One Man's Flag

by David Downing

  The doors were numbered on the upper floors, one with a metal plate, the others with chalk scrawls. He could hear nothing inside the rooms, but the men would all be at work, the women most likely down in the courtyard doing chores and watching the children.

  Number 8 was on the second floor, at the rear of the building. There was a metal lock on the door, which looked likely to cause a problem—breaking in would be noisy. But a tentative turn of the new-looking knob proved successful, and he was quietly pushing the door open when someone or something crashed into the other side, throwing McColl back into the corridor.

  Before he could get to his feet, an Indian man had leaped over him and raced away down the stairs.

  McColl gave chase. Down the stairs he thundered, ignoring the sound of splintering wood that accompanied his descent. A head emerged from one doorway and just as quickly withdrew when its owner spotted McColl’s white face. When he reached the ground floor, he saw that the Indian was halfway down the alley, about thirty yards ahead. He was clutching a piece of paper in his right hand.

  McColl reached the street as his quarry turned in to an alley on the other side. The waiting tonga-wallah, mouth gaping, somehow managed a heartfelt wail as his fare ran past. He hadn’t been paid.

  The young man could run, and McColl was still twenty yards adrift when the Indian took the next turn. Rounding the corner, he was greeted by a vista of stalls and shoppers, which filled the street ahead. Only another fifty yards and the man would be lost in the crowd.

  McColl could try to drop the Indian with his Webley, but chances were good he would hit someone else. If he did, he might easily get beaten to death by an angry mob. So he just kept running, without much hope.

  The Indian ran into the throng, but as he was taller than most, his bobbing head remained in view. McColl had just waded into the crowd himself when another man suddenly stepped into his path, knocking him to the ground.

  The assailant was full of apologies, but the glint in his eyes suggested a job well done. He then let out a cry of surprise and darted down a hand to retrieve the Webley from under the wheel of a cart. Gun in hand, finger on the trigger, he turned to McColl with a grin that could best be described as wicked.

  A widening zone of silence fell across the market, until only faraway voices were audible. McColl’s life didn’t pass before his eyes, but his bowels came close to moving, and his fright must have been all too evident.

  The Indian laughed out loud, baring several gold teeth, nimbly reversed the gun, and offered it butt-first to its owner. “This must be yours, sahib,” he said, the golden smile cracking his face from ear to ear.

  McColl took his leave with as much dignity as he could muster and, sweating profusely, walked slowly back to the rooming house, where the tonga-wallah greeted him like a long-lost brother.

  He felt like stepping aboard, closing his eyes, and not opening them again until he was once more on safer ground, but instead he forced himself back up the stairs to Gangapadhyay’s room.

  He was hoping that the informer’s killer had not had time to finish his search, but there was nothing there to suggest as much. The mattress had been pulled off the bed; the only drawer lay facedown on the bare floor. A single change of clothes had been tipped out of a relatively new suitcase, the toilet bag emptied of toothbrush and razor. An English edition of Trollope’s Barchester Towers was wedged between the rusty springs of the bedstead, reminding McColl that these people—both the Jugantar rebels and informers like Gangapadhyay—were educated men. Almost all of them members of India’s nascent middle class.

  He told himself that most of their fellow countrymen were too busy trying to feed themselves to care who their rulers were. A few educated men, no matter how determined, were not going to compromise the British war effort.

  Whatever was written on the piece of paper the killer had taken was unlikely to be that important. Which was fortunate, because McColl didn’t suppose he would ever find out.

  He descended the stairs and walked back to the tonga. He felt more than slightly weak in the knees and decided that hunger had to be part of the reason. “The Bristol Grill,” he told the driver.

  They drove back toward the river and eventually turned south toward the stock exchange. The heat was still rising, and the cool caress of the restaurant’s electric fans was one reason McColl liked the grill. The food was another. As he looked round at the other diners—almost all of them businessmen—McColl reflected on one of the Raj’s central paradoxes, that its ultimate rulers—the civil servants and soldiers—mostly eschewed such modernity, preferring the abysmal cuisine at their clubs, where the punkah wallahs who worked the mechanical fans fought a far less successful battle against the torpid heat.

