed Registan Street, receiving raucous cries of encouragement from the denizens of the chaikhanas that spilled their light across the road. They skirted around the Registan, just three huge shapes against the sky, and entered Tashkent Street. Throwing caution to the winds, McColl asked the boy to take him to Biruni’s carpet shop. The mule snorted.

They passed a large mosque with a cloven arch, and a few minutes later clattered to a halt outside Biruni’s shop. Two Uzbeks were busy carrying rolls of carpet into the dimly lit interior.

When McColl handed over a Kerensky note, the boy’s face dropped. “Coin,” he demanded. McColl fished in his pocket and found one, restoring the habitual grin. “I wait,” the boy announced.

“No,” McColl insisted, handing over another coin, “no wait.” He asked one of the carpet-bearers for Ali Zahid and was pointed through the door. He went in, down a short passage, and out into a yard. An Indian was sitting on a wooden bench beside an open door. “Ali Zahid?” McColl asked.

The Indian nodded warily.

“I come from your brother-in-law,” McColl said.

The Indian’s eyes widened fractionally, but he said nothing.

McColl sat down beside him. “He said to tell you that your new niece’s name is Benazir and that your sister now has three gold teeth.” This had been the standard introduction in 1916—swapping Indira for Benazir when the agent was a Hindu—and McColl was hoping it hadn’t been changed.

Ali Zahid was smiling now, albeit anxiously. “What do you want?” he asked in a whisper.

“The wireless. I must talk to Delhi.”

“It is far away, hidden. Perhaps tomorrow.”

“No, now.” Why had the man been surprised to see him? And why was he trying to put him off?

“Tomorrow no problem, sahib,” the Indian said ingratiatingly.

“Tomorrow I may be in the hands of the Cheka. And they may force me to name my contact in Samarkand.”

Ali Zahid seemed to digest this information quite literally, making chewing motions with his mouth as he stared at the ground. “Very good,” he said at last. “Wait here.” He disappeared inside, and McColl could hear him and a woman talking. A few minutes later the Indian reappeared at the door, beckoning. McColl followed him into a richly decorated room and was handed a set of Uzbek clothes.

“You must wear these,” Ali Zahid said. “I will wrap your turban.”

Ten minutes later they were working their way through another maze of narrow streets, the delicious mélange of cooking smells offering McColl an acute reminder of how long it had been since he’d eaten. Another few minutes and they arrived at the foot of a low cliff. Worn steps led diagonally up the face; at the top there was only the darkness of open country.

“It is not so far,” Ali Zahid said encouragingly, almost disappearing from sight as he strode off down a near-invisible path. McColl’s eyes slowly grew accustomed to the dark: they were making their way through a cemetery that sprawled across acres of undulating bare earth. A copse of trees loomed in front of them, and beyond it a dry riverbed. Behind them the meager lights of the town had faded completely from view.

“We are almost there,” Ali Zahid said. He now seemed as eager to please as he had been to thwart.

They traversed a rock-strewn gully and emerged onto a wide shelf, beyond which the land dropped away again. The gnarled trunk of an ancient tree stood in splendid isolation.

“See here,” Ali Zahid said, pointing. A low sarcophagus lay in the sandy earth; at its head two long poles bearing horsetail emblems fluttered uneasily in the breeze.

“The wireless?” McColl asked.

“No, that is a little farther. This is the grave of Daniel.”

“Daniel who?”

The Indian smiled, his teeth flashing. “In your Christian book, he fought lions, I think. See these stones—they move a little each year as his body grows.”

“What?” If there was one thing McColl hadn’t expected that evening, it was a Bible class.

“He grows, about one half inch in every year. And that,” he added, pointing at the trunk, “is the sacred tree. Its touch cures leprosy.”

McColl looked at the tree, then the Indian. Which of them was crazier? “And the wireless?” he asked patiently.

“A little farther,” Ali Zahid repeated. “I thought you would be interested,” he added, sounding slightly indignant. “Come.”

McColl followed, doing the sums in his head. By his reckoning Daniel should have been around a hundred feet long by now.

They clambered down onto the desert floor, and had been walking for only a couple of minutes when dark shapes loomed ahead—the broken walls of abandoned houses. The Indian threaded his way between them, stopped at the side of a disused well, and started removing loose bricks from the base of the wall. The hole that someone had dug in the space beneath contained a bulky package wrapped in sacking.

His Majesty’s wireless in Samarkand.

McColl looked around as Ali Zahid unwrapped it. The moon would soon be rising in the east; a silver glow was already seeping above the distant hills. The night was silent save for the murmur of the town to the north. A train whistle blew, a long way off.