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.