“I’m not royalty,” Komarov told him, letting himself into the front.
The road into town was wide and flanked by artificial streams that flashed in the sunlight. At first there was little in the way of traffic, but when, after half a mile or so, they turned onto an even wider thoroughfare, he felt he was entering another, busier continent. Long strings of heavily laden camels vied with mule- and horse-drawn carts; dust and the flat smell of animal dung both hung in the air. Yet the buildings were still European, and tramlines shone in the earthen highway.
They veered around a large park, full of office workers taking their lunch in the shade of spreading trees, and entered a narrower street. This, Komarov guessed, was the oldest part of the Russian town. Ahead of them a pair of parked cars indicated the position of Cheka headquarters, while away to his right, a slim, incredibly graceful minaret rose above the square Russian mansions, like a flower climbing out of a tomb.
The Cheka building had clearly been a ballet school in a previous incarnation: in the hall off the vestibule, now filled with typists and desks, exercise bars still clung to the walls. Yakov Peters’s office was on the first floor, a spacious room with a view of gardens and not much furniture: a camp bed, several native rugs, and a wide polished desk encircled by upright chairs. Three of the walls were hung with tapestries; the fourth had a large map of Turkestan and a framed portrait of Lenin.
Two ceiling fans were noisily whirring, but it was still incredibly hot.
Peters came out from behind the desk to embrace Komarov. The two men had never socialized much, but they’d done much the same job for the last three years and dealt with the same inner demons.
“Something to eat, something to drink?” Peters asked. He was wearing an open-necked shirt, baggy trousers, and sandals. A cigarette smoldered on the edge of an ashtray.
“Tea,” Komarov said, remembering that the Lett was a teetotaler. Peters’s complexion had been coarsened by the local sun, but Turkestan’s Cheka plenipotentiary looked in much better shape overall than he had on the occasion of their last meeting, eighteen months before. The haunted eyes were gone. “You’re looking well,” Komarov said, feeling almost envious. “This place must agree with you.”
Peters nodded. “Things are more clear-cut here; that’s for sure. I don’t keep bumping into old friends in the interrogation room.”
“Why is Vladimir Ilych up on the wall?” Komarov wanted to know. Lenin was notoriously averse to that sort of idolatry.
“That was put up before my time. I was told there used to be one of the czar,” Peters explained, “and that when it was taken down people used to stare at the patch on the wall. So someone decided to replace it.”
“A new father figure.”
“Exactly. People down here seem to want one.”
The tea arrived, two steaming glasses and a bowl of lemon slices.
“It’s a long journey from Moscow,” Peters said, condemning one cigarette and lighting another. “And I still don’t know why you needed to make it,” he added with a smile.
“Ah.”
“I have my suspicions, of course.”
It was Komarov’s turn to smile. “Which are?”
“Felix Edmundovich is trying to tangle himself up in laws again. ‘Please, Vladimir Ilych,’” Peters said in a fair imitation of Dzerzhinsky’s breathless voice, “‘let me capture a real murderer or two.’”
Komarov laughed. “Something along those lines. But it’s more than that. These really are dangerous men.”
“And hard to catch. Ignore my cynicism, Yuri Vladimirovich.”
“You haven’t caught them, then?”
“No.” Peters didn’t sound that apologetic. “We had some bad luck. The two of them left the train at Saryagash—you know that—and they must have come into Tashkent by road. Unfortunately, the train they abandoned broke down ten miles short of here, and we only got to check and question the passengers on the following afternoon. By which time they must have passed through the guard posts. We started a city search at once, but… well, you have to understand the situation here: I don’t have many men, and half of those I have are worse than useless. This is not Petrograd. The party and Cheka are almost a hundred percent European, but Europeans are less than half the population. The other ninety percent, well, they don’t fight us in the cities the way the bandits, the Basmachi, fight us in the countryside, but few lift a finger to help us. They’re waiting to see if the next wind blows us away.”
He grimaced. “And then there’s our side. I’ve got the usual quota of zealots who want to revolutionize Turkestan overnight—shut the bazaars, free the women, shoot the Muslim priests—and the usual quota of timeservers who don’t want to revolutionize anything in case we all end up being roasted on some tribal spit out in the desert. And as if that wasn’t enough, I’ve had three Zhenotdel women murdered in the villages in the last fortnight and the local delegates ringing me every ten minutes. First they won’t have anything to do with the brutal Cheka; now they’re demanding that we shoot the Muslim men in batches!”
Komarov smiled. “I’ve brought one with me,” he said, and went on to explain Piatakova’s presence.
“She’s the American, yes? I met her several times in Petrograd after the revolution—she took a letter to my family in London. And I saw her again in Moscow, during the LSR uprising. She never struck me as a man-hater.”
“I don’t think she is. But she’s certainly committed. Anyway…”
“Yes, where was I?”
“Shooting men in batches. What about the other two, the Indian and the Armenian? Any news of them?”
“None. But getting back to Piatakov and the American: the first we heard of their arrival was a telephone call from Vladimir Rogdayev. I’d spoken to him after getting your wire—he was the only ex-anarchist we knew of down here—and it turned out he did know Piatakov and Brady. We agreed that they might try and contact him, but he thought it was pointless to keep him under surveillance—that it would just scare them off. At the time I thought he was right, so we arranged a coded telephone message instead.
“Unfortunately, I was out dealing with the murder of the third Zhenotdel woman when the call came, and it was taken by a man named Dubrovsky. Not the cleverest of men. And not the most mobile these days,” he added as an afterthought. “Dubrovsky took three men to Rogdayev’s apartment at around ten in the evening. And that was the last time anyone gave them a thought until the next morning, when one of my abler assistants realized they hadn’t come back.
“We found them there, all tied up. Rogdayev was dead, shot in the head, and Dubrovsky had been shot in the foot trying to disarm them, or so he said. The car was gone, and we later discovered that it passed through the Salarsky Bridge guard post at four minutes past eleven.” Peters sighed. “The idiots were so busy recording the exact time that they neglected to check the men’s papers.”
“That probably saved their lives,” Komarov murmured.
“A small consolation,” was Peters’s rejoinder. He lit another cigarette; the smoke curled away out through the window. “We found the lodging house where they’d stayed the night before—as party members—road inspectors, would you believe! Their stuff was still there, including a map on which a route was marked out, south from here to Khodjend, then east to Andijan and over the border to Kashgar.”
Komarov smiled.
“Exactly. It felt like a deliberate deception, even before we discovered that they’d returned to their room after killing Rogdayev. Some nerve, though, hanging around like that. Most people would have headed straight for the hills.”
“Oh, they have nerve, all right. Which direction is that bridge you mentioned?”