“I found a shirt covered in blood when I got home last night. I thought there must have been an accident, so…”
“You went to the hospital. But not until this morning.”
“I went looking for him, and I ended up sleeping at the office.”
“Why? Surely your husband would have come back to your room.”
“I… I don’t know. I was upset, and strange as it seems, I feel more at home at work.” Komarov’s face told her that struck a chord.
“But was that all?” he asked. “Did you hear about the robbery while you were out looking for him?”
“No. I didn’t hear anything until this morning. A comrade who came to work early had heard about it.”
“And then you guessed that your husband was involved,” Komarov suggested, stroking his chin.
“You didn’t report these suspicions, comrade,” Maslov interjected.
She gave him a withering look, said nothing.
“That was understandable in the circumstances,” Komarov said. “But now that you actually know he’s committed a serious crime, I expect your full cooperation. Have you heard from him since?”
“No,” she said.
“He left no goodbye message?”
“No,” she repeated. The verse she’d found on the bed that morning when she dropped in to change her clothes was not a message she wanted to share with the Cheka.
“Did he ever mention any future plans?”
She shook her head. “No. He was—is—angry about the way things have been going, but if he had any particular course of action in mind he never talked to me about it.”
“Did he ever speak about India?”
“India?” What mad scheme had Sergei gotten himself involved in? She remembered arriving home a week or so earlier to find him and Aram Shahumian poring over a map of the world. “No, never,” she said. “Comrade Komarov, I think I have the right to know exactly what my husband has done.”
He leaned back in his chair. “Yesterday evening seven men held up the tram depot on Shabolovka Street. A clerk, a Chekist and a militiaman were killed, along with two of the criminals. The five who escaped have been identified as Aidan Brady, Aram Shahumian, your husband, and two Indian comrades who are here for the congress. Last night a man was murdered in the Hotel Lux. He was a Russian, but the room he was found in belonged to one of the missing Indians and one who was killed in the robbery. I suspect that the two events are connected but haven’t as yet been able to establish the connection.”
She felt as though she’d been hit in the stomach.
“I believe you know some of these men…” Komarov said.
“I have met Aram several times—he’s a Red Army comrade of Sergei’s, and a friend. As you know, Aidan Brady and I have a long history—he and my brother were both involved in an Irish plot against the British right at the start of the war. I came through Siberia with Brady in 1918—we just happened to meet in Vladivostok—and I saw him a few times after that. He and Sergei met independently, and they’ve remained friends.”
“But not you?”
“No. I haven’t spoken to him since he shot that boy in Kalanchevskaya Square. The incident we talked about three years ago.”
“As I recall, the boy’s death was an accident.”
“In my experience, those sort of accidents tend to happen around Brady.” Until now she had always been on the same side as her fellow American, but she couldn’t remember ever liking him. Even at their first meeting all those years ago, when Brady was still basking in the role of a workers’ crusader, there’d been something not quite right about the man. Something missing.
“And did your husband ever introduce you to any Indian comrades?” Komarov asked.
“No. Never.”
Komarov leaned forward, his elbows on the desk, his chin resting on his interlinked hands. “You said your husband is angry at the way things are going. Why is that? The people he’s involved with—most of them are anarchists, so their resentment is understandable. But your husband is still a member of our party.”
“He is a Bolshevik,” she said simply. A picture of the Universalist clientele crossed her mind, denying the words.
“So are you, Comrade Piatakova, but there are obviously differences of opinion between you.”
“We had—have—different views on who and what we should be fighting.”
“And who do you think the enemy is?” Maslov asked.
She didn’t bother to answer. Where had they gone? Oh, Sergei.
“Answer the question,” Maslov insisted.
“Bureaucrats, careerists, and Neanderthal males,” she said coldly, staring straight at him. “Is that all?” she asked, turning back to Komarov.
“Almost.” He asked her for a description of Aram Shahumian, and then, almost apologetically, for one of her husband. She gave him only the barest of bones, but Komarov made no complaint. “If you hear from him, please inform me,” he said formally. “Your husband has an exemplary record,” he added, “both with the fleet and the army. And I would like to think a tribunal would take that into account.”
Caitlin gave him an incredulous look.
“I heard a joke the other day,” he said unexpectedly. “Not a particularly funny one. The essence of it was that we Bolsheviks consider ourselves magicians but we’ve really only mastered the first half of one particular trick. We’ve managed to saw the person in half but not put him back together again. Well, that’s what we have to do—put Russia back together again. You and your husband are not the only people fighting for beliefs, comrade.”
Several responses came to mind, but none seemed very grown-up. “I assume we’re done,” she said, getting to her feet.
“For the moment, yes.”
Turning on her heel, she strode back across the outer office, down the grey corridors, and out into the moonlit city, where people who didn’t have fugitive partners were happily going about their lives.
The Only Good Indian
“We got a bunch of contradictory sightings at the railway stations,” Ruzhkov said. “Someone who looked like the American at the Kazan Station, people who might have been Indians at the Kursk Station and the Kiev Station. Nothing definite. They found Dzharova’s father, but he’d put her on the train to Tashkent three days before. He knew about her Indian lover—that’s why he sent her home. Caught them at it apparently.”
Ruzhkov’s face clouded over for an instant. Remembering catching his wife, McColl guessed.
“What really enraged him,” the Russian went on, “was the man’s color—it seems the party’s policy on racial tolerance hasn’t taken hold in Turkestan.” Ruzhkov looked up, as if expecting sympathy for this ideological setback. “Anyway,” he continued, “they put a call through to the Samara Cheka with instructions to hold the girl for questioning when the train arrives there. Which might be today, might be in a week’s time—the railways are in chaos.” He snorted with apparent amusement. “Would you believe that five whole trains have been lost since the New Year? They’ve completely disappeared. Vanished off the face of the earth.”
Thirty-six hours had passed since McColl’s first encounter with Komarov, and he was beginning to feel a little more sanguine about his chances of staying free. An optimist might have considered his situation—an unsuspected spy close to the heart of an official investigation into the very matter that had brought him to Russia—close to ideal, but as far as McColl was concerned, that would be overstating the case, and he was determined not to let down his guard. Nerves were good for you, as his school PE teacher used to say, teaching his charges how to dive into an icy loch through the stunningly simple expedient of making them walk the plank.