  He took his time over lunch, enjoying two iced whiskeys before working his way through the usual mulligatawny soup, chicken curry, and caramel custard. Through the window he could see the air on New China Bazaar shimmering in the heat, shifting his view in and out of focus.

  None of his colleagues would be at their desks until the temperature started to fall, so he walked back down Old Court House Street to the Great Eastern, making the most of what shade was on offer. After stopping at the desk to pick up a letter from Jed, he was pulled up short by a copy of The Statesman that someone had left on a lobby chair. last of the august saboteurs executed was the headline halfway down.

  There wasn’t much more. Just Colm’s name and a rehashing of the plot. It was prominently placed, though—someone in authority here in Calcutta had taken the opportunity to remind the Jugantar rebels of the fate that awaited them.

  McColl remembered the first time he had met Colm, at the family home in Brooklyn—the adolescent anger that had spilled from his face. And he could still see the young man’s expression when his friend Seán Tiernan was killed beside him—an almost joyful desperation.

  Caitlin would be devastated.

  And, if it was possible, even angrier with him.

  Upstairs in his room, McColl read the letter from his own younger brother. Jed’s friend Mac—whom McColl knew well from his car-selling days—had been wounded in February, but “in the best way,” slightly enough to cast no shadow over his future well-being, seriously enough to warrant a week’s hospitalization and a fortnight’s convalescence in the loving care of his fiancée, Ethel. And that was about it when it came to news—Jed had clearly written with the censors in mind. He couldn’t tell McColl where they were, only that it was very noisy and that when the wind was blowing in the right direction, they could sometimes smell the sea. There hadn’t been many casualties of late—“the Boche have realized that successful attacks need a lot of preparation.” The British generals, by contrast, were proving themselves intelligent, courageous, and incredibly solicitous of their men’s welfare. “Just like our old neighbor Jimmy Dalglish in Glasgow,” Jed added. He was sure his brother would remember Jimmy.

  He did indeed. Jimmy Dalglish had been a thug and a rumored killer, as thick as he was cowardly, and happily unaware that other lives might be as real as his own.

  McColl laughed, but only briefly. This wasn’t the first report he’d had from France that suggested failures of leadership reminiscent of those he’d experienced himself in South Africa. The sort of men who had contrived to leave him and several hundred others at the mercy of better-placed Boer sharpshooters on Spion Kop were still running the British army.

  He put down the letter and closed his eyes, hoping to God that Jed would come through it all. McColl had been absent for much of his brother’s childhood, and over the past few years he had tried to make up for that and to look out for the boy. But he was powerless now.

  As powerless as Caitlin had been.

  He wanted to send her his condolences, to tell her how sorry he was, but of course that was out of the question. She would probably think he was twisting the knife.

  Next morning a cable a
rrived from Cumming in London. McColl read it once in the cool telegraph office, then again in the shade of the palms outside. This, he thought, might change everything.

  He found Alex Cunningham and Douglas Tindall sitting in a shaded section of the police headquarters’ inner courtyard, drinking coffee fresh off the boat from Kenya and trying hard to “liaise.” Tindall was the local Department of Criminal Intelligence chief, a tall, fair-haired Cumbrian. His placid temperament masked a quick mind, and McColl liked him a lot better than he liked Cunningham, who had somehow managed to elect himself local representative of both Kell’s Section Five and the Indian Political Intelligence Office.

  Cunningham, for his part, openly resented McColl’s trespassing on what he considered his own organization’s patch. Section Five’s remit might be domestic security, but as far as Kell and his minions were concerned, “domestic” encompassed the whole British Empire.

  McColl wasted no time in sharing his news. “Our people in America have intelligence of a German arms shipment.”

  “They’ve said so before,” Cunningham replied dismissively. “The shipment always seems to vanish.”

