Once Bracegirdle was gone, McColl explored the flat. It didn’t feel like anyone’s home, but wasn’t as bland as a hotel room—the motley range of knickknacks, magazines, and books left behind by previous guests were more suggestive of an Indian clubhouse. The water was thrillingly hot, a private bath the height of luxury. After soaking for almost half an hour, he rummaged through the clothes that someone had brought from the room he’d rented in Kenton and dressed for an evening on the town.
The street outside was full of restaurants, but what he really wanted was fish and chips. Directed to a place near Baker Street station, he ate from the newspaper on a nearby bench, savoring each greasy mouthful. After washing his hands in the station toilet, he stood on the concourse just watching the flow of unrestrained people, wondering what to do. Visiting his friends in the disabled soldiers group seemed like a nice idea—there were trains to Wembley down the stairs—but explaining his early release might prove problematic. There’d be time enough to see them when he came back from Russia.
He took a walk through Regent’s Park instead. There were a lot of people out strolling on the long summer evening, and there was a queue for the rowboats on the lake. The hundred-day drought he’d read about in prison was evident in the parched grass and undernourished flower beds.
With the sun sinking, he found a pub and sat outside with a pint of beer and someone’s discarded paper. The news, as usual, was mostly bad. There were now over two million unemployed, and a similar number currently engaged in pay disputes—the promised country fit for heroes was apparently still at the drawing-board stage. A huge race riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, had seen hundreds of negroes—men, women, and children—murdered by a rampaging white mob. Large parts of Russia, if this clearly anti-Bolshevik paper could be believed, were stricken by famine. And the English cricket team had just lost to Australia at Lord’s, despite two ninety-plus innings from Frank Woolley.
Back at the flat, it took him three attempts to reach his mother before she finally answered. He expected to hear that she’d been at one of her meetings, but she’d actually been at the cinema, enjoying the new sensation Rudolph Valentino. Her delight at hearing he was out was somewhat tempered by the fact of a quid pro quo, which he didn’t try to hide. She knew better than to ask where he was going or why, merely queried how long whatever it was might take.
“I should be back in a couple of months,” he said, hoping he was erring on the side of caution. “How have you been?”
“Good enough. I seem to be slowing down a bit, but I suppose that’s the way of it once you get past sixty. I took some flowers to the graves today and had a word with them both.”
His father and brother were buried side by side, which wouldn’t have pleased the latter, but which made things easier for his mother. And as one of McColl’s disabled friends had put it: “Your brother’s dead, so he won’t really mind.”
After the call McColl went straight to bed, and slept surprisingly soundly for over nine hours. Up at seven, he had time for breakfast at a nearby café before another of Cumming’s helpers picked him up. His first briefer was a specialist in Russian current affairs; over the next few days he listened to several others and memorized numerous call signs. The number of wireless sets and operators that the Service had scattered across remote Central Asia was either truly remarkable or completely bonkers, and only time would tell which.
More unusually, he also spent several hours memorizing photographs of other British agents. These included Secret Service personnel, whose pictures Cumming had on file, and agents who worked for MI5 or the Indian Department of Criminal Intelligence (DCI), whose likenesses he had acquired by means best known to himself. When it came to the plot in question, the loyalties of most men concerned were largely a matter of guesswork, but a knowledge of the faces would at least allow McColl to spot an interested party.
On the day before his departure, he had a final meeting with Cumming himself. His old boss looked better than he had in the prison governor’s office, but still seemed unusually anxious about the matter in hand. They talked about cars as they always did, but McColl was out of touch, and Cumming’s interest seemed more halfhearted than usual. Their parting was friendly enough, but strangely tentative, as if each feared he wouldn’t see the other again.
McColl took a farewell stroll down the river. It was a beautiful sunny day, the dome of St. Paul’s shining like one of Wells’s flying machines, the trains chugging in and out of Cannon Street as if posing for Impressionist painters. The Pool of London was full of activity, omnibuses queuing on either side of the raised Tower Bridge. The cell at Wormwood Scrubs seemed like a distant memory.
He leaned against a balustrade and stared out across the busy river, wondering what he would do when he came back. He would be forty in a few months’ time—what did he want from the rest of his life?
He didn’t know, which was somewhat depressing.
Then again, he might not come back, in which case the question would have answered itself.
Red into Blue
The two men stepped aboard the tram.
“Two kopeks, citizen,” the driver said sharply, as Sergei Piatakov walked straight past his window.
Piatakov spun around to face him, feeling the all-too-familiar surge of resentment.
“The city soviet has reintroduced the charge,” the driver added apologetically, arching back in his seat, as if half expecting a punch.
Piatakov’s companion, Aram Shahumian, rummaged in his pockets, found the appropriate coins, and dropped them in the box.
Piatakov gave the driver a last contemptuous look and walked down to the far end of the almost empty tram, putting as much distance between himself and the transaction as he could. “Is this what we’ve been fighting for?” he asked his companion. “To bring back the rule of money?”
The Armenian shrugged.
Piatakov wasn’t done. “You remember when Zinoviev gave that speech announcing that all public transport would be free. I was proud of us that day.”
“Your party was never shy when it came to making promises.”
Piatakov shook his head, but not in disagreement. “On my way to meet you, I saw this shirt in a shop window. On Arbat, it was. It was creamy white with fancy buttons and a floppy collar. The sort of thing a czarist gigolo might wear. And there was a little card beside it, with a neatly printed price. And do you know what it cost? Eighty rubles! In a city where half the people are hungry, where thousands are out on strike, in a country ruled by people who say they speak for ordinary workers and peasants, there are shirts on sale for eighty rubles! A month’s wages, if you’re lucky!”
“You know what I think of our current rulers, Sergei. What I thought of them when we met. They haven’t done anything to make me change my mind.”
Piatakov sighed. There was no denying his friend’s consistency. Since the two men had first spent time together, sharing a hastily excavated trench in the northern Ukraine, Aram had made no secret of his anarchist beliefs. The Armenian had happily fought alongside Bolsheviks, but had never been reticent when it came to damning what he considered their obsession with power. Piatakov had liked and trusted him right from the start, which was more than he could say for many of his fellow Bolsheviks. There were no airs, no affectations, about Shahumian; what you saw was what you always got, no matter how difficult the circumstances. “And it seems you were right all along,” Piatakov said wryly.