“I don’t know. They might send them back to Russia . . .”
“Or kill them quietly here?”
McColl shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Either way it’s a death sentence. I have to give him a chance, Jack. You do understand that?”
“Yes, but how?”
“I don’t know.” Another thought occurred to her. “And what about you? What will your people do to you?”
“Nothing good. But they have to catch us first.”
She let the “us” go by. “We could say that a copy of the photograph has been sent to someone—your detective perhaps—with instructions to send it on to a newspaper if anything happens to you.”
“If they call it off, then the photograph won’t mean a thing,” he told her. “We need to work out what our options are.”
Which might have been right, but was easier said than done. “Once we’ve seen this through,” she promised. And then she could go home. Wherever that was.
Piatakov was woken, as usual, by the sound of sweeping; first the soft brush inside the house, then the more rasping tone of the twig broom being used on the paths outside. On the other side of the nearby wall, sounding like faraway raucous birds swapping opinions, muezzins were calling the Muslim districts to prayer.
He climbed off the hard bed and washed himself as thoroughly as he could with the water left in the earthenware pitcher. Throwing a kurta over his head, he walked through into the kitchen, where one of the servants was already making him a glass of chai. He stirred in two chunks of sugar and carried it out to his chair in the garden.
Thick morning mist shrouded the river away to his right; the sun glowing through it was a fuzzy orange ball. The crows had begun their incessant crowing; the parakeets, as ever, seemed unsure which tree best suited their mood. On the lawn in front of their absent host’s house, another servant was flailing the grass with a bamboo switch to take away the dew. According to Brady, if this wasn’t done, the grass would scorch in the noonday sun.
Piatakov sipped at the tea and let his mind wander. Since their arrival in Delhi, he had spent the early morning hours like this, sitting and watching the sunrise, letting the mesh of light, sounds, and smells wash over him. It did him good, made him feel that somehow he was back in touch with something real. It might be—probably was—the equivalent of the condemned man’s last meal, but that didn’t seem to matter: it was enough to know he was still connected, however tenuously, to that sense of life’s possibilities that had made him a revolutionary.
He had sadnesses but, in the end, no regrets.
The mist was clearing, sharpening the sun. He heard light footsteps behind him and looked around expecting to see one of the servants.
It was a youth he’d never seen before, holding what looked like a letter. Piatakov reached out to take it, expecting the usual two-way mime, but the boy was instantly on his way, breaking into a run as he disappeared behind the house.
Turning to the letter, Piatakov saw his name in Cyrillic script in her unmistakable hand. For a moment he thought he was dreaming and just sat there staring at the envelope, his mouth hanging foolishly open.
He tore it open and pulled out the folded sheet.
“Sergei,” she began. No “dearest,” he thought in passing, just “Sergei, I must talk to you. Meet me in the European restaurant room on Platform 1 of the central railway station at one o’clock today. Come alone. For both our sakes. Caitlin.”
No kisses either.
He read the note again, still struggling to take it in. She was here, in India, in Delhi. Why? How? As the different emotions and thoughts jostled for precedence, he felt a sudden constriction in his chest from holding his breath for too long. He heard his own laughter and the hint of hysteria that bubbled within it.
“What’s going on?” Brady asked from behind him. “I heard someone running.”
Piatakov passed him the letter but didn’t say anything. Brady looked through it, his expression moving swiftly through curiosity, amusement, concern, and anger. “Your wife?” he asked incredulously.
“Yes.”
“But how did—”
“I don’t know any more than you do,” Piatakov said. Somehow Brady’s sense of shock was exorcising his own.
“It must be Komarov,” Brady decided.
“He’s dead,” Piatakov said flatly. “You shot him, remember?”
“I know. But he’s reaching out from the grave. Or it’s Peters. She must be here on your party’s behalf.”
“Maybe she’s here for herself,” Piatakov said quietly. Still trying to save him. The thought brought him joy and sadness in what seemed equal measure.
