Lenin's Roller Coaster, page 3
The train rattled on, reaching Crianlarich soon after eleven. They had an hour’s wait there, another in Stirling. As their third train neared Perth, McColl realized that she’d fallen asleep, her head on his shoulder. Well, they hadn’t slept much the previous night, and the stirring of desire evoked by the memory mingled with the scent of her hair and the warmth of her breath on his neck to conjure up a wonderful sense of completion. He could have died there and then, McColl thought, but of course he wouldn’t.
The wait in Perth was closer to two hours. They ate a late lunch in the station buffet, which was crowded with soldiers and sailors. One of the former, apparently blinded, kept turning his bandaged eyes this way and that, as if seeking out someone to blame. His escort, whose facial features suggested a close relation, had only lost an arm.
Most of the other patrons were staring at McColl, and not with any affection. On each of his last two visits to Britain, someone had handed him a coward’s white feather, and a third seemed in the cards. “Let’s talk Russian,” he told her in that language. Caitlin had surprised him the night before with the news that she’d become almost fluent during her four-month stay.
“All right,” she replied in kind. “Any special reason?”
He explained that these days he was considered too young to be out of uniform. “And I can’t actually announce that I work for the Secret Service.”
“I was wondering why they were looking at you like that. I thought they were just jealous of your beautiful companion.”
“I’m sure she makes things worse,” he conceded. Looking around, he saw that the ruse had worked—thinking him a foreigner, the locals no longer seemed keen on a lynching.
“Does this happen often?” she asked.
“Not very,” he told her. “And anyway, sticks and stones and all that . . .”
Storm clouds overtook them on the last leg of the journey, and it was still teeming when their train reached Aberdeen. During the taxi ride to the port, they could hardly hear each other speak for the raindrops drumming on the roof, and both got wetter than they bargained for in their dash to the shipping office. The clerk within confirmed the next morning’s sailing and was happy to sell Caitlin a berth.
Twenty minutes later they were making love on a very bouncy bed in their fourth-floor hotel room. After sharing a bath in the outsize tub, they found themselves back in bed and reached for their clothes only when the chances of finding somewhere still open for dinner began to look less than certain.
By the time they got downstairs, the hotel dining room was closed, but the desk clerk knew of an Italian eatery only two streets away. There were no taxis outside, but the rain had almost stopped, so they walked. The restaurant in question was still surprisingly busy. And given the current level of war-induced privation, the food and wine on offer seemed more than acceptable.
“You couldn’t do much better in Little Italy,” Caitlin said. “I used to eat lunch there when I worked in Manhattan,” she explained.
“There are a lot of Italian restaurants in Glasgow,” McColl told her. “But I don’t think my parents ever went to any. My father didn’t trust foreign food, so my mother never got the chance to try it.”
“How will she cope, do you think? Now that he’s gone.”
“Pretty well, if the last couple of years are anything to go by. As long as Jed survives,” he added, as if the thought had just occurred to him.
“And you, too.”
“Not in the same way. I can’t explain it, but I think Jed dying would hit her harder. I don’t think she loves me any less, but . . . I don’t know. How are your family coping? Your brother Fergus is too old to be conscripted, isn’t he?”
“Yes. And so is Finola’s husband, Patrick. She’s had another baby, by the way. A girl this time.”
“And your Aunt Orla?”
Caitlin considered. “She seems to have aged a lot lately. She’s healthy enough, but . . .”
“Colm’s death must have been hard for her,” McColl suggested with some trepidation. Caitlin’s younger brother had been hanged in the Tower of London two years earlier, after taking part in an Irish republican plot to sabotage the transporting of British troops to France. McColl had caught and arrested him, albeit after offering to let him escape.
“Perhaps,” Caitlin agreed. “She’ll always feel she was partly responsible, favoring Finola and me—especially me—after our mother died, and neglecting him.”
“She actually said that?”
Caitlin smiled wryly. “Repeatedly.”
“Does she know my part in this?”
“Oh, yes. I eventually told her the whole story, and she was much more understanding of your behavior than I was. I think she made it easier for me to forgive you.”
“And your father?”
“He doesn’t know. And he would never forgive you.”
“I’m glad you did.”
“So am I.”
Back at the hotel, a discarded evening paper was lying on the bar. There was a full account of the Bolshevik rising in Petrograd, which had apparently been virtually bloodless, and a much sketchier report from Moscow, where serious fighting was allegedly under way. A map of European Russia showed the wide sweep of towns now under Lenin’s control.
“Have you met any of the Bolshevik leaders—other than your friend Kollontai?” McColl asked. Caitlin had known and corresponded with the Bolsheviks’ most prominent woman for several years.
“Quite a few,” she said. “I met Inessa Armand and Krupskaya—Lenin’s wife—at the Rabotnitsa offices—that’s the women’s magazine. I interviewed Trotsky in June, after meeting him in the street. And I met Radek and Bukharin at friends’ apartments.”
