The Dark Clouds Shining

Unworthy Empire

The tonga deposited Alex Cunningham at the end of the Kudsia Road. He lifted out his suitcase, paid the preagreed amount, and assured his young driver that there was no point in waiting. The boy turned the horse in a tight half circle, and offered up the usual reproachful look before gently twitching the reins and rattling off down the road.

Cunningham took a deep breath and started walking, mindful of the hot tropical sun and the strange, sweet scents of the flourishing gardens. Hundreds of invisible birds seemed to be singing their hearts out, and the distant sound of racket on ball, interrupted by bursts of excited laughter, offered evidence of human life behind the curtains of bougainvillea.

At a cursory glance, the Indian Political Intelligence building was just another European bungalow in the Delhi cantonment, but the soldiers lurking in the trees and the wireless mast reaching up to the heavens rather gave it away. A replacement had presumably been included in the plans for the new city five miles to the south, but Cunningham doubted the setting would have the same charm.

He had no sooner shown the soldiers his papers than a tall, fair-haired young man in a shirt and slacks appeared in the doorway. “Cunningham?” the man asked with a faint Yorkshire accent. “Morley, Nigel,” he said, offering his hand. “We’ve been expecting you.” He looked around. “You might as well leave your luggage here for the minute. We’ve got you a bungalow near the Ridge. Come this way.”

Cunningham followed him across the marble-floored hall and into a large reception room. “Help yourself to a drink,” Morley said, pointing out the decanters on the side table. “I’ll see what the colonel’s up to.”

Cunningham poured himself a generous whiskey and looked around the room. The creamy white walls were patterned by sun and shadow, the furniture a mixture of raffia and mahogany. Not a lot had changed since his last visit in 1918.

“The colonel will see you now,” Morley said from the door.

Another corridor took them through the bungalow and out onto a bougainvillea-draped veranda. Colonel Mortimer Fitzwilliam was sitting in an incongruously European chair with a polished walnut frame and burgundy velvet upholstery. His suit—the sort of limp white affair favored by tropical traveling salesmen—had rather less class.

Cunningham shook the outstretched hand and accepted the offer of a simple wooden chair. Morley remained standing.

“Glad you made it,” the colonel was saying. “How was the trip up from Bombay?” he asked, with the tonelessness of one repeating an oft-used phrase.

“No worse than usual,” Cunningham replied noncommittally.

The colonel smiled. “Ah, well, I expect we’ll be using airplanes soon.” He looked up at the sky, as if expecting one to appear at that very moment. “Ah, well,” he repeated, turning back to Cunningham, “I just wanted to welcome you in person. As to your business here”—the tone implied distaste, but whether that came from patrician breeding or a lack of sympathy with this particular endeavor wasn’t clear—“Morley here will fill you in on the current state of play.”

It sounded like a dismissal, and Cunningham got to his feet.

“At any rate,” the colonel said, staring at his garden, “it must be for the best that we’re all working together on this one.”

Cunningham presumed he meant Five, the IPI, and British India’s Department of Criminal Intelligence. “Indeed,” he agreed.

“You spent several years here, didn’t you?” the colonel asked.

“Three in Calcutta, two here in Delhi.”

“Then you know what we’re up against.”

“I hope so, sir.”

“Good, good,” the colonel said, finally signaling the end of the interview with a limpid wave of the wrist. A muttered “desperate remedies” floated after Cunningham and Morley as they reentered the bungalow.

Two short passages brought them to a small and untidy office. The walls were covered with maps, the desk with papers; a line of papier-mâché elephants sat atop a display cabinet packed with handguns that went back a century or more. Morley moved a pile of files onto the floor and offered Cunningham the newly empty chair.

It seemed hotter than it had outside, despite the fan whirring erratically overhead.

One of the maps was peppered with colored flags representing various expressions of political dissent. There seemed to be a lot of them, and more than half were red, depicting the highly serious kind. “How bad are things?” Cunningham asked.

Morley followed his gaze and shrugged. “Who knows? I think London’s been getting a trifle complacent lately. No offence, old boy,” he added with a crooked smile.

“None taken. There’s no money to spare, and complacency’s a damn sight cheaper than panic.”

Morley was rummaging around in a desk drawer. “Right,” he said, extracting a bulging folder, “I’ll give you the news as we got it ourselves. Seventh August—we had the first report of a gun battle in Kerki…” He turned and reached an arm toward the large map behind him. “Which is here,” he added, tapping with a finger. “There were Europeans involved, but we didn’t find out who until”—he moved on to the next message—“the eleventh. The battle took place on the twenty-eighth of July. The local Russian authorities—led, incidentally, by some high-ranking Cheka boss from Moscow—tried to stop a riverboat heading upstream past the town. Several men were killed, including the Cheka boss. There were two Europeans on the boat, who turned out to be members of the Good Indian team. By the time we heard about all this, they were halfway across Afghanistan, on their way to Kabul.”

“And McColl?”

“We had that message you know about, the one from Samarkand on”—he checked through the file—“on the twenty-fourth of July, and nothing since. According to our source in Kerki, the Cheka boss was already holding an Englishman, who might have been McColl. If so, he was probably taken to Tashkent, questioned, and shot. Which will save us the trouble.”

“Was there really no way of bringing him back on board?” Cunningham asked.

“When?”

“I don’t know. There must have been almost a month between his arrival in Moscow and his reaching… wherever you said the battle was.”

“Kerki.” Morley shrugged. “Maybe. But once Suvorov had taken the ‘need to know’ directive as literally as he did… well, the colonel decided we couldn’t take the risk.” He looked at Cunningham. “You knew McColl, right? I’ve talked to others who knew him in Calcutta during the war, and they all said much the same thing, that they never really thought of him as one of us.”

“No, he wasn’t.” Cunningham couldn’t say he’d ever liked the man’s holier-than-thou approach when it came to dealing with Indians, but he had been annoyingly proficient.

Morley turned to another page in his file. “Brady made contact in Kabul on August nineteenth and collected all the papers he and the others needed. He was told about Gandhi’s plans to visit Delhi in the third week of September.” Morley looked up. “Our loin-clothed friend is planning to stir up trouble during the Prince of Wales’s visit,” he explained. “And Brady was pleased to hear that—he thinks the local police will be stretched to the limit while the prince is here. Oh, and we did ask him about McColl. Brady said he hadn’t run into him in Russia.”

Morley consulted the next cable. “August thirty-first. They didn’t want to spend more than three weeks in Delhi, so they stayed a fortnight at Flashman’s Hotel in Peshawar and only arrived here a couple of days ago. We’ve put them up at Sayid Hassan’s…”

“Who’s he?”

“Ah, since your time. He’s from some tin-pot royal family or other—somewhere in Rajasthan, I think. Fortunately for us, he has some rather disgusting habits, and last year he got a little carried away with one of his little boys. We helped him out of the mess, which rather put him in our debt. He’s gone off to the hills for a holiday while this business is completed.” Morley grinned. “We’ve provided the Good Indian team with servants, a genuine one and three of our men. The real one’s there to show the others how it’s done. The team has been asked not to stray—we told them it’s for secrecy’s sake, but really it’s because it makes the surveillance that much easier. If and when they try to twist things around, we’ll be on them like a ton of bricks.”

“If? I don’t think there’s any doubt that Brady will try.”

“When, then.”

“Desperate remedies,” Cunningham murmured to himself.

“You don’t sound too sure about all this.”

“I’m sure enough. Whichever way it goes, they’ll be dead. And with any luck, Gandhi will be, too.”

“We certainly won’t be sorry to see the back of him. He can’t be ignored, he can’t be arrested without making things worse, and he can’t be killed by any obvious friend of ours without turning him into a martyr…”

“I know the rationale,” Cunningham said dryly.

The shadows were lengthening on Chandni Chowk, but the offices on one side of the street were still bathed in dazzling sunlight. On the other, leaning in a derelict doorway, McColl idly wondered what the street had looked like before the bomb attack on the viceroy had prompted the authorities to cut down all the trees.

Few in the throng gave him more than a passing glance. Those who did saw a tall, dark-skinned figure with a thick mustache and beard wearing a large floppy turban, an embroidered waistcoat over a white kurta, and matching cotton trousers. In the shadows he convinced as a Pathan, and even in full daylight, most would take him for one of the half-caste unmentionables fathered by British soldiers and administrators over the previous century.

The door across the street opened, and two men emerged, one in Indian dress, the other in a smart European suit. Harkishen Sinha was the latter.

Almost a decade had passed since their paths had last crossed, here in Delhi during McColl’s last visit as an automobile salesman. That meeting had not gone well. Sinha had suspected, quite rightly, that his old friend was also involved in intelligence gathering for the British government, and McColl had found the Indian’s views on British rule both glib and judgmental. Their prewar years at Oxford, and the friendship they’d forged as outsiders at the shrine of English breeding, had felt like a distant memory. In the intervening years, both men had written a few stilted letters, as if reluctant to accept that their friendship was actually over.

A situation like this one, McColl thought, could hardly have been foreseen by either of them.

Their conversation over, the two Indians went their separate ways, the stranger heading west, Sinha crossing the street on a diagonal and walking south. McColl started after him, keeping a fifty-yard gap between them, and remembering a summer day almost twenty years before. They’d been sitting outside a pub by the river, and Sinha had suddenly exclaimed, in his perfect English, how muted everything was. “The sounds, the colors, the smells—everything. I feel like I’m wrapped in cotton wool.”

His old friend turned down a twisting street that McColl remembered came out in front of the Jama Masjid mosque. But after a couple of hundred yards, the Indian turned left into what appeared to be a dead-end alley, and McColl reached the corner in time to see Sinha vanish through a gateway.

A few seconds later McColl let himself through the gate and into a pleasant courtyard, where a servant moved to intercept him. Sinha, glancing back, saw only the costume. “What do you want?” he asked curtly in Urdu.

The servant was trying to push him back, but McColl stood his ground. “Hello, Harry,” he said.

Sinha’s mouth gaped open. “Jack?” he asked, as if he could scarcely believe his ears.

“In person.”

“What…?” Sinha noticed his servant watching with interest. “Nikat, shut the gate,” he told the man abruptly. “Jack, come this way,” he urged, hustling McColl through an archway, across another courtyard, and into what looked like his study. Legal briefs were neatly stacked along one wall.

“How are you, Harry?” McColl asked.

“I’m well, thank you. But…”

“And the children?”

“They are well…”

“I—”

“Jack, what is this?” Sinha almost shouted. “Why have you come to my house dressed like a Punjabi bandit? Is this some stupid trick of your political police?”

McColl put a hand on the Indian’s shoulder. “No,” he said calmly. “I have come for your help.”

“But why this fancy dress, as you English call it?”

“Because it would be dangerous for both of us if I was seen visiting you. Even this is risky, but… well, I have no other choices.”

“I do not understand. Who is looking for you?”

“My own people. The ‘political police’ you were just talking about, I suppose.” It crossed his mind that using the same words to describe the Cheka and Five seemed less ludicrous than it would have a couple of months ago.

“But why?” Sinha wanted to know. “Why are your people after you? Have you stolen a polo trophy or something?”

McColl laughed. He was, he realized, really pleased to see Harry Sinha again. Whatever happened.

Sinha looked at him, then burst out laughing himself, and for a moment it felt as if the last twenty years had evaporated, and they were back in one of their college rooms, finding a shared hilarity in the farcical vagaries of Oxford life.

Could he tell his friend the whole story? McColl asked himself again. He could but he wouldn’t. Or at least not yet. It wasn’t just a matter of trust: Sinha would feel he had to tell others, to warn Gandhi, and who knew where that might lead? It would increase the danger to Sinha himself, and it would put both McColl’s and Caitlin’s freedom at risk. And, as McColl was prepared to admit to himself, it would take matters out of his hands. Somehow, deep down, absurdly or not, this had become an intensely personal business in so many different ways, between him and Brady, between Caitlin and Sergei, between her and himself.

“I can’t tell you much, Harry,” he said. “Only that I am not working for British intelligence anymore.”

“Then whom?”

McColl smiled inwardly at his friend’s perfect grammar and at the question. Who was he working for? Cumming? The dead Komarov? “Harry,” he said, “I know you want self-government.”

“More than that. Swaraj. Complete independence.”

“Okay. I can only promise that we’re on the same side and that if you knew the whole story, you would support me in what I’m doing. If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be asking you for help.”

Sinha gave him a long, hard look, sighed, and finally smiled. “I believe you,” he said. “But how can I help?”

“I need to borrow a little money.”

“That presents no difficulty.”

“And I need somewhere to stay. In the Indian part of the city. For a week, perhaps two.”

“You are welcome here.”

“I have someone with me.”

“Oh…”

“A woman. I think it would be better, in the circumstances, to say she is my wife.”

“She is English?”

“American. But she has been living in Russia for the last three years.”

“Russia?” Sinha exclaimed.

“As a journalist at first, and since the revolution she’s been working for the Bolsheviks’ women’s department.”

“My God,” Sinha said. “How long have you known this ‘wife?’”

“Eight years. It’s a long story, and I hope to bore you with it later. But for the moment… well, the less you know, the better for you.”

Sinha shook his head, but more in amusement than disbelief. “I am pleased you came to me, Jack. But I am not surprised by all this. You were always—how do you say it?—the stranger at the feast? That is why you became my friend at Oxford and why you became a spy, and it seems to me most likely that this is why you finally came to realize that your empire is not worthy of you.”

“Perhaps,” McColl said, remembering what someone had told him once—that old friends were always the best mirrors.

“So when will you bring your wife here?”

“This evening, if that’s okay?”

“I will be waiting for you.”

Half an hour later McColl ducked out of a busy street, passed through the narrow doorway of a serai, and walked across its inner courtyard. The proprietor’s wife looked up from her spinning wheel and gave him an uncertain smile—Pathans were not universally popular in Delhi. He wished her a good evening in Urdu and headed up the creaking stairs.

In their room two geckos were contemplating each other on the ceiling. Caitlin was out on the balcony, dozing on the mattress. He stood and gazed down at her, the hair half hiding the face he knew so well, the white cotton robe wound tightly around the body that never failed to arouse him.

Seven weeks had passed since that day beside the river, since Komarov’s death and their decision to continue the pursuit together. She was thinner now, browner, the lines of her face drawn a shade harder. He found it difficult to believe that he could ever love anyone else.

