They advanced along the alley in single file, the turbaned American leading, left hands keeping contact with the compound wall. The yard ahead was bathed in grey light, and as they approached it, the dog began to growl.
Brady murmured something in English, using the same tone he’d used with Chatterji that afternoon. Piatakov wondered if the Indian was noticing the parallel.
The dog continued growling but didn’t bark. They could all see it now, straining at the end of its tether, waiting to wag its tail. Brady kept murmuring encouragement until he was within reach, then ruffled the back of the neck with one hand and cut the throat with the other. The dog keeled over with hardly a whimper.
The American led the way, tiptoeing along a flagstone passage and into the inner courtyard. There was light in the window of the opposite wall and the whirring sound of an electric fan. After quietly edging around the perimeter, the three of them slowly eased their eyes over the sill of the open window.
Chatterji’s gasp was understandable, Piatakov thought, and fortunately masked by the sound of the fan. Inside the room a young woman was sitting astride the master of the house, the tableau lit by a host of flickering candles. He was moaning with delight as she eased to and fro. Long black hair hung down her naked back, and her small breasts shone with sweat in the yellow light. It was a highly erotic sight, Piatakov thought, until he noticed the expression on the girl’s face, which was cold, indifferent, almost bored. She might have been riding a rocking horse in a nursery, and idly wondering which toy to play with next.
Another short passage led into the house, where the door to the room stood half-open. Brady pulled out his Colt and walked in.
The girl saw him at once; she stopped moving but said nothing. The man asked her something, then opened his eyes. Wider and wider.
“Be very quiet,” Brady said softly, reinforcing the request with a flex of the gun. Piatakov hoped the man understood Russian.
He did. “Who are you?” he half-whispered. When the girl abruptly pulled herself free of his shrinking penis, he grabbed one of her hands in his, as if they needed each other’s protection.
“I’m Ali Baba,” Brady said, “and you must be one of the forty thieves.”
The room was certainly luxurious: the floors thickly carpeted, the walls hung with silk tapestries. Gleaming ornaments sat on several tables.
“I sometimes wonder if our revolution was only a dream,” Brady said conversationally, putting the Colt back under his belt.
“No, no.” The Uzbek pushed the girl aside and sat up, pulling a robe around himself. He was about forty, Piatakov thought, and no stranger to privilege. “You don’t understand,” the man said indignantly. “I am a member of the city soviet.”
Brady and Piatakov both burst out laughing. Chatterji was still staring at the girl, who stood to the side, watching them through expressionless eyes. “Cover yourself,” the Indian told her angrily in English.
She didn’t understand him. Piatakov picked up what looked like a robe and offered it to her. He also felt uncomfortable, both sexually aroused and ashamed to be so. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen.
“Well, comrade,” Brady said sarcastically, “the party requires another generous contribution.”
“But I am a not a rich man,” the Uzbek said.
Brady’s look around the room was an eloquent rebuttal. “Coins,” he said succinctly, holding the man’s eyes.
The Uzbek had a sudden realization: “You are the men they are searching for!”
“Don’t you mean ‘we?’”
“Yes, of course, we.”
Brady shook his head. Piatakov wondered if the Uzbek was aware of how little life he had left. Not a great loss to the party.
The man was taking an embroidered purse from the table that held most of the candles. “How much?” he asked.
“All of it, comrade.”
“But . . .”
“You won’t be needing it.”
The man’s eyes widened in understanding; his mouth opened to cry out, but the sound was choked off by the knife sliding up through the ribs and into the heart. “Allahu akbar,” Brady murmured, wiping the blade on a chair.
Piatakov was watching the girl, whose eyes were no longer devoid of expression. She took a quick step forward and spat in the dead man’s face.
Brady eyed her with what might have been amusement, then went back to examining the contents of the purse. “Good enough,” he said finally. “This should get us to Afghanistan.”
“We must kill the girl, too,” Chatterji interjected.
Piatakov was outraged. “No!” he almost shouted with a violence that surprised even him.
Brady gave him a hard look, then turned to the Indian. “She’s his enemy,” Brady said, gesturing toward the dead man on the floor, “not ours.”
“But what if she runs to the Cheka the moment we’re gone? We must at least take her with us,” Chatterji insisted.
“That seems sensible,” Brady said quietly, looking at Piatakov. “We can leave her in a village.”
“Dressed like that?” Piatakov asked.
“She’ll be fine,” Brady said. “It’s not that cold.”
Piatakov took the sash from the dead man’s robe and passed it to her, indicating that she should use it to tie up the one she was wearing. She smiled faintly and did as he suggested.
The three of them retraced their steps across the inner courtyard, the girl walking with them unconcernedly. No one had thought to gag her, Piatakov realized, but apparently there wasn’t any need—she showed no sign of making a fuss. They stood in the yard for what seemed an eternity until Brady led out three saddled ponies, their hooves muffled with sacking.
Piatakov mounted his, and Brady hoisted the girl up in front of the Russian, muttering, “Your baby, I believe.” Piatakov was acutely conscious of her perfumed hair just beneath his face and of the warmth of her body through the thin robe.
