The Dark Clouds Shining

by David Downing

  “Our lodgings,” Brady said.

  “Is there anything there we need?”

  “Probably not, but there’s something I want to leave behind. A little misdirection.”

  It was only a five-minute drive through virtually empty streets. While Brady went up to their room, Piatakov checked the petrol tank before climbing back in behind the wheel. He remembered how shocked he’d been to discover that Caitlin could drive, and how angry that surprise had made her. The phrase “swallowing gender-based assumptions” stuck in his mind.

  Brady came out looking pleased with himself, carrying both their bags. After dropping them in the back, he took his seat in the front and pulled out their dog-eared map.

  “So we’re heading south,” Piatakov said, just to be sure.

  “Yeah. Look for a sign to Khodjend.”

  “How far is that?”

  “About a hundred miles.”

  Piatakov started the car. The streets were even emptier now, just one lone walker in the city center, swaying to a rhythm that only he could hear. There were no signs to speak off, but the moon was up, and the dark line of mountains occasionally visible off to the left meant he was heading in the right direction.

  They had no trouble at the guard post on the city’s southern boundary; the guards saluted them through, knowing a Cheka vehicle when they saw one. After that there was only the moonlit highway, rough but surprisingly wide, the odd copse of trees a dark blotch on the star-filled sky.

  Brady lit one of his foul-smelling cigarettes. “I feel like Butch Cassidy,” he said.

  “Who?” Piatakov asked, glad that the windows were open.

  “He was the leader of an outlaw gang. Back in the States. A successful one, for a while. And when it looked like he was going to get caught, he and his partner went off to South America. Started all over again.”

  “Just like us,” Piatakov thought aloud. “What happened to them?”

  The American laughed. “Don’t ask.”

  Arbatov’s Chasm

  Through that day and the next, the train made steady progress across a land growing slowly whiter, barer, less hospitable. On the third morning, they all woke to find the grass was gone; to the south the Aral Sea was reflecting the sun like a vast silver plate left out in the sand.

  McColl had considered leaving the train at Orenburg, slipping into the town in the early hours and losing himself in the general confusion. He hadn’t thought Komarov would delay the train to search for a lost interpreter and was as confident as he could be of eventually finding his way out of Russia. He knew where Brady and Co. were going, and was almost certain of what they intended to do when they got there—all that remained was getting the word back to Cumming.

  So why had he stayed on the train? He had convinced himself that the nearer they got to Persia, the better his chances of reaching friendly soil. And he had started to wonder whether Cumming had the wherewithal to find and stop a group of renegades that was probably under the protection of both Five and Delhi’s DCI. Or indeed, whether he’d want to as much as McColl did. Gandhi and his fellow stretcher-bearer hadn’t carried Cumming down from Spion Kop, and it hadn’t been Cumming’s foster child that Brady had murdered in Kalanchevskaya Square.

  And then of course there was her. The woman he thought he’d seen the last of.

  She might still love her husband, as she certainly did her work. But there was no point in kidding himself—he loved her as much as ever.

  In the days that followed their departure from Orenburg, Caitlin couldn’t shake the feeling that someone out there was testing her resolve. Sergei’s departure, the carrion pile at Ruzayevka Junction, the roar of hunger at Sorochinsk . . . each accompanied by a cold voice intoning: “See, this is another price to pay. Are you willing to pay this one? If so, we’ll move right on to the next.”

  The latest blow had been the news she’d received in Orenburg. Anna Nemtseva, the Zhenotdel worker from Orel for whom she and Kollontai had been seeking justice, had risked going back for a family emergency and been found two days later floating in the Oka River. The local Cheka had explained her death as accident or suicide and put down the gaping head wound to her striking a bridge as she jumped or fell.

  Caitlin remembered Anna’s arrival at the Zhenotdel’s door that spring. Even after what the young woman had already been through, she’d been so full of hope for the future.