It had taken them more than a month to cross Afghanistan, eking out McColl’s emergency supply of silver coins. They had sometimes journeyed alone, sometimes with caravans, once even with a traveling cinema, rarely covering more than ten miles a day, but knowing that their quarry would be moving little faster. No one hurried in Afghanistan, a land where time was kept by the rivers and mountains, where humans still recognized forces greater than themselves. It had felt like time on loan from the rest of their lives, doing what humans had always done: eating, drinking, traveling, sleeping, and making love.

Then, one night in September, they had passed between the jaws of the Khyber with a Pathan caravan and seen the plains of the Punjab laid out below, a patchwork of greens fading into the east. Two evenings later they had boarded the train in Peshawar like people stepping back into civilization’s dream, with hardening faces, touches that felt merely physical, words that seemed bogged down in consonants.

Another three dawns had brought them to the Delhi station. McColl, turbaned and bearded, had walked out past a DCI man he recognized from 1915; Caitlin, tanned and veiled, had attracted even less attention. They had taken this room in a nearby serai. From its balcony they could see, in one direction, the station itself, forever smoke-signaling arrivals and departures, and in the other, looming above the ancient city, Shah Jahan’s Red Fort, stone at the heart of the British Empire.

McColl’s insistence that they rest for a day had less to do with physical need than his acutely felt reluctance to raise the curtain on the final act. That night, as they’d moved together in such effortless harmony, he’d had the sudden terrifying feeling that the two of them had crammed a lifetime’s love into only a couple of months.

And now the curtain was going up.

Until he met her, he had always thought people in love arranged their lives around that emotional fact. But Caitlin took the opposite view, that people should decide what they wanted from life and adjust their love lives to fit. This, she said, was what men did anyway, usually at the woman’s expense.

He could see her point, but…

He still had no idea whether or not she was going back to Russia or how he could live without her if she did.

As if in response to this thought, Caitlin opened her eyes. “Hello,” she said sleepily. For a moment she looked vulnerable, but the world soon took her back. She pulled herself up into a sitting position, her back against the balcony wall, and gave him a questioning look.

“Yes,” he told her. “We can stay with Harry. He’s expecting us in an hour or so.”

“I’ll get ready.”

Darkness had fallen by the time they started the short journey across the city. Caitlin still felt uncomfortable—not to mention vaguely ridiculous—wearing the veil, although after a month of doing so, she supposed she should be used to the damn thing. It wasn’t just the political insult it reflected; the cloth itself felt physically restrictive, as if it stopped her from breathing properly.

“It’s all in your head,” McColl had told her half seriously when she first mentioned it.

She had felt like kicking him, and apparently it had shown.

“When all you can see is the eyes,” he’d remarked, “it’s amazing how expressive they are.”

They were passing through the Queen’s Gardens now, gigantic palm fronds swaying above the tonga. “This is beautiful,” she murmured in Russian. As McColl had pointed out, two many Indians understood English for them to use it in public.

“Make the most of it,” he replied. “You may be stuck indoors for several days.”

“I know,” she said tersely. He had already explained that here in Delhi women—whether Hindu or Muslim—rarely went out alone. Even veiled, she would stick out like a sore thumb. “I sometimes think,” she added tartly, “that there’s a man inside you that likes the idea of the woman imprisoned at home.”

“You don’t believe that,” he said equably. “I just know how much trouble you have pretending to be someone you’re not. An admirable trait in itself but not a very useful one in these circumstances.”

“All right,” she said grudgingly. “Tell me more about where we’re going. Is it a big house? Who else lives in it?”

“It’s huge. And probably home to at least twenty people once you include the servants. Both of Harry’s parents died in the flu epidemic in 1919, and he’s the eldest of four brothers. They all live there, and at least three of them are married with children. As head of the family, Harry’s like a minor dictator—what he says goes, and no one would question his authority. Men or women.” McColl gave her a sideways glance. “I hope you’re not planning a full-scale agitation.”

“Not immediately,” she told him with a smile.

They drove past the Town Hall and into the bedlam of Chandni Chowk. On Caitlin’s side of the street, a line of customers in various stages of lathering, like frames from a moving picture, were awaiting a barber’s further attention. A man walked across the street in front of their tonga, holding two children with great delicacy, just a finger and thumb on each child’s wrist, guiding rather than pulling. She watched as they were swallowed by the throng on the sidewalk, fascinated. Such gentleness seemed more alien than any sight or smell.

“Your friend,” she asked McColl, “is he a member of the Indian National Congress?”

“Yes.”

“And he is rich. A lawyer, you said. Educated at an English school?”

“Winchester.”

“This National Congress party—is it an anti-imperialist party?”

“That depends on what you mean by anti-imperialist. They don’t like the empire they’re in.”

“Mmm. And are all the leaders rich people educated in England?”

“I don’t know,” McColl replied. “I don’t suppose there are many peasants and workers in the leadership, but most of those will be far too busy trying to keep their heads above water to attend conferences. From what I saw in Moscow, the Asian delegates at the Hotel Lux were mostly intellectuals from well-to-do families.”

“I suppose so,” she agreed. They had turned down a narrower street, past a row of shops whose insides glittered and shone.

“Goldsmiths,” McColl explained unnecessarily. “This is the Dariba Kalan.”

The name meant nothing to her. Their driver edged the tonga past a cow that was idly nosing through a pile of refuse, then continued down the narrow lane with its high walls and carved wooden doorways. Bright eyes in dark faces lifted to watch them go by, then returned to the business at hand.

McColl stopped the tonga at the end of the cul-de-sac and paid off the driver. Sinha was waiting in the outer courtyard, still dressed in the European suit, looking more than a little anxious. He was, Caitlin thought, extraordinarily handsome.

He closed the gate behind them before going through the process of a formal greeting, shaking McColl’s hand and offering Caitlin a namaskar, hands held together as if in prayer. “Some supper is being prepared,” he said. “But first let me show you your room.”

He led them through the archway, and up some winding stairs to a veranda that overlooked another courtyard, in which several seats were surrounded by a circle of tropical plants. An oil lamp above one doorway suffused the space with golden light, turning it into a mysterious grotto.

“What a lovely place,” Caitlin murmured.

“That is the women’s courtyard,” Sinha told her.

They reached the room. It was large, but the only items of furniture were a huge double bed and an old chest of drawers. A basin of water sat on the chest, and two towels had been laid out on the embroidered coverlet. Overlapping rugs in Asian styles covered the wooden floor.

“If there’s anything else you want…” Sinha said, looking first at McColl and then at Caitlin.

“Nothing,” Caitlin told him. “And thank you for taking us in.” If you’re ever in Brooklyn, she felt like adding, but first she had to be there herself. “I would be honored to meet your wife,” she added. “Whenever it is convenient.”

Sinha smiled and said he thought that would be possible on the following day.

Another thing occurred to her. “Have you any objections to my wearing Western dress while I’m here?”

“None at all,” Sinha said. “As you see, I wear it myself. Caitlin… I’m sorry, but Jack hasn’t told me your surname.”

“Hanley,” she said, because it required no explanation. And, she knew, because that was who she was again.

“Well, Caitlin. There are those in my country who wish to beat the English at their own game, and there are those who would rather go back to the game we played before they came. I am in the former camp,” he concluded with a smile. “And much as I like my wife in a sari, I also like her in a dress.” He turned to McColl. “Perhaps we could talk in the morning, before I leave for work?”

“Of course.”

“Then I’ll leave you to get settled in.”

Soon thereafter, food arrived: an enormous tray with at least a dozen different dishes. Once they’d eaten, different servants showed them to the bathing quarters. Caitlin threw water over herself with more energy than she’d known she had, and returned to their room to find a gorgeous red-and-blue sari draped across the bed.

Having slowly but surely mastered the art of putting one on over the last few weeks, she couldn’t resist the temptation.

“You look like a princess out of the Arabian Nights,” McColl said from the doorway.

She raised her eyebrows. “You wouldn’t be thinking yourself a sultan?”

“I wouldn’t presume.”

“Very wise,” she said. “If you think of yourself as a servant, you could come over here and unwrap me.”

Some time later she snuggled up into his shoulder, one arm draped across his stomach. “Jack,” she began, “tell me again—why are we here?”

“In this house? I thought—”

“No, in Delhi. In India. I know we’ve talked about this,” she said. “I just need to be clear.” Though whether it was clarity or certainty she needed, she wasn’t sure. Perhaps, in this instance, they were one and the same.

He was silent for several moments. “To stop them is the obvious answer.”

“And why is that important to you?”

Another pause. “Because I like and admire Mohandas Gandhi and because saving his life seems a thing worth doing. Because I loathe the people who set this thing in motion. The sort of people who thought naming this operation after some homicidal general’s remark was a clever joke.” He sighed. “And, I suppose, because I feel I owe it to Cumming and Komarov,” he added, thinking how appalled the two men would be to find themselves sharing a cause.

“And that’s all?” she asked once he had fallen silent.

“No,” he admitted. “It isn’t. I want revenge—justice—for Fedya. And for all the others: that mounted cop in Paterson, the constables in Hampshire, the night watchman at the quarry. Not to mention all the people he’s killed in the last three months.”

“And revenge for what he did to you?”

“For trying to kill me in Dublin and Moscow? No, I don’t hold a grudge over that—I wasn’t an innocent bystander.”

She twisted onto her back, eyes on the slow-moving fan. “This is all about Brady. What about Sergei?”

“I don’t know him,” McColl said simply. “But they all have to be stopped.”

She turned to look at him, her head supported on one arm. “You don’t resent him for what he meant to me?”

“Not enough to kill him. What about you? Are you only here to save him from himself?”

She ignored the flicker of anger. “I’d like to, but it’s not why I’m here.”

“Then why?”

“Because I want to stop them, too. I don’t know about Gandhi—maybe he’s what you say; maybe he’s the Menshevik that Sergei thinks he is. But assassinating anyone is just plain wrong. It’s the opposite of politics, a way of avoiding the necessary work, a lazy thinker’s shortcut. And this particular assassination would give the revolution a bad name here in India and all over the world. It would demean us and make us think less of ourselves. Komarov was right—without the rule of law, everything else will turn to dust.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?”

“There has to be something better. Brady’s small-fry compared to the bastards who run countries, but they both think stepping over corpses is the only way to get anywhere. Komarov stepped over them, too, but at least he noticed what was under his feet. He knew that killing should hurt the killer and that, when it didn’t, no good would come of it. Which is Gandhi’s philosophy in a nutshell. The world can’t afford to lose him.”

She moved her head back onto his shoulder, feeling a sudden surge of love. They lay there for a minute and more, the sounds of their breathing underlining the silence.

“So what’s the plan?” she asked at last.

“There are things we need to know before can we make one.”

“The first being where they are. We’re not even sure they’re in Delhi.”

“No, but it’s a very good bet. According to Komarov it was the only Indian city that Brady researched in the Moscow library.”

“How are we going to find them?”

“I don’t know yet. First I want to know who authorized the whole business. If this is some lunatic scheme thought up by a small group of mid-ranking hotheads, then all we need to do is alert their superiors. Either with the help of my old boss in London or more directly.” He smiled. “I could climb in through the viceroy’s bedroom window and tell him in person.”

Caitlin tried to ignore the mental picture his suggestion evoked—the viceroy and his wife in matching nightcaps, spluttering indignation. “But you don’t believe this is some small cabal.”

“No, but I’ve been wrong before.”

“So how do we find out?” she asked, idly stroking his belly.

“That’s easy. I ask someone who’ll know. At gunpoint.”

“And if that person tells you it goes right to the top?”

“Then it’s up to us.”

Her hand came to rest. “How long do we have?”

“According to the newspaper I read today, Gandhi arrives in Delhi a week from tomorrow.”

The Women’s Courtyard

The morning sun was still peering through the mist above the Yamuna River as they drove south through the half-completed new city. The road, never good, rapidly deteriorated as they headed out into open country, causing Sergei Piatakov to bounce up and down on the leather-upholstered back seat.

The Ford belonged to their absentee Indian landlord, and the three of them—ostensibly two Europeans and an Indian acquaintance interested in tiger hunting—were being chauffeured to a suitable spot for testing the three modern German rifles that their British hosts had supplied.

The guns weren’t the only thing they’d found waiting for them at Sayid Hassan’s luxurious villa. The four servants’ eagerness to please their foreign visitors had done nothing to allay Brady’s suspicions, and he had instructed Piatakov and Chatterji to search their quarters while he lectured the servants on their duties. Copies of the same neatly typed instructions had been hidden under three of the mattresses.

As Aram had said more than once, if it occurs to you, it has probably also occurred to them.

In the seat beside the driver, Brady turned to ask Chatterji if he’d ever been on a tiger hunt.

“Yes, many times when I was a boy.” The Indian began recounting a long anecdote, the obvious purpose of which was to distance himself from his privileged upbringing. Piatakov’s attention soon wavered. He had once had a Siberian tiger in his sights but hadn’t been able to pull the trigger—the animal had seemed so full of life and grace.

He allowed himself a rueful smile. After the last three years, he no longer had that problem where humans were concerned.

They motored on through several villages and stretches of semijungle, the day warming, dust rising in a long cloud behind them. Almost two hours after leaving the city, the car turned in through a ruined stone gateway, drove down a tree-shaded avenue, and emerged at the top of a large open space. The slope before them was littered with pieces of brick.

They all got out and walked a short distance, the servant-chauffeur carrying the three rifles, Brady their box of shells.

“Must have been a temple,” the American said, stopping to pick up a lump of brick that showed traces of faded red paint. He looked up. “How about down there?” he suggested, indicating a group of strange-looking trees some two hundred yards away. “That’s farther than we’ll have to shoot.”

The servant walked off down the slope to place the targets. He looked somewhat nervous, Piatakov thought. A premonition, perhaps.

Brady was helping Chatterji with the loading. The two of them had grown closer since the gunfight at Kerki, the American teaching the young Indian all the gun tricks he’d learned in his years as a rebel. Piatakov wasn’t sure he believed even half of Brady’s stories, but there was no doubting the man’s love affair with the fabled American West or his proficiency with the heavy Colt revolver. The Indian seemed enthralled, and probably was. Like a child who’d found a more suitable father.

