Then the men started forward again.
“Inside,” McColl snapped, somewhat unnecessarily: the two soldiers were already halfway through the doorway. McColl ducked in behind them, and began searching for something heavy to reinforce the door.
Caitlin was at his side. “What’s going on?” she asked. The smile was still there in her eyes—it had been too bright to fade so swiftly. Behind her the seated women were all turned toward them, their faces hard to read in the dark.
“A deputation of concerned menfolk,” he told her, finally noticing a useful stretch of laddering. It might do. “Is there another way in or out?”
Caitlin asked Shurateva, who asked an indomitable-looking middle-aged Uzbek woman. The sitting women all scrambled to their feet on hearing the question. “No,” the Uzbek replied in Russian. She walked past McColl to the door. “Who dares to violate my house?” she shouted through it.
Angry cries responded. “Wife stealer! Daughter of Satan!”
There was a thunderous crash, the sound of splintering wood. Before McColl could move, one of the soldiers fired through the wood, eliciting a yell of pain from the other side.
Then the door fell inward, spilling men into the courtyard. The Uzbek women retreated into the farthest corner, some yelling defiance, others streaming tears.
“Stop!” Caitlin cried out in the loudest voice he had ever heard her use. She stood fifteen feet from the invaders, palms held up to ward them off, her eyes brimming with anger. And for a moment she held them, but only that. She knew no words of Uzbek, and Shurateva, joining in, lacked Caitlin’s natural authority. With a thrill of horror, McColl noticed that one man was carrying a sword.
He grabbed Caitlin’s arm and tried to pull her away.
“What are you doing?” she shouted.
He kept pulling, but she squirmed out of his grasp. “Don’t you want to fight another day?” he yelled back.
“I can’t just abandon them!”
McColl instinctively dropped his head as something swished past his ear, then turned to see something flash on the end of an upraised arm. He pulled the trigger, and the man just dropped, his sword falling behind him.
Caitlin was trying to reason with another man, who seemed far more interested in splitting her skull. McColl put a bullet in the back of one of his thighs, and the single shot turned into a volley. A machine gun was firing in the street outside.
A man fell backward through the broken door like a bloodied sack of potatoes. His Uzbek friends were spinning this way and that, uncertain what to do. McColl walked slowly backward, pulling Caitlin with him, until he could feel the wall at his back.
No one came after them. Some men pulled themselves up and over the wall, silhouetting themselves against the night sky before they disappeared. Others just threw down their makeshift weapons and stood there waiting, suddenly submissive. They edged away from the sword on the rug, as if afraid it might explode.
The outside shooting stopped, and at least a dozen armed Chekists rushed in, forcing the Uzbeks onto their knees. The man striding in behind them could only be the local Cheka boss, Yakov Peters.
Komarov followed, his eyes ceasing their search only when they finally fell upon Caitlin.
As Peters’s men began taking the Uzbeks away, the wives who tried to follow were roughly prevented from doing so.
“Let them go with their husbands if they wish,” Peters said, staring at Shurateva.
She met his eyes but had obviously been shaken by the events of the last few minutes.
“Why wasn’t the Cheka informed of this meeting?” Peters asked her.
“We did not think it necessary,” Shurateva said quietly.
“You were wrong,” Peters said flatly. “It’s time you accepted that the Zhenotdel cannot function in Turkestan without our protection.”
No one answered him.
Out in the street ten or more bodies were spread-eagled in the dust, each with an attendant woman sobbing, keening, beating her breast.
“And with their protection it becomes meaningless,” Caitlin said bitterly to no one in particular.
An interesting equation, McColl thought, on the drive to Cheka headquarters. Perhaps what Arbatov had meant by his chasm.
Peters conducted the postmortem. Watching him at work was interesting, if only for the way he defied the usual expectations: McColl saw no signs of the man’s legendary ruthlessness; he seemed like an ordinary, overworked copper. Peters listened patiently to Shurateva, only occasionally interrupting with a pointed question or comment. Komarov perched on a windowsill, face impassive, saying nothing.
Rahima’s husband arrived, a handsome Uzbek about ten years older than her. He was clearly frantic with worry and was overjoyed to find her safe. She held his hand as if he were a little boy who needed comforting.
Caitlin at first seemed withdrawn, pale, almost in shock, but gradually the color seeped back into her face, the light to her eyes. Eventually something Shurateva said produced the faintest of smiles—an impoverished relation of the one McColl had seen on her face while the meeting was underway.
He and she were driven back to the hotel by a taciturn Chekist. They walked up the stairs together; then, just when he thought she would disappear into her room without a word, she turned and took his hand.
“I don’t want to sleep alone tonight,” she said softly, “but…”
What was the “but”? McColl wondered as the syllable hung in the air. He tried to read her expression, then gently kissed her on the lips. “For old time’s sake?” he asked.
“For tonight’s sake.”
She led him into her room.
They undressed in the dark, shadows to each other across the room, then lay down side by side on the mattress. McColl lifted himself on one elbow and kissed her again, his hand stroking the underside of her breast. Her arms encircled his neck and pulled them together.
When darkness fell soon after eight without any sign of the Cheka, Brady convinced the others that delaying their departure until the town was asleep was the sensible thing to do. He was probably right, Piatakov knew, but the extra hours still passed with agonizing slowness.
It was just past midnight when the three men clambered out of their hostel window and dropped onto the bare hillside. All were wearing the native clothes that Brady had bought at the market the previous day.
A half-moon hung in the eastern sky, throwing off just enough light for them to quietly negotiate the steep slope down to the street. There they stopped to listen for any unwelcome sounds, but the road was empty, the silence so complete that Piatakov briefly wondered if he’d lost his hearing. The scrape of Brady’s boot on a stone was reassuring.
They scurried across the street and slowly walked past the summer mosque. The minaret above glinted in the moonlight, but the compound and the alley beside it were shrouded in shadow. “Remember,” Brady whispered, “no shooting, whatever happens.”
They advanced along the alley in single file, the turbaned American leading, left hands keeping contact with the compound wall. The yard ahead was bathed in grey light, and as they approached it, the dog began to growl.
Brady murmured something in English, using the same tone he’d used with Chatterji that afternoon. Piatakov wondered if the Indian was noticing the parallel.
The dog continued growling but didn’t bark. They could all see it now, straining at the end of its tether, waiting to wag its tail. Brady kept murmuring encouragement until he was within reach, then ruffled the back of the neck with one hand and cut the throat with the other. The dog keeled over with hardly a whimper.