The latest blow had been the news she’d received in Orenburg. Anna Nemtseva, the Zhenotdel worker from Orel for whom she and Kollontai had been seeking justice, had risked going back for a family emergency and been found two days later floating in the Oka River. The local Cheka had explained her death as accident or suicide and put down the gaping head wound to her striking a bridge as she jumped or fell.
Caitlin remembered Anna’s arrival at the Zhenotdel’s door that spring. Even after what the young woman had already been through, she’d been so full of hope for the future.
Had it been misplaced? Had Caitlin’s own? As she’d also discovered that day, the Orenburg Zhenotdel’s three delegates were at the end of their collective tether. Having been vilified, mocked, and obstructed at every turn by their male so-called comrades, the women concerned seemed perilously close to quitting in disgust. In the hour they’d spent together, Caitlin had done her best to provide fresh heart, but couldn’t pretend she’d convinced either them or herself.
Sometimes she couldn’t help feeling that it was all going wrong. Not the way Sergei thought it was—she didn’t believe that the party was deliberately betraying its own ideals. It had more to do with the size of the original task, now swollen further by the depredations of the last few years. People had had enough of chaos, and their instinct was to hunker down, to defend what they had against the threat of the new.
“If we just keep opening doors,” Kollontai had once told her, “sooner or later women—and men—will choose to walk through them.”
Perhaps. But these days there seemed to be more doors closing than swinging open, and that augured badly for the Zhenotdel. If the revolution regressed, if democracy withered and the bureaucrats ruled, all those institutions—the party, the soviets, the unions—which conceived and realized progressive ideas would eventually turn into hollow shells, mere parodies of what they had promised. And the Zhenotdel’s future would be no different. In Russia at least, the women’s struggle was only one part of the revolution, and like all the other parts, it had no chance of succeeding alone.
Which was all too depressing. She turned her mind to her other immediate problem, who was probably playing chess with the Grand Inquisitor.
It was weird dealing with the false Jack, who seemed to be making up his false history as he went along. In the saloon on the previous day, he had recounted an abortive attempt to learn the piano, waxed lyrical about the color of some far-off hills, and advised them all to taste the melons in Tashkent. He had never mentioned the former in their real life together, nor taken much notice of the landscape. She wondered if he’d even been to Tashkent, let alone acquired a taste for its melons.
Every now and then, she’d had glimpses of the Jack she remembered: a facial expression, a way of holding himself, a swiftly dimmed look of the eyes. This Jack was more disturbing than the false one, mostly because this was the one she had loved. Like no other, indeed. She remembered once telling him that only the world ending could tear them apart, and then the old world had duly obliged. Or so she and millions of others had thought.
Was there any hope for them? In spite of their being part of the hunt for her husband. In spite of the fact that they were probably still on different sides. And those were just the hindrances she knew about. He might have a wife by now, and his marriage might have a future—he hadn’t said anything, but why would he?
If she did want him back, there was no guarantee he’d want her. She didn’t think she’d take him back if he’d treated her the way she’d treated him.
Why was she even thinking about this? Because she still loved him? Because despite everything, he was still unfinished business as far as her heart was concerned?
There were so many reasons not to fall in love again or give him any sign that she was doing so. She might admit to herself that she wanted him, but acting on the thought was something else entirely.
And there was still Sergei to think of. She had loved him once, though not in the way she’d loved Jack.
She often regretted letting him know that. If she’d been more willing to play a part, he might have stayed on the rails and not gone rushing off to pastures new with a killer like Aidan Brady.
No, she told herself, Kollontai’s voice in her ear. The man had made his choice, and it looked as though both he and she would have to suffer the consequences.
Komarov watched Piatakova and the Englishman share a stroll up the platform at Aralsk, politely forcing a passage through the throng of peasant saleswomen. The wares on offer—fish and bread, cakes and pastries, even the odd duck and goose—were certainly impressive and a stark reminder of how badly the war had affected distribution. Russia had enough food—the party just had to find a way of getting it where it was needed.
Maslov was walking toward him, holding a piece of paper and smiling. In his loose shirt and army breeches, he looked like a young, off-duty cadet, the sort who would have taken a young girl rowing on the Moscow River before the war.
“A message from Chairman Peters,” Maslov said, passing it over.
Komarov sat down on the carriage steps and read it. The renegades had known another anarchist in Tashkent. A man named Rogdayev, whom they’d robbed and killed. After which they’d taken off in a stolen Cheka car.
He sighed and swished a fly away from his face. It was beginning to look like he and Dzerzhinsky had erred on the side of optimism when it came to catching these men.
Piatakova and the Englishman were on their way back down the platform, laughing at something or other. He knew he should have pressed her harder about the agent she had admitted meeting in 1918, but had known in that moment that he was more than a little afraid of what he might find out. If a comrade with her record of service and devotion to the revolution turned out to be a traitor, there wouldn’t be many left to trust.
Piatakov and Brady arrived in Samarkand late in the afternoon. The last lap of their three-day journey had been spent in the back of a peasant’s cart, in the company of several hundred ripening melons. Dropped off in the heart of the old town, they just stood where they were for several moments, feeling hot and sticky, wondering where to go. Aram had forged them spare sets of papers, but the Russian town would be on full alert, with every available Chekist checking and double-checking each and every new face. This time staying in the old town made more sense.
This was easier to decide than arrange, but unsolicited help was soon at hand. The two men were sitting in a chaikhana, drinking tea and staring at the huge, half-ruined mosque that towered above them, when an old man came up and addressed them in heavily accented Russian. “It’s called the Bibi-Khanym,” he said, “after Tamerlane’s favorite wife.”
Brady offered him a seat.
The old man told them he was German by birth. A mercenary in the army of Czar Alexander III, he had remained in Turkestan after the Russian conquest of Transcaspia had been completed in 1881. He might have been a soldier by trade, he said, but he was a painter by inclination, and the Central Asian light… well, he had never known anything like it. He had lived in Samarkand for over thirty years, painting the old town and selling the finished canvases to visitors and Russian colonists. Or had until recently. Now, with the revolution, the market had more or less dried up; no one wanted the past on their walls anymore, not even a past as ancient and unthreatening as Samarkand’s. But there were still a few people with taste. “I am on my way to a customer now,” he said, patting the battered leather case by his side. “Would you like to see?”