Piatakov had been fond of Brady himself in the early days, and could understand the attraction. But he and the American had been drifting apart for quite a while. They were still allies, still comrades in the way that soldiers often were, but it no longer felt like a friendship. Perhaps it never had been. Perhaps Aram had been the glue that held the two of them together. Or perhaps they’d been more like people falling in love, seduced by the thought of a fresh beginning, the prospect of a new and better life.

As with lovers, the excitement had slowly worn off.

He thought of Caitlin thousands of miles away in Moscow, banging heads together, getting her work done. He smiled, just at the moment the first shot crashed out, pulling silence down across the jungle in the wake of its echo.

After searching in vain for any Russian news, Caitlin put aside the Eastern Mail, which a servant had brought with breakfast. She stared at the ceiling for a minute or so, then abruptly swung herself off the bed and started pacing to and fro. It couldn’t have been more than an hour since Jack had left, which meant it was only midmorning. Lunch, the next item on her sparse agenda, was still a long time ahead.

When Jack wasn’t with her, the reality of her situation quickly reasserted itself. The frustration and boredom that came with enforced seclusion was bad enough without the knowledge that what followed might well be worse. When she did get to leave the house, it would probably be to see Sergei, and since she doubted that anything good would come from the meeting, that prospect was far from enticing. She didn’t want anyone killed—Jack, Sergei, even Brady—but a peaceful resolution was hard to imagine.

She thought about their conversation of the night before. Jack had been honest, she thought, probably more so than she had. She still wasn’t sure why she’d come all this way, or which of the reasons she’d given were half-truths and rationalizations.

It was certainly true that she felt an obligation to Sergei and, rather more surprisingly, one to Komarov as well. What she hadn’t mentioned to Jack was her reluctance to leave him again.

All feelings, of course. A cold appraisal told her that Sergei and Komarov had respectively abandoned and kidnapped her and had thereby forfeited any claim to loyalty. And if her work in Moscow wasn’t more important than her feelings for Jack, why had she given him up in the first place? With the Zhenotdel facing a probable crisis, getting home to the capital should have been her top priority.

She told herself things might have been different if there’d been an easy way to return, if trains had been running to Kerki, if it hadn’t seemed certain that Brady and her husband would disable the Red Turkestan. She could have insisted that the soldiers take her back across the desert, but memories of the way some had looked at her on the outbound trip had been enough to quash that idea. Being raped, murdered, and left for the vultures hadn’t seemed like much of a future. So going on with Jack had hardly been irrational.

Trouble was, she knew she’d have done it anyway.

And even more disturbing than the knowledge that she wanted to go with him was the realization that she had no burning desire to go back. Or at least not yet. She remembered telling Jack, on the day they left Kerki, that as far as each other was concerned, they would have to learn to live in the present. And for seven wonderful weeks, they’d given a good impression of doing so. But she’d known it couldn’t last forever, that sooner or later the future would come banging on her door.

Did she just need a break? Her life over the last three years had been a damned sight easier than the lives of most Russians, but it had still been a great deal harder than anything she’d ever known before. Ten-hour days and six-day weeks without any breaks in a country whose economy had virtually collapsed and whose people were dying in droves. It might have been worth it—she still thought it had been—but the cost had been high. Almost everyone she knew seemed physically and emotionally drained, herself included. So why not take the long way back—leave India with Jack, visit her family in Brooklyn, and only then return to her desk in Moscow?

Or was that also self-deluding? Over the last few months, other people’s doubts and worries about the state of the revolution had felt like constant companions. Sergei’s sense of betrayal, Komarov’s fear of where all the killing would lead them, Kollontai’s pessimism, and Arbatov’s gaping chasm—only four years had passed since all these people had ecstatically welcomed the revolution, and now the only thing they had in common was the sense that it was all going wrong.

The revolution had certainly lost its soft edges, its warmth and comradeship. And, she thought, its outlandishness, its impudence and cheek. It had become less Irish, more English. Lenin might look like a leprechaun, but these days he felt more like an irascible principal whose pupils had let him down.

The sound of children’s voices came floating through the window, but she couldn’t see anyone. They were probably in that courtyard she and McColl had been shown. Why not go down and see? Harry Sinha hadn’t objected to her meeting his wife.

She dressed in her Russian clothes, which she had finally managed to wash and dry in the serai the previous day. The long skirt and linen blouse seemed modest enough, as did the leather sandals she’d been wearing since Kabul.

It took some time to find her way down to the courtyard because the house—houses, really—seemed like a labyrinth. The young voices rose and fell, coming from this direction and that, until she turned the handle on a large wooden gate and found herself the object of many astonished eyes.

One of the women—a girl, really; she couldn’t have been much more than fifteen—broke the spell by walking forward, smiling, and ushering Caitlin to one of the seats. “You must be our father’s guest,” she said slowly in English, before unleashing a torrent of Urdu at the other women and children.

Caitlin introduced herself.

“I am Maneka,” the girl said, bringing her hands together in a namaskar. Like all the other girls, she was wearing a white muslin shift with a colored border. Bangles carved from bone circled her forearms. “You are English?” she asked.

“American. I grew up in New York City. Have you heard of it?”

“Yes. There’s a picture in one of my books—the Statue of Liberty.”

“That’s the place. Now can you tell me the other girls’ names?”

Maneka introduced everyone in turn, starting with Katima, whom Caitlin knew was Sinha’s wife, and then presumably working her way down through the family pecking order. The three adult women smiled and brought their palms together; the seven other girls giggled and did the same. The big bright eyes in the dark brown faces made them all seem astonishingly beautiful.

Katima’s English was not very good, and after sharing a warm but halting conversation with Harry’s wife for several minutes, Caitlin was claimed by one of the girls, who shyly asked her to come and see a pair of lizards resting on a rubbery leaf on the other side of the courtyard. Then another child demanded attention, and another, until Maneka pulled rank and asked for help with her English. By the time an hour had passed, Caitlin was feeling almost part of the family.

On those rare occasions when she had some time for reflection, she felt the gentle pull of two contradictory emotions: on the one hand, the old anger at women’s position in the world—these women sequestered in their courtyard, while the men ran the world outside—and on the other, a slight hint of envy.

What was she envious of? The simple camaraderie, perhaps. And knowing your place in the world rather than having to fight for it every day. Which was no more than she should have expected—no one knew better than a Zhenotdel worker how hard it was for women to set aside those expectations learned in childhood and reinforced each day thereafter.

Watching one of the smaller girls rocking a doll to and fro in her arms, Caitlin wondered, not for the first time, whether she wanted children. Maybe later had always been the answer, but she was in her thirties now, and she didn’t want age to decide the matter for her.

Something of this must have shown in her face, because Maneka’s next question was on the button. “Children,” the girl said tentatively, waving an arm at the ones all around them. “You have?”

“No,” Caitlin said. She still could. She could turn her back on Russia, stay with Jack, hope to bear their children. Was that a life she wanted? Was that the life she wanted most?

Deep inside the heavily perfumed bush, McColl removed the kurta, dhoti and turban he had been wearing on top of his European shirt and trousers. That was the trouble with the British Empire, he thought, rolling the trouser legs down—if you didn’t want to stick out like a sore thumb, you had to swap outfits every time you changed social circles.

After stuffing the Indian clothes into a carpetbag, he emerged from the bush, lingering in its shadow until he was sure that the dark road was empty. Once convinced, he started walking. Ahead and to the left, the Delhi ridge was silhouetted against the stars; on either side of the rutted road, large, sprawling bungalows nestled beneath the trees.

He walked on, following the road around the base of a low, forested hill until he saw the familiar shape of the visitors’ bungalow. McColl had lodged there himself in 1916 and, during his reconnaissance that afternoon, had not been wholly surprised to find someone he knew in residence. The fact that it was Alex Cunningham, whom McColl had worked and often sparred with in 1915, had been something of a bonus. The other man was bright enough, but he was also one of Five’s less industrious agents.

There were no lights shining. Cunningham, McColl knew, was rather partial to a social drink, and would probably still be at the club. And, like any prudent intelligence agent, he had always insisted on the servants living out.

As McColl walked up the path, the breeze rose, stirring the branches of the tamarind trees and scenting the air with jasmine. Above the bungalow roof, a crescent moon was hanging in the eastern sky.

The front door opened to McColl’s push. He went in, down the short hall, and into a large but sparsely furnished room. In the reflected moonlight, he could make out a gramophone with a huge silver trumpet perched on a tea chest. A low table bearing a brass tray with whiskey decanter and glasses stood next to a familiar armchair. Beside it, on a chest of drawers, sat a large, ornate paraffin lamp and a box of safety matches. A writing table stood against the opposite wall, flanked by two upright chairs.

McColl poured himself a whiskey and sat down to wait, the Webley within easy reach on the writing table. As his eyes became accustomed to the darkness, the room began to look more familiar, like a photograph in a developing tray. He had spent several weeks living in this bungalow, but it felt like aeons ago.

An hour or so had passed when he heard a tonga coming up the road. The rattle of hooves slowed and stopped; a barely audible spoken exchange gave way to the sound of footsteps on the front path. McColl put down his glass and picked up the gun.

Cunningham stumbled slightly as he came through the door, and his efforts to light the paraffin lamp—burning his finger on the first match—made it clear that he’d been drinking. His success with the second augured rather better for the conversation McColl hoped was at hand.

“Evening, Alex,” he said softly.

The Five man spun around, almost too fast for his impaired sense of balance. There was nothing wrong with his brain, though: recognition of both man and gun was instant. An ironic smile flitted briefly across his face.

“Sit down,” McColl said, indicating the armchair by the low table. He stayed where he was, in the upright chair with his back to the wall, out of sight from either window.

“Bonnie Prince Charlie in the flesh,” Cunningham said distinctly. “You made it. I suppose congratulations are in order.”

“Probably,” McColl said dryly.

“Want another drink?” Cunningham asked.

“No thanks.”

“Mind if I do?”

“Not so long as you keep a clear head. I have some questions for you.”

“What makes you think I’ll give you any answers?” Cunningham asked as he poured himself a generous measure.

“I may shoot you if you don’t. I’ve got nothing to lose, as I’m sure you know.”

“True.” Cunningham took a sip of whiskey. “But since you’ve managed to get this far in one piece, why not just keep going?”

“I intend to. But first—and just between us—whose bright idea was Good Indian?”

Cunningham considered. “The idea came from here, originally. Given the Russian involvement, they thought about asking your lot for help, but came to the conclusion that Cumming wouldn’t approve. Much too old-school for this sort of caper. So they came to us instead.”

“And Cumming still doesn’t know?” McColl asked.

“Oh, I’m afraid he does, old boy. He was still in ignorance when you set off for Moscow, but he knows all about it now. The PM insisted he be told. I hear he kicked up a bit of a fuss at first, but, well…”

It was McColl’s turn to consider.

Cunningham put the thoughts into words for him. “Yes, even Lloyd George. So there’s no last court of appeal, no one you can go to. Look,” he said, easing some fake sympathy into his voice, “I can understand how you feel, but it was just bad luck that you ended up in the firing line. You know how it is. Just disappear; that’s my advice. Start again somewhere. If there’s one thing you learn in this job, it’s how to be someone you’re not, and you must know a dozen places in India where you can pick up a set of false papers.” He grunted. “And you won’t have any problems with the lingo, will you?”

McColl sighed. Not too dramatically, he hoped. “You may be right. But whose idea was it to use Brady, for God’s sake?”

“Brady’s, of course. He suggested it to us.”

“What makes anyone think he can be trusted?”

“No one does, old man.”

“Then why?”

“Let’s just say there were no other viable candidates. The theory was—is—that they’ll do it for their own ends and because they think they can fix it on us. We let them do it, then fix it on them. And we’ll have the easier job. This is our country—so to speak—and there are more of us. They’re under twenty-four-hour surveillance.”

“I still don’t like it,” McColl said, realizing how easy it was to slip back into this kind of detached risk appraisal.

“Look,” Cunningham said, with a gesture that suggested his last glass of whiskey was taking effect. “Aidan Brady may be a bastard of the first order, but he’s brought us a bona fide Bolshevik to kill Gandhi with. What more could we ask?”

So they were in Delhi, McColl thought. “I can’t believe the political situation is that bad,” he said.

“Isn’t. But it soon will be if we let the old scarecrow keep at us in the way he’s been doing. The stakes are just too high. Can you imagine where we’d be without the empire? Just a small island on the edge of Europe. Another Ireland, for Chrissake!”

McColl sighed again, more genuinely this time. “Maybe,” he said, standing and gesturing with the gun. “Come over here, will you?”

Cunningham emptied his glass and obeyed. “Turn around,” McColl said when they were both invisible from outside.

“At least I won’t feel…” Cunningham was saying as the gun butt came down on his head. He crumpled onto the carpet, and McColl left him there, faceup.

“God save the King,” he murmured, as he blew out the paraffin lamp.

Outside, the moon was high in the sky. He was walking down the road, still wondering where it would be best to change his clothes, when an empty tonga materialized out of a side road.

“Where to, sahib?” the driver asked. “The club?”

“The railway station,” McColl said, climbing aboard. If the IPI traced the driver, it would look like he’d followed Cunningham’s advice and taken off for points unknown.

The tonga rattled along the mostly empty roads of the British quarter. A dead city, McColl thought, an alien city. He hadn’t enjoyed his time here in 1916, and then he’d felt a lot less alienated from his fellow countrymen.

Komarov had been right, at least in that. There was no going back. And, despite what Cunningham had said, no running away either. One way or another, McColl was going to see this through.

They entered the Indian city by the Mori Gate, and McColl paid off the tonga driver at the northern entrance to the station. Relying on five-year-old memories, McColl bought tea in an empty room of a first-class restaurant, retired to the toilet to change back into the Pathan clothes, and walked brazenly out through the kitchen. He left the station via the southern entrance and walked through the Queen’s Gardens to the still-throbbing Chandni Chowk.

The contrast to the Civil Lines was hard to ignore. Nasal songs blared out of doorways; children scampered and shouted. In the distance a clashing cymbal or a reverberating gong occasionally split the night. Lights flickered like fireflies in each twisting alley; the glow thrown by oil lamps filled most open doorways. Fathers and children ate from brass trays on the doorsteps, the mothers often standing behind them and scanning the street, as if taking the chance to get out.

Another alien world, but somehow more inviting.

At Sinha’s house the servant let him in and told him the master had retired. McColl was glad—he didn’t want a barrage of questions from his friend.

