Дэвид Даунинг - The Dark Clouds Shining

As she picked it up, Brady must have seen the look on her face. “No,” he said, trying to rise. There was more disbelief than fear in his voice, as if he couldn’t quite believe in a world without himself.

After only the briefest of hesitations, she aimed at that place where most men had hearts and firmly squeezed the trigger.

Brady’s head slumped to the floor, his mouth twisting into a final snarl.

Footsteps sounded on the stairs,then stopped. The shooting hadn’t gone unnoticed.

McColl tried to gently pull Caitlin away, but she shook him off. Back on her knees, she closed the dead Piatakov’s eyes and kissed him on the forehead.

McColl could hear voices below. Arguing, probably over what to do. “We have to go,” he told her. “He didn’t save you so you could end up in an Indian prison,” he added when she failed to respond. “He’d want you to go on with your work.”

She looked up, eyes full of tears. “I know.”

“Then come on. We’ll go out the way I came in.”

She got back to her feet, wiping the tears away on her sleeve.

He scanned the room for anything they might have left behind, then turned down the lamp. When he took a last look back from the door, the room seemed full of corpses, but for once in his violent life, he could see no cause for remorse. His only regret was that he hadn’t shot Brady himself because Caitlin seemed in a state of shock.

She let him lead her across a succession of adjoining roofs and down the rickety fire escape that a progressive landlord had provided for his tenants. As they reached the bottom, a rickshaw came out of the darkness and stopped right beside them, the boy driver beaming with pride. McColl helped her into the seat, thinking that Komarov’s ghost had to be working overtime.

McColl told the boy where to take them and asked for a back-street route. Soon they were speeding down narrow, dimly lit alleys where the rickshaw often scraped along one of the walls.

“You tried,” he told her, conscious of how empty the words sounded.

She just looked away.

He had never seen her like this before, but then as far as he knew, she’d never shot a man before. Nor seen a husband die.

The shock would wear off, but until it did he’d have to think for them both. Would Five and the IPI be after them? By rights they should be grateful—he and Caitlin had succeeded where Cunningham and his helpers had failed—but McColl wasn’t holding his breath. He and Caitlin knew too much.

They had to get out of Delhi, but where should they go? He knew Calcutta much better than Bombay… He suddenly thought of Darjeeling, largely empty of Brits at this time of year, and close enough to the Chinese border should they need a place to run to. One of those hotels high on the hill with their stunning views of the Himalayas. Next morning he could go to see Mirza, tell the detective the story as promised, and ask for the help of his old railway comrades in getting them out of the city.

A glance at Caitlin’s expression brought McColl back to earth. Here he was planning their future, and only twenty minutes before she’d been begging Sergei to come home. Had she been lying to coax him away from the others, or had she really meant it? Even if she hadn’t, why was he assuming that she wouldn’t return on her own? Because she loved him? She’d loved him in 1918, and that hadn’t stopped her from saying good-bye.

They were, he suddenly realized, drawing up outside the serai. It was gone midnight, and their feet on the stairs sounded loud in the sleeping building. Once they were safe in their room, he tried to take her in his arms, and after an initial flinch, she allowed him to do so. “Thank you,” she said when he let her go, but he had no idea what for.

She lay herself out on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

Things would look better after they slept, he told himself, lying down beside her. He felt exhausted but was determined not to drop off before she did.

She seemed to sense as much. “Go to sleep,” she told him. “I don’t think I’ll be able to.”

“Do you want to talk?” he asked.

“No.”

In the hour before dawn,McColl awoke with a jerk, a sheen of cold sweat on his forehead. His mind reached for the fading dream, but it was already gone, leaving only the feeling that somehow he had gotten everything wrong.

He levered himself into a sitting position and stared down at her sleeping face, shadow drawn in the dim light: the dark pools of the shuttered eyes; the strong, graceful line of the jaw. The new Russia, he thought. Humanity’s best hope, where the best of people ended up as executioners.

One day maybe, far in the future.

When he woke up again,the sun was streaming through the window, and she was gone. So was her suitcase and, as he quickly discovered, half of their money. She was going back to Russia.

There was a note on the table. “I love you, Jack, and that makes this the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. Forgive me, Caitlin.”

He read it through again, and again, examining each pencil stroke as if there was some way he could release the feelings they had imprisoned, then sat staring into space for several minutes, before running a hand through his hair and walking out onto the balcony.

“I can give myself to you,” she had once said to him, “because I know I can take myself away.”

Outside, the familiar sensory palette presented itself: the smells, the noise, the ache of color. Across the street a man in a turban was sitting on a stool, a cobbler’s last between his knees, hammering away at a long black boot. A rickshaw went past, carrying a pasty-faced European toward the Red Fort. Above the roofs the sky seemed blue as the dome over Tamerlane’s tomb.

Had he always known she would go back?

He had to admit the answer was no. The fear had always been there, but he hadn’t really believed that she would.

What could he do now? Go home, he supposed, if only for his mother’s sake. To a country awash with anger and bitterness, to the half-dead life he’d left behind, to grieving her loss all over again.

He walked back into the room and wearily gathered his possessions together.

The map of Tashkent he’d taken from Rafiq’s room at the Hotel Lux was still in his bag, and seeing it there he remembered the courtyard of women, the flickering film on the wall, all those eyes in search of a better world.

Her place of hope. He seemed no nearer to finding his own.

The plumes of smoke inthe distance presumably marked the station. After she’d found a place there to change back into her Russian clothes, she would buy a ticket to somewhere. She had no idea how she would get back to Moscow and suspected it might take months, but there had to be a way. For someone like her—young, clever, and white—there would always be a way.

So why did the smoke in the distance seem too close? She had done the hardest part, done it because she knew she wouldn’t have the strength to do it again. So why was she crying inside?

What in God’s name was she doing?

They were passing through the Queen’s Gardens. “Pull over,” she told the driver, pointing him toward the curb when he turned to see what she wanted. He looked around again once they were stationary, and she held up five fingers.

He muttered something and climbed down from his seat. “More annas,” he warned her, before lighting a cigarette and ambling into the garden.

She sat there, absurdly exposed, watching the palm fronds sway in the morning breeze.

Was she returning to something that was no longer there?

In 1918 she’d been closer to joy than she’d ever expected. She remembered trying—and failing—to convey the strength of that feeling in a letter to her aunt Orla. What had happened in Russia was probably a once-in-a-lifetime thing, maybe rarer than that. A sense of togetherness, of social happiness, that had left her and all the people she knew drunk on hope and fellow feeling. The world had opened up, and things that had once seemed carved in stone—the poverty and exploitation, the never-ending wars, the subjection of women—were suddenly seen to be written only in sand, so swiftly erased, so easily rewritten. And she had been part of the change, one of so many making a difference.