“Sergei,” she began. No “dearest,” he thought in passing, just “Sergei, I must talk to you. Meet me in the European restaurant room on Platform 1 of the central railway station at one o’clock today. Come alone. For both our sakes. Caitlin.”
No kisses either.
He read the note again, still struggling to take it in. She was here, in India, in Delhi. Why? How? As the different emotions and thoughts jostled for precedence, he felt a sudden constriction in his chest from holding his breath for too long. He heard his own laughter and the hint of hysteria that bubbled within it.
“What’s going on?” Brady asked from behind him. “I heard someone running.”
Piatakov passed him the letter but didn’t say anything. Brady looked through it, his expression moving swiftly through curiosity, amusement, concern, and anger. “Your wife?” he asked incredulously.
“Yes.”
“But how did—”
“I don’t know any more than you do,” Piatakov said. Somehow Brady’s sense of shock was exorcising his own.
“It must be Komarov,” Brady decided.
“He’s dead,” Piatakov said flatly. “You shot him, remember?”
“I know. But he’s reaching out from the grave. Or it’s Peters. She must be here on your party’s behalf.”
“Maybe she’s here for herself,” Piatakov said quietly. Still trying to save him. The thought brought him joy and sadness in what seemed equal measure.
“Whatever. You can’t meet her.”
Piatakov looked up at the American, the shock of dark hair hanging over the angry eyes, a glimpse of the long-vanished child in the pouting mouth. “I have to,” he said. He hadn’t said good-bye to her in Moscow, and now he could.
“No,” Brady argued. “You could risk everything.” His hand reached almost absent-mindedly toward the place where he normally carried his gun, but he was still wearing his nightshirt.
Piatakov noticed but didn’t care. “I won’t betray you or back out, if that’s what you’re thinking. And since it won’t affect our business here, it has nothing to do with you.”
“It must affect our business here. How has she found you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the local party helped her look.”
Brady shook his head.
“Who else?” Piatakov asked. “The British won’t have told her.”
“It stinks.” Brady looked at the letter again. “Are you sure it’s her handwriting?”
“Of course I am. Look, what can happen in a station restaurant room? My guess is—they think they know what we’re planning to do, and she’s been sent to try and change our minds. She won’t. Okay?”
Piatakov got up out of the chair and looked out across the flats toward the river. “But I want to see her. And I’m going to,” he insisted, before walking off toward the house, leaving Brady still staring at the letter.
Colonel Fitzwilliam refolded the letter, replaced it in the envelope, and handed it back to Cunningham. “What do you think he wants?”
“Probably money,” Cunningham guessed. “To travel with,” he added.
“And what will he do if he doesn’t get it?” the colonel asked, helping himself to a chocolate biscuit.
“He doesn’t say,” Cunningham said pointedly, wondering if he and Morley would be offered biscuits. Or cups of coffee, come to that.
“But what’s your best guess?” the colonel asked tetchily. “I suppose you two want coffee,” he added ungraciously.
“Yes, thank you,” Cunningham said. As the colonel signaled to his hovering servant, Cunningham reached for the biscuit tin, and offered it to a surprised Morley before helping himself. “It seems to me,” he went on, “that McColl has very few options. The one potentially damaging thing he could do is give the story to foreign newspapers. They’d certainly be interested after the event, but the deed would be done, and we’d just have to manage the aftermath. It won’t be hard to discredit McColl as a source. He was recently in prison; there’s his history with the American woman who now works for Lenin. Etcetera, etcetera. Some Indians will hear the story, and some will believe it, but they’ll be the ones who think the worst of us anyway.”
“And at least we know the bastard’s still in Delhi,” Morley said hopefully.
“Which makes it all the more disgraceful that he hasn’t been found yet,” the colonel retorted.
“We’re sure he’s not staying in any half-decent hotel,” Cunningham said unapologetically. “We’ve checked out the people we know he had contact with during the war. And we’re still waiting for London to check through any Indians he might have known at Oxford or met in his time selling luxury cars. There’s nothing else we can do, other than the obvious.”
“Which is?” Morley asked.
“Well, we do know where he’ll be”—Cunningham looked at his watch—“in two hours and forty minutes’ time.”
“We know where he says he’s going to be,” the colonel corrected him.
“What have we got to lose?” Cunningham asked.
McColl was picked up opposite the Fatehpuri Mosque at a quarter past eleven.
“It is all arranged,” Mirza announced as the boy driver set the tonga in motion. The detective was wearing the usual white shirt and dhoti, this time topped off with a fez-shaped red cap. “Here is the camera,” he said, taking a worn leather case from the seat beside him. McColl undid the strap and took out the Leica that Mirza had offered to loan him. An Arab had stolen it from one of the Turkish army’s German advisers during the war, and Mirza had bought the camera a year or so later for a fraction of its real worth. He claimed—and McColl had no reason to doubt him—that it would take the picture required.
“And the place?” McColl asked.
“All fixed,” Mirza said with a smile. “You asked for”—he began ticking off fingers—“one, somewhere out in the open, which is, two, close enough for a clear shot of the faces and, three, not so close that we risk apprehension by the men concerned. And we have such a place—it is all as you wished.”
“Wonderful,” McColl said.
“I have been thinking about this business,” Mirza went on. “These people. One from your political police and the other a Russian revolutionary—there must be a simple reason why you want them to share a photograph, but I cannot deduce what it is.” He shook his head. “But I shall,” he added. “I shall.”
“Mr. Mirza,” McColl said, “you do understand that helping in this matter could get you into trouble with the authorities. I don’t—”
“Yes, yes, I understand. You told me this yesterday. Do not concern yourself. Holmes once said that it is worth committing a felony to save a soul, and I am satisfied that we are on the side of justice in this matter. The opinion of the authorities is of no interest.”
McColl couldn’t help smiling. “Okay,” he said.
They were approaching the Queen’s Road entrance to the station. Mirza tapped the boy driver on the shoulder, and the tonga was brought to a halt. The two men alighted, and Mirza led McColl through an unmarked gate and down a passage between temporary huts. A narrow alley in a row of offices brought them out into an open-air canteen, where Mirza was greeted by several of the patrons. “Many men from my regiment got work on the railways,” he told McColl in explanation.
They walked along two sides of a large shed and onto a loading platform packed with wooden crates. A line of empty freight cars, their doors flung open in expectation, blocked their view of the station.
They reached the end of the train as a locomotive approached from the east, belching grey smoke into the sky above the distant Red Fort. A minute or so later the line of packed carriages pulled into a platform three or four tracks away, wheels bouncing on the uneven rails. “Over there,” Mirza shouted in McColl’s ear, pointing out the signal cabin that straddled the tracks some fifty yards ahead and setting off across the shining rails like a man advancing on Turkish guns.