Caitlin was waiting anxiously in their room, and he wasted no time in telling her what he’d found out. “Right to the top. Right to the bloody top.”

“As we expected,” she said quietly, putting her arms around his neck. “But what about you?”

“I’m a potentially dangerous loose end. If I don’t disappear myself, they’ll do it for me.”

“Oh, Jack, maybe you should.”

“We’ve been through that. If I didn’t owe it to others, I’d owe it to myself. And I know you feel the same.”

She sighed and let him go. “I do,” she agreed, walking across to the window and leaning back against the sill. “So how are we going to find them?”

He smiled for the first time that night. “I saw a sign outside a shop this afternoon.”

Soon after nine on the following morning, McColl paused in the shadow of another doorway, this one on Ballimaran Road, a few hundred yards from its junction with Chandni Chowk. The day’s heat was still building, and the light seemed preternaturally bright, turning each passing tonga’s dust into a whirl of flashing specks.

Across the street, a professional letter writer was seated at his folding desk, taking dictation from the client who sat cross-legged in front of him. Ten yards to his left, a group of young boys, the oldest no more than twelve, were sparring good-naturedly in the mouth of an alley. Between these two centers of activity, a doorway opened onto a flight of stairs, and above it hung the sign that McColl had noticed the previous day: ahmed mirza—consulting detective. The same words appeared on the larger board that fronted the balcony above, and there was movement in the windows behind.

Glancing up and down the busy street, McColl saw no sign of fellow Europeans or Indian policemen. He waited for a gap in the procession of tongas, then sauntered across the sunlit road at a suitably Asian pace and started up the stairs.

A woman kneading dough on a wooden board was sitting on the top step, and after squeezing past her, McColl found himself facing a door bearing another notification of Ahmed Mirza’s profession. He knocked, and a voice called, “Enter,” in Urdu.

The room was spacious and surprisingly cool. Like most Indian rooms, it seemed half-empty to a European, but the detective’s desk almost made up for the lack of other furniture—it was at least six feet long and more than half that wide.

There were two men present. The one behind the desk presumably greeted most of his clients Indian-style; shaking hands across it, as he and McColl discovered, was a serious test of balance. “I am Ahmed Mirza,” the man said in English. He was in his forties, McColl guessed, but looked physically fitter than most Indians of that age. His hair was cropped quite short, unlike his mustache, which seemed in serious danger of running riot. As if in recognition of this fact, the detective began stroking it back into submission the moment he had reseated himself. His clothes were European; a lightweight white suit, white shirt, and red bow tie.

“And this is my friend and colleague Dr. Din,” Mirza added, gesturing toward the other man. The doctor was older than Mirza and dressed in traditional Indian clothes. He brought his palms together and flashed a smile full of golden teeth at McColl. “You may say before this gentleman anything you say to me,” Mirza added. “He is completely deaf.”

McColl sat back in the upright seat. “My name is Stuart,” he began spontaneously. “Charles Stuart. I assume that anything I say in this room will be treated with the utmost confidentiality.” He was speaking Urdu, hoping to show the detective that he wasn’t a complete beginner where India was concerned.

“Of course, Mr. Stuart,” Mirza said. “I must say, your Urdu is excellent,” he went on in English. “Which language would you prefer to use?”

“Your English is also excellent,” McColl said.

“I was in the army for eighteen years. Subahdar-major, Sixty-Sixth Punjabi Rifles.”

McColl was impressed, which was presumably the intention. “May I inquire as to why you changed careers?” he asked, thinking it a good idea to find out as much as he could about his prospective employee.

“It was time for a change,” Mirza said, not at all disconcerted by the question. “And—perhaps I should not say this; I do not wish to be political—but I had risen as far as is possible for someone like myself, and it is not a good feeling to pass down orders to brave young men knowing that those orders are not sensible.”

“The Sixty-Sixth were in Mesopotamia, yes?” McColl asked. They seemed to have settled on English as their lingua franca.

“Indeed so.”

“Then I can sympathize with your feelings.” Compared to the Mesopotamian campaign, the one on the Somme had been almost inspired.

The Indian nodded absent-mindedly, as if the memories had taken over for a moment.

“And so you became a ‘consulting detective?’”

“Yes. I’m sure you recognize the phrase.” He smiled brightly. “I read my first Holmes omnibus in Kut-al-Amara, during the siege, and it was the only book I had in the Turkish prison camp. Which turned out to be a good thing. But that is often the case, is it not? The darker the place, the easier it is to see the light.” He stroked his mustache again. “So, to business, Mr… . I assume Stuart is not your real name, and I assume you’re in trouble with the British authorities?”

“What makes you think so?” McColl asked, thinking he already knew the answer. What other reason would a European have for visiting an Indian private detective?

“There is a faint line around your head dividing two areas of skin, one slightly darker than the other. Since the exact curvature of this line is unique to those wearing Afghan turbans, I must assume that you have been disguising yourself as a tribesman, and since you have come to me for help, it seems unlikely that you’ve been dressing that way in the service of the king-emperor.”

McColl smiled. “I’m impressed,” he said. “But I’m afraid I have only a straightforward task for you. I want you to find some people for me.”

Mirza picked up his pen and pulled a sheet of paper onto his blotting pad, looking slightly disappointed. “Very well. Who are they?”

“Three men. An American named Aidan Brady, a Russian named Sergei Piatakov, an Indian—a Bengali—named Durga Chatterji. They are probably staying somewhere together—the American and Russian almost certainly so.”

“A group like that should not be hard to find in Delhi,” Mirza suggested.

“They will not be making themselves obvious. They’ll probably be staying in a private house and rarely, if ever, going out.”

“Why is that?”

“I would rather not say.”

“Ah. But you are certain they are here in Delhi?” The detective seemed more interested now.

“Yes.”

“Very well. Can you give me descriptions?”

McColl did so, relying on memory for Brady, Caitlin’s account for Piatakov, and the photograph that Cumming had shown him for Chatterji. Mirza wrote it all down in bright blue ink, his British-made pen scratching at the rough Indian paper.

“I very much doubt they’ll be staying in the Civil Lines,” McColl added. “They’ll be avoiding any contact with the British authorities.”

Mirza looked even more interested. “Curiouser and curiouser. But that will make my job easier,” he went on. “White faces stand out anywhere else.” He put his pen down.

“May I ask how you intend to proceed?” McColl asked, hoping he wasn’t breaking some arcane rule of etiquette. “Speed is important, I’m afraid.”

“Of course. Did you happen to notice a group of boys outside?”

McColl nodded.

“They are my ‘Baker Street Irregulars,’” he said with a wide smile. “Or ‘Ballimaran Road Irregulars’ might be more correct. They will scour the city for your friends. One day, perhaps, two days at most. If these men are still in Delhi, the boys will find them.”

“Good. When they do, I want the men watched. I want to know who comes to see them, where they go, and whom they meet if they do go out. Can you manage all that?”

“Of course.”

“Excellent.” McColl removed a tattered wallet from his pocket. “Now, what are your fees?”

“We can settle accounts when the case is concluded.”

McColl demurred. “I would feel happier if you accepted a deposit. As you can see, I’m not wearing a turban today and rather more visible than I want to be.”

Mirza grinned at him. “Very well. My rates are fifteen rupees a day.”

McColl counted out three ten-rupee notes from the money Sinha had loaned him. “Take this for now,” he said, passing it across. “And you will need to know where I am staying,” he added with only the faintest of misgivings. If he wanted Mirza to do the job, he had to trust him that much.

“I was about to ask that very thing,” Mirza told him.

McColl gave him Sinha’s address, which caused the detective to raise an eyebrow. He said nothing, though.

“When you leave a message, leave it for Mr. Stuart,” McColl said.

“That is most clear.”

McColl got up. “Thank you,” he said. “I hope to hear from you soon.” He turned to wish Dr. Din farewell, but this Holmes’s Watson was fast asleep.

The Indian Mrs. Hudson was still vigorously kneading her dough on the staircase. Komarov would have been more than a little amused, McColl thought as he went down the stairs.

“You checked with the railway authorities?” Colonel Fitzwilliam asked Nigel Morley.

As far as Alex Cunningham could tell, the IPI chief hadn’t moved since the previous day. Fitzwilliam was sitting in the same chair, wearing the same clothes, and seemed to be halfway through the same drink. His copy of the Eastern Mail, however, though lying in much the same position, boasted a different front page. And his mood was undoubtedly darker.

“Yes, sir,” Morley replied, glancing at Cunningham for corroboration. Cunningham was more concerned with the throbbing headache that a surfeit of port and the Webley butt had left him with.

“And?” the colonel asked with exaggerated indifference.

“Nothing. Only seven Europeans bought tickets at the booking office in the last twenty-four hours, and they’ve all been accounted for. If he’s traveling in native disguise, then no one noticed.”

“They wouldn’t,” Cunningham said, stirring himself. “McColl spent three months in Afghanistan and Turkestan in 1916 without getting caught. He knows the languages, knows the area, knows how to blend in. He’s very tanned. And there are so many different communities in Delhi that anyone looking at him twice would assume he came from one of the others. If he’s gone, there won’t be any traces.”

“But has he?” the colonel wondered out loud. He turned his gaze from the garden to Cunningham. “Do you think he has?”

“I don’t know.”

“What if he hasn’t?” the colonel insisted. “You talked to him. Is he likely to do anything with his knowledge? I mean, is he the sort of chap to take things personally?”

Things like your ordering his execution, Cunningham thought sourly. “Not in the way you mean,” he said, thinking back over the conversation. “He seemed more curious than anything else, and there weren’t any threats. But he was a bit of an Indian lover back in 1915; I remember how impressed he was by Bhattacharyya and Jatin Mukherjee. He always did his job, though—I have to give him that.” He shrugged. “People do change.”

Fitzwilliam shook his head. “Rarely in my experience. Could he stick his oar in if he wanted to?”

“He’d have to find them first.”

The colonel grunted, apparently in agreement.

“There’s no way he could know about Sayid Hassan’s house,” Morley added. “That business happened after he went back to England.”

“Are we going to tell the Good Indian team?” Cunningham asked Fitzwilliam.

“Good Lord, no. What would be the point?” The colonel sighed and closed his eyes. “I’ll be glad when this business is over.”

Snapshots

Having set the search underway, McColl and Caitlin spent almost all of the following forty-eight hours together in their room. They reminisced and read, ate leisurely meals, and took naps in the fearsome heat, and tried not to let their fears for the next few days drown out everything else.

It was midway through the second morning when a rap on their door announced the head servant, bearing a sheet of the consulting detective’s personal stationery. Mirza’s message was brief and to the point: “Success. Rendezvous, Central Post Office, Noon.” McColl passed it to Caitlin, who read it and took a deep breath. He could only guess how hard this was going to be for her.

“I don’t suppose it would be a good idea for me to come,” she said.

“No, it wouldn’t,” he agreed, looking at his watch. He had plenty of time to get into costume and walk to the post office.

She came across to him, and he thought she was going to give him an argument, but she simply held him close for a minute or so. “I suppose you want me to wind your turban?” she said playfully, releasing him.

“If you would be so kind.”

An hour and a half or so later he was climbing aboard Mirza’s tonga.

“An excellent disguise,” the detective said, studying McColl’s outfit with interest. Mirza was also dressed in Indian clothes—a simple white shirt and dhoti.

“You have found them?” McColl asked.

“Of course. Did I not announce ‘success’ in my message? We are going there now.”

“How far is it?”

“A mile? Perhaps a little more. They are staying in the home of one Sayid Hassan. He is not there, but it was arranged with him before he went away. No one seems to know where he has gone, but”—Mirza looked at McColl—“perhaps he is putting distance between himself and something particularly unsavory?”

“I don’t know,” McColl said, somewhat disingenuously.

The tonga rattled south down Faiz Bazaar, driven by a young boy whom McColl thought he recognized from the “Ballimaran Road Irregulars.” Did Mirza picture himself in a London hansom hurrying toward some leafy suburban scene of derring-do? McColl hadn’t read a Holmes story since before the war, but he remembered that several had Indian roots. Monkeys and mutiny treasure, or something along those lines.

After about five minutes, the Delhi Gate loomed ahead, but rather than pass through it, the tonga took a sharp turn to the right, heading west along the inside of the still-impressive city wall. A few minutes later the boy pulled the pony to a halt beside a semiderelict flight of steps.

Three of Mirza’s “irregulars” were sitting on the bottom tread.

The eldest reported to Mirza. The three men staying in Sayid Hassan’s house had been out for most of the morning and had only just returned. The two white men had simply driven around the city, up Faiz Bazaar and Elgin Road, along Chandni Chowk, and back through the Lal Kuan and Sitaram Bazaars. The Bengali had left the tonga in Chandni Chowk, walked to a house in a nearby street, and rented two rooms for a week, saying he and two friends would move in on the following day.

Mirza looked inquiringly at McColl, as if expecting an explanation.

“Where is Sayid Hassan’s house?” McColl asked.

“You will see it. Come.” Mirza turned and led the way up the crumbling steps. “Look out for snakes,” he said over his shoulder.

As they neared the top of the flight, Mirza advised that they should both keep low, and the two of them made their way half-crouched along a short stretch of passable rampart to the protruding remains of a guard tower. Here another of the detective’s “irregulars” was sitting and dozing with his back to the wall, a pair of British army binoculars reposing in his lap.

Mirza gave him an affectionate cuff. “The house is straight ahead, about two hundred yards away,” he told McColl. He pointed to a large gap in the brickwork and passed him the binoculars. “Don’t push them too far forward, or the light will reflect on the glass.”

McColl took his first look with the naked eye. Sayid Hassan’s house looked like a small estate, with several buildings set within spacious grounds alongside the old Circular Road. A magnificent banyan stood on the eastern edge of the gardens, and a man was sitting in its shadow.

McColl raised the binoculars and brought the figure into focus. A white face, Slavic and handsome, slightly cadaverous. Sergei Piatakov.

Gandhi’s would-be assassin. Caitlin’s husband and lover. According to her, yet another victim of the war.

Weren’t they all?

A pair of legs walked into view beneath the canopy of leaves. And then the familiar figure, face, and shock of hair. Aidan Brady. Laughing about something.

McColl wondered what he would have done with a decent rifle.

“That is them?” Mirza whispered in his ear.

“Oh yes,” McColl said. He lowered the binoculars and edged away from the gap. “Let’s go back down.”

