The Dark Clouds Shining

by David Downing

  Caitlin put the magazine proofs away in a drawer, stretched her arms above her head, and decided that was enough for the day. She’d been at work for over twelve hours, and all her colleagues had long since gone home. Rahima and her sister, who slept on a mattress in one of the upstairs rooms, were out at a Dutch comrade’s birthday party, but Fanya had made sure they had a key.

  At least Caitlin was spared the walk home. She had a meeting at the Serpukhovskaya office early the next day, and Fanya had pointed out that she might as well take the department car home for the night and save herself a trip across the river in the morning.

  It had been a good couple of days, she thought, as she gathered her things together, turned out the lights, and took the key from the hook in the antechamber. An up-and-down week, but one that had ended well. Since Caitlin’s sobering talk with Kollontai, Sergei had seemed almost his old self, as if he’d overheard the conversation and was trying to do better. They’d even had sex the previous night. Drunken sex admittedly, and not very good sex at that, but it was something. A new start perhaps.

  And things had gone well at work. There’d been no fresh news from Kollontai on the business in Orel, but the Orgbureau was proving more willing than usual to accept the department’s requests, and the latest recruitment figures were up all over the country.

  She let herself out the back door, and into the yard that housed the Renault CG. After checking the petrol, she took a deep breath and turned the engine over, praying it would burst into life.

  It did. After carefully maneuvering the car down the narrow alley that ran beside their building, she emerged into Vozdvizhenka Street and drove up the mostly empty thoroughfare, passing a posse of workers who were busy hanging banners in celebration of international solidarity. The wheel of the open-top car felt good in her hands, the cool night breeze fresh on her face. For all the things that were getting worse, she thought, there were others that were getting better. Earlier that day, as she and Fanya had been eating their lunch in the park near their office, they’d heard the strains of a distant orchestra. They’d looked at each other and burst out laughing with pleasure. Perhaps the sound of Mozart floating through the streets was all the justification the NEP needed.

  She remembered something her American friend and comrade Jack Reed had once said—that in normal times, only one in a thousand people were actively engaged in politics. In a revolutionary period, fifty times as many people were involved, a leap in numbers huge enough to create the impression, particularly in the minds of those involved, of a whole society on the move. But the impression was misleading, because fifty out of a thousand was still only one in twenty. And 95 percent of the population was still busy doing things they thought more important, like eating and sleeping and making love.

  Caitlin missed Reed, and his penchant for speaking his mind to any and every audience. She wondered what he would have made of Kronstadt and the NEP. Kollontai had used the occasion of his funeral to reaffirm Reed’s belief that the revolution was nothing if it wasn’t a selfless endeavor, and Caitlin had never been prouder of her Russian friend than she was on that day.

  But eight months on they were where they were. She could only hang on to what she knew was true. She had to do her job, had to trust herself. The Zhenotdel was making a difference—she was sure of it. And if the time ever came when she thought otherwise, then that would be the moment to do something else.

  She left the car outside their building and hurried upstairs, hoping that Sergei would still be at home.

  Their room was in darkness, and the electric light failed to go on. Either the power was off, or their wiring had finally succumbed, either to age or the rats.

  She found one of their precious candle stubs, lit it, and stood for a moment enjoying the dance of shadows on the wall. Then her eyes caught sight of their bucket, not in its usual place.

  On the floor beside it was something white. She walked over for a closer look. It was a shirt she didn’t recognize, and it was covered in something dark and sticky.

  Blood.

  McColl mopped up the last morsels of buckwheat porridge with a chunk of black bread and contemplated the bowl of rather sorry-looking apples that adorned the center of the table. The Filippov Café on the hotel’s ground floor was filled with the babble of foreign tongues, but the Indian comrades were nowhere to be seen. It looked as if the cruise had lasted longer than expected.

  Picking out the least-bruised apple in the bowl, he poured himself another cup of tea and kept a watchful eye on the entrance doors. The mix of nationalities was certainly impressive—whatever you thought of the Bolsheviks, their revolution clearly had global appeal. Some of the people on view had come an awfully long way.

  But not the Indians, he reminded himself. They’d been in Moscow ever since the closure of the school in Tashkent. More to the point, he couldn’t be certain that one or more of them wouldn’t recognize him from his time in Calcutta six years before. When he and Cumming had gone through the list of names, none had rung a bell, but the risk was there. And if anyone showed any sign of recognition, he could think of only one appropriate response. He would simply have to make for the door and the street and hope he could outrun any pursuit.

  This wasn’t a comforting prospect, and as the minutes dragged by, he found himself almost expecting such an outcome.

  The room was nearly empty when they finally arrived, all dressed in European clothes, all looking tired out. Scanning the Indians’ faces as they lined up to get their supper, McColl was more than a little relieved to see none he recognized.

  Only twelve of the fifteen were there. And Cumming’s man, Muhammad Rafiq, was one of the missing three.

  When McColl introduced himself, the reception was almost overly warm. A translator was what they’d been praying for, not of course that one actually prayed anymore. Each Indian insisted on shaking his hand, and if any man had the slightest recollection of seeing McColl’s face before, he should have been on the stage. McColl wouldn’t have to run for it. Or at least not yet.

