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.