Caitlin read it several times, and could find no silver lining. They were moving her friend away from the heart of power, and it felt like a small step from there to moving women away from the heart of the party’s concerns.
All of which made Caitlin consider her own position. If Russian men—Bolshevik or otherwise—had absorbed all the change they were ready for, then surely it made more sense for someone like her to continue the struggle elsewhere. On the other hand, if the Zhenotdel was under serious threat, it would need the help of people like her. So wouldn’t she just be running away?
Was she just looking for reasons to stay with Jack?
That thought brought her back to the present and her constant companions of worry and guilt. Each time Jack went out, she wondered if she’d see him again, and the knowledge that she’d written those notes to Sergei seemed to hang in the back of her mind like a small dark cloud.
The knock on the door broke into her thoughts, and Maneka’s abrupt appearance threw them aside.
“English downstairs!” she said excitedly. “English with guns! You must get what you need and come with me.”
Repressing the urge to seek clarification, Caitlin took a brief inventory of the room and decided there was nothing she couldn’t live without. But as Maneka was already bundling some of Jack’s clothes into their suitcase, she threw in some of her own.
As they left the room, footsteps were audible on the nearest stairs. Maneka grabbed Caitlin’s wrist and set off in the other direction, down a narrower flight, through an arch, and along a corridor lined with boxes of vegetables. Two servants stepped sharply out of Maneka’s path, and offered Caitlin namaskars as she hurried by. She and Maneka were almost at the end of the passage when a shout rang out behind them.
Not pausing to see whose it was, Caitlin followed the girl through another door and found herself back in the women’s courtyard. The children all stared at her and the suitcase as Maneka tried to explain her presence to the older women. The debate was hardly started when someone rapped on the gate that guarded the second entrance, and an angry dispute erupted beyond it. The men of the household were telling the white invaders that they weren’t allowed in the women’s preserve. The white invaders were demanding the key to the door.
They’ll break it down, Caitlin thought. If she’d been wearing the Indian clothes, they might not have noticed her. As it was…
“Please,” Maneka was saying, tugging again at her wrist. There was a third door half-hidden by foliage, which at first refused to open but then did so with an angry squeak. Another corridor, another gate, and they were out in an alley.
“That way,” Maneka said, pointing her toward the busy-looking road at the end.
Caitlin took the girl’s hand and squeezed it. “Thank you,” she said as the sound of screams came over the wall to her left. The “English” had invaded the women’s sanctum.
“Go,” Maneka told her.
She went, hurrying down the alley with the suitcase in hand, wondering where she should go and how she and Jack would find each other again. Their old room at the serai, she decided, if she could find it.
She needn’t have worried. As she inched her way out of the alley, a brown hand in a uniformed sleeve closed around her neck. When she struggled, the policeman quickly released her, but not, she soon realized, from any intention of letting her go. He was shocked at having laid hands on white skin.
While his partner recovered the suitcase she’d dropped, he harried her down the street like a sheepdog, urging her this way and that without coming too close. Several hundred interested eyes watched them pass, and some at least had the sense to look amused. An open car had been backed into Sinha’s street and now stood waiting by his gate, upper body gleaming and lower half caked in dust.
Her captor’s partner dropped her suitcase in the back seat and disappeared into the house, emerging a few moments later with a red-faced Englishman in civilian clothes. In their wake a posse of outraged Indian men were protesting the breaking of purdah with shaking fists and shouts of defiance.
Without looking back the Englishman flicked a hand at them, a gesture of dismissal that Nero might have practiced.
“Where’s Jack McColl?” he barked at her.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“When did he go out?”
“He didn’t. He’s been staying somewhere else,” she added, hoping it would help Harry.
“Where?”
“I told you, I don’t know.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“That’s your privilege.”
He took her upper arm in a tight grip, walked her across to the open car, and told her to get in. She did as she was told. Kicking the overgrown schoolboy might make for a few joyful seconds but probably wouldn’t be wise.
McColl arrived at the end of Sinha’s street at the same time as the car. He took in the scene in an instant: the pedestrians and slow-moving tongas choking the Dariba Kalan, the open car with the Indian soldiers up front, Caitlin and the IPI’s Morley sitting behind them.
Morley saw him in the same instant, but his true identity clearly took longer to register. McColl had one foot on the running board and the Webley out from under his dhoti, before the other man could react.
“Don’t anyone move,” McColl said, holding the gun against Morley’s head. “Let’s go,” he told Caitlin, aware of the growing space around him as the locals slowly backed off. How could he disable the car and its occupants?
“Why don’t we take the car?” Caitlin suggested.
He grinned. “What a good idea. Out!” he told the two Indians.
They obeyed.
“Now start walking. That way.” He gestured toward the south.
With one last hopeless look at their English boss, they started trudging away.
“You won’t escape,” Morley said without a great deal of conviction.
“Now you,” McColl ordered, stepping back to let him out. “Take out your gun, and put it on the ground,” he added.
Morley did as he was told.
“Now walk.” McColl picked up the gun intending to hand it to Caitlin, but she was getting in behind the wheel. “I should have guessed you’d learned to drive,” he said. He climbed in beside her, once again conscious of the multitude around them.
As Caitlin drove carefully up the crowded street, the onlookers’ stares grew no less incredulous. It took a few minutes for McColl to realize why: a white woman chauffeuring a native man was not a common sight in British India.
The Hardest Thing
“I never liked this damn business from the beginning,” Colonel Fitzwilliam said, losing his usual linguistic precision in the stress of the moment.
Oh yes? Cunningham thought. The plan had originated in Delhi, if not in Fitzwilliam’s brain, with his obvious approval and encouragement. Cunningham idly wondered who, if anyone, would garner the blame. Always assuming that anyone would ever admit a mistake had been made.
“Too tricky by half,” Fitzwilliam was muttering as he strode up and down the room, glass of whiskey in hand. Through the window other club members could be seen in various degrees of midafternoon wakefulness.
The colonel placed his glass on the polished sideboard, extracted an oval Turkish cigarette from his silver case, and lit it with an English match. “You are certain a photograph was taken?”
“Not absolutely. But I saw something reflect the light, and what other reason would he have had to set up such a meeting?”