  McColl took his time sipping his tea while they ate their suppers, and eventually asked about the discrepancy between his list of fifteen and the twelve men present. The other three, he was told, had not been on the cruise. No one knew why they’d been absent, but the fact that both Habib Shankar Nasim and Muhammad Rafiq had found themselves Russian girlfriends might have been significant. As for Durga Chatterji—he was, one Indian suggested, not the most reliable of comrades.

  Piatakov put the book back where he’d found it, tucked half under Brady’s mattress. The text was in English, which Piatakov couldn’t understand, but there were plenty of drawings to look at, almost all of them depicting famous gunfights of the American West. When they’d served together in Ukraine, Brady had been fond of telling western stories over the evening campfire, and was always saying that his one regret was being born thirty years too late.

  Two hours had passed since the depot robbery. Piatakov didn’t know how they’d all made it back to Brady’s room without running into the Cheka again, but somehow they had. Not all of them, he corrected himself. Ivan Grazhin would never pick another title from the pile of dog-eared Dostoyevsky novels by his bed, and Habib Ahmed Nasim would never see India again.

  Chatterji didn’t seem that upset at the loss of his comrade, offering only a few stiff words extolling his glorious sacrifice. His other Indian companion had even less to say: the barely conscious Rafiq was laid out on Grazhin’s bed, white-faced and quietly wheezing. He seemed likely to die with or without any medical help, and Brady had decided that seeking some out posed too great a risk to the rest of them.

  He had gone back out once everyone was there. The prearranged meeting with Suvorov was now more urgent: they had planned to take southbound trains the next morning, traveling in pairs they’d drawn by lot, but that was no longer feasible—the stations would be swarming with Chekists.
Suvorov might be able to help, though Brady had expressed his doubts. Even if the other man had the contacts, he wouldn’t have time to make use of them.

  Now they heard the returning American’s heavy tread on the stairs.

  “The Chekas are fucking everywhere,” was the first thing Brady said, but his eyes went straight to Rafiq. “How is he?”

  “No better,” Shahumian told him.

  “Good,” Brady said. He looked around at the shocked faces. “Suvorov just informed me that Rafiq’s a British agent.”

  Piatakov was confused. “But so is Suvorov!” he exclaimed.

  “They work for different organizations, and Rafiq’s people knew nothing about our plans,” Brady said. “Still don’t, according to Suvorov’s bosses in London because Rafiq hasn’t filed a report since he joined us. But Rafiq’s people in London have sent someone out to contact him. Whether or not the man’s arrived, Suvorov doesn’t know.”

  They were all looking at the stricken Indian.

  “So what do we do with him?” Shahumian asked.

  “Let him die,” Brady said simply.

  “And if he doesn’t before we leave?” Shahumian asked.

  “He will.”

  There was a short silence. “Did Suvorov have anything useful to offer?” Shahumian asked.

  “No, we’re on our own as far as getting out of Moscow’s concerned.”

  “Then what should we do? Wait for morning or get going now?” Piatakov asked.

  Brady didn’t hesitate. “Now,” he said. “We’re only five minutes away from the Paveletsky yards—that’s why we took this room in the first place—and a freight train’s our safest way out of the city. Two would be better, with some time in between. The militia must have noticed that Nasim’s an Indian, so Durga should be on the first. He and Aram should leave right away.”

  Shahumian nodded. “And where do we meet?”

  “Samarkand,” Brady decided after only a moment’s thought. “You can get there by train from the Caucasus or Samara, and the Cheka garrison there will be much smaller than the one in Tashkent. There’s a square with madrasahs on three sides called the Registan—I was reading about it the other day. Whoever’s there first, just keep turning up at noon until the others arrive. It’s in the native town, not the Russian one.”

  “Which should we stay in?” Piatakov wondered out loud.

  Brady shrugged. “We’ll be more noticeable in the native town but easier to find in the Russian. We’ll have to play it by ear.”

  “And how long do we wait?” Chatterji asked.

  “For as long as you have to. The journey could take a week, but a month’s more likely. And take all the coins you can easily carry.”

  Once they had done so, Shahumian went to embrace Piatakov. “One last adventure,” he murmured with a smile. “I’ll see you in Samarkand.”

  “You will,” Piatakov said, hoping it was true. From the window he and Brady watched the twosome walk away along the empty street. There didn’t seem to be any motor vehicles in the vicinity, and the distant chuff of a locomotive was reassuring.

  Piatakov had wanted to travel with Aram, but the lots they’d drawn had decided otherwise, and leaving later with Brady at least offered one consolation—he could say good-bye to Caitlin.

  “I’ll be back in an hour,” he promised after telling the American where he was going.

  “You’re crazy,” Brady said.

  “Probably.”

  “Is any woman worth it?” Brady asked half-jokingly.

  Piatakov stopped by the door, looked back. “Yes,” he said simply.

  Caitlin knew it hadn’t been one of Sergei’s shirts. But had it been his blood? Had he been hurt, or had he hurt someone else? The only good answer was neither, and that seemed unlikely.