He was impressed but hardly surprised. He knew how good a journalist she was. “What about Lenin?” he asked.
“No. I mean, I’ve seen him speak, but I haven’t actually been introduced.”
“And are they the fanatics our papers say they are?”
Caitlin smiled. “They’re serious about real change. Does that make them fanatics?”
“That depends. Do they want it at any cost?”
She shook her head. “What does that mean? Would you call your General Haig a fanatic?”
“I might,” McColl said lightly as they waited for the lift. “But most wouldn’t.”
“Well, he’s hell-bent on defeating the Germans at any cost, and that wouldn’t change the way we live.”
“And the Bolsheviks will?”
“They want to. I don’t know if they can, but . . .”
“Russia doesn’t seem like the ideal setting for a new world.”
She sighed. “Maybe not, but as we say in the States, it’s the only show in town.”
“I almost wish I were coming with you,” he said as they got into the lift.
She smiled at that. “You know, I almost wish it, too. But you can’t, and I must. And I think I’m ready for bed.”
The lift door opened to reveal a uniformed constable standing outside their room.
“Mr. Jack McColl?” the man asked.
“That’s me.”
“I have a message for you. From London.”
“Yes?” McColl responded, feeling more than a trifle irritated by how quickly they’d tracked him down.
The constable pulled a note from his pocket and reminded himself of the contents. “‘Mr. Cumming requires your presence,’” he read.
“Thank you,” McColl told him.
The young man consulted his watch. “You may just have time to catch the night train,” he suggested helpfully.
“I don’t think so,” McColl told him. “I’ll take one in the morning,” he added, following Caitlin into the room and gently closing the door behind them.
He was the first awake and lay there watching as a patch of sunlight climbed the opposite wall. There were echoes of that last morning in New York, three and a half years before, when she’d accompanied him to the Hoboken ferry, the first leg of his journey to Mexico. And on that occasion he’d had no idea that they wouldn’t share a bed again for almost two years.
He eased himself from this one and walked across to the window. The North Sea seemed bluer than usual, stretching beyond the docks under a cloudless sky. He hoped there were no U-boats waiting out there, hoped that the revolution she was going so far to report was as bloodless as the newspapers claimed. He hated the thought of her putting herself in any sort of danger but knew how useless it would be to say so. She was going, and that was that.
The following morning was cold, windy, and wet. McColl rode the bus south along Charing Cross Road, thinking how dour London was beginning to look after almost four years of war. The shop windows seemed sparse; the few umbrella-wielding pedestrians hurrying past them all looked anxious or grumpy. Trafalgar Square was virtually deserted, a scattering of empty bottles around the lion plinths left over from the drinking of the night before.
McColl got off the bus, put up his own umbrella, and started walking toward the river. The wind insisted on turning the brolly inside out, and he eventually gave up the struggle, arriving wet and somewhat bedraggled at the Service HQ in Whitehall Court. Cumming’s office up under the eaves looked much the same, full of maps and models, the man himself ramrod straight behind his cluttered desk.
“Sorry to hear about your father,” Cumming said gruffly. “The Russian army is disintegrating,” he added without any further ado, almost conveying the impression that the two events might be connected. “More than half the units on the Eastern Front have stopped fighting, and the armies in Turkey have simply turned their backs and started for home. The Russians in northern Persia are holding their ground at the moment, but probably only because they’re so far from the front. If either the Turks or the Germans head their way, we don’t expect them to put up a fight.”
“Have the Bolsheviks actually sued for peace?” McColl asked.
Cumming sighed. “Not yet. But the way they’re talking it’s only a matter of days. None of our experts think the Bolsheviks will survive much beyond Christmas, but the damage will be done by then. The main problem, of course, is that the Germans will be able to shift their armies in Russia to the Western Front. If they do that quickly enough, they’ll have a significant advantage when spring comes.”
“Won’t the Americans make up the difference?”
“Not by then. And if the Germans win a major victory while the Yanks are still on the way . . . well, we’re looking at another five years of war. And frankly, I’m not sure the country could stand it.”
McColl was inclined to agree.
“But the Western Front’s a matter for the General Staff,” Cumming went on. “Our job is to shore up what’s left of the Eastern Front and prevent the Germans and Turks from exploiting the Russian collapse.” He paused. “I’ve lumped them together because they’re allies, but they want different things. The Germans can make good their oil shortage if they occupy the Caucasus, and they can grab all the cotton they need for making munitions if they push on across the Caspian and take control of Turkestan, where this year’s crop still hasn’t been shipped. And that’s not all. There are more than forty thousand German and Austrian prisoners of war in the area, who could also end up fighting our men in France.
“And then there are the Turks. They see Turkestan as a replacement for the empire they’re losing in the Middle East, so they won’t want the Germans to hang around, but they’ll take what help they can get to push any opposition out of the way. And if they manage that between them, then the road to India will be wide open.”