  Had it been misplaced? Had Caitlin’s own? As she’d also discovered that day, the Orenburg Zhenotdel’s three delegates were at the end of their collective tether. Having been vilified, mocked, and obstructed at every turn by their male so-called comrades, the women concerned seemed perilously close to quitting in disgust. In the hour they’d spent together, Caitlin had done her best to provide fresh heart, but couldn’t pretend she’d convinced either them or herself.

  Sometimes she couldn’t help feeling that it was all going wrong. Not the way Sergei thought it was—she didn’t believe that the party was deliberately betraying its own ideals. It had more to do with the size of the original task, now swollen further by the depredations of the last few years. People had had enough of chaos, and their instinct was to hunker down, to defend what they had against the threat of the new.

  “If we just keep opening doors,” Kollontai had once told her, “sooner or later women—and men—will choose to walk through them.”

  Perhaps. But these days there seemed to be more doors closing than swinging open, and that augured badly for the Zhenotdel. If the revolution regressed, if democracy withered and the bureaucrats ruled, all those institutions—the party, the soviets, the unions—which conceived and realized progressive ideas would eventually turn into hollow shells, mere parodies of what they had promised. And the Zhenotdel’s future would be no different. In Russia at least, the women’s struggle was only one part of the revolution, and like all the other parts, it had no chance of succeeding alone.

  Which was all too depressing. She turned her mind to her other immediate problem, who was probably playing chess with the Grand Inquisitor.

  It was weird dealing with the false Jack, who seemed to be making up his false history as he went along. In the saloon on the previous day, he had recounted an abortive attempt to learn the piano, waxed lyrical about the color of some far-off hills, and advised them all to taste the melons in Tashkent. He had never mentioned the former in their real life together, nor taken much notice of the landscape. She wondered if he’d even been to Tashkent, let alone acquired a taste for its melons.

  Every now and then, she’d had glimpses of the Jack she remembered: a facial expression, a way of holding himself, a swiftly dimmed look of the eyes. This Jack was more disturbing than the false one, mostly because this was the one she had loved. Like no other, indeed. She remembered once telling him that only the world ending could tear them apart, and then the old world had duly obliged. Or so she and millions of others had thought.

  Was there any hope for them? In spite of their being part of the hunt for her husband. In spite of the fact that they were probably still on different sides. And those were just the hindrances she knew about. He might have a wife by now, and his marriage might have a future—he hadn’t said anything, but why would he?

  If she did want him back, there was no guarantee he’d want her. She didn’t think she’d take him back if he’d treated her the way she’d treated him.

  Why was she even thinking about this? Because she still loved him? Because despite everything, he was still unfinished business as far as her heart was concerned?

  There were so many reasons not to fall in love again or give him any sign that she was doing so. She might admit to herself that she wanted him, but acting on the thought was something else entirely.

  And there was still Sergei to think of. She had loved him once, though not in the way she’d loved Jack.

  She often regretted letti
ng him know that. If she’d been more willing to play a part, he might have stayed on the rails and not gone rushing off to pastures new with a killer like Aidan Brady.

  No, she told herself, Kollontai’s voice in her ear. The man had made his choice, and it looked as though both he and she would have to suffer the consequences.

  Komarov watched Piatakova and the Englishman share a stroll up the platform at Aralsk, politely forcing a passage through the throng of peasant saleswomen. The wares on offer—fish and bread, cakes and pastries, even the odd duck and goose—were certainly impressive and a stark reminder of how badly the war had affected distribution. Russia had enough food—the party just had to find a way of getting it where it was needed.

  Maslov was walking toward him, holding a piece of paper and smiling. In his loose shirt and army breeches, he looked like a young, off-duty cadet, the sort who would have taken a young girl rowing on the Moscow River before the war.

  “A message from Chairman Peters,” Maslov said, passing it over.

  Komarov sat down on the carriage steps and read it. The renegades had known another anarchist in Tashkent. A man named Rogdayev, whom they’d robbed and killed. After which they’d taken off in a stolen Cheka car.

