Wending their way through the galleries of the newly reopened history museum, McColl and Ruzhkov were entering one that housed a Mongol tent or yurt. A selection of yak-tail banners, bows, and quivers hung from the walls; displays of whistling arrows filled several glass-topped cabinets, complete with typed explanations of how the Mongols had used them in battle for transmitting tactical orders.
“Fascinating,” Ruzhkov said, leaning in so close to the glass that his breath formed a circle of steam.
“So they’re just waiting around?” McColl asked hopefully.
Ruzhkov straightened, holding his back. “Oh no. Deputy Chairman Komarov is not the idle sort. He has no other life, so neither do his men. When there’s something big on—and there almost always is—all of them work every hour God gives. And unlike most of them, he’s a real stickler for the rules. His wife died of hunger two winters ago because he wouldn’t bend them to get her an extra ration. At least, that’s the story, and it wouldn’t surprise me. That kind of dedication is frightening.”
Absurdly so, McColl thought. “So what have they been doing, then?” he asked.
“There are three things Komarov wants to know,” Ruzhkov said, ticking them off on his fingers. “Who the Russian was, where the American and his friends were living, and what it’s all about. He grilled all our men who were undercover at the Universalist, but they weren’t very helpful. All the turncoats talked about was India and some new Menshevik named Gandhi. Have you heard of him?”
“I have,” McColl said. He had actually met the man twice, once over twenty years before when Gandhi and another Indian medical orderly had carried him down on a stretcher from the Spion Kop plateau, the second time in 1915 when he’d stopped to visit Gandhi’s ashram in Ahmedabad on his way home from Calcutta. But this didn’t seem the time for reminiscing.
“Well, the men in this group went on and on about him. And they don’t like him one bit. The Indians in particular.”
“Why not?” McColl asked.
Ruzhkov shrugged. “Because he’s a Menshevik, I suppose. You know what they were like—they talked a good revolution, but they didn’t really want much to change.” Ruzhkov rubbed his eyes. “But I wouldn’t rely too much on any of this. The men we had there were not the brightest.”
“We” was now the Cheka—Ruzhkov had trouble with personal pronouns. “So that was all—India and Gandhi?”
“That was all.”
They were now perusing an intricate re-creation of a battle—the one fought beside the Kalka River in 1223, according to the inscription. The model river itself was full of finely crafted corpses and patches of red staining. “The Mongols never shed the blood of princes,” Ruzhkov said. “So they rolled the Prince of Kiev in a carpet and suffocated him.” He giggled.
India and Gandhi, McColl was thinking. What were these men planning?
“Last night our men raided the Universalist,” Ruzhkov was saying. “Took about fifty people in. They’re still interrogating them,” Ruzhkov said. “They’ve found out the American lived in Serpukhovskaya, but no one seems to know exactly where. They’re making street inquiries as well.”
“They haven’t discovered anything about the Russian who died at the Lux?”
“Not a thing. He could have come from the moon.”
“And the others in the group?”
“They know who they are. An Armenian named Aram Shahumian and a Russian named Sergei Piatakov. Both served with Brady in the Red Army back in 1918.”
“What else can you tell me about Komarov?”
“He’s a really big wheel, very close to Dzerzhinsky. Komarov was a policeman before he joined the Bolshevik underground, and it’s said that the two of them met in Yauzskaya police station when Dzerzhinsky was brought in under arrest. Komarov’s father was a minor clerk in some ministry, nothing grand. His wife died a year or so ago, and they never had any children. They say only Dzerzhinsky and Yakov Peters have signed more death warrants, but Dzerzhinsky and Komarov have been trying to persuade the party leadership to abolish the death penalty again. Maybe they both have writer’s cramp. Maybe… It’s a madhouse, you know, an absolute madhouse. Do you know what I had to arrange yesterday? There’s some idiot wandering around the city at night painting white flowers on doors, and we can’t catch him. So my boss decided we should get a painter of our own, and have him go around and overpaint them in red. If that isn’t crazy, what is?”
She was alone and hard at work when he entered the office, and so absorbed that she became aware of his presence only when a shadow loomed across the desk. She looked up, felt a lump in her throat.
“No, we haven’t found him,” Komarov said, searching for somewhere to sit. He chose the edge of Fanya’s desk, perching there like a vulture, she thought. Since their last meeting she’d asked several comrades about him, but only one had met him, more than seven years earlier, at a clandestine meeting in 1914 of the Bolshevik underground network in Moscow. According to the witness, Komarov hadn’t said much, but those that did had often looked his way, as if seeking his approval.
He had a way of making Caitlin feel out of her depth, which both intrigued and annoyed her. “What do you want then?” she asked briskly. “I’m very busy this morning.”
“This won’t take long. Have you remembered anything since we spoke that might help us locate your husband?”
“No.”
“Would you tell me if you had?”
The question threw her for a moment, partly because it seemed absurdly playful, partly because she wasn’t sure of her answer. “Of course,” she said, with only the faintest hint of sarcasm.
He smiled and changed tack. “Would you say your husband was a believer in permanent revolution, comrade?”
She considered. “We’re all waiting for new revolutions to help make ours more secure,” she said primly.
“Some of us are getting used to the idea that we shall have to survive on our own,” Komarov responded dryly, “but that is not what I meant. There are some comrades, respected comrades, who argue that we can only avoid going into reverse by running faster and faster.”
“What a strange image,” she said, finally putting down her pen. “Did you come here for an ideological discussion, comrade?”
“Not really. Enlightenment perhaps.” He kneaded his jaw with his thumb and forefinger. “I like to understand the crimes I investigate. And why they are committed.”
“To help you catch the criminals?”
“In part. But I also just like things explained. Though as someone reminded me recently, to explain is not to excuse.”
“Could there be any excuse for what Sergei and his friends have done?” she asked. “You told me that five men had died already, three of them innocent. And heaven knows how many more will if Aidan Brady’s the one in charge.”
“Our Russia’s knee-deep in dead men,” he said.
“Does that make any difference?”
He looked at the floor for several moments. “I really don’t know,” he said. “It shouldn’t, but it has to. Groups of Bolsheviks committed crimes like this in the years before the revolution and probably for much the same reason—a need of funds to further their political ends. And though we said we regretted any loss of life, we saluted the deed and welcomed the money and half-believed that no one who got in our way could be completely innocent. These men—your husband and the others—I assume they feel the same. And, if by some miracle they overthrow the party and set up their own government, the crime they committed the other day won’t just be excused—it’ll become a glorious chapter in their new revolution’s history.”
“But they won’t succeed,” Caitlin said.