“No. But one of them’s been killed—we don’t know which. Not an Indian.”
“So it might be Piatakova’s husband.”
“Yes, she’s distressed. As you would expect.”
McColl boarded the train, wondering why Komarov hadn’t asked where he’d been that morning. Then again, his fictional self was supposed to come from Tashkent, so maybe the Cheka boss had assumed he was visiting family or friends.
He rapped softly on Caitlin’s compartment door and, when he got no answer, gently pushed it open. She was sitting with hands clasped between her knees, a glimmer of tears on her face.
“Can I help?” he asked.
She looked up, managed a quarter smile, and shook her head. “No. Thank you, but no. I need to be alone.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
He retreated into the corridor, taken aback by how upset she was and disappointed with himself for feeling that way.
In the saloon he found Komarov and Maslov. “If one man was killed, what happened to the others?” McColl asked the senior man.
“They escaped,” the Russian said wryly. “And at this rate we’re never going to catch them. Why the hell aren’t we moving?” he asked, sticking his head through a convenient open window in search of the answer.
As if in response, the wheels jerked forward, causing Komarov to draw in his head, and spread his hands wide like a magician completing a trick. McColl couldn’t help laughing; Maslov’s expression suggested they’d both taken leave of their senses.
The magic soon wore off. The train kept stopping and starting at what seemed increasingly frequent intervals. McColl took up residence in the saloon, which by now felt almost like a home away from home—the smell of leather and the rattling wheels, the familiar books and companions. It took him most of the afternoon to notice what had changed; Maslov was no longer able to look him straight in the eye.
McColl got up and walked through onto the rear veranda, feeling butterflies looping the loop in his stomach. He lit a cigarette and watched the rails recede across the empty desert. What had he done to cause such a change in the way the Ukrainian looked at him? He couldn’t believe that his sleeping with Caitlin would affect the young man so.
No, they knew. Perhaps there’d been more than one shadow that morning; perhaps the Indian had already been under surveillance or was himself a Cheka informer. It hardly mattered. They knew.
McColl’s admiration for Komarov went up another notch. A lesser man would simply have arrested him. He also realized with a sinking heart that now he’d have to keep his distance from Caitlin. If he didn’t, she might wind up in front of the same firing squad.
Piatakov crouched down beside the tracks, supporting himself with one hand on a coach buffer, calculating distances and angles. The two Chekists were leaning against the wall of the Kagan station building, talking idly to each other and smoking cigarettes. They had checked all the alighting passengers’ papers when the train arrived but had shown no inclination to investigate those still on board. Presumably the search was still unfocussed: there would have been no time to get a message through before they’d cut the wires. Though that in itself, once discovered, would be suggestive enough.
A one-coach train was sitting in a bay platform some hundred yards away. Beyond it, across a wide expanse of yellow-ochre desert, Piatakov could make out Bokhara’s mud walls and a line of trees that presumably followed a river. Which probably meant that the small train was headed that way. In which case, where was the one to Kerki? The only other wheeled vehicles in sight, aside from the train he’d been on, were the rusted wagons standing in the sand-blown siding.
The two Chekists were looking away, talking to someone inside the station building. Piatakov took his chance, moving out from behind the train in a crouching run. After reaching the end of the building without raising any alarm, he took a cautious look around its farther corner, and found himself eye to eye with a middle-aged Russian woman. She was sitting in a droshky, shading herself with a red parasol. An Uzbek was busily tying her luggage onto the back, stressing the efforts he was making on her behalf with a series of groans and mumbled asides.
Piatakov walked across and offered a respectful bow. “Good afternoon, madam,” he said. “Would you happen to know if there’s a train to Kerki?”
She stared at him for several seconds, probably wondering how a wretch in native clothes could act and talk like a civilized Russian, then decided to be generous. “I’m afraid not,” she said with a gracious smile. “I have only just arrived here myself. My husband is the new consul in Bukhara,” she proudly added in explanation.
“Kerki,” the Uzbek said, emerging from behind the droshky, “nyet.” He made a throat-cutting motion to emphasize the point. “Basmachi trouble,” he added with a grin, and swung himself up into the driving seat. He flicked the whip casually across the back of the pony, which turned to look at him as if expecting confirmation of these travel arrangements. The driver provided it with another flick, and the pony, apparently satisfied, set the droshky in motion. As it turned a tight circle and clattered off, the new consul’s wife gave Piatakov a suitably regal wave.
There was no one else in sight. A whistle announced the departure of one of the trains. “Nyet” seemed clear enough, the Basmachi rebels a reasonable explanation. Piatakov walked back along the end of the station building and again put his head around the corner.
The two Chekists had disappeared, and the one-coach train was in motion, chuffing its way down the single track toward the ancient city walls. He walked swiftly across to the stationary train, stepped up onto the rear veranda, and made his way forward to the carriage they were sharing with a horde of Uzbeks. There were no empty seats and barely room to sit on the floor, but they’d managed to colonize a corner.
“No,” Piatakov told the others in response to their questioning looks. “It’ll have to be the boat.”
As the train continued its fitful journey, Caitlin braced herself for the news that Sergei was dead. It felt such a waste, seemed so stupid, and the sorrow she half expected was already riddled with anger. In truth, she didn’t know what she was feeling, only that something was tearing at her heart.
Waking in the night, she was suddenly convinced that her sleeping with Jack had rebounded on Sergei, that by betraying her husband, she’d somehow abandoned him to the ultimate fate. Which was, of course, absurd. Sergei had left her. He had chosen to follow Brady and Shahumian, and whatever he was, he wasn’t a fool—he must have known what the likely end would be.
Which was no consolation at all. Had she tried hard enough to stop him? Had she been too impatient, too involved in her work? Had she loved him enough? Had she ever loved anyone enough to put them first? A brave heart was good, but maybe a kind one was better.
When the sun eventually rose on another day, she sat and watched the desert go by, thinking that she’d never felt less sure of who she was and what she wanted.
The train reached Samarkand early that afternoon. In the stone station building, a Cheka chauffeur was waiting to lead them to the shiny car parked in the forecourt. It had obviously just been washed in their honor: the ground underneath it was damp; a pile of empty kerosene cans lay scattered on the verge.
They crammed into the car, which should have been parked in the shade. The metal was too hot to touch, the interior like an oven. Caitlin shared the back seat with Maslov and Jack, feeling like she hadn’t slept for days.
The drive through the Russian town took five minutes, ending outside a small house where several Uzbek militiamen were reluctantly standing to a semblance of attention. A thin, bald, and rather cadaverous Russian emerged through a doorway to greet them.