Northcutt wiped his brow again. “It’s hard to tell. The government’s public position hasn’t changed—victory’s just around the corner. In private they’re much more worried. The Germans have made a lot of gains over the last few months, and what with Russia dropping out . . . Last I heard, the General Staff still believe we can win, but not until 1920. If we manage to get the Russians fighting again, we could cut that short by at least a year.”

  “And can we?” McColl asked.

  “We’re doing our best.”

  “The Bolsheviks will have to go,” McColl suggested.

  “Of course. We need a government that wants to fight the Germans, and they’ve made it clear that they don’t.”

  “Why not the LSRs? They’re a lot more popular than the old parties.”

  Northcutt’s grunt was dismissive. “Too late for that—they’ve overreached themselves this time.”

  “With French help?”

  “Oh, I expect so. The French approach is a tad scattergun. Not a horse I’d have backed. That woman—Maria Spiridonova—what sort of young woman shoots a police chief?”

  A brave one, McColl thought. One at the end of her tether.

  “Hysterical,” Northcutt was saying. “And the whole party takes after her. I think we’ll stick with the old guard. Denikin seems sound enough, and there’s an even better prospect in Siberia. Alexander Kolchak—used to be an admiral in the czar’s navy. Factor in the Czechs and a few of our own and their shiny new Red Army will have a fight on its hands. The trick is in keeping the show on the road, and that’s our second job. Providing links, keeping things coordinated, oiling the wheels with money.”

  “And the first job?” McColl asked, thinking he must have missed something.

  “Oh, subversion. Above all subversion. If we can bring the leaders down, their precious Red Army will just melt away.”

  They were almost back to the bandstand, which a noisy group of ragged-looking children were using as the center of their racetrack. There were no adults in attendance.

  “Moscow’s full of them,” Northcutt remarked, nodding at the children. “They play all day and do their thieving after dark.”

  McColl was wondering whether this was Fedya’s future when the chief dropped his second bombshell. “Almost forgot to ask. Someone else that showed up on our foreign arrivals list—an American by the name of Aidan Brady. One of our people thought he might have been involved in the Sussex and Hampshire railway bombings right at the beginning of the war. Wasn’t that one of your operations?”

  “It was. And Aidan Brady was one of the eight men involved—the only one who escaped. He murdered two policemen that night.” And tried to murder me in Dublin, McColl thought. He could still smell the moss on the quayside, the water like ice on his chest.

  “Well, he’s become one himself,” Northcutt was saying. “The Cheka have taken him on.”

  “Have they indeed?” McColl muttered, his thoughts elsewhere. Two years before, at the height of the Easter Rising, Caitlin had saved him from a bunch of murderous republicans. He didn’t know if Brady knew these particular men, but he was willing to bet they had friends in common. And if Brady had heard about the rescue, then Caitlin might well be in danger.

  After Northcutt had commandeered a droshky and driven off, McColl walked slowly down toward Kalanchevskaya Square, still mulling the matter over. No decent human being would condemn somebody else for saving a loved one’s life, but Brady wasn’t a decent human being. He would see Caitlin as a traitor, to her brother and the wider cause. And he would see her treason as a God-sent opportunity, to prove his own credentials and to do what McColl thought he most enjoyed—killing his enemies.

  In which case McColl had to warn her.

  Or was he just looking for an excuse to see her? It seemed unlikely that Brady would know the details of what had happened that night in Dublin. Two of the republicans who’d been at the Mary Street house had died in subsequent days; the others were still in prison, at least as far as he knew. And even if Brady had somehow learned the details, he would surely think twice about meting out personal justice in Moscow, especially when the intended victim was a well-known supporter of the Bolshevik government.

  There were also risks in warning her. If Brady knew nothing, then McColl himself was more of a threat to Caitlin. Meeting with a British agent would, if word got out, lay her open to espionage charges and possible execution. At best she would face deportation and an end to reporting the revolution that meant so much to her. She would never forgive him.