Getting down the broken steps was harder than getting up.

“You can keep watching?” McColl asked when they finally reached the bottom.

“Of course. As long as you wish it.”

“It won’t be for long.” One way or the other, he thought, climbing back aboard the tonga. They turned back toward the city center close by the Turkman Gate, and passed through a succession of unusually lifeless bazaars. McColl was puzzled. “It’s not Sunday, is it?” he asked.

“No… Ah.” Mirza realized what was puzzling his companion. “A hartal—a shop owner’s strike—has been called by Gandhi’s supporters,” he explained. “Many are closed. Many Hindu shops, in any case; the Muslims are not so keen.”

“I see.”

“Gandhi will be here himself in a few days,” Mirza added.

“What’s your opinion of him?” McColl asked the detective.

Mirza shrugged. “An unusual man, certainly. Half saint, half Artful Dodger. A rare combination. But I will offer you a prediction, my friend. One day India will be ruled by Indians—perhaps better, perhaps worse—and Mohandas Gandhi will probably hasten that day. But in the end his only legacy will be a faint whiff of guilt hanging over future generations. The time for spinning wheels is past.”

It was late in the afternoon, the shadows lengthening almost visibly, but even in the shade, the heat was still intense and, to Piatakov’s taste, unpleasantly humid. He would have been cooler indoors, sitting beneath the efficiently whirring fans, but over their five-day stay, Piatakov had grown to love the views at this particular time of day. There was something quite magical about the mix of light and color: the dark palms framing the distant silver river, the towers and domes of the city slowly catching fire in the brilliant sunset. Delhi seemed to glow with inner light, as if its walls were hung with a million burnished icons.

Piatakov smiled ruefully at the image. He felt at peace with himself, more so as the day grew nearer. It was funny how people took to such situations differently: Chatterji was like a spring coiled tighter and tighter; Brady had become relaxed to the point of avuncularity. Their two reactions seemed symbiotic, as if each had taken half of the other’s personality.

Piatakov could hear them now, inside the house, talking in English. If they survived the next few days, he could imagine them going off somewhere as partners. Well, good luck to them—he had no idea what he would do. He had, he realized, not even given his possible future a moment’s thought. Returning home was out of the question and would remain so until true revolutionaries seized back control of the party. Which could happen only with help from abroad—a new revolutionary wave to lift their stranded Russian boat. It was why they were here in India.

That morning they’d taken a rickshaw into the city for a look at the killing ground. Driving down Chandni Chowk, he’d gone through it all in his imagination: the seething crowds, the bands playing, the people hanging from windows; the squeezing of the triggers, the cracks, the wailing panic. The two of them hurtling down a flight of steps and onto the flat roof in full view of the watching crowds. White men with guns, the snapshot of guilt.

And then with any luck they would be gone, into the British cantonment, where their faces wouldn’t stand out, and they’d be no more at risk than thousands of other white men caught in the chaos of a broken empire.

Piatakov smiled to himself in the gloom. It was a wonderful plan. He slapped at and missed a mosquito on his forearm. It was time to go back in. The sun was gone, the sky rushing through the spectrum as if each color were clamoring to replace its predecessor, fearful that darkness would come before they all had time to shine.

Caitlin sat on the edge of the bed while McColl went over what he had seen. His portrait of Sergei alone in a garden almost made her cry, but knowing how he would misread them, she managed to keep the tears in.

“And now all we have to decide is what we intend to do,” he concluded wryly.

“I’ve been thinking about that while you’ve been out,” she said. “It’s simple really.”

He gave her a doubtful look. “Go on.”

“Your government wants Gandhi dead and Sergei and Brady to take the blame. I expect they have some plan for twisting things around the other way. But your people can’t afford the connection to be exposed, can they? If we can find a way to expose it, then the whole thing falls to pieces.”

“Yes,” he said, in a tone that suggested she’d merely stated the obvious. “The problem is how.”

“All we need is a good modern camera. And to get, say, Cunningham and Brady to the same spot at the same time.”

That got him thinking. “It would have to be Sergei. He’s the Russian Bolshevik.”

She realized he was right. “I suppose it would,” she concurred reluctantly.

“But they’re not going to agree to pose for a group photograph,” he continued, as much to himself as to her.

“No, Jack,” she said, surprised at him for being so slow. “We trick them. You ask Cunningham to meet you. And you fake a message from Cunningham to Sergei asking him to the same place.”

He shook his head. “Not quite. The first part would work, but not the second. We don’t know how they’ve agreed to communicate with each other in an emergency, and if we get it wrong, which we probably would, Brady will smell a rat.” He looked at her. “The note must come from you.”

“Oh…” She stood and went to the window, angrily brushing away an unexpected tear. “You’re right,” she almost whispered, still looking the other way.

“If it’s too hard, we’ll think of something else,” he said, walking across and putting an arm around her shoulders.

She was grateful for the offer, but knew this was something she had to do. She gently untangled herself. “Once we have the photograph, what do we do with it?”

“We send a copy to Cunningham and friends, I assume. It’s your plan, my love.”

She made a sweeping gesture with her hand, as if brushing aside the endearment. “And Sergei and Brady? What will your people do with them once they know the plan won’t work?”

“I don’t know. They might send them back to Russia…”

“Or kill them quietly here?”

McColl shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Either way it’s a death sentence. I have to give him a chance, Jack. You do understand that?”

“Yes, but how?”

“I don’t know.” Another thought occurred to her. “And what about you? What will your people do to you?”

“Nothing good. But they have to catch us first.”

She let the “us” go by. “We could say that a copy of the photograph has been sent to someone—your detective perhaps—with instructions to send it on to a newspaper if anything happens to you.”

“If they call it off, then the photograph won’t mean a thing,” he told her. “We need to work out what our options are.”

Which might have been right, but was easier said than done. “Once we’ve seen this through,” she promised. And then she could go home. Wherever that was.

Piatakov was woken, as usual, by the sound of sweeping; first the soft brush inside the house, then the more rasping tone of the twig broom being used on the paths outside. On the other side of the nearby wall, sounding like faraway raucous birds swapping opinions, muezzins were calling the Muslim districts to prayer.

He climbed off the hard bed and washed himself as thoroughly as he could with the water left in the earthenware pitcher. Throwing a kurta over his head, he walked through into the kitchen, where one of the servants was already making him a glass of chai. He stirred in two chunks of sugar and carried it out to his chair in the garden.

Thick morning mist shrouded the river away to his right; the sun glowing through it was a fuzzy orange ball. The crows had begun their incessant crowing; the parakeets, as ever, seemed unsure which tree best suited their mood. On the lawn in front of their absent host’s house, another servant was flailing the grass with a bamboo switch to take away the dew. According to Brady, if this wasn’t done, the grass would scorch in the noonday sun.

Piatakov sipped at the tea and let his mind wander. Since their arrival in Delhi, he had spent the early morning hours like this, sitting and watching the sunrise, letting the mesh of light, sounds, and smells wash over him. It did him good, made him feel that somehow he was back in touch with something real. It might be—probably was—the equivalent of the condemned man’s last meal, but that didn’t seem to matter: it was enough to know he was still connected, however tenuously, to that sense of life’s possibilities that had made him a revolutionary.

He had sadnesses but, in the end, no regrets.

The mist was clearing, sharpening the sun. He heard light footsteps behind him and looked around expecting to see one of the servants.

It was a youth he’d never seen before, holding what looked like a letter. Piatakov reached out to take it, expecting the usual two-way mime, but the boy was instantly on his way, breaking into a run as he disappeared behind the house.

Turning to the letter, Piatakov saw his name in Cyrillic script in her unmistakable hand. For a moment he thought he was dreaming and just sat there staring at the envelope, his mouth hanging foolishly open.

He tore it open and pulled out the folded sheet.

“Sergei,” she began. No “dearest,” he thought in passing, just “Sergei, I must talk to you. Meet me in the European restaurant room on Platform 1 of the central railway station at one o’clock today. Come alone. For both our sakes. Caitlin.”

No kisses either.

He read the note again, still struggling to take it in. She was here, in India, in Delhi. Why? How? As the different emotions and thoughts jostled for precedence, he felt a sudden constriction in his chest from holding his breath for too long. He heard his own laughter and the hint of hysteria that bubbled within it.

“What’s going on?” Brady asked from behind him. “I heard someone running.”

Piatakov passed him the letter but didn’t say anything. Brady looked through it, his expression moving swiftly through curiosity, amusement, concern, and anger. “Your wife?” he asked incredulously.

“Yes.”

“But how did—”

“I don’t know any more than you do,” Piatakov said. Somehow Brady’s sense of shock was exorcising his own.

“It must be Komarov,” Brady decided.

“He’s dead,” Piatakov said flatly. “You shot him, remember?”

“I know. But he’s reaching out from the grave. Or it’s Peters. She must be here on your party’s behalf.”

“Maybe she’s here for herself,” Piatakov said quietly. Still trying to save him. The thought brought him joy and sadness in what seemed equal measure.

“Whatever. You can’t meet her.”

Piatakov looked up at the American, the shock of dark hair hanging over the angry eyes, a glimpse of the long-vanished child in the pouting mouth. “I have to,” he said. He hadn’t said good-bye to her in Moscow, and now he could.

“No,” Brady argued. “You could risk everything.” His hand reached almost absent-mindedly toward the place where he normally carried his gun, but he was still wearing his nightshirt.

Piatakov noticed but didn’t care. “I won’t betray you or back out, if that’s what you’re thinking. And since it won’t affect our business here, it has nothing to do with you.”

“It must affect our business here. How has she found you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the local party helped her look.”

Brady shook his head.

“Who else?” Piatakov asked. “The British won’t have told her.”

“It stinks.” Brady looked at the letter again. “Are you sure it’s her handwriting?”

“Of course I am. Look, what can happen in a station restaurant room? My guess is—they think they know what we’re planning to do, and she’s been sent to try and change our minds. She won’t. Okay?”

Piatakov got up out of the chair and looked out across the flats toward the river. “But I want to see her. And I’m going to,” he insisted, before walking off toward the house, leaving Brady still staring at the letter.

Colonel Fitzwilliam refolded the letter, replaced it in the envelope, and handed it back to Cunningham. “What do you think he wants?”

“Probably money,” Cunningham guessed. “To travel with,” he added.

“And what will he do if he doesn’t get it?” the colonel asked, helping himself to a chocolate biscuit.

“He doesn’t say,” Cunningham said pointedly, wondering if he and Morley would be offered biscuits. Or cups of coffee, come to that.

“But what’s your best guess?” the colonel asked tetchily. “I suppose you two want coffee,” he added ungraciously.

“Yes, thank you,” Cunningham said. As the colonel signaled to his hovering servant, Cunningham reached for the biscuit tin, and offered it to a surprised Morley before helping himself. “It seems to me,” he went on, “that McColl has very few options. The one potentially damaging thing he could do is give the story to foreign newspapers. They’d certainly be interested after the event, but the deed would be done, and we’d just have to manage the aftermath. It won’t be hard to discredit McColl as a source. He was recently in prison; there’s his history with the American woman who now works for Lenin. Etcetera, etcetera. Some Indians will hear the story, and some will believe it, but they’ll be the ones who think the worst of us anyway.”

“And at least we know the bastard’s still in Delhi,” Morley said hopefully.

“Which makes it all the more disgraceful that he hasn’t been found yet,” the colonel retorted.

“We’re sure he’s not staying in any half-decent hotel,” Cunningham said unapologetically. “We’ve checked out the people we know he had contact with during the war. And we’re still waiting for London to check through any Indians he might have known at Oxford or met in his time selling luxury cars. There’s nothing else we can do, other than the obvious.”

“Which is?” Morley asked.

“Well, we do know where he’ll be”—Cunningham looked at his watch—“in two hours and forty minutes’ time.”

“We know where he says he’s going to be,” the colonel corrected him.

“What have we got to lose?” Cunningham asked.

McColl was picked up opposite the Fatehpuri Mosque at a quarter past eleven.

“It is all arranged,” Mirza announced as the boy driver set the tonga in motion. The detective was wearing the usual white shirt and dhoti, this time topped off with a fez-shaped red cap. “Here is the camera,” he said, taking a worn leather case from the seat beside him. McColl undid the strap and took out the Leica that Mirza had offered to loan him. An Arab had stolen it from one of the Turkish army’s German advisers during the war, and Mirza had bought the camera a year or so later for a fraction of its real worth. He claimed—and McColl had no reason to doubt him—that it would take the picture required.

“And the place?” McColl asked.

“All fixed,” Mirza said with a smile. “You asked for”—he began ticking off fingers—“one, somewhere out in the open, which is, two, close enough for a clear shot of the faces and, three, not so close that we risk apprehension by the men concerned. And we have such a place—it is all as you wished.”

“Wonderful,” McColl said.

“I have been thinking about this business,” Mirza went on. “These people. One from your political police and the other a Russian revolutionary—there must be a simple reason why you want them to share a photograph, but I cannot deduce what it is.” He shook his head. “But I shall,” he added. “I shall.”

“Mr. Mirza,” McColl said, “you do understand that helping in this matter could get you into trouble with the authorities. I don’t—”

“Yes, yes, I understand. You told me this yesterday. Do not concern yourself. Holmes once said that it is worth committing a felony to save a soul, and I am satisfied that we are on the side of justice in this matter. The opinion of the authorities is of no interest.”

McColl couldn’t help smiling. “Okay,” he said.

They were approaching the Queen’s Road entrance to the station. Mirza tapped the boy driver on the shoulder, and the tonga was brought to a halt. The two men alighted, and Mirza led McColl through an unmarked gate and down a passage between temporary huts. A narrow alley in a row of offices brought them out into an open-air canteen, where Mirza was greeted by several of the patrons. “Many men from my regiment got work on the railways,” he told McColl in explanation.

They walked along two sides of a large shed and onto a loading platform packed with wooden crates. A line of empty freight cars, their doors flung open in expectation, blocked their view of the station.

They reached the end of the train as a locomotive approached from the east, belching grey smoke into the sky above the distant Red Fort. A minute or so later the line of packed carriages pulled into a platform three or four tracks away, wheels bouncing on the uneven rails. “Over there,” Mirza shouted in McColl’s ear, pointing out the signal cabin that straddled the tracks some fifty yards ahead and setting off across the shining rails like a man advancing on Turkish guns.

