“I see,” Komarov said, raising his eyes after placing the final pawn.
He seemed satisfied with the explanation, and McColl could see no reason why he shouldn’t be.
“My first move, I believe.”
“It is.”
McColl was wondering how wise it would be to inquire after Komarov’s past when the Russian introduced it himself, albeit from a curious angle.
“Have you heard of Sherlock Holmes?” Komarov asked.
“I don’t think so,” McColl said after studying the board for several nerve-steadying seconds.
“He is an English detective. Not a real one, a storybook character. An amateur detective, I should say, not connected with the English police, Scotland Yard. There are many stories, though I believe the author stopped writing them some years ago. If so, a great pity. They are all in Russian translations—you should read them.” He stopped to consider his next move, then brought out his queen’s bishop. “I first read them in, oh, about 1906, when I was a young policeman in Moscow.” He looked up. “And though I shouldn’t say so, they probably influenced me more than Marx.”
McColl showed appropriate surprise. Was the Russian a little drunk?
“The stories,” Komarov continued, “taught me that detection was both an art and a science. Which made me want to be a detective. They also helped my political education, though of course the author had no such intention. You see, Sherlock Holmes is a classic bourgeois creation—a razor-sharp mind for solving problems, a blind eye to the social context in which such problems are bound to arise. And the contradictions revealed by that basic split are wonderfully illuminating. Holmes’s brilliance makes him heroic, and his obtuseness makes him a safe hero for the English bourgeoisie.” Komarov leaned back in his chair and gulped down what remained in his glass.
“I shall try to read these stories, comrade,” McColl said tactfully. He was trying to square this Komarov with the one that Ruzhkov had described.
“This will be a long journey. I am Yuri Vladimirovich.”
“Nikolai Matveyevich,” McColl responded.
“Well, Nikolai Matveyevich, it’s your move.”
On the second morning, she realized she would have to meet him. The train, as her man from the kitchen informed her, had still not reached Ryazan and, at its current rate of progress, was unlikely to reach Tashkent in less than a month. If she stayed that long in her compartment, she’d probably go mad.
And, she had to admit, she wanted to hear what he had to say. Whatever he was doing in Russia, it obviously had something to do with Brady, and therefore also with Sergei. Not to mention her own forced exile from Moscow and work. She wanted to know what it was all about.
The first opportunity arose about half an hour later, but Komarov and Maslov were both standing close to their carriage, so she decided to wait for another. The moment the train stopped again, she was out on the platform and putting distance between herself and the three red cars. After joining the queue at the samovar, she looked back to see if Jack was there, and was pleased to see him striding toward her. There was no sign of Komarov or Maslov.
He insisted on shaking hands, as if they were just introducing themselves. “Let’s walk,” he suggested in Russian, gesturing toward the distant rear of the train. “How are you?” he asked, as if they were friends who’d been out of touch for a while.
“I’m ready for the promised explanation,” she said coldly. Seeing him again up close was arousing all sorts of thoughts and emotions.
“Okay,” he agreed. “But it would be better if you didn’t look so angry with me. Komarov might wonder how his humble interpreter has managed to annoy you so much after such a brief acquaintance.”
“Is that what you are, his interpreter?”
“I was interpreting for the Indian delegation at the Comintern conference when it all blew up.”
“All what?”
“The robbery at the tram depot in which three of the Indians were involved. Along with Aidan Brady.”
“He’s the leader in all this, isn’t he?” she asked, wondering why McColl hadn’t mentioned Sergei. He had to know that they were married.
“I think so.”
“And what are they planning?” she asked, glancing down the platform to make sure there was no one in earshot.
“The murder of Mohandas Gandhi.”
“What?” What madness had Sergei gotten himself into?
“They think he’s a Menshevik, holding back the real revolution.”
“Oh, give me strength.” But the idea had a ghastly plausibility. Given how Sergei and his friends saw the world these days, it probably seemed like perfect sense to them. Another thought crossed her mind. “But then what brought you here? Why would your boss give a fig about Gandhi? Wouldn’t the British government be glad to see him gone?”
“I’m sure they would, but I don’t think they’d condone his assassination. It’s a small group of men in one section of British intelligence that’s behind all this. Not my section, and not my boss. He wants to know exactly who’s involved. Who hired Brady to put the team together in the first place and who’ll be helping them once they reach India.”
“Helping them how?” she asked, finding it all a bit hard to believe. Reaching the end of the train, they stood there for a moment, staring down the receding track. The way back to Moscow, she thought, wishing she could take it.
“With money,” Jack was saying. “And probably guns when the time comes. A suitable hideout, information. Whatever they need.”
“All right. But why in heaven’s name would Brady get involved with the British in the first place?”
“He was caught in Ireland, and that was their price for letting him go.”
“He’s using you.”
“I quit the Service three years ago.”
She wanted to trust him. “Okay, he’s using your former colleagues.”
“And they him. And as far as I’m concerned, they deserve each other. If it wasn’t for Gandhi . . .”
