She wasn’t fooled. “It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?”
“I can’t think of anything better. And if by some miracle Sergei agrees, we can stick him on a train to somewhere and shop the others. If he doesn’t…”
“Then what do we do?”
“We could disable them all. A bullet in the kneecap is very effective.”
She looked shocked, but only for a moment.
“You walk again eventually,” McColl said, far from sure it was true.
She looked unusually waiflike in her uncertainty. He pulled her head onto his shoulder, and they sat like that in silence for more than a minute. “I sometimes think of Sergei as a grown-up boy,” she said eventually. “And in some ways he is. But he’s been at war for years, and he knows how to fight.”
“I guessed as much.”
“And in case you don’t know—what worries me most is the thought of losing you.”
He held her a little tighter and wished they could stay where they were.
“So when do we go?” she asked.
“Later this evening, but I’ll need to do a reconnaisance first. The more we know, the better our chances.”
Cunningham found the colonel sitting in his usual chair, the tip of his cigarette glowing in the darkness as he gazed out into the wind-twisted shadows of the garden. Cunningham expected a tongue-lashing, but Fitzwilliam listened to his report with a faint smile and then offered him a cigarette.
The Turkish tobacco seemed, as ever, faintly redolent of decadence.
“Any sign of McColl?” Fitzwilliam asked.
“No.”
“He’ll have made a run for it,” Fitzwilliam said confidently. “He’s thrown his spanner in the works. Why would he hang around?”
To make sure, Cunningham thought. “You’re probably right,” he conceded out loud. “And the Good Indian team must know we’re scouring the city for them.”
“You think they’ve made a run for it, too.”
“Probably,” Cunningham said carefully. “Their plan may have failed, but Brady can congratulate himself on cheating the hangman, at least for a while. If they haven’t, and they do stick around for a crack at Gandhi, then we’ll have some questions to answer.”
“The photograph?”
“Precisely.”
“Maybe it’s not such a problem. You’re the one in the picture, and once you’re on the boat home, we can deny all knowledge of you. Or better still, find someone willing to testify that you’re another Russian. It’ll be a hard job proving otherwise.”
Cunningham took a last drag on the cigarette and stubbed it out in an ashtray. “One other thought occurred to me.”
“That the Prince of Wales might have been their target?”
“Might still be. I think we have to consider the possibility.”
“I already have. Our usual security arrangements have worked well enough in the past. And I don’t think it would help to confuse matters at this late hour.” He turned to take another cigarette from the case on the table and lit it from the stub of the last. “Good Indian was authorized by London,” he said, meeting Cunningham’s eyes for the first time that evening. “They can hardly hold us responsible if anything goes wrong, can they?”
“But…”
“You see, I’ve been giving this matter a great deal of thought. If Brady and his friends do nothing, then no harm’s done. And if they do make use of the guns, then we’ll have the excuse we need to nail down the lid on this country.”
“And the prince?” Cunningham heard himself ask.
“Oh, there’s always another one waiting in line.”
Waiting on their balcony, half-lost in the street’s mosaic of lamps, Caitlin was brought back to earth by the voice calling up from below and felt for one beautiful moment like someone’s misplaced Juliet, a rose by any other name.
Or had she gotten that the wrong way around?
She walked down the stairs, adjusting her veil, thinking that here it was—the moment she’d been dreading.
The source of her trepidation was harder to pinpoint. Why should the prospect of seeing Sergei and his murderous friends evoke this hideous sinking sensation? Wisely or not, she felt no fear for her life, but she was afraid of something. Her sense of who she was seemed far too fragile, as if she’d spent the last few years pretending to be someone she wasn’t. A broken future could be repaired; a broken past could not.
McColl helped her into the tonga and, after climbing aboard himself, gave the boy driver their destination. As they rattled down the street toward the station, the boy let loose a string of shrill exhortations to clear their passage through the knots of evening strollers.
A glance at her companion confirmed Caitlin’s feeling that he was—if not quite in his element—much more at home in such situations than she was. She could see why he’d kept that job for all those years, despite a growing disenchantment with the cause it served. He loved thinking on his feet; as she’d now seen on more than one occasion, he functioned well in a crisis.
Well, he had one here.
The boy swung them around a corner and into an even busier street. Even in summer Moscow’s streets would have been practically deserted at this time of night—just a handful of drunks and Cheka patrols. As they rode between lines of still-open stalls, she remembered the last time she’d gone looking for Sergei, driving past the futurist flower stalls on Bolshaya Dmitrovka.
Moscow—Russia—seemed a long way away. Fall would be almost half-done, winter already looming. So much energy spent in simply keeping warm, so little light to live by. Yet so much warmth in people’s hearts, so much brightness in their eyes. A whole other world.
She found herself thinking how utterly Russian the revolution had been, how thin its subsequent claims to internationalism, no matter how sincerely meant. People like her and Brady, who came from a similar political tradition, could lend the Russians a helping hand, but what were he and she and Sergei doing here, far from any way of life they really understood? Scratching an itch until it bled?
Their tonga should have been a troika, she thought. Plowing through snow rather than dust.
She hugged herself against the sudden chill.
Her silence was slightly unnerving, but also hardly surprising. McColl hoped she was gathering focus and strength, like a last man waiting to bat, and not already saying good-bye.
The world had always divided them, he thought, as their tonga skirted the chaos of the station forecourt. In a room, a bed, there were no borders. Traveling across the Pacific, America, and Afghanistan, they had been like Lenin in his famous sealed train. But now that their lives were bound up with those all around them, the boundaries were slowly materializing, like invisible writing exposed to the sun.
In his more optimistic moments, McColl believed that things had improved, that during the years apart, their approaches to life had actually grown more similar. Their politics were certainly less incompatible, mostly because of the distance he had traveled. Her opinions had hardly changed in seven years, but then, events hadn’t proved her wrong. The future he’d been hoping for had died in the Flanders mud.
She had changed, though. The questing intelligence and almost reckless determination that he’d first encountered in China were still there, but they’d been tempered by age, work, and unhappy knowledge. All the brittleness was gone, leaving her stronger and surer of herself. She had come into her own in Russia.
Was that reason enough for her to go back? Over the last few weeks, they’d discussed the situation in Russia almost daily, and sometimes she seemed to be saying it was. At others she didn’t seem half so sure. Lenin’s Russia was changing, she said, and people like her might soon find it hard to get anything useful done.