“What’s your name?” he asked in Russian, not really expecting an answer.
“Haruka,” she said.
The other two mounted, the Indian looking slightly uneasy, though the ponies were docile enough. They walked them down the dark alley, the dust and muffles reducing the sound of their passage to almost nothing. At the crossroads they turned southeast and continued along past the foot of the avenue of mausoleums. The moon was high now, the blue domes shining in its glow. The girl’s hair shifted in the breeze.
They walked the ponies for an hour, drawing a wide circle around the southern edge of the town. When they struck the dirt track that ran westward alongside the railway, they stopped, got down, and took off the muffles. According to Brady’s watch, it was almost two in the morning.
Once they had all remounted, the American started down the track, Chatterji close behind him. Piatakov held the reins loose for several moments, then put his hands on either side of the girl’s narrow waist and gently lowered her to the ground. When she gave him a questioning look, he pointed her toward the town.
She turned to see what he meant, then looked back up and raised her hand to touch his leg.
He watched her walk off with a sharp sense of loss and then wheeled his pony to follow the others.
The clock in the lobby claimed it was half past midnight. Komarov paused at the foot of the stairway to yawn, then slowly began to climb, marveling at the survival of the rich carpet, heedless for the moment of the vital role it was playing in silencing his approach. Maslov was a few steps behind him.
As his eyes came level with the floor above, Komarov brought himself to a halt. At the end of the dimly lit corridor, a man was opening a door with the kind of elaborate caution that suggested it wasn’t his room. After a cursory glance around, he disappeared inside.
“Wait here,” Komarov whispered to Maslov. Taking his gun from its holster, Komarov a
dvanced down the corridor on the balls of his feet.
He reached the door, which was standing slightly ajar. Inside the room it seemed dark. There was no sound.
Komarov pushed the door back slowly, and there was the man, standing over the bed in a pale wash of moonlight. A knife gleamed in his hand.
He seemed at a loss.
“Put it down,” Komarov said softly.
The man’s head jerked up in surprise, but his shoulders sagged when he saw the gun. He placed the knife down on the empty bed.
“Now come with me.” Komarov backed into the corridor, turning so the would-be assassin would come out of the room between himself and Maslov.
The man emerged, his features clearer in the kerosene glow. He was a Russian, probably in his early twenties, with fair hair and a flat, slightly Mongoloid face. Komarov pointed him down the corridor toward Maslov. The three of them descended the stairs in silence.
“Take him into the dining room,” Komarov said. He checked the room number on the register, and a smile flickered on his face.
Maslov had sat the man down. Komarov took a chair and sat astride it, his arms crossed on the backrest, facing his captive. Maslov remained standing just behind the man’s right shoulder.
“What’s your name?” Komarov asked.
“Aleksandr Polyansky,” the man said sorrowfully. He looked as if he was about to burst into tears.
“Why did you want to kill Nikolai Davydov?”
Polyansky wrung his hands. “I . . .” His face brightened suddenly. “But he’s not really Davydov. He’s an English spy, an enemy of the revolution!”
“We know,” Komarov said, wiping the incredulous smile off Maslov’s face. “I have known since Moscow, Pavel Tasarovich,” Komarov told the young Ukrainian. “I decided it would be easier for you to behave naturally if you remained in ignorance.” He turned back to Polyansky. “Why did you want to kill this man? And don’t pretend it had anything to do with him being an English spy.”
Polyansky searched the ceiling for inspiration but found none.
“Who hired you?”
The look of defeat returned. “A man in Samarkand,” he mumbled.
“His name?” Komarov persisted.
“He never told me his name. An Indian. He came to me, gave me this man’s description, said that I would find him here in Tashkent. He told me the man was an English spy. But I didn’t do it for the money, you understand . . . It wasn’t . . .”
“What did you do it for?”
Another silence. Maslov moved behind Polyansky and placed a hand on each of his shoulders, as if about to offer a massage.
“You must tell us, citizen,” Komarov said.
The words came out in a sudden rush: “Passports, English passports for my family . . . We were branded as bourgeois . . . I can get no work . . . I . . .”
“Enough. Describe the Indian.”
“Just an Indian.” He shrugged helplessly. “About forty, maybe. Quite small. An Indian.”
So it wasn’t Durga Chatterji. “Did the Indian tell you where the English passports were coming from?”
Polyansky gave him a disbelieving look. “From the English.”
“Telephone for someone to come and collect him,” Komarov told Maslov. The whole business made less and less sense. Komarov tried to think coherently but thought only of how tired he was. He got to his feet and started pacing up and down between the lines of tables.
There was a quarrel between Englishmen—that seemed certain. A quarrel that had something to do with the American and his renegade friends. Was it possible that one group of Englishmen opposed their endeavor—whatever it might be—while another group supported it?
Perhaps. But why would any group of Englishmen give support to men like Brady and Piatakov? Either Komarov was missing some obvious point, or someone else had.
Where was Davydov? Komarov suddenly wondered. The Chekists outside had reported his and Piatakova’s return to the hotel, and the Englishman had not gone out again.