“You always did admire him,” she said, reducing McColl to silence. Referencing their mutual past was obviously not a good idea. “So why did you let yourself be press-ganged?” she asked.
He shrugged. “What better way to stay on their trail? If Komarov catches up with them, I can leave them to Soviet justice. If they get across the border, I’ll find a way to follow.”
“You know that one of the men is my husband?” she asked, aware she was trying to provoke a reaction but not knowing which sort she wanted.
“I do,” he said calmly.
They walked several yards in silence.
“So why did Komarov bring you along?” McColl asked.
“Because they have no photographs, and he knows I can identify Sergei, Brady and Aram Shahumian. Because I might be able to persuade Sergei to give himself up. Or just because he can.” Looking up, she saw that the man in question was walking toward them.
“I’m glad that you two have met,” Komarov said in greeting, an almost genial smile on his face.
After his talk with Caitlin, McColl went back to his compartment and tried to lose himself in a Turgenev novel he had borrowed from the saloon. But he found it impossible to concentrate—his unconscious mind was much more interested in endlessly replaying the conversation he’d just had out on the platform.
There was a lot she hadn’t told him. She’d implied that her presence on the train was far from voluntary, and the questions she’d asked him suggested a lack of knowledge when it came to her husband’s intentions. Indeed, when McColl had told her that Gandhi was the likely target, she had seemed surprised. Not to mention disapproving. She hadn’t actually criticized her husband, but then why would she? It occurred to him that she and Sergei might have agreed to let each other follow their own paths and consciences for a while, just as McColl and she
had done in 1916.
And then there was Brady. She must have introduced the American to her husband, which presumably meant that she was still in touch with the bastard after his killing of Fedya. Then again, she might not know that Brady had shot him.
Too many questions, he thought. Not to mention too many memories.
The train continued on its stop-start way. He got off whenever he could, to give his body exercise and his mind something different to ponder. Most of the soldiers he talked to were young and seemed strangely sullen considering they’d just won a war—there was none of the enthusiasm that he’d witnessed among Bolshevik supporters three years earlier. The cotton experts he met in one samovar queue were a very different matter. These two stocky Russians heading south on government business oozed good cheer and optimism—after fifteen minutes in their company, McColl felt positively exhausted.
There was no further sign of Caitlin, though, either on the sun-baked platforms or later in the dining car, where Komarov again brought out his chess set.
As before, McColl found it easier to accept than refuse the invitation to play, but merely being in Komarov’s company demanded as much concentration as playing the game. The Russian was easy to talk to, too easy, and McColl felt the need to measure each thought before allowing it into the open.
They had just finished the first game when another man appeared, the one with the neat beard that McColl had seen by the train in Kazan Station. The newcomer shook hands with Komarov and took a seat at the adjoining table. “One of your praetorians?” he asked, indicating McColl.
Komarov smiled and introduced them. Ivan Arbatov, as McColl knew from his London briefing, was one of the last Menshevik leaders still at liberty in Lenin’s Russia. Or had been. McColl remembered the Chekist escort at Kazan Station.
“Where are we sending you, Ivan Ivanovich?” Komarov asked as he reset the pieces, confirming McColl’s suspicion.
“Verny. Or whatever it’s called this month—your party’s penchant for name changing is becoming almost obsessive.”
“It’s called Alma-Ata now,” Komarov told him.
“Whatever. Nothing but apples to eat, they tell me. I loathe apples.” Arbatov stirred his tea morosely, then smiled. “But don’t let me interrupt your game. We can talk at some other time. At this rate,” he added, staring out into the darkness, “we shall be spending several years in each other’s company.”
Komarov had finished resetting the pieces.
“It’s a great relief, you know,” Arbatov went on conversationally, “being ejected from the political arena. Suddenly I can say exactly what I think again, without worrying about whether that will be the phrase or the sentence that finally gets me into trouble. A relief,” he repeated. “I hold no grudge against you, Yuri Vladimirovich. I want you to know that. Now I really will leave you to your game.” He gave them each a farewell nod and left the carriage.
“Old fool,” muttered Maslov, who’d been standing in the vestibule doorway for the last few minutes.
“Perhaps,” Komarov said, “but that old fool was a comrade of Lenin’s when you were still a mother’s dream.”
“Why is he being exiled?” McColl asked. He had found the Russians’ conversation both bizarre and touching in its old-world civility.
“The usual,” Komarov said, holding out his hands for McColl to choose a color.
Two hours later he had lost three games in a row and was about to plead exhaustion when the train clattered over a succession of points and began to slow down alongside another line of lighted carriages.
“Samara?” Maslov asked hopefully, looking up from his book.
Komarov was trying to see out, his hands cupped around his eyes. “No. The old fool was right—we’ll be on this train for years.”
It squealed to a halt, and the three of them climbed down to find themselves in a multitrack yard. Looking under their train and the one alongside it, McColl could see at least half a dozen others. He remembered Ruzhkov’s remark about trains disappearing into thin air.