“Whatever. You can’t meet her.”
Piatakov looked up at the American, the shock of dark hair hanging over the angry eyes, a glimpse of the long-vanished child in the pouting mouth. “I have to,” he said. He hadn’t said good-bye to her in Moscow, and now he could.
“No,” Brady argued. “You could risk everything.” His hand reached almost absent-mindedly toward the place where he normally carried his gun, but he was still wearing his nightshirt.
Piatakov noticed but didn’t care. “I won’t betray you or back out, if that’s what you’re thinking. And since it won’t affect our business here, it has nothing to do with you.”
“It must affect our business here. How has she found you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the local party helped her look.”
Brady shook his head.
“Who else?” Piatakov asked. “The British won’t have told her.”
“It stinks.” Brady looked at the letter again. “Are you sure it’s her handwriting?”
“Of course I am. Look, what can happen in a station restaurant room? My guess is—they think they know what we’re planning to do, and she’s been sent to try and change our minds. She won’t. Okay?”
Piatakov got up out of the chair and looked out across the flats toward the river. “But I want to see her. And I’m going to,” he insisted, before walking off toward the house, leaving Brady still staring at the letter.
Colonel Fitzwilliam refolded the letter, replaced it in the envelope, and handed it back to Cunningham. “What do you think he wants?”
“Probably money,” Cunningham guessed. “To travel with,” he added.
“And what will he do if he doesn’t get it?” the colonel asked, helping himself to a chocolate biscuit.
“He doesn’t say,” Cunningham said pointedly, wondering if he and Morley would be offered biscuits. Or cups of coffee, come to that.
“But what’s your best guess?” the colonel asked tetchily. “I suppose you two want coffee,” he added ungraciously.
“Yes, thank you,” Cunningham said. As the colonel signaled to his hovering servant, Cunningham reached for the biscuit tin, and offered it to a surprised Morley before helping himself. “It seems to me,” he went on, “that McColl has very few options. The one potentially damaging thing he could do is give the story to foreign newspapers. They’d certainly be interested after the event, but the deed would be done, and we’d just have to manage the aftermath. It won’t be hard to discredit McColl as a source. He was recently in prison; there’s his history with the American woman who now works for Lenin. Etcetera, etcetera. Some Indians will hear the story, and some will believe it, but they’ll be the ones who think the worst of us anyway.”
“And at least we know the bastard’s still in Delhi,” Morley said hopefully.
“Which makes it all the more disgraceful that he hasn’t been found yet,” the colonel retorted.
“We’re sure he’s not staying in any half-decent hotel,” Cunningham said unapologetically. “We’ve checked out the people we know he had contact with during the war. And we’re still waiting for London to check through any Indians he might have known at Oxford or met in h
is time selling luxury cars. There’s nothing else we can do, other than the obvious.”
“Which is?” Morley asked.
“Well, we do know where he’ll be”—Cunningham looked at his watch—“in two hours and forty minutes’ time.”
“We know where he says he’s going to be,” the colonel corrected him.
“What have we got to lose?” Cunningham asked.
McColl was picked up opposite the Fatehpuri Mosque at a quarter past eleven.
“It is all arranged,” Mirza announced as the boy driver set the tonga in motion. The detective was wearing the usual white shirt and dhoti, this time topped off with a fez-shaped red cap. “Here is the camera,” he said, taking a worn leather case from the seat beside him. McColl undid the strap and took out the Leica that Mirza had offered to loan him. An Arab had stolen it from one of the Turkish army’s German advisers during the war, and Mirza had bought the camera a year or so later for a fraction of its real worth. He claimed—and McColl had no reason to doubt him—that it would take the picture required.
“And the place?” McColl asked.
“All fixed,” Mirza said with a smile. “You asked for”—he began ticking off fingers—“one, somewhere out in the open, which is, two, close enough for a clear shot of the faces and, three, not so close that we risk apprehension by the men concerned. And we have such a place—it is all as you wished.”