  But could he take the risk of saying nothing? If Brady did kill her, McColl would never forgive himself.

  The pros and cons kept outbidding each other as the hours went by. After visiting the safe house to check up on Fedya, he walked three miles across town to the antique shop on Bolshaya Nikitskaya. The proprietor was dealing with a customer—an angry-sounding middle-aged man who wanted more for his gold cigarette case than was currently on offer but who eventually gave up the struggle with better grace than McColl expected.

  “Buying or selling?” the proprietor asked once the customer was gone. His Russian seemed as fluent as McColl’s, and his angular face looked a lot less English than Bowers’s.

  “A little of both,” McColl said, completing the password per Northcutt’s instructions.

  “In that case . . .” the proprietor said, flipping over the sign in the window, “you’d better come through to the back.” He led the way, not speaking again until the door to the shop was closed behind them. “Sandy Luckett,” he said, offering McColl a muscular handshake. “I think we once shared the lift at Whitehall Court.”

  “More than likely,” McColl conceded. The other man’s face was vaguely familiar.

  Over the next half hour, Luckett explained the workings of the shop and went through the inventory. He had a long list of what he’d paid for the items and what he hoped to sell them for. The attention to detail was quite impressive but also seemed a tad extreme. Perhaps Napoleon had been right, McColl thought, and England really was a nation of shopkeepers. If so, he was glad he was Scottish.

  There was less to say about their real job. After sharing contact protocols and emergency arrangements, Luckett gave McColl a rundown of the neighbors and local house-committee snoopers. And that was that. Luckett was bound for Kharkov and what he described as “rather different work.” Sabotage, McColl assumed. Blowing up gasometers would certainly be a change from selling baubles.

  After seeing him off and locking up the shop, McColl headed back toward the safe house. He was passing the Sukharev Tower when it suddenly occurred to him that Caitlin could probably help when it came to the business of finding a home for Fedya. Over lunch in Fort William, she’d been full of the plans her friend Kollontai had for reforming the so-called angel factories and for helping mothers and children in general. If those plans had come to fruition and progressive new homes had been built, then Caitlin would know how to find one.

  Was this just another excuse to see her? Perhaps. But if neither Brady nor Fedya alone could justify the risk, then maybe together they did.

  He would have to find her first. He had thought of asking Northcutt where she was, but knew that such a query, no matter how casually expressed, would undermine his boss’s belief that their love affair was defunct.

  What exactly had Northcutt said about her current circumstances? “A job with one of their new women’s organizations.” That shouldn’t be hard to track down.

  Soon after nine the next morning, he and Fedya moved into the empty shop. He was beginning to think that telling the boy he was English might not be such a bad idea. It would stop him from wondering who people like Bowers were, stop him from asking questions like the ones he’d asked the previous evening, about where the supposed photographer had left all his equipment and how he had suddenly become the proprietor of an antique emporium.

  What would Fedya say if he found out? He knew about other nations, and the idea of spying wasn’t hard to grasp. He doubted that the boy would care one way or the other, but he might use the knowledge to get his own way—McColl remembered the night in Bucha when Fedya had threatened to wake up the village if he wasn’t taken to Moscow.

  But that was more than a month ago. They’d been through a lot together since then, and McColl didn’t think the boy would deliberately endanger him. But unknowingly? That was a different matter. Perhaps it was better to wait and see.

  Fedya was busy examining the stock. He already had a feather boa around his neck and was trying to unfurl an umbrella. As McColl was demonstrating the technique, their first customer came through the door, a youngish woman in worn but once-expensive clothes, with plaited blonde hair and a strikingly pale complexion. Looking and sounding nervous, she produced a small but exquisite icon from her bag and explained that her parents needed money to travel.

  McColl examined the object with what he hoped would look like expertise. He had no idea what it was worth.