McColl hurried after him, remembering days as a boy risking the wrath of railway officials. This time there were no angry shouts, and soon they were climbing the stairway up to the box. The two men working among the gleaming levers greeted the detective like a long-lost uncle; their boss was in a small office at the other end. “My friend, Shah Ali Khan,” Mirza said, introducing the uniformed official. “And this is our hide, as you call it,” he added, swinging open a shuttered window. “There,” he said, gesturing outward.

The roof of the office on the northernmost platform was mostly flat, but the small raised section containing a door promised access from below. A man on the roof would be only ten yards away, and at roughly the same level. A train passing between them would be beneath the line of sight. Only smoke could spoil the picture, and for that their luck would need to be truly out.

“Yes?” Mirza asked.

“It’s perfect,” McColl said.

Piatakov arrived at the station almost half an hour early and sat for several minutes in the back of Sayid Hassan’s tonga, trying to let the whirl of emotions settle. It wasn’t easy. Assuming she knew what they intended to do—and her presence here surely meant that she did—he knew only too well what her objections would be. They’d had variations of the same argument over and over again during the winter and spring, and they all came down to a single judgment—whether or not their party was beyond redemption. She said it wasn’t, and he said it was, and that was all there was to it. So why would she travel thousands of miles to tell him something he’d already heard a dozen times?

If she’d come out of love… well, that would warm his heart, but it wouldn’t change his mind, and she had to know that. She who’d been fond of quoting Kollontai’s dictum that passion was transient, the political struggle unending.

It was a quarter to one by the huge station clock. He climbed down, told the servant-driver to wait, and walked in through the entrance arch. The booking hall was a seething mass, the adjoining platform just as crowded and noisy. After the garden’s serenity, the cacophonous racket felt like a physical battering.

At least the platforms were prominently numbered—a request for directions in Russian or schoolboy French would probably have gone unanswered. The restaurant room for Europeans was also easy to find and empty save for one middle-aged pair, presumably English, who gave him synchronous nods, as if they shared a puppeteer. He returned the gesture and chose a table as far from them as possible.

The room was surprisingly cool and quiet considering how few feet separated it from the heat and bedlam outside. He asked the hovering waiter for chai, knowing the word meant the same in Delhi as it did in Moscow.

The steaming cup arrived as the clock on the wall reached the hour. He handed the waiter the five-rupee note that Brady had provided with the air of a parent handing out pocket money, accepted the frown and small mountain of coins in exchange, and stirred in some sugar from the small brass bowl. The minute hand clicked again.

An Indian boy darted in through the doorway and handed him a note. The waiter moved to shoo the youth out again, but Piatakov held up an arm to stop him while he took in the message. “Come with this boy and wait for me,” it read. The writing was hers.

He followed the boy out onto the platform and up across a footbridge that straddled several tracks. After taking the last steps down and walking the length of the station, they finally arrived at what looked like a storehouse. The room within boasted a stack of red flags, shelves of paraffin lamps, doors to apparently empty offices, and a stairway to the second floor. Piatakov followed the boy up two flights of stairs, emerging onto a roof just as a freight train steamed majestically past. There was no one else there. The boy said something incomprehensible and promptly disappeared.

Cunningham arrived at the north entrance soon after twelve-thirty and spent the next half hour as instructed, walking from one end of Platform 6 to the other.

It was more like an obstacle course than a path. Indians provided the obstacles, they and all the mercantile and domestic activities they’d managed to cram onto a platform thirty feet wide. It seemed to Cunningham that an Indian was incapable of traveling anywhere without taking his entire family, all its belongings, and enough hardware to cook six-course meals. Many had also brought livestock—goats, chickens, pye-dogs—and at least two sacred cows were trundling up and down Platform 6 in search of something to chew.

There were also coconut sellers, soda-water sellers, toy sellers, and sticky-sweet sellers. Toys and sweets, Cunningham thought—that was what Indians loved. Toys and sweets in the brightest imaginable colors. Children, every last one of them. The real children made faces and giggled each time he went past; the adults only wanted to.

One Indian was tugging at his sleeve. As he turned, a note was pressed into his hand by a young adolescent. Come with this boy. Alone. McColl.

“Lead on,” Cunningham invited his guide. They crossed to the farthest platform, entered one of the railway offices, and climbed two flights of stairs to the roof. A white man was waiting for him, but it wasn’t McColl. In fact the features were distinctly Slavic.

“Who are you?” Cunningham asked.

The man was looking over his shoulder. Cunningham caught the glint of reflected glass from the signal box across the tracks, the shutters closing around it like a snuffer on a candle. Someone had taken a picture of him and the Russian, which could only be bad news.

As Cunningham hurtled back down the stairs hoping to catch whoever it was, he realized his young guide had disappeared.

After reaching and crossing the platform, Cunningham jumped down between the nearest rails, and was almost run over by an idling shunter. By the time he reached the foot of the signal box steps and took a few seconds to look around, there was nothing to see. No one running. No McColl. Even the Russian had vanished.

He went up anyway, but the Indians on duty responded to his shouts with the usual infuriating smiles. The little office at the end was empty; the head signalman, he was told, had gone to lunch.

“Christ, what a mess,” he murmured as he took in the view from the cameraman’s window. Fitzwilliam was going to love this one.

Caitlin spent the morning alone in their room at Sinha’s house, and her mood had not been improved by the reading matter. McColl had come across the Indian communist newspaper on his way back from the station the day before and thought it might contain the recent Russian news she craved. Reading through it, she told herself to be more careful in what she wished for. There was indeed a feast of news—the latest trade deals and production targets, more peasant rebellions ended, a united party still set on delivering its brave new world. The NEP was undoubtedly working, the famines apparently loosing their grip. It was all good, all true, as far it went. And yes, the revolution had been about increasing production, giving people a better material life. But that wasn’t the end of the story. It had also been about building a real democracy, one unfettered by money and privilege. And, in those joyful early days, it had been about creating a new man and woman.

And there, in one small paragraph, was the news that meant something to Caitlin.

The “woman’s advocate” Alexandra Kollontai, the Indian writer noted, was leaving Moscow for “six months of agitational work in Odessa.” With the women’s issue now “resolved,” Kollontai’s “separate organization” had “surely fulfilled its purpose.”

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?”

The colonel stared at his whiskey. “Pity you didn’t think of that before,” he said, adding a withering look for emphasis.

Cunningham returned the gaze and said nothing.

“But I suppose the damage is done. I suppose we’ll be hearing soon enough what McColl has in mind. Either blackmail or the fool’s picked up a bleeding heart in Russia.”

“I’d guess the latter,” Cunningham said.

Fitzwilliam grunted his disbelief, though whether in McColl’s new organ or the concept itself, Cunningham couldn’t be sure. “What about the Good Indian team?” Cunningham asked.

“Yes, I was coming to them. Did the Russian see the camera?”

“He must have.”

Fitzwilliam gulped down the last of his whiskey. “Well, we weren’t planning on giving them knighthoods.” He thought for a minute, leaning against the sideboard, the cigarette curling blue smoke across the back of his hand. “In fact,” he said finally, “our options seem extremely limited.”

Cunningham nodded. “Brady won’t be any great loss to humanity.”

“An arrest that goes sadly awry,” Fitzwilliam murmured, half to himself. He looked at his watch. “It’ll be dark in three hours. You’d better take a platoon—we don’t want any more slipups. And you can bury them there.” He allowed himself a wintry smile. “If we ever need more on Sayid Hassan, we can dig them up again.” He stubbed out the cigarette and turned for the door. “If only Gandhi had a garden,” he said over his shoulder.

If only, Cunningham thought, as he picked up the club secretary’s telephone. After arranging the troops for that evening, he strolled back down to the IPI bungalow. He’d been there only a few minutes when Morley returned, looking hot, disheveled, and angry.

“What happened to you?” Cunningham asked.

“That bastard McColl,” Morley spluttered, wiping the back of his neck with a damp-looking handkerchief. He told the story between gulps of ice water.

“But who was the woman?” Cunningham wanted to know.

“Not a clue, old man. She didn’t deny knowing McColl, but she claimed he wasn’t staying there. Lying like a trooper, of course. She had a faint American accent, I think. A looker, all right. Chestnut hair, big green eyes.”

“Nice tits?” Cunningham asked sarcastically.

“Sorry, I didn’t have time to take measurements,” Morley retorted in the same tone.

Cunningham laughed. “Okay, okay. It doesn’t matter now.” He explained about the setup at the station and his conversation with the colonel.

Hearing someone else’s tale of woe raised Morley’s spirits. “So what now?” he asked with his customary air of boyish expectancy.

“We clear up their mess. What else?” Cunningham gazed out of the window, wondering why he felt vaguely envious of McColl.

When Piatakov got back to the house, he found Brady waiting in the chair beneath the banyan tree. When the American heard what had happened, he burst out laughing, loudly enough to bring Chatterji out of the house.

“What is happening?” the Indian asked with an uncertain smile.

As Brady repeated the story in English, Piatakov asked himself for the umpteenth time if she really was in Delhi, if she really had betrayed him.

“The police must have engineered it,” Chatterji said without stopping to think.

“No,” Brady decided. “Why would they? We’re not the sort of friends they’ll want to publicize.”

“Then who? Why would anyone do this?” the Indian asked nervously.

Brady raised a hand to quiet him, but said nothing for several moments. Then his face broke into a smile. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Look—”

“Who could have forced her to write a note like that?” Piatakov interjected in Russian. “I don’t understand it. If she’s a prisoner, then maybe. But whose? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Sergei, for Christ’s sake, get a grip,” Brady said coldly. “You left her and your precious party behind. What does it matter what intrigue she’s gotten herself mixed up in?”

It matters because I cared about her, Piatakov thought. And still do. You could leave a lover behind, but not the heart that loved her.

“You didn’t see her,” Brady continued remorselessly. “You don’t even know she’s here.”

“It was her handwriting!”

“Christ! Maybe someone had a copy from somewhere…”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care. She’s history! Forget her. Forget about whoever it was sent that note. You spend your life wondering why other people are doing what they’re doing. Who cares? Now listen. Whoever was behind that camera—they’ve actually done us a favor. Because now the English have lost any chance of pinning it all on the Bolsheviks—not when there’s a picture showing one of them hand in glove with…” His voice trailed off. “Fuck!” he exclaimed. “What’s the time?”

Chatterji told him.

“Pack up all our stuff,” Brady told them. “We’re moving out now, as soon as the sun goes in.”

“Why?” Piatakov asked.

“The English will know that we know. And there’s only one way that they can be sure of calling the whole thing off.”

The American was right, Piatakov realized.

“Durga,” Brady said, “why don’t you bring the servants together?”

Piatakov thought about protesting but decided against it. There was no time to find out whether one of the servants was genuine and, if so, which. The struggle was a lottery, claiming innocent and guilty alike. He remembered the woman in Samarkand, the shock on her face as she sank to her knees, blood coursing out through her fingers.

During the war Piatakov had heard several soldiers say that the more they saw of death the more careful they were with their lives. Not me, he thought. He was becoming more careless, with his own and everyone else’s.

Caitlin leaned against the balcony rail, watching the street life below. She preferred their old room at the caravansary to the one in Sinha’s house—it might be dirtier, smaller, devoid of extras, but it had this window on the world. She could still feel like part of the human race.

Jack had gone off to see about the photographs, his mood a lot lighter than it had been for days. She wanted to share his confidence, to believe they had found a solution that scuppered the plot without costing Sergei his life, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to believe it. Something kept nagging at the back of her mind, but she didn’t know what it was.

Maybe it was nothing. She watched two girls walk by in identical chrysanthemum-colored saris, their hair oiled, their eyes surrounded by pools of dark makeup. At what age, she wondered, was freedom curtailed and purdah imposed? Were there big differences between the religious groups? She would have liked to find people to ask, but even if she hadn’t been stuck there in her own peculiar purdah, her lack of the relevant linguistic skills would probably have proved a significant obstacle. She had no idea how many of the people walking by on the street below spoke English. Indeed, until the last couple of weeks, India itself had hardly featured in her consciousness.

She noticed Jack coming up the street, his turbaned head bobbing above the shorter locals. He was cradling a bag with one arm, and idly swinging a rolled-up newspaper with the other. Seeing her there on the balcony, he waved the paper and disappeared through the doorway below. A few moments later he was wrapping his arms around her waist and kissing the side of her neck.

“I bring food,” he said.

She followed him into the room, where uncorked pots of rice and sauce were gently steaming on the floor. They ate with their fingers, something both had grown increasingly proficient at in the last couple of months, while McColl told her all about Mirza’s friend with the darkroom and their picture taking form in his developing tray.

“It’s perfect,” he said. “They didn’t say a word to each other, but they look like they’re deep in conversation.”

“That’s good,” she agreed.

“Mirza’s sending one to Fitzwilliam, and there are a dozen copies going out to all and sundry—foreign correspondents, the nationalist groups—”

“It won’t work,” she said abruptly. Reaching out for the jug of water, her eyes had caught the photograph and story on the front page of the Eastern Mail, and suddenly it all made sense.

He looked surprised. “Why not?”

“You sent the warning to Sergei and the others?”

“Yes, we agreed—”

“I know. But it won’t work.” She leaned across, grabbed the newspaper, and placed it in front of him. “Look, Jack,” she said, jabbing a finger at the picture.

“It’s the Prince of Wales.”

“I know. When does he arrive?”

“In a few days.” He shook his head. “No…”

“When was the visit arranged?”

“Months ago, I expect.”

“It has to be. He’s the one they plan to kill, not Gandhi. They think your government will overreact and turn the whole country against it.”

“They’re probably right.” He shifted his gaze from the picture to her. “Why did you ask whether I’d sent the warning?”

It was almost seven when Cunningham, Morley, and three carloads of infantry roared up Sayid Hassan’s drive, bounced across his lawn and flower beds, and drew up in front of the house. No lights sprang on; no shouts of alarm rang out.

Cunningham elected himself to check out the house and found the four servants. Each had been strangled with a silken cord—thuggee-style. Either Chatterji had traditionalist leanings, or one of the others had gone native.

He went back outside. “Get the shovels,” he told the platoon commander.

It had been dark for over an hour when Ahmed Mirza announced his arrival with a knock on their door. McColl introduced him to Caitlin.

The detective grinned. “The woman who drives! All of Delhi is talking about you.”

She smiled back. It had been a memorable few minutes.