“Wonderful,” McColl said.
“I have been thinking about this business,” Mirza went on. “These people. One from your political police and the other a Russian revolutionary—there must be a simple reason why you want them to share a photograph, but I cannot deduce what it is.” He shook his head. “But I shall,” he added. “I shall.”
“Mr. Mirza,” McColl said, “you do understand that helping in this matter could get you into trouble with the authorities. I don’t—”
“Yes, yes, I understand. You told me this yesterday. Do not concern yourself. Holmes once said that it is worth committing a felony to save a soul, and I am satisfied that we are on the side of justice in this matter. The opinion of the authorities is of no interest.”
McColl couldn’t help smiling. “Okay,” he said.
They were approaching the Queen’s Road entrance to the station. Mirza tapped the boy driver on the shoulder, and the tonga was brought to a halt. The two men alighted, and Mirza led McColl through an unmarked gate and down a passage between temporary huts. A narrow alley in a row of offices brought them out into an open-air canteen, where Mirza was greeted by several of the patrons. “Many men from my regiment got work on the railways,” he told McColl in explanation.
They walked along two sides of a large shed and onto a loading platform packed with wooden crates. A line of empty freight cars, their doors flung open in expectation, blocked their view of the station.
They reached the end of the train as a locomotive approached from the east, belching grey smoke into the sky above the distant Red Fort. A minute or so later the line of packed carriages pulled into a platform three or four tracks away, wheels bouncing on the uneven rails. “Over there,” Mirza shouted in McColl’s ear, pointing out the signal cabin that straddled the tracks some fifty yards ahead and setting off across the shining rails like a man advancing on Turkish guns.
McColl hurried after him, remembering days as a boy risking the wrath of railway officials. This time there were no angry shouts, and soon they were climbing the stairway up to the box. The two men working among the gleaming levers greeted the detective like a long-lost uncle; their boss was in a small office at the other end. “My friend, Shah Ali Khan,” Mirza said, introducing the uniformed official. “And this is our hide, as you call it,” he added, swinging open a shuttered window. “There,” he said, gesturing outward.
The roof of the office on the northernmost platform was mostly flat, but the small raised section containing a door promised access from below. A man on the roof would be only ten yards away, and at roughly the same level. A train passing between them would be beneath the line of sight. Only smoke could spoil the picture, and for that their luck would need to be truly out.
“Yes?” Mirza asked.
“It’s perfect,” McColl said.
Piatakov arrived at the station almost half an hour early and sat for several minutes in the back of Sayid Hassan’s tonga, trying to let the whirl of emotions settle. It wasn’t easy. Assuming she knew what they intended to do—and her presence here surely meant that she did—he knew only too well what her objections would be. They’d had variations of the same argument over and over again during the winter and spring, and they all came down to a single judgment—whether or not their party was beyond redemption. She said it wasn’t, and he said it was, and that was all there was to it. So why would she travel thousands of miles to tell him something he’d already heard a dozen times?
If she’d come out of love . . . well, that would warm his heart, but it wouldn’t change his mind, and she had to know that. She who’d been fond of quoting Kollontai’s dictum that passion was transient, the political struggle unending.
It was a quarter to one by the huge station clock. He climbed down, told the servant-driver to wait, and walked in through the entrance arch. The booking hall was a seething mass, the adjoining platform just as crowded and noisy. After the garden’s serenity, the cacophonous racket felt like a physical battering.
At least the platforms were prominently numbered—a request for directions in Russian or schoolboy French would probably have gone unanswered. The restaurant room for Europeans was also easy to find and empty save for one middle-aged pair, presumably English, who gave him synchronous nods, as if they shared a puppeteer. He returned the gesture and chose a table as far from them as possible.
