His mother hadn’t wanted him to go—which was hardly surprising given that she’d already lost a husband and son to the Baltic’s icy waters—but she hadn’t tried to stop him. The reason he’d given her—that someone who aspired to teach literature and history had to know more of the world than the town he was born in—was one she had understood.
In the event he hadn’t seen much of the world in a geographical sense, but he had seen one world give birth to another. And not just seen: like many of the fleet’s junior officers, he had sided with the men and helped make it happen.
He had still been walking on air when he’d finally found the time to visit home, only to discover that he’d left it too late. A sudden illness had taken his mother, and Olesya’s parents had whisked their daughter out of Russia, beyond the reach of godless Bolsheviks like himself. If she’d ever written expressing regret, he’d not received the letter.
After donating the family house to the local soviet, he had headed back to Petrograd. It was only a few weeks later, at the sailor-leader Dybenko’s wedding to Alexandra Kollontai, that he’d first laid eyes on Caitlin, and only a few months after that that he’d left Moscow on a similar train to this one, heading south and east to fight for Trotsky’s newly formed Red Army on the banks of the Volga.
Now here he was again, watching the last moonlit roofs of the city recede, this time with Lenin and Trotsky’s Cheka on his trail, and the city soviet’s money weighing down his breeches.
There was sadness and bitterness, a sense of ill fate lodged in his heart. And yet, still, for the first time in months, he also felt at one with himself. He had climbed off the fence at last. The die had been cast.
For better or worse, he was a revolutionary.
And revolutionaries made revolutions.
Real Police Work
It had been light for about an hour, but most of the depot still lay in shadow. This was the best part of the day, Komarov thought, as he followed the official down the tramlines: a few hours of merciful freshness between a sweat-inducing night and a broiling day.
“This is where the Indian died,” the official said, stopping in front of him.
The body had long since been taken away, but the blood it had shed remained visible. A few coins glinted in the running gap beside the rails, presumably dropped when the man went down.
There was nothing else to see. A strange place for an Indian to die, Komarov thought, as a tram clanked out through the distant gates. He was annoyed by how long it had taken the militia to report the robbery, but supposed he should be grateful they had done so at all—at least someone at the local HQ had realized that an Indian dying violently in the middle of an International congress was likely to have political ramifications. “The foreign comrades are here to be impressed, not perish in anarchist robberies,” was the way Dzerzhinsky had put it.
Had there been only one Indian? All the robbers had been masked, but some depot staffers had noticed that two at least had unusually dark-skinned hands. Against this, two other men had been heard speaking Russian, including the one who seemed to be in charge. The latter’s accent had sounded strange to all the people questioned, but not in “an Asian sort of way.”
India, of course, was a British possession. Could the agent they were hunting have anything to do with this? Komarov wondered. It seemed unlikely—the man had only just arrived in Moscow.
If the witnesses were to be believed—and there seemed no reason they shouldn’t be—the man with the funny accent had boasted that “any true Bolshevik” would approve their plans for the stolen money. Which hardly suggested British involvement. It was much more likely that the men concerned were renegades of one sort or another—perhaps a bunch of anarchists as Dzerzhinsky had suggested, perhaps a splinter group of Socialist Revolutionaries. There was no shortage of men with a grievance.
There was no foreign power behind this. And no organization with any prospect of widespread support. This was just another bunch of dissidents who’d grown bored with the problems of putting ideals into practice, men who thought compromise equaled betrayal. They’d be planning some sort of desperate action, something to show the world just how right they were.
Komarov’s new assistant emerged from the building where the witnesses were still being questioned. His name was Pavel Maslov, and he’d been seconded from the Vecheka on account of the possible foreign ramifications of the investigation. A young fair-haired Ukrainian with a childlike face, he seemed efficient enough, but hadn’t yet shown signs of anything more.
“We’re finished,” he reported.
“Nothing to help with identifications?”
“No.”
And he wasn’t verbose, Komarov thought, adding to the mental appraisal. “Then we’ll visit the morgue,” he said.
The expression on Maslov’s face asked why, but he didn’t voice the question.
It was a short ride in the Russo-Balt. The pavements were thronged with people heading for work, and Komarov watched the eyes turn away from the Cheka car, pretending they hadn’t seen it. He wondered if Maslov noticed and what he felt if he did. Angry? Pleased? The sadness that Komarov himself felt?
The morgue was attached to the Pavlovski Hospital, a place he knew only too well—it was there that his wife had spent her final weeks. The main chamber was artificially cooled, and the stench of putrefaction seemed fainter than usual. The four corpses, still fully clothed, were laid out on marble slabs.
Komarov looked at the Indian first, a slim young man not much older than twenty, with sleek black hair and a rather handsome face. Two bullets had entered his chest, leaving egg-shaped brown stains on the thin white shirt. The eyes were still open and looked strangely excited.
The Russian on the next slab was familiar. His name was Ivan Grazhin, and if Komarov remembered correctly, he had been a well-known voice in the soldiers’ soviets, both before and after the first revolution. The man didn’t look like he’d prospered since, but the eyes were serene for those of someone who’d fired a gun through the roof of his mouth.
And then there were the real victims: one with his throat slit from ear to ear, looking as if he were wearing a blood-colored bib; another with a look of surprise on his face and a coin-sized hole above the heart. Several witnesses had said that the handgun was the largest they’d ever seen.
“Have the relatives been informed?” Komarov asked Maslov.
“I don’t know.”
“Call the militia and ask. If they haven’t done it, then ask them to do so.”
Maslov hurried off in search of a telephone. After one last look at the grisly tableau, Komarov walked back outside, where the air was noticeably warmer than it had been only ten minutes earlier.
Entering the hospital, he inquired after the wounded militiaman and was directed upstairs to one of the wards. The man had died in the last few minutes. “They couldn’t stop the bleeding,” a nurse told Komarov.
Five men dead, he thought, standing by the bed. And for what?
Through the window he saw a woman walking toward an automobile, and realized it was her. She must have been visiting someone, he decided. Or maybe the Zhenotdel had business at the hospital. As she went to wind the starting handle, a soldier hurried to offer his help and seemed somewhat put out when she firmly refused.
Komarov’s smile was his first of the day.
After watching her car drive away, he went down to his own, where Maslov was patiently waiting.
“There’s been another killing,” the young man said. “At the Hotel Lux.”
“An Indian?” Komarov asked.
“A Russian. But he was found under a bed in one of the Indians’ rooms.”