Miliutin put a hand on McColl’s shoulder. “One piece of free advice: don’t hang around here any longer than you need to—the Cheka look after their own.”
McColl watched Miliutin walk away along the embankment, then started across the Okhtinsky Bridge, feeling the cool gusts of air wafting up from the water below. He felt calmer than expected, which wouldn’t have pleased his old Service instructors. If your heart wasn’t racing, it probably meant you’d missed something crucial.
A narrow street led through to the wider Suvorovskiy Prospect, where a banner announced that children are the flowers of our life. So why had Lenin never had any? McColl wondered, as he turned south toward Nevsky Prospect. Many of the shop fronts and office premises were still boarded up, and the road itself was empty save for an occasional clanking tram, but the pavements were crowded with hurrying people, and there seemed less tension in the faces than there had been three years before.
The fashions hadn’t changed. The women were still dressed in the full-length skirts fashionable at the time of the revolution; those men not in uniform were attired in either worn-looking suits or the traditional Russian summer wear of linen blouse, loose trousers, and high, soft boots.
Halfway down the avenue, he noticed an open basement café. On the counter several loaves and a large slab of evil-looking lard provided the choice of fare; a price list was propped up beside the bubbling samovar. McColl helped himself to the bread, took a strong-looking brew from the woman serving, and handed her the requisite number of kopeks. She gathered them up in her apron and flicked a few beads across the abacus.
He found a poorly lit corner seat, wolfed down the bread, and sipped at the scalding tea. The only other customer was an elderly man busy chewing sunflower seeds. After shelling each one in his mouth, he used his tongue to maneuver the husks onto his lower lip, where they sat in a quivering line.
McColl tore his gaze from the spectacle and went through his options again. He had originally planned to spend at least one night in Petrograd, thinking it better to arrive in Moscow with some idea of Russian conditions. But that was too risky now—the Chekist he’d inadvertently thrown from the train was akin to a spluttering fuse. He had to keep moving.
First he needed to change his clothes. A description of his current attire would no doubt soon be circulating, and in any case his travel permit was for a metallurgist.
He gulped down the last of his tea, got up, and left the café. Farther down the avenue he came across a street leading off to the left, and then an alley that ran behind a row of disused stables. A door sagging off its hinges offered a way into one of them, which looked like it hadn’t been used for months. Sunbeams were lancing through gaps in the walls, and putting an eye to one crack McColl found himself watching a group of boys being drilled by a broad-chested sailor. Their formation was somewhat ragged, but everyone looked very earnest and determined to get it right.
McColl took off the blouse and leather breeches, put on a threadbare suit, and rethreaded the belt that contained his emergency supply of silver coins. A few minutes later he was back on the avenue, breeches and blouse packed away in the suitcase, a metallurgist en route to a conference in the capital.
Reaching Nevsky Prospect, he skirted Vosstaniya Square and entered the ornate grandeur of the old Nikolayev Station. In the concourse a horde of people were milling to and fro, many of them in uniform, and around the walls a regiment of peasants sat or lay with their belongings, watching the activity with the familiar air of blank detachment. The heat was oppressive, the smell of human sweat heavy on the air.
McColl joined the scrum in the ticket hall and watched the line of harassed clerks as they examined credentials and issued tickets and permits. As far as he could see, the permits looked identical in style to his own. When his turn came, he stepped forward, resisting a ludicrous desire to turn and run, and passed across permit and papers. Without even a cursory look, the clerk used one finger to type out a ticket on an old American machine.
“When’s the next train?” McColl asked.
The clerk’s expression suggested he might as well have asked for a fortune-telling. “Perhaps today,” the clerk said shortly. “Next.”
McColl took a long look at the concourse, and tried to decide what to do. There were plenty of Chekists in evidence, and joining the waiting throng seemed like asking for trouble, but he couldn’t just come back later if he had no idea when to come. He would have to trust his papers and try to be invisible. Over there, he thought, spying a corner that already seemed crowded, in the shadow of the eastern wall.
It was a long day, and McColl moved with the shadow as it circled the concourse, until darkness finally fell. Two trains were announced one after the other soon after ten, but the first didn’t leave until just before midnight, a serpentine, twenty-one carriage monster hauled by three huge locomotives. Each coach was packed to the ceiling, making movement to a probably mythical restaurant car impossible, the transfer of bread from pocket to mouth merely difficult. Once on its way the train stopped with depressing frequency, though no one ever seemed to get off, and only the most determined had a ghost’s chance of getting on. There was much drunken singing and much vociferous debate, mostly about politics. Sleep, McColl decided, would not be possible.
He was woken by a hand shaking his shoulder and immediately feared the worst. Then he saw the other hand, holding in front of his eyes a card that identified the bearer as a member of the Young Communist League. Both the eyes and the card belonged to a boy of around eleven. It was Fedya, he thought for a second. Fedya returned in a dream.
“For the famine victims, citizen,” the boy said, gesturing toward the collection box that his companion, a girl of about the same age, was holding out.
McColl groped for some coins and dropped them into the box. The girl smiled at him, lighting large dark eyes in a pale, emaciated face. As the two children clambered their way out of the compartment, McColl noticed that both had bare feet.
“Rossiya,” he murmured to himself. Russia. A time and place like no other, as someone had told him three years before. Through the window the trunks of the silver birches glowed in the morning twilight.
Yuri Komarov always walked to the office, even though it was more than three miles from his room. Other men of similar rank—not that there were many—often used the official cars, but Komarov had never felt comfortable with privilege. He knew such self-denial made others feel guilty and himself unpopular, but people’s approval had never been high on his list of priorities.
He walked down Bolshaya Lubyanka, past the criminal investigation office where he’d worked during the hectic weeks of the revolution, past the headquarters of the statewide Vecheka where its Chairman Felix Dzerzhinsky was probably still agonizing over some trivial problem that he should have left to a subordinate, and turned in through the doors of number 14. This impressive building, once home to Moscow’s governor and later used as offices by the Moscow Fire Insurance Company, now housed the headquarters of the M-Cheka. Dzerzhinsky was nominally in charge of this department as well, but left its running to Komarov.
After passing through the large anteroom, he walked down a corridor, through another large office, and up a short flight of steps to his own smaller sanctum. A window looked out across the inner courtyard, where several prisoners were being given their morning exercise. The room itself conveyed an impression of bareness, despite containing four chairs, a desk, and two tall filing cabinets. The white-painted walls were yellow and peeling.