  He sighed and swished a fly away from his face. It was beginning to look like he and Dzerzhinsky had erred on the side of optimism when it came to catching these men.

  Piatakova and the Englishman were on their way back down the platform, laughing at something or other. He knew he should have pressed her harder about the agent she had admitted meeting in 1918, but had known in that moment that he was more than a little afraid of what he might find out. If a comrade with her record of service and devotion to the revolution turned out to be a traitor, there wouldn’t be many left to trust.

  Piatakov and Brady arrived in Samarkand late in the afternoon. The last lap of their three-day journey had been spent in the back of a peasant’s cart, in the company of several hundred ripening melons. Dropped off in the heart of the old town, they just stood where they were for several moments, feeling hot and sticky, wondering where to go. Aram had forged them spare sets of papers, but the Russian town would be on full alert, with every available Chekist checking and double-checking each and every new face. This time staying in the old town made more sense.

  This was easier to decide than arrange, but unsolicited help was soon at hand. The two men were sitting in a chaikhana, drinking tea and staring at the huge, half-ruined mosque that towered above them, when an old man came up and addressed them in heavily accented Russian. “It’s called the Bibi-Khanym,” he said, “after Tamerlane’s favorite wife.”

  Brady offered him a seat.

  The old man told them he was German by birth. A mercenary in the army of Czar Alexander III, he had remained in Turkestan after the Russian conquest of Transcaspia had been completed in 1881. He might have been a soldier by trade, he said, but he was a painter by inclination, and the Central Asian light . . . well, he had never known anything like it. He had lived in Samarkand for over thirty years, painting the old town and selling the finished canvases to visitors and Russian colonists. Or had until recently. Now, with the revolution, the market had more or less dried up; no one wanted the past on their walls anymore, not even a past as ancient and unthreatening as Samarkand’s. But there were still a few people with taste. “I am on my way to a customer now,” he said, patting the battered leather case by his side. “Would you like to see?”

  “Of course,” Piatakov said.

  The unwrapped canvas showed a long line of deep blue domes climbing a yellow-brown hill, set against a pale blue sky. The style reminded Piatakov of some German paintings he’d seen at an exhibition in Petrograd before the revolution, all bold colors and minimal lines. Expressionists, the artists had called themselves. He hadn’t known quite how to take them, but this . . . it had a simplicity that told no lies. “It’s beautiful,” he said.

  The old German gave them an ironic smile but seemed pleased nevertheless. “The place is called the Shah-i-Zinda,” he said. “And it is very beautiful. About a mile over there,” he added, nodding toward the east. “And you?” he asked, rewrapping the canvas. “What are you doing with your brief time here on earth?”

  Brady and Piatakov exchanged glances. “We are having a little trouble with the authorities,” Brady admitted with a smile. “We need somewhere to stay in the old town.”

  The old man didn’t raise an eyebrow. “Any enemy of theirs is a friend of mine,” he said brightly, and gave them directions to a place where they should find a room. “Mention my name,” he said as he left, “Bertolt.”

  The hostel proved easy to find, a caravansary set back from the crossroads at the old town’s eastern gateway; they had actually passed it on their way in. The lower floor was a chaikhana, above and behind which a long building with half a dozen rooms had been dug into the hillside. The proprietor, a morose-looking Uzbek, grunted on hearing the German’s name but took their money and asked no questions.

  The room was on a corner, with unglazed windows facing north and east. Looking through the former, Piatakov saw a summer mosque on a flattened ridge, its colonnaded prayer canopy flanked by ornate minarets. Beside and slightly below it, there was a sprawling one-story compound, containing both inner and outer courtyards. Because of the hostel’s elevation, he had a view of the inner sanctum, albeit one interrupted by trees.

  Joining him at the window, Brady took a look with his collapsible telescope and let out a soft whistle. He passed the instrument to Piatakov, who soon espied the reason. The courtyard was full of young women, all unveiled.