  North of the river again, she piloted the Zhenotdel Renault through Moscow’s dark and sparsely populated streets. On the door of an empty shop, someone had painted a huge bird in flight, a small biplane with German markings dangling from its claws. Farther down the same street, outside an abandoned hotel, a revolving door lay on its side like a giant’s abandoned spinning top. Here and there a working lamp illuminated a boarded shop front or a group of smoking militiamen; on one corner a huge poster demanding electrification of the countryside loomed across the stripped carcass of a horse.

  As she drove past the New Theater on Bolshaya Dmitrovka the giant flower stalls constructed by the futurists seemed like strange growths swaying on the floor of a dark ocean.

  She felt close to hysteria, as if all the weeks and months of her struggle with Sergei had engulfed her in one moment.

  An errant child, that was what he was. She was angry with him. Frightened for him.

  She had to bring him home.

  After driving down Kamergersky Street, she turned onto Tverskaya and pulled up outside the Universalist Club. At the entrance she hesitated for a moment, wondering whether to remove the enamel star from her blouse front. Why? she asked herself. To hell with them.

  She took a deep breath and walked into the building, down the narrow corridor, and into the main clubroom. Smoke, noise, and the smell of male bodies assailed her. The handful of women all looked like prostitutes, and the men who noticed Caitlin’s arrival were wondering whether she was one herself, if their head-to-toe appraisals were any indication. She didn’t see a soul she recognized.

  She stood there, disgusted by the atmosphere. The tinkling jazz music, the smell of marijuana—it reminded her of the seedier clubs she’d visited in prewar New York. But they’d also been home to a wild kind of joy, and here the air seemed thick with the opposite, a lovingly cocooned sense of hopelessness. Was this what Moscow’s free spirits had come to?

  She wanted to shout at them all, the way she’d shouted at Sergei.

  A young man, obviously drunk, was leering at her. She turned to the next table, where two men were playing chess with homemade pieces, and asked them if they knew Sergei. They looked at her warily, shook their heads in unison, and bent back over their board.

  “Are you looking for Piatakov?” a voice asked.

  It was the drunk, teetering right behind her. She stepped back a pace. “Do you know where he is?”

  “Why do you want to know?” he asked conspiratorially.

  “Shut up, Belov!” someone shouted.

  Belov tried winking with both eyes at once. “Has our party pretty boy got you pregnant, sweetheart?”

  She’d smacked him across the face before she knew what she was doing.

  He looked at her, astonishment turning to rage, then lifted a hand.

  She hit him with her fist the way Colm had taught her all those years ago, right on the nose.

  He collapsed backward, into a sudden silence.

  “I’m looking for Sergei Piatakov!” she shouted, massaging her knuckles with the other hand. “I’m his wife.”

  Heads turned away. She stood there, wishing she could hit them all.

  “Come and sit down,” said another voice behind her, this one soft and sober.

  She turned to find a middle-aged man with intelligent eyes in a battered face. He pushed out a chair.

  She ignored it. “Have you seen him?”

  “Not this evening. But he does come in most nights.” He paused. “Though I don’t think he was in yesterday either.”

  “What about his friends?”

  “Not them either.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” she asked. She had the absurd feeling that he was betraying Sergei.

  “You asked.”

  His face was somehow familiar. “Have we met before?” she asked.

  He smiled ruefully. “A long time ago. At one of Volodarsky’s gatherings.”

  She remembered the evening, the crowded room—Volodarsky had never been short of friends. “Th
ank you,” she said. “If Sergei comes in later, could you tell him I’m looking for him?”

  “I will.”

  “Thank you,” she said again. Turning to leave, she saw the drunk trying, without much success, to get himself upright. Resisting the temptation to kick his arm out from under him, she walked back out to the street.

  There she stood for a moment, the last of her anger peeling away in the night air, revealing only a numbing sense of loss.

  She climbed wearily into the car and sat behind the wheel wondering what to do, where to go.

  The office, she decided. She could cope there. She could always cope there.

  Ten minutes later she was back in the familiar room. After lighting the candle on her desk, she took a chair to the open window and sat there wondering why the tears wouldn’t come.

  She heard movement behind her and looked around. Rahima was standing in the doorway in a cotton shift, watching her. “Madame Piatakova?” she asked tentatively.

  “Comrade Piatakova,” Caitlin said automatically.

  “Yes, I am sorry . . .”

  “It’s nothing. Go back to sleep, Rahima.”

  But the girl had joined her at the window. “You are sad,” she said, as if surprised to find such a commonplace emotion afflicting someone so exalted. Rahima held out her arms, and suddenly Caitlin felt herself enclosed, sobbing, the tears running down her cheeks and onto the girl’s bare shoulders.

  It wasn’t a long walk, but the frequent need to huddle in doorways made it seem so. As Brady had said, the Cheka was out in force, cars, lorries, and foot patrols combing the city for him and his companions.

  Like Caitlin two hours earlier, Piatakov found their room in darkness. He lit their candle, noticed the bucket, the shirt. “Hell,” he muttered.

  After pouring away the bloody water and stuffing the rolled-up shirt in his trouser pocket, he sat wearily down on the bed.