  When Fedya asked to see it, he suppressed a smile and passed it over. “It’s beautiful,” the boy said simply after staring at the icon for several seconds. “You should keep it and tell your parents to stay in Moscow.”

  “We can’t,” the girl said sadly. “How much will you give me for it?” she asked McColl.

  “How much do you want?”

  “My father once said it was priceless, but I will take a hundred rubles.” She said it almost defiantly, as if fully expecting refusal.

  McColl thought about it, but not for long. “That sounds fair.”

  She almost clapped her hands in excitement.

  McColl took the requisite notes from the desk, handed them over, and held the door open for the girl to leave. He thought it unlikely that Northcutt would appreciate his generosity, but then making people happy didn’t seem to be his boss’s stock-in-trade.

  “Was it worth that much?” Fedya asked once she’d gone.

  “I’ve no idea,” McColl told him. “I felt sorry for her.”

  “So did I.”

  This one early customer was something of a false dawn—only three more came that morning. Two whizzed around the shop and were gone within a few minutes; the third spent half an hour squinting at every article on display, mumbling disparaging remarks as she did so. None of the three bought a thing.

  When no one came between noon and three, McColl decided to close the shop early. He needed to register his and Fedya’s residence in the district and thereby qualify them both for ration cards.

  The government office they needed was farther west on Nikitskaya, close to its junction with Sadovaya. There were a lot of people milling around inside and quite a few in the relevant queue, but in the end the wait was less than an hour. A young woman with tied-back hair and an earnest face examined McColl’s papers, added a new stamp, and filled out a ration card. The fact that Fedya had no papers was not a problem in itself, but she needed proof that McColl was his legal guardian to issue the boy a card of his own. It was apparently not unknown for people to hire a fictional child to gain them an extra ration.

  McColl pleaded, but it was probably the stricken look on Fedya’s face that won her over. “Oh, what the hell—you look honest to me,” she said, reaching for another blank card.

  On the steps outside, they examined their treasure. From that day forth, they could purchase a certain amount of bread, tea, sugar, and margarine or butter and eat in the local government canteens at a heavily subsidized rate.

  “I have some things I need to do alone,” McColl told Fedya, “but first I’ll take you back to the shop.”

  “Just give me the key,” the boy said. “I can’t get lost on a straight road!”

  “Once you—”

  “I can look after the shop,” Fedya insisted. “All the things are marked with a price.”

  McColl laughed. “Okay, you can sell stuff. But don’t buy anything.”

  “I don’t have any money.”

  “That’s right. Well, if people have things to sell, tell them to come back later.”

  “All right. When will you be back?”

  “I don’t know. A couple of hours, maybe.”

  Fedya seemed happy with that. After watching him walk off, McColl went back into the government office and sought out the person in charge. He was finally ushered into a very full office, where a dark-haired man wearing spectacles was busy transferring papers from his desk to the floor. The “Yes?” was somewhat irritable.

  McColl explained that his wife would be joining him in Moscow in a couple of months, once her mother’s convalescence in Petrograd was complete. When she arrived, she hoped to find a place working with the Bolshevik women’s organization—professionally if possible, as a volunteer if necessary—and in order to avoid wasting time she wished to make her application now. For which, of course, she needed an address.

  “I can’t help you,” the man said, polishing his glasses with part of his cotton blouse. “But I think our new office on Bolshaya Lubyanka will probably know. I believe it’s at number 37.”

  A tram took McColl to Teatralni Square, and it was only a short walk to Lubyanskaya Square. Number 37 was a hundred yards along Bolshaya Lubyanka, just past the Moscow Vecheka headquarters. The office was a lot less crowded than its junior brother on Nikitskaya, and he soon had someone to talk to. The man didn’t know the answer, but a colleague knew where to look in one of the wooden cabinets. The address he wanted was 21 Bolshaya Cherkasski. If he went back to the square and down Nikolskaya, it was the first street on the left. A five-minute walk at most.

