Which had to be more than a coincidence, Komarov thought. He looked at his watch. Dzerzhinsky had asked him not to pull the Indian delegates out of the conference before the day’s business was concluded unless he considered it absolutely necessary. He decided he did. He would wait for the morning session to finish, but no longer.
McColl spent the morning at his new job, translating speeches for the Indian delegation among the splendors of the Kremlin’s old imperial throne room. The first speaker was Lenin, who devoted two hours to a reasoned defense of the NEP, standing between the large gilded columns and beneath a huge sheet of scarlet velvet emblazoned with a golden hammer and sickle. His speech was matter-of-fact, like a kindly uncle’s address to a gathering of favorite nephews, and compelling in its simplicity. The Bolshevik leader’s preeminence was easy to understand.
Translating from Russian to Urdu was a touch on the tricky side, particularly where Marxist terminology was concerned, but McColl just about kept pace, and shamelessly précised the more difficult passages. The Indians hung on his every word, and several took copious notes.
After his presentation, Lenin sat himself down on the steps leading up to the platform, notepad in hand, and offered occasional asides that made everyone laugh. McColl’s translations were eagerly anticipated and usually greeted by a joyful clapping of hands.
As they all filed out at the session’s end, McColl saw the posse of leather-clad Chekists waiting at the exit and, for several dreadful seconds, thought they were waiting for him.
They were, but only for his services as an interpreter. The whole Indian delegation was needed back at the Hotel Lux.
There were no protests, only a slight air of bewilderment, as McColl and the twelve Indians were walked to their destination. At the hotel they were shown into a large, luxuriously furnished room on the ground floor; the smoking room in czarist days, McColl guessed. A tall, greying man in a suit was standing with his back to them, gazing out of the window. He turned to reveal a long face, steel-grey eyes above an aquiline nose.
His name was Komarov, and unless there were two men of that name high in the Moscow Cheka, this was the man that Ruzhkov had mentioned as being in charge of the hunt for McColl. Which made his heart beat a little faster.
After introducing himself as the deputy chairman of the Moscow Cheka, Komarov asked everyone to sit down, then described the tram depot robbery and Nasim’s subsequent death. He made it clear that those assembled were not, in any way, being held responsible for the actions of their comrade Nasim, but he was sure that they would realize the need for questions. One or more of them might be able to throw some light on the motivation of their dead comrade, give some clue, however small, that would help with the apprehension of his fellow robbers.
McColl interpreted all this into Urdu, absorbing the information as he did so. He’d heard snatches of conversations about a big robbery over breakfast that morning, but there’d been no reason to connect this news with Cumming’s plotters.
Komarov’s first question was the obvious one—were there any Indian comrades missing?
There were. Neither Durga Chatterji nor Muhammad Rafiq had been seen since early the day before, and according to the former’s roommate, Chatterji hadn’t slept in his bed. Rafiq had shared with Nasim, so no one could say whether he had slept in his or not.
Komarov then dropped another bombshell—the body of an unidentified Russian had been discovered in Rafiq and Nasim’s room. After each Indian had been separately questioned, Komarov went on, Comrade Maslov would escort him down to the basement for a viewing of the corpse, in the hope that one of them knew whose it was.
McColl and the first Indian were taken into the adjoining room, and the interrogations began. Komarov showed no signs of impatience as the questions and answers were carefully translated, and no sign either that he had any reason to suspect the translator, but the twin imperatives of doing a decent job and making sure that his mask stayed firmly in place took all of McColl’s concentration.
Komarov asked each man for his opinions of the dead Nasim and the missing Rafiq and Chatterji. One by one they all said much the same—that all had seemed fully committed to the struggle against imperialism. The notion that the threesome might have been working for the British was politely but firmly dismissed; indeed, if any political wrongheadedness could be attributed to them, it would be of the opposite type. All three men had expressed their anger at the recent closing of the Tashkent school for Indian revolutionaries.
Their social lives had given cause for concern. Both Nasim and Rafiq had been seeing Russian women—not, of course, that there was anything wrong with Russian women, but… Nasim’s girlfriend was a teacher at the Toilers of the East University, one Anna Kimayeva. Rafiq’s was a girl he’d met on the train to Moscow, Marusya Dzharova, the daughter of a railway union official from Tashkent.
When the last Indian had been interviewed, McColl was left alone with Komarov. The Russian hadn’t taken any notes, but McColl suspected he remembered every word. His questioning, though diplomatic, had been thorough and forensic. McColl had no previous experience of Cheka bosses at work, but this wasn’t how he’d imagined one. He realized he was sweating copiously, but it was atrociously humid.
Maslov returned from the basement. “None of them admitted to seeing the man before,” he reported.
Komarov grunted and turned to McColl. “Are you also staying in this hotel?” he asked.
“Yes, comrade.”
“Did you notice anything suspicious in the way any of them answered my questions?”
“No, comrade.”
“And you haven’t overheard anything relevant in the last few days?”
“I only arrived from Tashkent yesterday.”
“Ah.” Komarov stood. “Well, keep your ears open from now on. And as I may have need of your services again today, stay with the delegation, either at the conference or here at the hotel. Understood?”
It wasn’t a request. “Yes, comrade.”
Trudging back to the Kremlin for what remained of the afternoon session, McColl felt relief at escaping the Cheka’s embrace but not much wiser as to what was going on. As he and the Indians passed through the Kremlin gate, he tried to take stock of what he did and didn’t know. Had Suvorov known who he was? If he had, then who had told him? What had he been doing in Rafiq and Nasim’s room several hours after Nasim had been killed in the robbery? And where the hell was Rafiq?
It looked as if all three Indians had been recruited by Brady on Five’s behalf. But had Brady known that Rafiq was already working for Cumming? There seemed little doubt that all four had taken part in the robbery, along with sundry others. Why? For money, presumably. Money to pay their way south, if Cumming was right. If they weren’t still lying low in Moscow, they were probably on their way.
Should he head that way himself or stay and follow the investigation? Keeping close to Komarov felt like a daunting proposition, but seemed to offer more than a headless-chicken rush to India. And if it was personal safety he wanted, he should have stayed in the London prison.
He did have another—safer, he hoped—lead to follow up: Suvorov’s Moscow address, which Cumming had given him in London, “for emergency use only.” Not tonight—he had no intention of defying Komarov’s instruction to stay put. But tomorrow should be fine. The Cheka had nothing to go on when it came to identifying Suvorov, so searching the Five agent’s room should still be a relatively risk-free endeavor.
Komarov walked out to his car. “Any news of the Englishman?” he asked the waiting Yezhov.