Another shot and Aram crumpled, still grasping the Chekist’s gun hand. Chatterji fired, and the Chekist flew backward against a stall, scattering apples.
Piatakov sped across the widening space, shouting, “It’s me!” as Chatterji whirled toward him. Behind him the other Chekists had been temporarily swallowed by the retreating crowd.
Aram was dribbling blood from the mouth; there was a gaping hole in his chest. But he was conscious. “Get out of here!” he wheezed.
“But—”
“A blaze of glory, Sergei! Go!”
Piatakov turned to Chatterji, who was skipping from foot to foot like a dancer on hot coals, a manic look in his eyes. He grabbed the Indian’s arm and pulled. “This way!”
He sped down one rapidly emptying aisle, then turned into another where an overturned stall had created a bottleneck. The panicking crowd did its best to part before them, but there wasn’t the space to do it quickly.
“Halt!” a voice screamed out in Russian. A shot was fired, the bullet crashing into a woman just beside them. She sunk to her knees; everyone else flung themselves into the dust. Piatakov and Chatterji raced on, hurdling over prone bodies and leaping up steps as bullets gouged showers of tile from the ancient walls of the central madrasah.
They ran into the building through the nearest doorway, only to find there was no way out.
For want of anything better, Piatakov pulled the Indian into one of the arched enclosures.
The pursuing Chekists followed them in at a run, which was a serious mistake. Piatakov shot one in the legs, Chatterji one in the torso. The two of them raced back out through the doorway, and found themselves facing an audience of thousands. Piatakov had the fleeting sense of coming out onto a stage.
Away to the left, two cars were squealing to a halt in the open space fronting the square. “This way,” Piatakov said, pulling the Indian along the front of the madrasah toward the gap he’d arrived through.
They sped down the dark passage between the buildings, almost knocking over a group of veiled women, dodging under a line of stationary camels straddling the street, and ran into a narrow alley. A hundred yards, two hundred, their feet splashing through the dust, their breath now loud and ragged. For one dreadful moment, it seemed like a dead end, but a concealed turning took them through a yard full of tall clay jars and out into another narrow street. This one was empty and led them to Tashkent Street just in time to watch another car roar past in the Registan’s direction.
Fifteen minutes later they were at the hostel. Piatakov sat down heavily, mopping the sweat from his face.
“Where’s Aram?” Brady wanted to know.
“They got him. He’s probably dead by now.” Piatakov explained what had happened, dragging out each word with what felt an immense effort.
“You left him,” Brady summed up coldly.
Chatterji also looked at Piatakov, as if expecting a new and better explanation. What blame there was was his, Piatakov thought angrily. If the Indian hadn’t started shooting… Piatakov looked up at the American. “He told us to. And he was right. We couldn’t have moved him, and the Chekists would have had us all.”
Brady took this in, standing with one hand clenched inside the other. The Indian still looked resentful.
Piatakov felt sick. First Ivan, now Aram. But what else could he have done?
“You think he was dying,” Brady muttered. “What if he doesn’t?”
Piatakov gave him a cold stare. “You know Aram as well as I do. You know he would never give us up.”
“I know, I know. And he doesn’t know where we are in any case.” Brady was pacing the room like a caged animal. “And the moment it gets dark we’ll be on our way.” He paused at the window and stared at the sprawling Uzbek compound across the street.
“What if they find us before then?” Chatterji asked. He was still breathing heavily, his cheeks twitching. Brady glanced at the Indian, saw something he didn’t like, and walked across to throw an arm around Chatterji’s shoulder. He began talking in a quiet, hypnotic undertone.
On the other side of the room, Piatakov watched the Indian’s body relax, the dangerous glitter fade from his eyes. Piatakov walked across to the other window and the line of blue domes. A blue, blue world. Another comrade gone.
McColl had never seen Caitlin so upset.
“They sent the last girl back in a sack,” she said, in a voice that made him think of broken glass. “They’d cut off her head and her arms and legs, and they pinned a message to the sack: This is your women’s freedom.”
A late-afternoon sunbeam lay across the white tablecloth, revealing a mosaic of ancient stains. McColl put down his glass of beer, adding another ring to the pattern.
“She was only seventeen,” Caitlin continued. “Her name was Ulugai, and she wanted to teach her friends to read.”
“Not a lot to ask,” McColl said quietly.
“They read, they learn, they question. And then they say no,” Caitlin told him.
They were sitting in the huge communal room that took up most of the party hostel’s ground floor. At the time of McColl’s only previous visit to Tashkent, this had been the dining room of the Hotel Tzakho, invariably packed with people eating and talking to the strains of a full orchestra. Composed mostly of Austrian prisoners of war, the orchestra had included a bewildering variety of national melodies in its repertoire. Now the room was nearly empty and almost silent, just them and three Russian men, who were chatting in desultory fashion at a table ten yards away.
“Another woman was lynched for suggesting a husband shouldn’t beat his wife,” Caitlin said with a sigh, as if she couldn’t quite believe it.
“Komarov thinks that the Zhenotdel workers may have been too confrontational,” McColl said, remembering his conversation with the Russian earlier that afternoon. “For their own safety, that is,” McColl quickly added when he saw the look on Caitlin’s face.
“Does he indeed?” she said sarcastically. “And what does he suggest?”
“That the killing of Zhenotdel workers should be classed as a crime against the revolution, rather than as simple murder. I know,” McColl said, raising both palms, “but it does make sense, at least in the short term. Men like these put no value on their own women’s lives, but if they know that the government holds your delegates in the highest regard, they might think twice about killing them. Which won’t help ordinary women much in the meantime, but at least you’ll be able to operate.”
“Perhaps,” she said, looking slightly mollified. She was wearing a long Uzbek dress that she’d bought in the market that afternoon, dark blue with a pattern of large pink and white flowers. It suited her and went well with the bright red Zhenotdel headscarf that was loosely draped around her neck.
Suddenly her face lit up. McColl turned to see two women threading their way through the tables toward them, one dark and probably Uzbek, the other blonde and probably Russian.
Caitlin was on her feet, hugging the former. “This is Rahima,” she told McColl eventually. “We met in Moscow.”
The Russian’s name was Shurateva. “I’ve got two soldiers outside,” she said after the introductions had been completed. “Just in case.”
Caitlin turned to McColl. “It seems you’re not required.”
McColl didn’t hesitate. “I’ll come anyway,” he told her. He needed to establish wireless contact with India but still hadn’t decided what to tell his putative listener. Attending a Zhenotdel meeting in such a hostile environment would be interesting for him and might prove dangerous for her. The empire could wait another day.