“It won’t take more than five minutes. Take your suitcase and whatever else you want to pack and wait for me at the back door to the alley. Five minutes,” he warned. “Be very quiet. If you see anyone, run into the alley and hide.” He reached into the satchel and handed her a small booklet, her Russian passport. “Put this in your pocket, in case we get separated.”
“I’ll be ready.” She jumped up and retrieved her suitcase from across the room. Hearing his shoes clatter down the back stairs, she worried that he was not wearing boots.
It took more than half an hour to find a hostler so late at night, agree to terms, and harness the horse. Gabriel would have to find a way to return the carriage tomorrow so as not to arouse further suspicion. Tonight of all nights, with the gold safely hidden, he had wanted to celebrate by making love to Vera. He wished he still had his driver, Abel, and the carriage, but after the robbery they had driven to the pasha’s stables in Bebek to stash the gold, and then Abel had dropped Gabriel off and gone home.
Gabriel wiped the snow from his eyes and slapped the horse’s rump with the reins. It was senseless to rail at Vera for her naïve enthusiasm, which had made her forget the basic rule of any mission-make sure you’re not detected. But he could no longer risk staying here. It was crucial that he not be arrested. The entire project, years of preparation, would be destroyed. New Concord commune needed the weapons and the gold to survive. Vera didn’t know about the robbery and the guns or their link to New Concord, so how could he expect her to understand what was at stake?
Over the past eight months, fifty pioneers of the socialist International from Europe, Russia, and the United States had made their way to the Choruh Valley in the Kachkar Mountains to begin a grand experiment Gabriel had conceived and spent the last ten years bringing to life-the first truly socialist community in the world. This was his dream and the dream of dozens of comrades who were risking their lives to realize it.
Last year, he and three associates had traveled by ship down the Danube past Budapest and Belgrade to Trabzon on the Black Sea. From there they rode through the mountains and followed the rapids of the Choruh River to the village of Karakaya, where in the name of the New Concord Foundation, the commune had bought a parcel of land, an orchard, and a ruined monastery that it planned to restore. The valley was a paradise of alternating rain and brilliant sunshine, with stands of poplar and neat orchards of olive, pomegranate, and fig trees. The streams were alive with trout. Villages clung to the slopes below dizzying ascents through forests and alpine meadows. It reminded him of Geneva and made him think of the Garden of Eden. It was the perfect place to begin the human experiment anew, without the sin of greed.
Gabriel left the rented carriage at the end of the dark alley and waded through the snow to the back door of the tenement. Vera wasn’t there. Perhaps she had gotten cold and gone back upstairs to wait by the stove.
He pushed open the door and climbed the stairs. His feet were wet and cold, and he thought he’d change into his boots, which were drying by the fire.
Inside, the suitcase was open, its contents strewn across the floor, but Vera was gone. He looked down and saw a bloody mass beneath his shoes. He stumbled backward, then realized, to his relief, that it was a crushed pomegranate. He wondered where it had come from. Maybe Vera had kept the fruit until they could make their luck together. The pomegranate told him that she had struggled. He walked around the room, his fists balled, but there was nothing else to tell him what had happened.
He ran down the stairs to the front of the house, noticing muddy smears on the treads. He peered out into the empty street. The snow gave off a nacreous glow. A glint of candlelight appeared in a window across the way. He could see carriage tracks, but snow had already filled them in, leaving only shallow depressions.
He went back upstairs and examined the room again. An object on the floor, embedded in the crushed flesh of the pomegranate, caught his eye. He picked it up and wiped it clean. It was Vera’s passport. A corner of the first page had torn away.
Gabriel pulled from his pocket the wool cap, a kind local workers wore, tucked his scarf around his face, and stepped into the street. He walked slowly and deliberately in the opposite direction from where he had left the carriage.
He felt rather than saw the men behind him. Gabriel was skilled at evasion, learned as a boy in the brutal dockyards of Sevastopol and honed in two decades of political organizing. He leaped sideways into an alley, leaving no tracks, then moved from one doorway to another, trying to land on dry surfaces. Before long he had lost his pursuers.
He walked much of the night, not daring to hail a carriage. Keeping the Bosphorus in sight to his right, he headed north. The road wound through a forest at the crest of the hill, then dipped steeply and rose again. He stumbled in the darkness under the trees and more than once became mired in drifts. In desperation, he left the road and struggled down the slope, pushing his way through undergrowth and brambles, toward the waters of the strait pulsing far below.
He came to a village, dark and shuttered against the storm. A thin stream of smoke drifted from a stovepipe chimney protruding from the side of a house, and Gabriel was momentarily entranced by the scent of burning wood. He imagined his sister sitting beside him on a quilt. It was satin. He could almost taste the bright pink color. He had stolen it from a porch where it was being aired and brought it to their shack in the forest. Whenever his sister stroked the slippery surface, her face took on a soft, faraway look. Gabriel was gripped by a powerful impulse to sit down beneath the chimney and lose himself in his memories.
The thought of his naïve childlike wife in the hands of the police pushed him forward. He stumbled past the houses and found a path that he thought might connect this fishing village to the next. It was barely discernible in the storm, but at least it was level.
After several more hours, his hair and beard were frozen and he could no longer feel his limbs. Like a leper, he moved forward insensibly, not caring whether he was freezing to death. It didn’t matter. Why had he left Vera alone?
He thought he felt the warm winter breeze of Sevastopol on his face, the wetness on his cheeks was salty sea spray. His sister kissed his cheek softly. He caught her scent of hyacinths and thought he should stop and embrace her. He had believed his sister was dead, but he was mistaken. The realization filled him with happiness. He resisted the desire to sit down and let the snow cover him. He had to stay alive to get Vera back.
6
The windows of Kamil’s villa glowed invitingly as he rode up the drive, wrapped against the icy wind in a heavy wool coat and a kalpak of Persian lamb. His cook and housekeeper, Karanfil, made it a point to place lamps near the windows when he was out, a habit she had developed when he was a child and sentimentally kept up now that he was a grown man. He could see the elegant silhouettes of his orchids on the sills, the long sprays of flowers preening in the limelight. He would have to remind Karanfil again not to put the lamps so close to the delicate blooms. He looked forward to one of her meals and to an hour in his winter garden before returning to the problem of finding the guns.
The firearms meant that something unusual was brewing, something that could tear at the belly of the empire, already made vulnerable through massive debt to European banks and loss of territory in decades of wars and revolts. The Ottoman state had created a stable system, fairer than most, that allowed every subject to participate, regardless of faith. Ottoman laws respected people’s differences and accommodated them. None of those who broke away and founded their own nations could say the same, Kamil thought. These new states on the empire’s receding fringes were cradles of blood in which nothing grew but hatred. The streets of Istanbul were crowded with refugees from massacres committed by people newly freed from the Ottoman system of law, acting with impunity or, worse, with a nod from their national leaders. Kamil was determined to keep the center strong, serving the empire like his father and grandfather, who had both been governors.