Whatever the influences, his sympathies — in retrospect never with tsarist autocracy — had evolved into being with the Russian working classes. This was hardly something he could admit to Cumming. In this context, had things been different, he would have had no sense of apprehension at the prospect of returning to Russia. Under normal circumstances, he couldn’t see that he had anything to fear from the Bolsheviks.
After all, Jacobs who had seemed to know about these things, had told him that they were all honourable men.
They had spent two nights and two days up to their chests in that vile water, plagued by the incessant rain, by rats, and the overpowering stench of the putrefying German next to them. After the first couple of hours, once the bombardment that had killed Sykes had died down, they had tried to get back to their lines. But the Hun had been waiting for them and, as soon as they had crawled out of the shell-hole, they had had to dive back in under a hail of mortars and sniper fire. Jacobs had caught one in the leg, shattering the bone.
Paul suspected that the corporal had lost a lot of blood, although since his leg was under water there wasn’t much he was able to do to help him. Remembering what Sykes had said about Jacobs’ politics, Paul encouraged Jacobs to talk, to keep the man awake and his mind off his wound.
‘So, who are these workers’ and soldiers’ deputies, then?’ he asked, and Jacobs told him about the Soviets and how they represented the working man and were taking the means of production into their own hands.
‘Those that create the wealth should control it,’ Jacobs said, ‘not men who inherit it through an accident of birth or through manipulation of capital.’
Paul had heard all this before, of course, in the comfort of his mother’s apartments. But in that filthy shell-hole there seemed more substance to the argument.
Jacobs told him about the Bolsheviks, how they were the same as the other left-wing parties and differed only in matters of procedure. And in the fact that they were more alert to the dangers posed by reaction.
‘They only took control of Russia because no one else would,’ Jacobs maintained. ‘It’s like nature abhorring a vacuum.’
By the second night Jacobs was slipping into periods of incoherence. At least Paul thought he was. The man had begun to talk about Karl Marx and Kapital so it was difficult to say. They had eaten nothing and had only been able to quench their thirst with rainwater. Sykes was starting to smell as bad as the German and the patrol Paul had expected to rescue them hadn’t put its head above the parapet. He assumed that he and Jacobs had been given up as dead. They couldn’t call out to their lines — even though they were no more than eighty yards away — in fear that the Germans would get a fix on their voices and start lobbing mortars at them again.
Paul waited until twelve o’clock on the second night, catching Jacobs in a coherent interlude, half-pulling and half-bullying him out of the crater. They made it to the wire before the Hun spotted them.
Jacobs got hung up and Paul couldn’t free him. He was still trying when he realised the man was dead. Then a mortar exploded nearby and it felt as though a red-hot poker had been jabbed into his ear. Luckily, after that he didn’t feel anything at all.
He regained consciousness in a casualty clearing station. They had pulled him off the wire, he was told, and he was lucky. He’d caught a ‘blighty’ and wouldn’t be going back. His war was over.
Well, they had almost got it right. He wasn’t going back. The part about his war being over, though, they hadn’t got right at all. He was going to Russia.
9
‘We’ll allow you sufficient funds to cover all requirements in your absence,’ Cumming droned on, seeming in no hurry. ‘You’ll not find the Department ungenerous.’
Paul sneaked a look at his watch. It had already gone three o’clock — only two hours until the train — and he wondered how much more there was.
His mind wandered. Cumming’s offer was a lifeline. Although he couldn’t help thinking of the proverb, ‘never look a gift horse in the mouth’, and stop Valentine drifting insidiously through his head, dragging a string of contradictory proverbs behind him: ‘once bitten, twice shy… beware of Greeks bearing gifts’…
Particularly gift horses?
Yet the twist was, Cumming was offering him money.
‘Browning will take you to Miss Henslowe for the formalities,’ Cumming finally finished, reaching across the desk and offering Paul his hand. ‘Keep your wits about you. If Kell’s right and they’ve managed to get an agent aboard the steamer you’ll do well to trust no one. Get out of that uniform and into civvies. Hart will fill you in on the details. Remember, we’re relying on you. You could hold the fate of Russia and the outcome of the war in your hands.’
Paul said nothing. He didn’t want the fate of Russia in his hands. Never mind the outcome of the war. It was all very well Cumming telling him to trust no one and that Hart would fill him in on the details, when he didn’t even know Hart. But before he was able to give voice to these reservations, Browning was bundling him out of the door and down the corridor again.
‘Look, sir,’ he said over his shoulder after they had gone a few yards, ‘I don’t want to sound ungrateful, or as if I was windy about all this, but are you sure I’m the man for the job?’
Browning regarded him with eyes that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a fisherman’s keepnet.
‘Personally? No, I’m not.’
‘Oh,’ said Paul. ‘Why does Captain Cumming think I am, then, with as much riding on it as—’
‘C,’ Browning said.
‘Pardon?’
‘You call him C if you have to call him anything at all. His name is confidential.’
‘Well then, with as much as C said is riding on it. Wouldn’t you be better off with someone experienced in this sort of game? Hart, or this fellow Steveni who stayed behind, for instance?’
‘My argument entirely,’ Browning agreed with irritating equanimity. ‘Here we are.’
Browning knocked at the door and walked straight in. A startlingly attractive girl with auburn hair and lively eyes was sitting behind a desk. Browning suddenly turned affable.
‘We’re all set, Dorothy. Briefed and ready for the fray.’
‘Not until the paperwork is complete, Colonel,’ she replied smiling, not at Browning but at Paul.
She flicked through some papers on the desk and one by one turned them around so that Paul could see each. ‘Sign here, here and here,’ she said, an elegant finger indicating each line.
The first sheet was a receipt for the rail warrant already in his pocket. He signed for it. Then signed the rest without reading them.
‘Thank you, Captain,’ Miss Henslowe said, gathering the sheets together. She turned to Browning. ‘If you would, Colonel?’
Browning knelt at a large safe standing in the corner of the room. Taking a key from his pocket he unlocked it. Miss Henslowe left her desk and opened a door to the adjoining room. ‘Elsie, if you’re ready…’
She returned to the desk and placed a steamer ticket in front of Paul. ‘Your travel documents. There is also an address in Petrograd of a safe house where you may stay. But for no more than two nights.’