And until the previous fall they had made each other happy enough, sharing their thoughts and their bodies, and leaving their future for a postwar discussion, always assuming the war ever ended. Then, in October 1920, his regiment had been one of the units sent to Tambov province to crush the peasant rebellion, and several months later he’d come back a different man. For one thing he was impotent; for another he would often wake up shouting or—which seemed even worse to Caitlin—weeping. By day he was either depressed or angry and, on each succeeding trip to Moscow, seemed to spend more and more time at one or other of those disreputable clubs where renegades of every stripe met to share their rage and despair. When he’d last gone back to his regiment, she’d realized with a shock that all she felt was relief.
Caitlin took a deep breath and opened the door to her room. He was standing at the gable window, looking out over the moonlit roofs, and the face he turned toward her looked boyish and terribly bleak.
“Sergei,” she said, walking across and throwing her arms around his neck. “It’s good to see you.”
He was stiff in her arms, but slowly relaxed. “And you,” he said, just about managing a smile.
“How long are you here for? Where have you come from?”
He explained that the regiment was on its way back to Tambov province, and that he and many others suspected that part of the reason was to get them as far away from Kronstadt as possible. “I don’t think they trust us to go against the rebels.”
“That’s terrible,” she said.
“What is? That we couldn’t be trusted or that that’s what they thought?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know what to make of what’s happening at Kronstadt.”
“As far as I can tell, it’s not complicated. The sailors are the revolution’s conscience, and they say the things we fought for are in danger of being lost. Have already been lost in some cases.”
“But according to Pravda it’s not the same sailors who were there in 1917, and there are Whites involved.”
Piatakov shook his head dismissively. “They’re lying.”
“That’s a serious accusation. Are you sure?”
“Not a hundred percent. But I know these men. And even if I didn’t—sometimes you just know. Sometimes the facts only add up one way. But is there any news from Kronstadt? I’ve been on a train for more than a day.”
“None that I’ve heard. But I was in an Orgbureau meeting for almost that long.”
That made him smile. “I’m hungry,” he said. “Let’s go to the cafeteria, and maybe someone will know something.”
“All right.”
They walked the three blocks arm in arm, Caitlin silently wondering why she found it so hard to believe that Lenin was actually lying to his own party. Was it because the truth would be too damning? Would undermine everything?
The cafeteria was still almost full, despite the lateness of the hour. They queued for their soup and bread, but Sergei was more interested in asking the other diners questions than eating his food. “They say that Trotsky has appointed Tukhachevsky to lead an attack across the ice,” he said, when he finally returned to their table. “Sixty thousand men against three thousand,” he added, picking up his spoon and staring stonily into space.
It occurred to Caitlin that the rebels would have been wiser to wait a few weeks until the ice surrounding their island had melted, but Sergei seemed depressed enough already. On the walk back to the house, he suddenly stopped, grabbed both her hands, and earnestly looked her in the eye. “Sometimes I think it’s all over,” he said, “and we should just find another country, and start again from scratch, determined not to make the same mistakes.”
No, she thought, remembering Rahima and the others. It wasn’t over. But she didn’t want to argue with him. Not tonight.
In bed, they undressed and held each other for what seemed a long time, until he murmured, “I’m sorry,” and turned his back.
June–July 1921
Quid Pro Quo
It was the middle of the morning, and hunger was doing its usual best to flatter the coming lunch, when a jangle of keys announced an official visit. “Someone to see you,” the screw told McColl. “Look sharp.”
Who the hell? McColl thought. His mother had been down only a week or so before, and the normal hour for visits was in the afternoon. Had something happened to her?
“Who is it?” he asked the screw as they threaded their way through the wing.
“I wasn’t told. This way,” he added, taking an unexpected turn.
Another door unlocked, and suddenly there was a carpet on the floor.
“In here,” his escort said, showing McColl into what looked like a sitting room. A desk stood against one wall; two comfortable sofas faced each other in front of an open fireplace. The governor’s reception room, he guessed.
“Sit down and don’t touch anything,” the warder told him, as if he were five years old.
At first McColl did as he was told, but the lure of the window was too much. Standing beside it, he could see treetops above the prison wall. Trees that had sprung into leaf since his day at the Harrow assizes.
He was still engrossed in this new outside world when the door opened behind him, and Mansfield Cumming stepped into the room.
McColl had last seen the Secret Service chief toward the end of 1918, but Cumming looked more than three years older. His former boss hadn’t many years left, McColl thought, surprised by how sad that made him feel.
After shaking hands, they each sat down in the middle of a sofa. “How would you like to get out of here?” Cumming asked without preamble.
“Show me a man who wouldn’t,” McColl admitted, wondering what the price would be. Cumming was no one’s idea of a fairy godmother.
“I have a job for you. A full pardon can be arranged if you agree to do it. Are you interested?”
More so than he would have been three months earlier, McColl thought, but that wasn’t saying much. “Curious at least,” he said. “But I’m sure you know that the last one left a very sour taste.”
Cumming had the grace to nod his agreement. On McColl’s final mission for the Service, he had been ordered to participate in a plot by Russian Whites and the French secret service to poison the crops around the Bolshevik capital and thereby starve the city’s residents to death. After thwarting the scheme he hadn’t wanted anything more to do with the sort of people who’d dreamed it up.
“Where and what?” he asked.
“Russia,” Cumming replied, with more than a hint of apology.
McColl sighed. If there was one country on earth… No, that was wrong. There’d been something special about Russia and most of the Russians he’d met. It had simply been the place where he’d run out of rope. “Do you still have people there? I thought we pulled everyone out in 1918.”
“We did, but only for a while. We have new agents now, all of them locals. And so do Kell’s people.”
McColl was surprised. “What are MI5 doing there? I thought their writ was Britain and the empire.”
Cumming settled back in his seat, as if finally sure he had McColl’s interest. “Last year,” he began, “after the Bolsheviks held their second international jamboree in Moscow, a school for Indian revolutionaries was set up in Turkestan. In Tashkent, to be precise. Around forty men were enrolled, and they were given weapons training along with all the usual propaganda about how brutal the British have been to India. We know who most of these men are—your old friend Bhattacharyya was one of them—and in my estimation there wasn’t much cause for worry, but the government, both here and in Delhi, has been close to panic ever since that idiot Dyer ordered his troops to open fire on that demonstration in Amritsar. They’d been insisting that it was vital to cut any links between the Indian opposition and Russia, and early this year they got their chance. Having virtually destroyed the Russian economy, the Bolsheviks were so desperate for economic help that they agreed to close the Tashkent school in return for a trade deal. So far, so good, you might think,” Cumming said, pausing for breath.