  McColl extracted Cumming’s cable from the jacket on the back of his chair. “According to this, in the months before Christmas the Kaiser’s people on the West Coast amassed 8,080 Springfield rifles, 2,400 Springfield carbines, 410 Hotchkiss repeaters, 500 Colt revolvers, and 250 Mauser pistols, along with decent supplies of all the relevant ammunition, and they put the whole lot on a boat. That’s definite. And though they don’t know where it is at this moment, our people are in no doubt at all that it’s headed this way. Remember that Ghadar member we arrested last month in Lahore who let slip that a boatload of guns was expected? Well, it seems he was telling the truth. It obviously didn’t arrive in time for him and his friends, but it looks like it’ll get here eventually. And once it does reach this side of the Pacific, we all know who the Germans will give it to. Ghadar are out for the count, so it has to be Jugantar. Sometime soon, on some Bengali beach, Mukherjee and his friends will be unloading all the guns they need.”

  “That does sound a bit worrying,” Cunningham conceded reluctantly.

  “It’s more than bloody worrying,” Tindall said coldly. “With eight thousand Springfields, Jugantar could turn this province upside bloody down. Instead of sending more troops to France, we’d have to start bringing them back!”

  “Okay, it might be serious,” Cunningham said, putting up a hand. “Assuming for a moment that this boat is on its way, how are we going to intercept it? Does the navy have enough ships to patrol the whole coastline?”

  “No, they don’t,” McColl answered. “So we’ll have to help them narrow the search. The gunrunners can’t just turn up on any old beach and hand their cargo over to the local peasants—someone from Jugantar will have to meet them. Someone who knows the time and place. It’s him we have to find.”

  Cunningham’s grunt was pessimistic, but Tindall had something to offer. “As it happens, I’ve got somewhere for us to start. Or rather someone—a young man named Abhijit Bhattacharyya, who arrived on the boat from Rangoon yesterday evening. He boarded at Batavia, which was enough to make the duty officer consult the suspect-persons list. And Bhattacharyya’s name was on it. He used to be a member of the same so-called youth club that Jatin Mukherjee set up and which two of the Garden Reach robbers belonged to.”

  “Who haven’t been seen since the court granted bail,” Cunningham added disgustedly.

  Tindall ignored him. “Bhattacharyya works for his father, who’s one of Calcutta’s wealthiest merchants, and he seems to travel a lot—he recently visited Bangkok as well. All of which may be perfectly innocent and the nationalist politics just a youthful phase, but if Bhattacharyya is a member of Jugantar, he has the perfect cover for liaising with the Germans.”

  Cunningham pulled himself up in his seat. “Let me have a go at him.”

  Tindall had other ideas. “I think we’ll keep you in reserve. Bhattacharyya is an Urdu speaker, and McColl’s is much better than yours.”

  “I bet the little bastard speaks English as well as I do,” Cunningham protested, but Tindall was having none of it.

  Their relative fluency was neither here nor there, McColl realized. Tindall might not be certain of him, but he sure as hell didn’t like Cunningham. McColl asked where Bhattacharyya was being held.

  “He’s in a holding room down at the docks. It seemed more discreet than bringing him here, but the news is probably all over Black Town by now.”

  “I’ll get down there,” McColl said, rising to his feet. “What’s the duty officer’s name?”

  “Byrne.”

  This could change the outcome of the war, McColl thought as he hailed a tonga a few minutes later. This was why he’d joined the Service.

  The port administration’s offices were on Napier Road, just north of the Hastings Bridge over Tolly’s Nala canal. Byrne, a lean Englishman with sideburns far bushier than the hair on his head, showed McColl the entry against Bhattacharyya in the current blacklist and then escorted him to the holding room, where the Indian detainee looked up from his book with the air of someone generously accepting an unwarranted interruption. The book, McColl noticed, was John Reed’s Insurgent Mexico.

  Abhijit Bhattacharyya was tall for a Bengali, with the lighter skin of the typical Brahmin. Slightly overlong hair was brushed back from a wide forehead, above large eyes and a mocking smile full of very white teeth. According to the record, he was twenty-six years old.