  “A harem?” Brady said, as if he couldn’t quite believe it.

  “Or a lot of daughters,” Piatakov responded drily. He was examining the view through the other window, where the line of blue domes from Bertolt’s painting tumbled down their grave-strewn hillside.

  “Where there’s a harem, there’ll be money,” Brady mused out loud. “We’ll soon be down to our last few kopeks again.”

  “Let’s wait until the others arrive before we let the Cheka know we’re here,” Piatakov suggested mildly as he watched a huge black bird touch gracefully down on the crown of a dome.

  Piatakov slept badly and woke up scratching a new crop of bites. The darkness was only just breaking, the town still quiet. Through the window a distant line of low hills was silhouetted against the faint glow of the coming dawn.

  He left the room quietly and climbed the steps to the flat roof, where a young boy was curled up in sleep. Samarkand was spread out around him, a vista of flat yellow-brown houses interspersed with the occasional dome. Away to the west, a clutch of minarets guarded three large buildings, which themselves formed three sides of a square. The Registan, he thought, remembering the engravings Brady had shown him in the Moscow library. Their rendezvous point. He wondered if Aram was already here.

  The line of hills grew darker, the sky yellower; then the first sliver of the rising sun flashed in a distant cleft. A cock crowed in response, and the sleeping boy sat up abruptly, rubbing his eyes. Noticing he had company, the boy said something in his own language, and when Piatakov simply shrugged in reply, he almost leapt to his feet and left, bare feet slapping on the earthen steps.

  Piatakov took a last look around, then followed him down. Brady was awake and sitting at the window with his telescope.

  “Movement,” he reported, handing the instrument over.

  All Piatakov saw was a woman hurrying across the inner courtyard, carrying a basin of water.

  “Look to the right,” Brady said, “where the road climbs level with the front gates. There’s an alley there. It must go around the back; it can’t go anywhere else.”

  “There’s also a dog,” Piatakov told him. It was a large wolflike creature, lying against a wooden outhouse.

  “I know. But he won’t be a problem.”

&nbs
p; “This one may be the exception,” Piatakov suggested. But he knew that wasn’t likely—the American had a way with dogs that verged on the miraculous.

  “I doubt it,” Brady said, in a tone that precluded even the possibility. He pulled on a shirt, announced he was hungry, and left the room. Ten minutes later he was back with a tray bearing bowls of yogurt, two small omelets, bread, and a jug of tea. There were even four large chunks of sugar.

  They ate and drank with relish, then sat for several minutes in contented silence before Brady went back to the window to reexamine the view. “Tamerlane never lost a battle,” he said after lowering the telescope. “I can’t remember any other great general who could say that. Lee, Hannibal, Napoleon—they all lost the last one. Tamerlane won them all. He conquered Mesopotamia, Turkey, Russia, India. He was on his way to China when he died. And this was his capital,” he added, raising the telescope once more. “It was about twice the size it is now. All the other cities he took, he killed every last person and made a mound of their skulls.”

  “A real sweetheart,” Piatakov murmured.

  Brady smiled. “Now we make enormous graveyards. Endless fields of crosses. The bourgeois way.”

  “That’s progress,” Piatakov said wryly. This was a typical conversation between them, he thought. Knowing and bitter. They were so tangled up in history that the present was beginning to feel unreal.

  The train journeyed on across the desert steppe. A returning traveler told McColl that in spring this stretch was a carpet of flowers, unsurpassed in loveliness, but now the land was parched and mostly bare. Not that there was uniformity: swathes of yellow-brown earth would dissolve into sand or disappear beneath drifts of snow-white salt; flat horizons would break into rounded hills or jagged escarpments; occasionally the line would veer close to the Syr Darya, the Jaxartes of ancient times, a river as brown as the land it traversed. Two or three times a day they would pass caravans of a hundred camels and more, shepherded along by tribesmen in wide skin hats, who would rein in their mounts and watch the train steam by through hooded eyes.