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.
“He was seen in Tibet, in the west, near Mount Kailas, near a monastery called Phensung Gompa. He was alone, and he seemed to have been travelling for a long time. In Tibet, Christopher. Nikolai Zamyatin. I didn’t believe it at first. But my man managed to take some photographs. There’s no doubt about it. He was there. Am I making sense to you?”
Christopher nodded. Winterpole was making a sort of sense.
Tibet was Christopher’s territory, one of his special sectors. The agent who had sent the photograph had probably been one of his own men, recruited and trained by him. He followed the other man’s gaze into the darkness beyond the windscreen. More strongly than before, he felt that he was being sucked down beneath heavy waves. Thin hands above the water; the taste of salt on his lips; and a cold wind coming from the shore, driving him out to sea.
“You were in the Kailas region back in 1912, weren’t you, Christopher?”
Winterpole asked.
“Yes,” said Christopher dully.
“What were you doing there?”
“I was looking for agents. Russian agents. We had received a report, a reliable report. I was sent to investigate.”
“And what did you find?”
Christopher shrugged.
“Nothing,” he said.
“I spent a month up there, on the slopes of Mount Kailas itself and round Lake Mansarowar. It’s a sacred region. I made excursions to several of the monasteries. I spoke with pilgrims. If there were Russians, they must have been invisible.”
He saw Winterpole shake his head.
“Not invisible,” he said.
“Dead.”
Christopher realized that, with one hand, he was holding tightly to the door-handle beside him. Drowning men never let go: that is an axiom. He tightened his fingers on the cold metal.
“There were two of them,” Winterpole went on.