  McColl followed the instructions, approaching the building in question with his cap pulled firmly over his eyes. The prospect of seeing her was a heady one, even if the warmth of her reception was open to doubt. She might be angry, might be overjoyed; she would certainly be shocked.

  There were several signs beside the door, and one of the names was familiar. If memory served him well, Rabotnitsa was a magazine that Caitlin had mentioned more than once.

  It was almost five o’clock. McColl didn’t know when workers in Lenin’s Moscow usually called it a day, but between then and seven seemed likely. He looked around for somewhere inconspicuous to wait, but the only real possibility was on the far side of Nikolskaya, a couple hundred yards away. It would have to do—if he couldn’t recognize Caitlin at twice that distance, either he needed glasses or he wasn’t as much in love as he thought.

  The important thing was that he saw her before she saw him. Because seeing him was bound to be a shock, and for both their sakes it was one she ought to have when no one else was watching.

  The minutes went by. Some people seemed to be leaving their places of work, but the door he was watching stayed closed. It was past seven, and he was about to give up when a group of six women finally emerged and walked off in several different directions. Caitlin wasn’t one of them.

  Perhaps he had the wrong office. Perhaps she was only there part-time—she wouldn’t have given up her journalistic work.

  He would try again tomorrow.

  Next evening she was there. He had just a distant glimpse of the face, but the glorious hair, that graceful stride—it could only be her.

  Four of the women were coming toward him, Caitlin and the other two walking down toward the river. McColl started after them, matching his speed to theirs and staying at least two hundred yards behind. It felt strange following her, and more than a little deceitful, but what else could he do? Avoiding a public reunion was as much in her interest as his.

  The threesome reached the road that skirted the Moscow River and vanished around a corner. Hastening his stride, McColl reached the same spot in time to see them pass over the bridge at the foot of Red Square. Crossing in their wake, he thought the water looked inviting. It was another extremely hot day.

  Another bridge, this one astride a canal, a left turn, swiftly followed by a right. McColl reached this final corner just in time to see the last woman step through a doorway. The house was about a hundred yards down, and he didn’t want to risk walking past it. Approaching as near as he dared, he counted out the probable number, then walked back to check the name of the street. “So . . . 18 Pyatnitskaya,” he murmured. One of his teachers at school had always insisted that saying things out loud was a surefire way to remember them.

  Now what? he asked himself. A knock on the door seemed out of the question, but how long might he have to wait before he caught her alone?

  A message, he thought. He would come back during the day and put a note through the door, suggesting a suitable time and place. A park, perhaps. Or down by the nearby river.

  Caitlin arrived home from work the next day to find a letter on the vestibule table and almost dropped her bag when she recognized the writing on the envelope. Ignoring cries of welcome from the kitchen, she hurried upstairs to examine the contents. Her “old friend Yakov” had just arrived in Moscow and urgently needed to see her. He proposed a meeting in the small park further down the street from her office, and said he would be there at noon, tomorrow, and each day thereafter until she came.

  She stood looking out the window, working through the shock and the emotions the message had evoked. While her heart rejoiced at the thought of seeing him, her mind rejoindered that he wouldn’t have come all this way to see her. And the same mind was acutely aware that women who worked for the revolution should not be keeping trysts with agents of the British Crown.

  He knew that as well as she did. What the hell did he think he was doing?

  She would go—of course she would—but only to tell him that they couldn’t meet again. If only her heart would stop smiling at the thought of seeing him even once.

  She was spared further inner turmoil by a shout from below—she had visitors. Aidan Brady had promised to look her up, and there he was at the foot of the stairs, along with Sergei Piatakov, the young man who’d shared her droshky and roller-coaster car on the night of Kollontai’s wedding. The two men had met a few days earlier at the Cheka’s military-enlistment center and had somehow discovered that they shared her acquaintance. Their unit was leaving for the Volga front in a week or ten days’ time.

 

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