A probable answer came close on the heels of the question. Komarov grunted. It looked as though Davydov and Piatakova had each unwittingly saved the other’s life that night, he by leading his Cheka tail to the women’s meeting, she by taking him into her room. As Komarov’s father used to say, good fortune had a habit of repeating herself.
He heard the car pull up outside and told Maslov to take Polyansky out.
Alone in the empty dining room, Komarov turned his thoughts to Davydov and Piatakova. If he wasn’t the English agent she’d met up with in 1918, then Piatakova had made a third disastrous choice when it came to romantic attachments—two foreign agents and a renegade wouldn’t do much for anyone’s political reputation.
If Davydov was the same man, and he and she had known each other for years, they’d done a wonderful job of concealing the fact. Had they been partners all this time? Had they acted out a growing friendship on the train so that finally sharing a bed would seem quite natural? Was Caitlin Piatakova an English agent, too, or simply so besotted with love or lust that she was willing to put her own life at risk?
He couldn’t believe the former. She’d been living in Russia for years, and unless he’d completely misread the woman, her work at the Zhenotdel was a labor of love. She and the revolution’s leading lady were bosom friends.
And she’d married a Russian, for God’s sake. A committed Bolshevik then, a leftist renegade now.
So perhaps she’d told the truth in 1918. Perhaps Davydov’s reappearance had come as a total surprise.
What would Komarov have done in her shoes? He would have asked what the hell her former lover was doing in Russia and, depending on the answer, decided whether or not to give him up.
If that was what had happened, she must have been satisfied with his explanation. And if Komarov was right about her, that could mean only that Davydov’s presence in Russia was all on account of the men they were chasing, and wasn’t part of any fresh attempt by the British to undermine the Bolshevik government.
Was it possible, Komarov wondered, that he and Davydov were actually on the same side?
Maslov was standing in the doorway, apparently waiting for his presence to be acknowledged. “What about the Englishman?” he asked when Komarov finally looked his way. “Should we arrest him now?”
His Majesty’s Wireless
in Samarkand
Caitlin was woken by the sunlight streaming through the uncovered window. His hand was resting lightly on her hip. She carefully moved it aside and got to her feet, then walked across to the window, the breeze caressing her skin. The distant mountains were wreathed in shadow; on the street below, a boy was sprinkling handfuls of water across the dusty sidewalk.
She turned her gaze to the sleeping McColl. What had she been thinking, inviting him in? And not just him—their whole damn past. And yet, and yet. She couldn’t deny it—not to herself—it had been as sweet as ever. He might not have been God’s gift to every woman, but there was something about him—about them—that made her want to weep with joy.
It had been that way from the start, she thought. A love so sweet and all consuming that it left no room for the rest of who she was.
He stirred and opened an eye. She reached for the blue dress and pulled it over her head. “I’m going to the bathroom,” she mumbled, and fled.
She washed herself from head to foot and examined her face in what was left of the mirror. “What should I say?” she murmured. That she’d enjoyed it, that they should do it again sometime soon. If she was using him, that was only what men had been doing to women since time began. Which of course was no excuse.
She made a face in the mirror and walked back to the room.
He was dressed and smoking one of her cigarettes.
“Let’s not say anything,” she said.
“All
right.”
“So let’s go and find some breakfast.”
Once Caitlin had left for the local Zhenotdel office, McColl ordered more tea and lit another cigarette. Why was he smoking again? What in God’s name should he do?
Making love again had been wonderful, and he told himself to cherish what had happened, not use it to build up hopes of something more. Whatever would be would be and might well depend on how long they stayed in each other’s company. Sooner or later her husband would either be caught or cross the border, and she would go back to Moscow to resume her work and life.
He hoped it would be later. In the meantime, he still needed a clearer picture of what Brady and her husband were actually planning and what support they had from whom. In his last conversation with Cumming in London, they’d agreed that if, as seemed likely, the mission took McColl toward India, he should attempt to contact DCI HQ in Delhi. “If the people you speak to know nothing about Brady and Co.,” Cumming had said, “then you’ve alerted them. If, as seems more likely, they’re up to their necks in the plot, you won’t have told them anything that they don’t already know.”
McColl finished the apple tea and pocketed the raisins in the accompanying saucer, wondering which made the world go ’round—love or bastards in Whitehall.
Outside the sun was already busy transforming the city into an oven. It was just past nine o’clock, and the temperature had to be into the eighties. He walked down Chernyaevskaya Street, keeping to the shade of the karagach trees, and caught a tram heading east at the bridge that linked the old and Russian towns. A familiar poster caught his eye: the Moscow Circus was about to arrive in Tashkent.
He alighted from the tram outside the Kukeldash Madrasah and walked up a wide, stall-lined street that he seemed to remember led into Iski Juva market place. It did. He ordered tea at a chaikhana and cooled off in the welcome shade.
There was one other European face in sight, and it belonged to a man who had been on the same tram that he had. Was he being followed? And if so, why? Why would Peters keep a watch on one of Komarov’s assistants? The man’s presence could have been a coincidence, but he did have a sneaky look about him.
The Dark Clouds Shining Page 25