The room was surprisingly cool and quiet considering how few feet separated it from the heat and bedlam outside. He asked the hovering waiter for chai, knowing the word meant the same in Delhi as it did in Moscow.
The steaming cup arrived as the clock on the wall reached the hour. He handed the waiter the five-rupee note that Brady had provided with the air of a parent handing out pocket money, accepted the frown and small mountain of coins in exchange, and stirred in some sugar from the small brass bowl. The minute hand clicked again.
An Indian boy darted in through the doorway and handed him a note. The waiter moved to shoo the youth out again, but Piatakov held up an arm to stop him while he took in the message. “Come with this boy and wait for me,” it read. The writing was hers.
He followed the boy out onto the platform and up across a footbridge that straddled several tracks. After taking the last steps down and walking the length of the station, they finally arrived at what looked like a storehouse. The room within boasted a stack of red flags, shelves of paraffin lamps, doors to apparently empty offices, and a stairway to the second floor. Piatakov followed the boy up two flights of stairs, emerging onto a roof just as a freight train steamed majestically past. There was no one else there. The boy said something incomprehensible and promptly disappeared.
Cunningham arrived at the north entrance soon after twelve-thirty and spent the next half hour as instructed, walking from one end of Platform 6 to the other.
It was more like an obstacle course than a path. Indians provided the obstacles, they and all the mercantile and domestic activities they’d managed to cram onto a platform thirty feet wide. It seemed to Cunningham that an Indian was incapable of traveling anywhere without taking his entire family, all its belongings, and enough hardware to cook six-course meals. Many had also brought livestock—goats, chickens, pye-dogs—and at least two sacred cows were trundling up and down Platform 6 in search of something to chew.
There were also coconut sellers, soda-water sellers, toy sellers, and sticky-sweet sellers. Toys and sweets, Cunningham thought—that was what Indians loved. Toys and sweets in the brightest imaginable colors
. Children, every last one of them. The real children made faces and giggled each time he went past; the adults only wanted to.
One Indian was tugging at his sleeve. As he turned, a note was pressed into his hand by a young adolescent. Come with this boy. Alone. McColl.
“Lead on,” Cunningham invited his guide. They crossed to the farthest platform, entered one of the railway offices, and climbed two flights of stairs to the roof. A white man was waiting for him, but it wasn’t McColl. In fact the features were distinctly Slavic.
“Who are you?” Cunningham asked.
The man was looking over his shoulder. Cunningham caught the glint of reflected glass from the signal box across the tracks, the shutters closing around it like a snuffer on a candle. Someone had taken a picture of him and the Russian, which could only be bad news.
As Cunningham hurtled back down the stairs hoping to catch whoever it was, he realized his young guide had disappeared.
After reaching and crossing the platform, Cunningham jumped down between the nearest rails, and was almost run over by an idling shunter. By the time he reached the foot of the signal box steps and took a few seconds to look around, there was nothing to see. No one running. No McColl. Even the Russian had vanished.
He went up anyway, but the Indians on duty responded to his shouts with the usual infuriating smiles. The little office at the end was empty; the head signalman, he was told, had gone to lunch.
“Christ, what a mess,” he murmured as he took in the view from the cameraman’s window. Fitzwilliam was going to love this one.
Caitlin spent the morning alone in their room at Sinha’s house, and her mood had not been improved by the reading matter. McColl had come across the Indian communist newspaper on his way back from the station the day before and thought it might contain the recent Russian news she craved. Reading through it, she told herself to be more careful in what she wished for. There was indeed a feast of news—the latest trade deals and production targets, more peasant rebellions ended, a united party still set on delivering its brave new world. The NEP was undoubtedly working, the famines apparently loosing their grip. It was all good, all true, as far it went. And yes, the revolution had been about increasing production, giving people a better material life. But that wasn’t the end of the story. It had also been about building a real democracy, one unfettered by money and privilege. And, in those joyful early days, it had been about creating a new man and woman.
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