They got down to business. “All the copies have been delivered by hand,” Mirza told them. “Including the one to Kudsia Road.”

“And the warning was delivered?” Caitlin asked.

“To the three men we have been watching? Yes, but not at that house. They left there… but I am losing the logical progression of events. When the Russian arrived back from his appointment with my camera, he told the American something, and the American just laughed. Then the Indian came out, and they all had an argument. After that they went back in and stayed in the house until it got dark. Then they all left together.”

“How? Did they walk?”

“To the Delhi Gate, where they hired a tonga.”

“And you know where they went?”

“Of course. To the room overlooking Chandni Chowk that the Indian rented yesterday morning. That is where the warning was delivered—one of the boys slipped it under their door.” Mirza hesitated. “But there is something else I must tell you. The servants at the first house—they are all dead. Once the three men were gone, the boy in charge took a look through the windows, and he saw the bodies. I have to say, it does not feel acceptable, letting them lie there.”

McColl was less surprised than Caitlin was. “Can you inform the police?” he asked Mirza. “An anonymous tip-off, perhaps.”

The detective looked grateful. “I will do so. And now I await your instructions.”

“You’ve done a wonderful job,” McColl told him, “but I must take it from here.” He reached for the purse he’d bought in the market. “You must tell me how much I owe you.”

Mirza looked disappointed. “I am not to be present at the final conclusion?”

“I’m afraid not. It is a family matter,” he added, which was true enough. “But I promise I will come and see you once everything is settled and tell you the story from beginning to end.”

The Indian gave him a rueful smile. “That is good,” he said. “Not good enough, as you English say, but still good. I believe thirty rupees are outstanding.”

McColl handed him the requisite notes, and the two of them shook hands. After seeing the Indian out the door, he turned to find Caitlin sitting on the side of the bed, hands interlinked on top of her head, bleakness in her eyes.

“What now?” she asked.

He sat down beside her. “I think we have three options.”

“Which are?”

“We could tell Fitzwilliam where they are and let him deal with them.”

“Kill them, you mean?”

He decided not to sugarcoat the pill. “Probably.”

“And you think that’s what they deserve,” she replied. It was more a statement than a question.

“If anyone does. They have just murdered four servants.”

She gave him a despairing look. “I know.”

He threw her a lifeline. “I don’t want to hand them over either.”

“For my sake?”

“Partly,” he conceded. “But I’m also afraid that Five will find some other use for Brady.”

“All right,” she said, as if knowing he had a reason legitimized hers. “So what are the other two options?”

“The easiest one is just to walk away.”

“And not lift a finger to save your prince?”

McColl laughed. “He’s not my prince. And the thought of either of us dying to save him… well, it’s too ridiculous for words. If I don’t believe that Jed and Mac gave their lives for anything worthwhile, then why would I want to risk yours and mine?”

She was silent for several moments. “Russia will get the blame,” she said. “The trade deals will collapse, and the famines will go on forever.”

“And we’re still guessing about the target,” he added. “If it is the prince, he’ll be well protected. If it’s Gandhi, we’re his only hope.”

“And walking away never feels right.”

“No,” he agreed, wondering what that might mean for their future. Whatever she decided, she’d be walking away from something.

“So option three is stopping them.”

“Yes. Which won’t be easy.”

“Sparing Sergei complicates matters, doesn’t it?”

“Of course, but…”

“Maybe I can talk him around.” She had a sudden memory of Sergei telling her how much cleverer she was than him.

“You really think that’s possible?”

“I don’t know. If we can get him away from the other two… then perhaps. But Jack, Sergei knows about you, that I had a long love affair with an Englishman. He never asked any questions—he’s old-fashioned in that way—and I don’t remember whether I ever told him your name. I am sure I never told him whom you worked for, but Brady probably has, and you being there will make it less likely he’ll listen to me. So…”

“You’re probably right, but I won’t let you go alone.”

“Sergei wouldn’t hurt me.”

“Maybe, but Brady or Chatterji might.”

She gave him a despairing look. “Couldn’t you hide behind the door or something?” she asked, only half seriously.

“It might work,” he said. “If there’s somewhere close by I can stay undetected, then I needn’t show my face until he makes up his mind.”

“That would work.”

“Then that’s our plan,” McColl said, with as much confidence as he could muster.

She wasn’t fooled. “It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?”

“I can’t think of anything better. And if by some miracle Sergei agrees, we can stick him on a train to somewhere and shop the others. If he doesn’t…”

“Then what do we do?”

“We could disable them all. A bullet in the kneecap is very effective.”

She looked shocked, but only for a moment.

“You walk again eventually,” McColl said, far from sure it was true.

She looked unusually waiflike in her uncertainty. He pulled her head onto his shoulder, and they sat like that in silence for more than a minute. “I sometimes think of Sergei as a grown-up boy,” she said eventually. “And in some ways he is. But he’s been at war for years, and he knows how to fight.”

“I guessed as much.”

“And in case you don’t know—what worries me most is the thought of losing you.”

He held her a little tighter and wished they could stay where they were.

“So when do we go?” she asked.

“Later this evening, but I’ll need to do a reconnaisance first. The more we know, the better our chances.”

Cunningham found the colonel sitting in his usual chair, the tip of his cigarette glowing in the darkness as he gazed out into the wind-twisted shadows of the garden. Cunningham expected a tongue-lashing, but Fitzwilliam listened to his report with a faint smile and then offered him a cigarette.

The Turkish tobacco seemed, as ever, faintly redolent of decadence.

“Any sign of McColl?” Fitzwilliam asked.

“No.”

“He’ll have made a run for it,” Fitzwilliam said confidently. “He’s thrown his spanner in the works. Why would he hang around?”

To make sure, Cunningham thought. “You’re probably right,” he conceded out loud. “And the Good Indian team must know we’re scouring the city for them.”

“You think they’ve made a run for it, too.”

“Probably,” Cunningham said carefully. “Their plan may have failed, but Brady can congratulate himself on cheating the hangman, at least for a while. If they haven’t, and they do stick around for a crack at Gandhi, then we’ll have some questions to answer.”

“The photograph?”

“Precisely.”

“Maybe it’s not such a problem. You’re the one in the picture, and once you’re on the boat home, we can deny all knowledge of you. Or better still, find someone willing to testify that you’re another Russian. It’ll be a hard job proving otherwise.”

Cunningham took a last drag on the cigarette and stubbed it out in an ashtray. “One other thought occurred to me.”

“That the Prince of Wales might have been their target?”

“Might still be. I think we have to consider the possibility.”

“I already have. Our usual security arrangements have worked well enough in the past. And I don’t think it would help to confuse matters at this late hour.” He turned to take another cigarette from the case on the table and lit it from the stub of the last. “Good Indian was authorized by London,” he said, meeting Cunningham’s eyes for the first time that evening. “They can hardly hold us responsible if anything goes wrong, can they?”

“But…”

“You see, I’ve been giving this matter a great deal of thought. If Brady and his friends do nothing, then no harm’s done. And if they do make use of the guns, then we’ll have the excuse we need to nail down the lid on this country.”

“And the prince?” Cunningham heard himself ask.

“Oh, there’s always another one waiting in line.”

Waiting on their balcony, half-lost in the street’s mosaic of lamps, Caitlin was brought back to earth by the voice calling up from below and felt for one beautiful moment like someone’s misplaced Juliet, a rose by any other name.

Or had she gotten that the wrong way around?

She walked down the stairs, adjusting her veil, thinking that here it was—the moment she’d been dreading.

The source of her trepidation was harder to pinpoint. Why should the prospect of seeing Sergei and his murderous friends evoke this hideous sinking sensation? Wisely or not, she felt no fear for her life, but she was afraid of something. Her sense of who she was seemed far too fragile, as if she’d spent the last few years pretending to be someone she wasn’t. A broken future could be repaired; a broken past could not.

McColl helped her into the tonga and, after climbing aboard himself, gave the boy driver their destination. As they rattled down the street toward the station, the boy let loose a string of shrill exhortations to clear their passage through the knots of evening strollers.

A glance at her companion confirmed Caitlin’s feeling that he was—if not quite in his element—much more at home in such situations than she was. She could see why he’d kept that job for all those years, despite a growing disenchantment with the cause it served. He loved thinking on his feet; as she’d now seen on more than one occasion, he functioned well in a crisis.

Well, he had one here.

The boy swung them around a corner and into an even busier street. Even in summer Moscow’s streets would have been practically deserted at this time of night—just a handful of drunks and Cheka patrols. As they rode between lines of still-open stalls, she remembered the last time she’d gone looking for Sergei, driving past the futurist flower stalls on Bolshaya Dmitrovka.

Moscow—Russia—seemed a long way away. Fall would be almost half-done, winter already looming. So much energy spent in simply keeping warm, so little light to live by. Yet so much warmth in people’s hearts, so much brightness in their eyes. A whole other world.

She found herself thinking how utterly Russian the revolution had been, how thin its subsequent claims to internationalism, no matter how sincerely meant. People like her and Brady, who came from a similar political tradition, could lend the Russians a helping hand, but what were he and she and Sergei doing here, far from any way of life they really understood? Scratching an itch until it bled?

Their tonga should have been a troika, she thought. Plowing through snow rather than dust.

She hugged herself against the sudden chill.

Her silence was slightly unnerving, but also hardly surprising. McColl hoped she was gathering focus and strength, like a last man waiting to bat, and not already saying good-bye.

The world had always divided them, he thought, as their tonga skirted the chaos of the station forecourt. In a room, a bed, there were no borders. Traveling across the Pacific, America, and Afghanistan, they had been like Lenin in his famous sealed train. But now that their lives were bound up with those all around them, the boundaries were slowly materializing, like invisible writing exposed to the sun.

In his more optimistic moments, McColl believed that things had improved, that during the years apart, their approaches to life had actually grown more similar. Their politics were certainly less incompatible, mostly because of the distance he had traveled. Her opinions had hardly changed in seven years, but then, events hadn’t proved her wrong. The future he’d been hoping for had died in the Flanders mud.

She had changed, though. The questing intelligence and almost reckless determination that he’d first encountered in China were still there, but they’d been tempered by age, work, and unhappy knowledge. All the brittleness was gone, leaving her stronger and surer of herself. She had come into her own in Russia.

Was that reason enough for her to go back? Over the last few weeks, they’d discussed the situation in Russia almost daily, and sometimes she seemed to be saying it was. At others she didn’t seem half so sure. Lenin’s Russia was changing, she said, and people like her might soon find it hard to get anything useful done.

But she had never said that she wanted to leave that country behind. Not once. Not for political reasons and not for love of him.

As he turned to look at her, she wrapped herself up in her arms.

“Are you cold?” he asked, surprised.

“No. How much farther is it?”

“Not far.”

“I just want it over. I expect you do, too.”

Part of him did, though what came after might be worse.

Assuming they survived. Going up against three armed men—at least two of whom were seasoned fighters—felt like a real roll of the dice.

They were passing the Queen’s Gardens, heading up toward Chandni Chowk. The town hall clock struck eleven as they turned onto the wide thoroughfare, too British a sound for such a hot night. The number of people still in motion was rapidly diminishing, the pavements filling with would-be sleepers and more than a few crying babies.

A hundred yards short of their turnoff, McColl leaned forward and tapped their driver’s shoulder. “This will do.”

The boy hauled back on the reins and guided them into the curb. A man on the nearby pavement raised his head in surprise, then gently laid it back on his makeshift pillow.

McColl paid off the boy and pulled Caitlin into the shadows of a shop front. “See that side street?” he said, pointing it out. “Number four is about twenty yards in. You can just see the corner of its roof from here,” he added. “Take the staircase right to the top—”

“And it’s the door on the left. I haven’t forgotten.” Farther up Chandni Chowk, the dark outline of a huge fortress was visible. “Your prince will come this way?” she asked.

“Yes.” He tried to picture it. Soldiers and elephants, rajas and banners. Presumably the homeless would be moved out first.

The veil was now a neck scarf. “So this is where we part.”

“Yep. But I won’t be far away. You just keep them talking.”

“Oh, I don’t think the conversation will flag,” she said drily.

“You are sure about this?”

“As sure as I can be.” She gave him a farewell kiss and was halfway across the street by the time he realized she was gone.

McColl pulled his service revolver from his waistband and checked it. “Time to be myself again,” he murmured, unwinding the turban and hanging the doubled-up strip around his neck.

She found the house without difficulty. Her knock on the door brought an Indian, so she pointed upward. The Indian smiled, said something incomprehensible, and gestured her toward the stairs. She climbed to the top and found a door with a strip of yellow light beneath it.

She rapped on it softly, and after a few seconds, the light all but disappeared.

“Sergei, it’s me,” she said loudly, the words sounding strangely inadequate.

The door edged opened, and the familiar features stared out of the gloom. His face was a picture.

“Caitlin! What—”

“Get inside,” Brady said, bustling past them onto the landing, clearly intent on making sure that she was alone.

She followed Sergei into the room and watched as he turned the lamp back up. Their Indian comrade was staring at her, a gun hanging loosely in his hand.

“What in God’s name are you doing here, Caitlin?” Sergei wanted to know.

He sounded so distressed, as if her appearance was the worst thing he could have imagined. Which might even have been a good sign. “I—”

“First things first,” Brady said, striding back in and leaving the door slightly ajar. “Durga, check the roof. And you,” he said, turning to Caitlin, “will explain how you found us.”

She and Jack had expected the question. “With Indian comrades’ help,” she said curtly. “We knew the British would want to keep you at a distance, and finding two white men in the Indian town isn’t so difficult.”

“What were you trying to achieve with that business at the station?” Brady asked.

“That was aimed at the British,” she patiently explained. “We thought you might be playing into their hands, so we had to make sure they didn’t come out on top.”

Sergei looked like he might explode. “But who is this we? And what does this have to do with you?”

“I am here on behalf of the Cheka,” she told him, noting in passing that this wasn’t a sentence she’d ever expected to hear herself say. “The Cheka that your friend here once served,” she added with a contemptuous glance at Brady. “But I know I won’t change his mind. It’s you I’ve come to plead with,” she told Sergei. “The party—your party—the one you made the revolution with, the one you served for all those years. It opposes this. It asks you to think again.”

Out on the roof, crouched in the shadow of a large tin chimney, McColl could see Chatterji in the open doorway, his gun gleaming blue in the somber light. Behind the open window off to the Indian’s right, there were three people conversing in Russian: Caitlin, Brady, and a second man, who had to be her husband, Sergei.

