“None. He hasn’t come back to the dormitory.”
Komarov took a deep breath of the early evening air. “Start going through the others again. And the hotels.”
He and Maslov climbed into the Russo-Balt’s rear seat, and the driver set off for headquarters. As the city center streets rolled by, Komarov went through what he suspected. The robbery itself was unimportant; what mattered were the future plans of the men involved. This wasn’t just another mindless outrage; it was, he was sure, a threat that needed taking seriously. But why did he feel that? It wasn’t as if the revolution’s survival was at stake.
Maybe its soul was.
He gazed down at his hands, which were steady as a rock. Real police work suited him.
At the M-Cheka offices he barked out rapid-fire orders to a clutch of subordinates: bring in Kimayeva; seek out photographs of Chatterji and Rafiq, bring back the tram-depot witnesses to see if any recognized the body from the Hotel Lux.
The subordinates scattered.
Komarov sat in his inner sanctum, awaiting their findings. Maslov was the first to return. “We have no photographs of Rafiq or Chatterji,” he reported. “They probably don’t have passports, but if they do, we haven’t found them. And there are no other records: the International Executive asked the commissariat not to ask for photographs. They were worried the foreign delegates might interpret the request as a lack of trust.”
Komarov smiled wryly. “Kimayeva?”
“Borin’s on his way.”
He appeared a few minutes later with the woman. She was about thirty, blonde, fairly attractive in a sharp-faced way. As Komarov questioned her, anger gave way to evasion, then finally to tears. Komarov sent Maslov out on a pretext and patiently extracted a confession that she’d been sleeping with Nasim. If her husband found out, he would kill her, she said. And the affair was over anyway: she hadn’t seen Nasim for more than a week. He’d said he was too busy, but the bastard had been lying—a friend had seen him drinking in the Universalist Club four or five nights ago. Not with a woman; it was true. With a group of men.
Komarov sent her home, issued Maslov with new instructions, and told Sasha to bring him some tea. Above his head the electric fan whirred erratically, doing little more than stirring the torpid air.
Maslov returned after twenty minutes or so, bearing a large stack of reports. “We had four men in the Universalist,” he said, “submitting nightly reports.”
It was Maslov who found what they wanted half an hour later. Three Indians had been drinking in the Universalist on the fifteenth. With four other men. They’d been talking about conditions in India and about the relocation of a military school from Tashkent to Moscow. They’d been expressing disapproval of party policy.
“Was it our three Indians?” Komarov interrupted.
“It doesn’t say.”
“And the other four?”
Maslov read on. “Two well-known anarchists—Aram Shahumian and Ivan Grazhin—”
“Grazhin was the one in the morgue,” Komarov said. “The one who shot himself in the street.”
“The others were an American comrade, Aidan Brady, and”—Maslov looked shocked—“a party member, Sergei Piatakov.”
Komarov looked up sharply. He remembered Brady from 1918, when the man had turned up at the M-Cheka office to report that his fellow American Caitlin Hanley—the woman who had later married Sergei Piatakov—was in touch with a British agent who had once been her lover.
Her taste in partners seemed somewhat at odds with her politics, but she wasn’t alone in that. “Get their files,” he told Maslov.
While his subordinate was doing his bidding, Komarov walked around the desk and read the report himself. On the same evening, another group of anarchists had been discussing the creation of a new language in which letters would be replaced by numbers, and the report’s compiler was clearly unsure whether this was politically acceptable.
Komarov snorted his disbelief.
He returned to his chair. Piatakov, Piatakova. Seeing her at the hospital. What had she been doing there?
He could think of one possibility.
Maslov returned empty-handed. “There are no criminal files on Piatakov or Brady. There were files on Grazhin and Shahumian, but they were destroyed in the fire last year—the one the anarchists were suspected of starting.”
“Piatakov will have a party file,” Komarov said. “I ran into his wife a few months ago,” he added; “she works for the Zhenotdel. She’s on the executive committee. Get her address from them.”
Maslov was gone for only a couple of minutes. “One forty-two Bolshaya Dmitrova,” he reported.
“Take a car,” Komarov told him. “And a couple of men just in case. Bring in whoever’s there. Him, her, whomever.”
The Zhenotdel meeting in Serpukhovskaya had gone on for almost eight hours, and it was virtually dark by the time Caitlin reached home. As she’d feared and expected, no light was showing in their upstairs windows, but there was a Russo-Balt parked outside the building’s entrance, and she was barely out of the Renault when two Chekists appeared to block her path.
“You will come with us,” one of them said.
She sighed. “I’ve had a long day, comrade. Can’t this wait till the morning?”
“Comrade Komarov wants to see you now.”
She thought about making a scene, but what would be the point? She allowed herself to be hustled into their car, and sat in simmering silence as the Cheka driver bullied his way through the still-busy evening streets. The last time she’d taken a ride like this—in far-off Yekaterinburg—her next ten days had been spent in a cell. What did Komarov want with her? She allowed herself a moment’s hope that the summons concerned Rahima, but knew she was clutching at straws. This was about Sergei. The shirt drenched in blood.
When she was finally ushered into Komarov’s office, he was on the telephone. Glancing up, he gave his caller a few instructions before putting the instrument down. “Please take a seat, comrade,” he said. “I apologize for the abrupt summons, but this is an urgent matter, as I’m sure Comrade Maslov informed you.”
“Comrade Maslov didn’t even introduce himself,” she said stonily. The young man was hovering at Komarov’s shoulder, like a butler at a dinner party.
“Oh. Then I must also apologize on his behalf,” Komarov said without even looking at his young subordinate.
She nodded.
“We’re looking for your husband,” Komarov said without more ado.
“Why?” she asked, managing to keep the tremor out of her voice.
“We need to ask him some questions.”
She looked at him, remembering the trembling hand. Tonight it was still. Tonight he was working. “I don’t know where he is,” she said flatly. “Why do you need to question him?”
“That is not your concern,” Maslov interjected.
“He’s my husband,” she snapped back. For better or for worse, she thought. That hadn’t been part of the Soviet ceremony.
“When did you last see him, comrade?” he asked.
She thought back a moment; the last few days seemed all rolled into one. “Yesterday morning,” she said. “He was still asleep when I left for work.”
“What were you doing at the hospital this morning?” Komarov asked.
She looked up quickly. “How… We really do have spies everywhere, don’t we?”
“I appreciate the ‘we,’ comrade, but as it happens I saw you there myself. I was visiting a militiaman who’d been shot in the tram depot robbery.”
“That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”
“That’s part of it. You haven’t answered—”