  McColl took the seat of authority behind the tea-stained table. “Would you like to speak in Urdu or English?” he asked in the former.

  “English will be fine,” Bhattacharyya decided.

  “Your full name?” McColl asked.

  The Indian smiled. “Abhijit Anup Bhattacharyya,” he articulated, syllable by syllable.

  “Address in Calcutta?”

  “Three Lansdowne Road.”

  It was an impressive address for an Indian. “Occupation?”

  “I work for my father, Gautam Bhattacharyya. You’ve probably heard of him.”

  “I have. What exactly do you do for him?”

  A shrug. “This and that. Anything that requires travel, though. My father is getting old.”

  “What was your business in the Dutch East Indies?”

  “What business is that of yours?”

  “Your past affiliations make it my business. I believe you once belonged to a youth club named after Swami Vivekananda?”

  The young man nodded, as if granting McColl an unexpected point. “When I was a boy, yes.”

  “You know that the club was set up by Jatin Mukherjee?”

  The Indian pushed out his chest and pulled back his arms, as if he were stiff from sitting too long. “The name rings a bell, as you English say, but nothing more than that.”

  Now he was tapping his foot, McColl noticed. “Mukherjee is the leader of the Jugantar terrorist group.”

  Bhattacharyya smiled. “Is he really? I have heard of these people, of course. But I never knew their leader’s name. That is interesting.”

  “Your club used to meet in a building on Cornwallis Street,” McColl persisted, throwing in the last of his information. “Young men dedicated to building a new India.”

  “Yes.”

  “An India without need of the British.”

  “Of course. What nation can grow when another one rides on its back?”

  It was a good answer, McColl thought. Caitlin, he thought with a pang, would certainly have approved. “You say you have never heard of Jatin Mukherjee—have you heard of Amarnath Dutta and Kaushik Dasgupta?”

  “I don’t believe so, but these are common names.”

  “These two men were arrested on suspicion of involvement in the Garden Reach dacoity.”

  Bhattacharyya g
rimaced. “Why do you not say robbery? Must you steal our language, too?”

  The foot was tapping again, but try as he did, McColl couldn’t convince himself that the Indian was even the slightest bit worried. “You have never met these two men?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “So you would be surprised to discover that they both attended the same youth club on Cornwallis Street?”

  “When?”

  “Between 1909 and 1911.”

  “I had left by then. I started work for my father in 1908.”

  “So you’ve never met these men?” he asked again.

  “If I have, they must have used false names,” Bhattacharyya said, his face a study in innocence.

  “Why would they do that?”

  Another shrug. “They are criminals, you tell me. Who can say what a criminal will do?”

  McColl tried not to show his annoyance. “They consider themselves patriots, just as you do. The dacoity was doubtless carried out to raise money for buying weapons.”

  “How should I know?”

  “Don’t you think such methods are justifiable?”

  Bhattacharyya gave him a look. “If I say yes to that, you could put me in prison.”

  “So why not say no?”

  “All right, no. I understand the temptation, but no.”

  “You would not condone violence in any circumstances?”

  Bhattacharyya shook his head.

  “No, or you refuse to say? I’m simply interested. Consider this a philosophical debate.”

  Bhattacharyya laughed. “Philosophical debate! You’re just trying to incriminate me.”

  “There’s no one else here.”

  “And your word and mine would be treated alike in a British court? You are joking, I think.”

  There was more than a little truth in that, McColl knew. Which was not a comfortable thought.

  “But I will answer your question,” Bhattacharyya said unexpectedly. “I think that violence is sometimes necessary when it comes to expelling an invader. In Belgium today, for example—how else will the Belgians eject the Germans? You British say you took up arms because the Germans invaded Belgium. So how can you object—philosophically, of course—when Indians take up arms to eject you? The fact that the invasion took place a century and a half ago makes no difference—we are still invaded. No, the only real issue—from a philosophical point of view—is whom the violence should be directed against. The occupying forces, certainly; their Indian helpers, sometimes; innocent civilians, never. Although I have to add that political reality is, unfortunately, seldom so clear-cut.”