On his reconnaissance earlier that evening, McColl had been tempted to go it alone and simply kill or disable all three men—he hadn’t got around to deciding which. With surprise on his side, his chances of survival would have been much better, and there would have been no need to put her at risk. She would have been furious with him for presuming to know what was best for them both, but that he could have coped with—his problem was, he knew why she wanted to give Sergei a chance. Her husband had been responsible for several innocent deaths over the last few months, but McColl was willing to believe that Sergei was following his conscience. Just as Caitlin’s brother Colm had done; Colm, whose death would always haunt McColl’s relationship with her. Just as he himself had done while working for the Service. You did what you thought was right, and people died. Because you made a simple mistake, or didn’t think things through, or were simply wrong to begin with. It was hard playing God without the omniscience.

He could see Fedya’s face as the boy told him good-bye.

The latch clicked as Chatterji pulled the door shut. It was time to get closer.

She knew she was wasting her breath from the look of amazement on his face.

“This is insane,” Sergei said. “That you should come all this way… it’s… Go home, Caitlin. Go back to your work. There is nothing for you here.”

She met his eyes, knew it was true.

“You and the party disapprove of our plan,” Brady said, “but you don’t even know what it is.”

She glanced at the American, now sitting on the edge of his chair, but still outwardly unruffled. “You’re going to shoot the English prince,” she told him. She turned back to Sergei. “I remember when you had nothing but contempt for this sort of terrorism,” she said. “All that killing this prince will do is give the English the excuse they need to cancel the trade treaty. And we cannot afford to be alone in the world. Russia will starve.”

Sergei stared her straight in the eye, and she could feel the sadness and rage washing around inside him. “It was the party leadership that betrayed the revolution,” he said, grinding out each word. “It wasn’t me.”

Chatterji reappeared. “Nothing,” he told Brady before taking a seat at the table and placing the gun within easy reach. As far as she could see, neither Brady nor Sergei was armed.

“Women always say they have more imagination than men,” Brady was saying, a self-satisfied smile on his face, “but I’m afraid you haven’t bothered to apply yours. I’m sure it will be satisfying to assassinate a prince, but as you say, that on its own is hardly likely to set India ablaze.”

Caitlin just looked at him.

“We are going to assassinate him, but not only him. While Durga does the honors from the roof outside, Sergei and I will be half a mile away, executing the sainted Gandhi. An Indian killing an English prince, white men killing India’s favorite son. It’s called a double play in baseball, as I’m sure you know.” He grinned at her, relishing the moment. “And India truly will explode.”

“And Russia will no longer be alone,” Sergei pointed out. “A revolution here will keep ours alive. The party will no longer need to make compromises.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “What use would India be to us? It’s ten times more backward than we are!”

“All the more reason,” Brady drawled. “But I think we’ve talked for long enough. The only thing left to decide is what we do with you.”

McColl was a short step away from the barely open door, trying to pinpoint each man’s position from the sounds of their voices. He still had no idea where Chatterji was, but he might wait forever for the Indian to speak.

He pushed the door wide, took in the frozen tableau, and let the aim of his revolver come to rest on the Indian, whose hand was inches away from the gun on the table.

“Push it away from you,” McColl told him in English.

Chatterji did so.

“You,” McColl said to Piatakov in Russian, “back against the wall.”

“Jack McColl,” Brady said, a grin spreading across his face like a mask. “I should have guessed. Are you working for the Cheka, too, or has Caitlin here joined British intelligence?”

“Neither,” McColl told him, stepping into the room.

“We’re here together because we want the same thing,” Caitlin told the stunned Piatakov. “An end to this madness.”

Brady laughed at her. “When the Cheka starts working with the British Crown, there’s no revolution worth saving. But perhaps you’ve been too busy sleeping with the past to notice. Why not go home, as Sergei tells you? Back to your women’s business.”

“Nothing would make me happier. As long as he comes with me.”

“At the end of a gun?” Piatakov asked bitterly.

“If there was another way to save you from this idiocy, I would have used it.”

He shook his head sadly. “I can’t go back.”

“So that’s that,” Brady said. “I guess you’ll have to kill us all.”

She ignored him. “Sergei?”

“Remember Vedenskoye,” Brady said matter-of-factly.

“No!” Piatakov cried as Chatterji tipped himself backward.

Distracted by the Indian’s movement, McColl took his eye off Brady just long enough for the latter to raise his Colt revolver and would probably have paid the intended price if Piatakov, intent on shielding Caitlin, hadn’t thrown himself at the American.

McColl had braced himself for the bullet, but when the Colt boomed, it was the Russian who took it, staggering forward and then collapsing in front of his shocked-looking partner.

As Piatakov toppled, McColl fired over him, slamming Brady into the wall.

McColl fired again, blowing a hole through the side of Chatterji’s head as the Indian lunged for his gun.

Caitlin was on all fours, leaning over the now-prone Piatakov. “Oh, Sergei,” she whispered, but there was no answer, only a dark patch spreading on the white linen shirt.

Brady was slumped behind them, clutching his upper side, the fallen Colt beyond his reach.

McColl kept him covered, ears cocked for the sound of feet on the stairs. The other people in the house would have heard the shots, but would they do anything more than lock their doors and remind one another that white people’s business was better left to them?

So far, apparently not.

Chatterji and Caitlin’s husband were dead, so the obvious thing to do was finish Brady off and leave the building as fast as they could.

He looked at the wounded American and wished the man would give him the excuse he needed. It was doubtless to humanity’s credit that most people found it hard to kill in cold blood, but sometimes it was most inconvenient.

He didn’t think he could do it, not even when the man in question was Aidan Brady.

Caitlin stared at her fellow American. He had led her brother and Sergei to their deaths, and it made no difference to her that both had been willing disciples. He had murdered Yuri Komarov, whom she’d come to respect and almost cherish. Three times now, he had tried and narrowly failed to kill Jack.

What sort of monster was he? The five words that came to mind were hackneyed as hell but seemed bizarrely appropriate: an enemy of the revolution.

The gun that Chatterji had knocked off the table was lying a foot from her hand.

As she picked it up, Brady must have seen the look on her face. “No,” he said, trying to rise. There was more disbelief than fear in his voice, as if he couldn’t quite believe in a world without himself.

After only the briefest of hesitations, she aimed at that place where most men had hearts and firmly squeezed the trigger.

Brady’s head slumped to the floor, his mouth twisting into a final snarl.

Footsteps sounded on the stairs, then stopped. The shooting hadn’t gone unnoticed.

McColl tried to gently pull Caitlin away, but she shook him off. Back on her knees, she closed the dead Piatakov’s eyes and kissed him on the forehead.

McColl could hear voices below. Arguing, probably over what to do. “We have to go,” he told her. “He didn’t save you so you could end up in an Indian prison,” he added when she failed to respond. “He’d want you to go on with your work.”

She looked up, eyes full of tears. “I know.”

“Then come on. We’ll go out the way I came in.”

She got back to her feet, wiping the tears away on her sleeve.

He scanned the room for anything they might have left behind, then turned down the lamp. When he took a last look back from the door, the room seemed full of corpses, but for once in his violent life, he could see no cause for remorse. His only regret was that he hadn’t shot Brady himself because Caitlin seemed in a state of shock.

She let him lead her across a succession of adjoining roofs and down the rickety fire escape that a progressive landlord had provided for his tenants. As they reached the bottom, a rickshaw came out of the darkness and stopped right beside them, the boy driver beaming with pride. McColl helped her into the seat, thinking that Komarov’s ghost had to be working overtime.

McColl told the boy where to take them and asked for a back-street route. Soon they were speeding down narrow, dimly lit alleys where the rickshaw often scraped along one of the walls.

“You tried,” he told her, conscious of how empty the words sounded.

She just looked away.

He had never seen her like this before, but then as far as he knew, she’d never shot a man before. Nor seen a husband die.

The shock would wear off, but until it did he’d have to think for them both. Would Five and the IPI be after them? By rights they should be grateful—he and Caitlin had succeeded where Cunningham and his helpers had failed—but McColl wasn’t holding his breath. He and Caitlin knew too much.

They had to get out of Delhi, but where should they go? He knew Calcutta much better than Bombay… He suddenly thought of Darjeeling, largely empty of Brits at this time of year, and close enough to the Chinese border should they need a place to run to. One of those hotels high on the hill with their stunning views of the Himalayas. Next morning he could go to see Mirza, tell the detective the story as promised, and ask for the help of his old railway comrades in getting them out of the city.

A glance at Caitlin’s expression brought McColl back to earth. Here he was planning their future, and only twenty minutes before she’d been begging Sergei to come home. Had she been lying to coax him away from the others, or had she really meant it? Even if she hadn’t, why was he assuming that she wouldn’t return on her own? Because she loved him? She’d loved him in 1918, and that hadn’t stopped her from saying good-bye.

They were, he suddenly realized, drawing up outside the serai. It was gone midnight, and their feet on the stairs sounded loud in the sleeping building. Once they were safe in their room, he tried to take her in his arms, and after an initial flinch, she allowed him to do so. “Thank you,” she said when he let her go, but he had no idea what for.

She lay herself out on the bed and stared at the ceiling.

Things would look better after they slept, he told himself, lying down beside her. He felt exhausted but was determined not to drop off before she did.

She seemed to sense as much. “Go to sleep,” she told him. “I don’t think I’ll be able to.”

“Do you want to talk?” he asked.

“No.”

In the hour before dawn, McColl awoke with a jerk, a sheen of cold sweat on his forehead. His mind reached for the fading dream, but it was already gone, leaving only the feeling that somehow he had gotten everything wrong.

He levered himself into a sitting position and stared down at her sleeping face, shadow drawn in the dim light: the dark pools of the shuttered eyes; the strong, graceful line of the jaw. The new Russia, he thought. Humanity’s best hope, where the best of people ended up as executioners.

One day maybe, far in the future.

When he woke up again, the sun was streaming through the window, and she was gone. So was her suitcase and, as he quickly discovered, half of their money. She was going back to Russia.

There was a note on the table. “I love you, Jack, and that makes this the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. Forgive me, Caitlin.”

He read it through again, and again, examining each pencil stroke as if there was some way he could release the feelings they had imprisoned, then sat staring into space for several minutes, before running a hand through his hair and walking out onto the balcony.

“I can give myself to you,” she had once said to him, “because I know I can take myself away.”

Outside, the familiar sensory palette presented itself: the smells, the noise, the ache of color. Across the street a man in a turban was sitting on a stool, a cobbler’s last between his knees, hammering away at a long black boot. A rickshaw went past, carrying a pasty-faced European toward the Red Fort. Above the roofs the sky seemed blue as the dome over Tamerlane’s tomb.

Had he always known she would go back?

He had to admit the answer was no. The fear had always been there, but he hadn’t really believed that she would.

What could he do now? Go home, he supposed, if only for his mother’s sake. To a country awash with anger and bitterness, to the half-dead life he’d left behind, to grieving her loss all over again.

He walked back into the room and wearily gathered his possessions together.

The map of Tashkent he’d taken from Rafiq’s room at the Hotel Lux was still in his bag, and seeing it there he remembered the courtyard of women, the flickering film on the wall, all those eyes in search of a better world.

Her place of hope. He seemed no nearer to finding his own.

The plumes of smoke in the distance presumably marked the station. After she’d found a place there to change back into her Russian clothes, she would buy a ticket to somewhere. She had no idea how she would get back to Moscow and suspected it might take months, but there had to be a way. For someone like her—young, clever, and white—there would always be a way.

So why did the smoke in the distance seem too close? She had done the hardest part, done it because she knew she wouldn’t have the strength to do it again. So why was she crying inside?

What in God’s name was she doing?

They were passing through the Queen’s Gardens. “Pull over,” she told the driver, pointing him toward the curb when he turned to see what she wanted. He looked around again once they were stationary, and she held up five fingers.

He muttered something and climbed down from his seat. “More annas,” he warned her, before lighting a cigarette and ambling into the garden.

She sat there, absurdly exposed, watching the palm fronds sway in the morning breeze.

Was she returning to something that was no longer there?

In 1918 she’d been closer to joy than she’d ever expected. She remembered trying—and failing—to convey the strength of that feeling in a letter to her aunt Orla. What had happened in Russia was probably a once-in-a-lifetime thing, maybe rarer than that. A sense of togetherness, of social happiness, that had left her and all the people she knew drunk on hope and fellow feeling. The world had opened up, and things that had once seemed carved in stone—the poverty and exploitation, the never-ending wars, the subjection of women—were suddenly seen to be written only in sand, so swiftly erased, so easily rewritten. And she had been part of the change, one of so many making a difference.

Wordsworth had put it well: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.”

The years that followed had not been so joyful—the civil war and the hardship it brought in its wake had seen to that. Some had thought victory would rejuvenate the revolution, but the opposite seemed to have happened. The magic was gone, the world closing down, the sand reverting to stone.

They found it hard to admit, to themselves as much as to one another, but all of them knew. Sergei and Komarov had railed against it in their very different ways; Kollontai was doubtless still tenaciously fighting her corner. But deep in their hearts, they all knew that the odds were against them, that the brand-new world they thought they had glimpsed was fading like a dream.

Caitlin sighed and watched as a pair of young Indian men in suits strode past, presumably bound for some office. She could go back to hers in Moscow and do that work that could still be done. Part of her wanted to; part of her thought she should.

But other voices demanded a hearing. The one that said, “Cut your losses, and find a new country where doors are waiting for someone to break them down.” The one that just said, “Jack.”

In 1918 she’d had to choose between love and ideals because he was a wanted man where she most wanted to be. But even then, setting him loose, she’d hoped that they might meet again, that she wasn’t burning her bridges completely. And miracle of miracles, she’d been right.

If she left him again, she knew there’d be no way back.

Passionate love wasn’t everything, but it sure as hell was something. And though for women it often seemed to crowd out everything else, that didn’t have to be the case. Maybe winning that particular battle was the hardest thing she’d ever have to do.

He took one last look around the empty room, and felt the sting of tears. Feeling foolish, he wiped them away and made for the stairs. He was halfway across the courtyard below when the street door swung open and there she was, suitcase in hand.

Seeing him there, an uncertain smile appeared on her face.

“Forget something?” he asked.

“Just you.”