“Dehra Dun. The war in general. Your wife’s death. Whatever mattered to you. Whatever still matters to you now.”
Several of Christopher’s best agents had died in Dehra Dun because of an administrative blunder by the Delhi Intelligence Bureau, to which he had been attached. He still felt a sense of responsibility for the deaths, though he had been in no way to blame for them.
“I was surprised,” Christopher said at last.
“Surprised?”
“That you let me go so easily. Just that letter. That letter from Philpott; whoever Philpott is.”
Winterpole took a silver cigarette-case from his pocket and snapped it open. He offered a cigarette to Christopher, but he declined. Delicately, Winterpole extracted a single cigarette for himself, closed the case, and put the cigarette between his lips. He paused briefly to light it. Christopher remembered the smell from the old days. The match flared briefly and died.
“How can I help you, Christopher?” Winterpole asked.
“You say your boy was kidnapped. I’m sorry to hear that. And I understand someone was killed; a priest. Have the police discovered anything?”
Christopher shook his head.
“You know they haven’t.”
“Have you no idea at all who was responsible?”
“I was hoping you might tell me that.”
There was a nervous silence. Winterpole drew on his cigarette and exhaled slowly, through the corners of his mouth. The car filled slowly with a perfumed smoke.
“Me? Why should I know anything about this?”
“You didn’t travel all the way from London to tell me you know nothing.
A telegram would have done. A telephone call. A messenger-boy.”
Winterpole said nothing. He was watching the snow fall against the windscreen.
“Let me tell you exactly what happened,” Christopher went on.
Carefully, he described the events of Sunday night. When he had finished, he turned to Winterpole.
“I am not a rich man,” he said.
“In any case, there has been no ransom note. The men who took my son and killed Father Middleton were Russians I’d stake my life on that. If they were, there must be a link with you: whether they are Whites or Reds or some other colour, they could not be in this country without your knowledge. And if you are involved, that establishes a sufficient link with me.”
“I assure you, Christopher, I am not involved.”
“I’m sorry,” Christopher said.
“Perhaps “involved” is not the correct word.
“Connected” is that what I should have said? Or “informed” would that express it better?”
Winterpole was silent. So much depended on how he phrased himself. In this business, the right choice of words was often more important than the right choice of weapon. A man’s life could hang in the balance.
Several lives. Winterpole thought of himself as a general, though his
troops were few and easily wasted. He disposed them like tiny chessmen
on a vast and tilted board, little glass
pawns clinging precariously to the surface: an army of glass, brittle, betrayed, and dreaming.
“I think,” he said slowly, ‘that I may be able to help you. And you, in your turn, may be able to help me.”
“You mean that’s the price I have to pay if I want to see William alive again?”
Winterpole said nothing. He pulled deeply on his cigarette, wound down the window, and tossed it half-smoked into the darkness. Slowly, he wound the window up again. It was suddenly cold in the car.
“Tell me,” he said.
“Have you ever heard of a man called Zamyatin? Nikolai Zamyatin?”
“Zamyatin,” Winterpole began, ‘is probably the most dangerous Bolshevik agent currently operating in the Far East. He’s a leading light in Comintern, the Communist International set up by the party in March last year to co-ordinate the work of worldwide revolution. In Moscow, he is Trotsky’s eminence gnse. In the East, he is almost independent. Without Zamyatin, it’s safe to say there would be no Bolshevik policy in the region. To be honest, if it weren’t for Nikolai Zamyatin, I would sleep a lot more easily in my bed at night.”
And if it weren’t for Simon Winterpole, thought Christopher, a lot of other people would sleep better.
“Exactly what has any of this to do with me or my son’s disappearance?” he asked.
“I don’t know this Nikolai Zamyatin, I’ve never heard of him, and I assume he has never heard of me.”
Winterpole glanced at Christopher.
“Don’t be so sure about that,” he said.
There was something in Winterpole’s tone that unsettled Christopher. Like a swimmer who senses the first pull of the undertow plucking him down, he could feel the past tugging at him. He wanted to cry out, to struggle against drowning in waves that might be of his own devising; but his limbs felt tense and his throat was raw with the cold night air.
“Go on,” he said quietly.
“Zamyatin is half Russian, half Burial Mongol. His father was Count Peotr Zamyatin, a wealthy landowner from Cheremkhovo to the north of Lake Baikal. His mother was a Buriat woman, one of the peasants on his father’s estate. They’re both dead now.
Nikolai was born about 1886, which makes him roughly thirty four
“He had a little money as a child, enough to get what passed for an
education in Irkutsk, but he learned soon enough that he had no hope of
inheriting a penny from his father. By the age of sixteen,
he was an active member of the Communist Party in the region, and before he turned twenty he had been sent to Moscow. He was about thirty when the Revolution started Sovnarkom, the Soviet of People’s Commissars, sent him out to help organize the new order in Transbaikalia. From that point on he led a charmed life.
In Moscow, the Russians accepted him: he was the rebel son of an aristo claiming his own on behalf of the people. And in Transbaikalia he was a local boy made good. What had been a disadvantage his mixed parentage now became his passport to power “He was Moscow’s chief man in Transbaikalia throughout the Civil War. Now he talks with Lenin and Trotsky and Zmoviev about an empire beyond Siberia, a people’s republic stretching to the Pacific. China, Mongolia, Manchuria, Tibet. They can all see that Europe’s hopeless now, that it may be hopeless for another fifty, another hundred years. But they need to dream, you see, and so they dream about the East. And all the time Zamyatin stands there whispering in their ears like a mesmerist, telling them that he can make their dreams reality.”
Winterpole paused for a moment, staring into the darkness beyond the windscreen, as though he could see a second darkness gathering there, discrete, intact, waiting. He shivered. It was cold:
cold and empty.
“About a year ago,” he went on, “Zamyatin dropped out of sight.
One minute, my people were sending me almost daily reports about him, the next he was gone. There were sightings at first, but they all proved negative. The internal pogroms had already started, of course, so my first thought was that he had fallen victim to his erstwhile friends in the Kremlin. Stalin is the coming man in Russia, and he wants socialism in one country. Zamyatin could have been a sacrifice, a reassurance that the others are not dreaming too hard.
“But time passed and Zamyatin’s name wasn’t mentioned, and I knew he must still be alive. They have to denounce their victims, you see it’s no good just doing away with them some dark night.
Their deaths are a sort of atonement, you understand, and their sins must be expiated in public. Pour encourager les autres.
“Then, about four months ago, I had a firm sighting. One I could rely on, from one of my best men.” He hesitated.