McColl hurried after him, remembering days as a boy risking the wrath of railway officials. This time there were no angry shouts, and soon they were climbing the stairway up to the box. The two men working among the gleaming levers greeted the detective like a long-lost uncle; their boss was in a small office at the other end. “My friend, Shah Ali Khan,” Mirza said, introducing the uniformed official. “And this is our hide, as you call it,” he added, swinging open a shuttered window. “There,” he said, gesturing outward.
The roof of the office on the northernmost platform was mostly flat, but the small raised section containing a door promised access from below. A man on the roof would be only ten yards away, and at roughly the same level. A train passing between them would be beneath the line of sight. Only smoke could spoil the picture, and for that their luck would need to be truly out.
“Yes?” Mirza asked.
“It’s perfect,” McColl said.
Piatakov arrived at the station almost half an hour early and sat for several minutes in the back of Sayid Hassan’s tonga, trying to let the whirl of emotions settle. It wasn’t easy. Assuming she knew what they intended to do—and her presence here surely meant that she did—he knew only too well what her objections would be. They’d had variations of the same argument over and over again during the winter and spring, and they all came down to a single judgment—whether or not their party was beyond redemption. She said it wasn’t, and he said it was, and that was all there was to it. So why would she travel thousands of miles to tell him something he’d already heard a dozen times?
If she’d come out of love… well, that would warm his heart, but it wouldn’t change his mind, and she had to know that. She who’d been fond of quoting Kollontai’s dictum that passion was transient, the political struggle unending.
It was a quarter to one by the huge station clock. He climbed down, told the servant-driver to wait, and walked in through the entrance arch. The booking hall was a seething mass, the adjoining platform just as crowded and noisy. After the garden’s serenity, the cacophonous racket felt like a physical battering.
At least the platforms were prominently numbered—a request for directions in Russian or schoolboy French would probably have gone unanswered. The restaurant room for Europeans was also easy to find and empty save for one middle-aged pair, presumably English, who gave him synchronous nods, as if they shared a puppeteer. He returned the gesture and chose a table as far from them as possible.
The room was surprisingly cool and quiet considering how few feet separated it from the heat and bedlam outside. He asked the hovering waiter for chai, knowing the word meant the same in Delhi as it did in Moscow.
The steaming cup arrived as the clock on the wall reached the hour. He handed the waiter the five-rupee note that Brady had provided with the air of a parent handing out pocket money, accepted the frown and small mountain of coins in exchange, and stirred in some sugar from the small brass bowl. The minute hand clicked again.
An Indian boy darted in through the doorway and handed him a note. The waiter moved to shoo the youth out again, but Piatakov held up an arm to stop him while he took in the message. “Come with this boy and wait for me,” it read. The writing was hers.
He followed the boy out onto the platform and up across a footbridge that straddled several tracks. After taking the last steps down and walking the length of the station, they finally arrived at what looked like a storehouse. The room within boasted a stack of red flags, shelves of paraffin lamps, doors to apparently empty offices, and a stairway to the second floor. Piatakov followed the boy up two flights of stairs, emerging onto a roof just as a freight train steamed majestically past. There was no one else there. The boy said something incomprehensible and promptly disappeared.
Cunningham arrived at the north entrance soon after twelve-thirty and spent the next half hour as instructed, walking from one end of Platform 6 to the other.
It was more like an obstacle course than a path. Indians provided the obstacles, they and all the mercantile and domestic activities they’d managed to cram onto a platform thirty feet wide. It seemed to Cunningham that an Indian was incapable of traveling anywhere without taking his entire family, all its belongings, and enough hardware to cook six-course meals. Many had also brought livestock—goats, chickens, pye-dogs—and at least two sacred cows were trundling up and down Platform 6 in search of something to chew.
There were also coconut sellers, soda-water sellers, toy sellers, and sticky-sweet sellers. Toys and sweets, Cunningham thought—that was what Indians loved. Toys and sweets in the brightest imaginable colors. Children, every last one of them. The real children made faces and giggled each time he went past; the adults only wanted to.
One Indian was tugging at his sleeve. As he turned, a note was pressed into his hand by a young adolescent. Come with this boy. Alone. McColl.
“Lead on,” Cunningham invited his guide. They crossed to the farthest platform, entered one of the railway offices, and climbed two flights of stairs to the roof. A white man was waiting for him, but it wasn’t McColl. In fact the features were distinctly Slavic.
“Who are you?” Cunningham asked.
The man was looking over his shoulder. Cunningham caught the glint of reflected glass from the signal box across the tracks, the shutters closing around it like a snuffer on a candle. Someone had taken a picture of him and the Russian, which could only be bad news.
As Cunningham hurtled back down the stairs hoping to catch whoever it was, he realized his young guide had disappeared.
After reaching and crossing the platform, Cunningham jumped down between the nearest rails, and was almost run over by an idling shunter. By the time he reached the foot of the signal box steps and took a few seconds to look around, there was nothing to see. No one running. No McColl. Even the Russian had vanished.
He went up anyway, but the Indians on duty responded to his shouts with the usual infuriating smiles. The little office at the end was empty; the head signalman, he was told, had gone to lunch.
“Christ, what a mess,” he murmured as he took in the view from the cameraman’s window. Fitzwilliam was going to love this one.
Caitlin spent the morning alone in their room at Sinha’s house, and her mood had not been improved by the reading matter. McColl had come across the Indian communist newspaper on his way back from the station the day before and thought it might contain the recent Russian news she craved. Reading through it, she told herself to be more careful in what she wished for. There was indeed a feast of news—the latest trade deals and production targets, more peasant rebellions ended, a united party still set on delivering its brave new world. The NEP was undoubtedly working, the famines apparently loosing their grip. It was all good, all true, as far it went. And yes, the revolution had been about increasing production, giving people a better material life. But that wasn’t the end of the story. It had also been about building a real democracy, one unfettered by money and privilege. And, in those joyful early days, it had been about creating a new man and woman.
And there, in one small paragraph, was the news that meant something to Caitlin.
The “woman’s advocate” Alexandra Kollontai, the Indian writer noted, was leaving Moscow for “six months of agitational work in Odessa.” With the women’s issue now “resolved,” Kollontai’s “separate organization” had “surely fulfilled its purpose.”