Komarov and Maslov were already walking past their train’s locomotives, and McColl strode after them. A couple of hundred yards beyond the lines of stabled trains, the lights of a small station were burning; to left and right, on the slopes of the shallow cutting, hundreds of shadowy figures moved among myriad campfires, the sum of their murmuring voices sounding almost sepulchral. The whole scene, in fact, felt strangely biblical.
They walked on to the station, Ruzayevka Junction, as a large nameboard proudly proclaimed. An old woman was sitting on the platform, deftly spitting chewed sunflower seeds out onto the tracks.
Behind the station more fires illuminated a palisaded area no larger than a tennis court, into which were crammed several hundred prisoners. They appeared to be mostly peasants and mostly men, though there were a few young boys to be seen. Red Army soldiers surrounded the staked fencing, talking among themselves, the ends of their cigarettes occasionally flaring in the gloom.
At the door of the station building, a soldier barred their way, then examined Komarov’s credentials with a thoroughness which exasperated Maslov. Eventually they were allowed inside, where the Cheka officer in charge provided suitable recompense with a display of unmitigated awe. His news was less inspiring. A bridge up ahead was down—maybe blown up, maybe simply collapsed—and for the moment no trains could continue on to Samara. There was no other route worth considering. But the engineers were working on repairing it. It would take them twelve hours, perhaps twenty-four.
Komarov asked who the prisoners were.
“Antonovists.”
Komarov nodded. “Keep me informed,” he said, and turned to leave. As they walked back alongside the tracks to their train, McColl found himself imagining that medieval armies occupied the slopes on either side and that dawn would see them launch their attacks across the shining rails.
The first time Caitlin heard the sound it eluded recognition, but the second time, half-awake, she could not be deceived. It was gunfire.
She dressed quickly, exited the carriage, and walked briskly down the corridor between two trains in the direction the sound had come from. It was still early morning, the sun not yet visible over the hills ahead, and for a moment, as she stepped out into open space and saw the slopes covered with bodies, she thought she’d walked into a massacre. But then she saw heads raised among the smoldering fires, and realized that they, too, had been woken by the noise.
Another fusillade shattered the morning.
She walked on up a track, toward the source of the noise. After passing a goods warehouse that had lost its roof, she suddenly came upon it: a line of people backed onto the edge of a loading platform, facing a group of soldiers around a machine gun. Behind and below the former, a pile of bodies covered the rails.
She heard a shout, then the loud, incredibly loud, clatter of the gun, saw most of the line topple backward onto the corpses below. One man had fallen into a squat and swayed there on the brink before finally toppling over.
She couldn’t move. She realized her mouth was open and managed, with great effort, to pull it shut. She felt like running back to the train and asking Komarov to intervene. But she knew what he would say; she could even see the look on his face as he said it: This is a war, and there are always casualties; rebellions must be stamped out. This is the real revolution, the one you read about in Pravda, sitting at your Zhenotdel desk. Real people, real atrocities; they burn party cadres alive, then slice them up and feed them to hogs. And this is how we avenge them—this is what “suppressing banditry” looks like when it’s happening in front of your eyes.
This was Sergei’s world. This was the war he had found himself in, the one that had let loose his demons and shut down the young man she’d known. In that moment she felt her heart go out to him, wherever he was, whatever mad scheme he might be pursuing.
Ano
ther group was being led forward. She wanted to walk away, to lower her eyes, but if standing and watching was the only way she could share in the responsibility, then stand and watch she would.
Sensing other eyes, she turned to find Komarov’s. He was leaning against the wall of the roofless warehouse gazing straight at her. He quickly looked away, and neither spoke, but she instinctively felt that his heart’s response to these killings was no different from hers, and that all their obvious differences paled into insignificance as long as this burden of barely supportable sorrow bound them together.
The machine gun opened up again, dispensing death and bouncing echoes down the valley.
It turned into a long, hot day. Caitlin spent it shut away in her compartment, mostly lying down, listening to the sounds of the outside world drifting in through the open window. There were no more volleys of gunfire, only the distant murmur of the camps on the slopes, the occasional couple walking by outside, children playing hide-and-seek under the stabled trains. A bee searched her compartment for pollen and left disappointed. She tried to do some work, but the article she was trying to edit now seemed depressingly theoretical.
Her state of mind frightened her. Away from Moscow, away from the office, she felt alarmingly adrift, all her usual points of reference either gone or revealed in a completely different light. What had happened? Well, Sergei had deserted her, Komarov had virtually kidnapped her, and Jack had dropped himself back in her life like an unexploded emotional bomb.
She reminded herself that nothing really had changed. Okay, she was on a train, heading out to God knew where for God knew how long. But her desk would still be there when she returned. The Sergei she’d married had been gone for months, Komarov couldn’t hold her hostage indefinitely, and unexploded bombs could damn well stay that way. She would get her life back.
The Dark Clouds Shining Page 17