McColl shook his head. “Road?” he asked. “We’re talking about a thousand miles of desert and mountains. Does anyone really think that the Germans could move a meaningful number of troops across that sort of distance and that sort of terrain? If they do, they’ve spent too much time looking at maps and not enough at the real world.”
Cumming nodded. “You may be right, but some of our so-called experts are worried, and those are the ones the politicians seem to be listening to. I spoke to some government chap yesterday who insisted that Britain had to absorb Central Asia into the empire, as the last link in a crescent stretching from South Africa through East Africa, Mesopotamia, India, Singapore, and Australia. That if we don’t take over the area, the Germans will.”
“I’m sure he consulted his atlas,” McColl said dryly.
Cumming smiled. “All right, but even if there’s no real threat to India, we still have an interest in stopping the Germans and Turks from taking the Caucasus and getting across the Caspian. If we deny them the oil and cotton, we damage their whole war economy and compromise whatever offensives they mount in France.”
“Okay,” McColl said. “So what’s in their way?”
“That’s hard to say. The winter weather in eastern Turkey and the Caucasus Mountains is pretty severe, and they probably plan to use the next few months to get their supply chain in order, with a spring offensive in mind. The Caucasus has always been a hotbed of disputes. The Armenians, Russians, Georgians, the Azer-whatsits—the place has been divided on national and religious lines since kingdom come, and now it’s divided on political lines as well. There are Bolsheviks and Mensheviks and God knows what else almost everywhere, fighting one another and what’s left of the old order, and it’s hard to keep track of who’s in control of any particular place. But as far as we know, the Bolsheviks are in control of both the Baku oilfields and the cotton-producing areas of Turkestan. They run the soviet in Tashkent—you know what a soviet is?”
“An elected council.”
“So they say. They run that one, but not the one in Ashkhabad, which the cotton shipments would have to pass through. The soviet there is theoretically subordinate to the one in Tashkent, but the two cities are five hundred miles apart and the Bolsheviks are only one of several influential groups in Ashkhabad. The other socialist parties resent being ruled from Tashkent, and the local Turks—Turcomen, I think they’re called—resent Russian rule full stop. So anyone seeking to stir things up would have something to work with. How’s your Russian?”
“Pretty good.”
“Seems like a hell of a language to me. Strange alphabet, and it sounds like they all have bad colds.”
McColl smiled. For someone who ran a global organization—and, as far as McColl could tell, ran it well—Cumming was remarkably insular. “It’s not the easiest,” he said diplomatically. “I had a lot of help. I studied it at Oxford, and I had a Russian friend who gave me lessons in return for improving his English. And I’ve been there three times. The job last year and twice before the war, when I was still selling automobiles.”
“Can you pass as a native?”
McColl considered his answer. “Most of the time, in most places. My vocabulary’s good, but the accent can wander a bit. The trick is claiming you’re from a different region than the person you’re talking to, because they put down any discrepancies to that.”
“That shouldn’t be too difficult in Turkestan,” Cumming suggested. “If their empire’s anything like ours, there’ll be people from all over Russia.”
“Probably. So that’s where I’m going?” McColl asked, just to be certain.
“You and another agent, Audley Cheselden—have you run across him?”
“No,” McColl said, hiding his surprise. He was used to working alone and generally preferred it that way.
“He’s a good man. Young and a trifle rash on occasion, but sound enough. He’s in South Africa at the moment, so you’ll meet up in Egypt and go on to Persia together.”
McColl nodded. The rain now hammering on the office windows made such places sound almost attractive. “I assume you have some specific tasks for us. Beyond just stirring things up.”
Cumming grinned again. He seemed in a good mood. “First, we need up-to-date information. Who’s in charge in Ashkhabad and how far does their writ run? Are there any people or groups among them who’ll work with us against the Germans and the Turks? If not, are there any opposition groups who would if given the chance? Second, I want a report on how and where we could best put the Transcaspian Railway out of action. It’s the only means of moving troops from the eastern shore of the Caspian to the border of Afghanistan—wreck it and we wreck any faint hope they might have of marching on India. Or of moving all that cotton in the opposite direction. We have to keep those stockpiles out of German hands, and it may well be that you’ll need to destroy them. Is that specific enough for you?”
“It certainly is. One question, though. What if our best allies against the Germans turn out to be the Bolsheviks?”
“Then shake them by the hand. I doubt they’ll last, but if they do, we can always deal with them later.”
“Right,” McColl said. He didn’t need to wonder what Caitlin would say to that.
His mission decided, McColl waited in London while others worked on the logistical details. Waited and waited. A second meeting with Cumming followed three weeks after the first, but all he learned was that his and his chief’s superiors were still mulling over the many potential ramifications of the latest upheaval in Russia. No one, it seemed, could agree what to do about the Bolsheviks and their annoying aversion to war. Seduce them or step on them, that was the question, and if seduce turned out to be the answer, then annoying them first would be unwise.
