The city had a fever, and Trotsky hated it.
It had been three days since the leaflets appeared, three days of a rising tide of paranoia that grated on his nerves. He believed in a revolution of grand, sweeping gestures, of disciplined armies and intellectual clarity. This… this was a revolution of gossiping neighbors and fearful glances. It was ugly. It was vulgar.
He stood in his grand office in the Winter Palace, the gilded mirrors reflecting his own tense, frustrated image. A harried-looking Cheka liaison stood before a massive map of Petrograd. The map was a sea of red pins, each one marking a citizen's denunciation of a suspected spy. It looked like the city had broken out in a rash.
"The tips are flooding our offices, Comrade Commissar," the liaison said, his voice strained. "Hundreds per day. We can't keep up."
He gestured to the map. "A baker on Gorokhovaya Street, accused of hoarding flour—his neighbors say it's to feed saboteurs. A man in the Vyborg district who paid for vodka with an old Tsarist coin. Two families on Liteyny Prospekt accusing each other of being German agents because of a long-standing argument over firewood."
Trotsky's patience, a famously finite resource, snapped.
"This is irrelevant noise!" he thundered, his voice bouncing off the high, ornate ceilings. "What about the real target? The primary objective I assigned to Menzhinsky? What about the nurse?"
The liaison flinched. "That is the problem, Comrade. We've had to pull half of Menzhinsky's best surveillance teams to chase down these… these phantom leads. We simply don't have the manpower to follow every ghost the citizens invent for us."
A deep, intellectual contempt simmered in Trotsky's gut. He saw Koba's leaflets not as a coherent strategy, but as a crude, populist stunt, a desperate appeal to the lowest instincts of the masses. And now that stunt was interfering with his serious, vital work. He was an elitist by nature, and he despised the messy, chaotic reality of the very people he claimed to lead.
Furious, he grabbed his greatcoat. He would deal with this himself.
The Lubyanka was as cold and silent as a tomb. Trotsky stormed through its halls to Menzhinsky's office, ready to unleash his fury. He found the man not in a state of crisis, but sitting calmly at his immaculate desk, sifting through stacks of denunciation forms. He was sorting them into neat, alphabetized piles.
"What is this circus, Menzhinsky?" Trotsky demanded, his voice sharp. "I gave you a direct order. Your priority is the German nurse, not investigating every petty squabble in Petrograd!"
Menzhinsky did not look up. He carefully placed a report into a file before speaking, his voice a dry whisper. "Commissar Koba's public warnings have… stimulated the revolutionary consciousness of the masses. It is my duty to process all incoming intelligence."
"This isn't intelligence, it's garbage!" Trotsky spat. "I order you to ignore it. Focus all your available resources on the nurse and her contact, the Finn. I want them watched around the clock."
For the first time, Menzhinsky stopped his work. He slowly raised his head, and his cold, analytical eyes met Trotsky's fiery gaze.
"That would be a mistake, Comrade Commissar," he said, his voice flat and devoid of any deference.
Trotsky was so taken aback by the quiet man's insubordination that he was momentarily speechless.
"The leaflets and the nurse are connected," Menzhinsky continued, explaining it as if to a slow student. "Koba began his campaign the day after we began our surveillance. This chaos is not an accident. It is the point. He is hiding his real move inside this storm of his own making."
Trotsky stared, aghast. The sheer arrogance of the man! A bureaucrat, a policeman, presuming to understand grand strategy better than him.
"You are a policeman, Menzhinsky," Trotsky said, his voice dripping with condescension. "Your job is to follow leads and collect facts. Stick to the facts of this case. I will handle the strategy."
Just as the tension in the room reached a breaking point, an agent entered, knocking sharply before stepping inside. He held a single sheet of paper. "Urgent report, Comrade Menzhinsky."
Menzhinsky took the report, read it, and without a word, handed it to Trotsky.
Trotsky scanned the few lines of text. His anger instantly vanished, replaced by a surge of vindication.
"The Finn," the report read. "He was followed from the docks. He met with an unidentified male in a back alley. A package was exchanged. We have the second man in custody."
Finally! A real lead. A tangible piece of evidence. This was how proper espionage worked. Facts. Arrests. Interrogations. Not this chaotic nonsense of rumors and whispers.
"Interrogate him," Trotsky commanded, his voice ringing with renewed authority. "I want to know what was in that package. I want the names of everyone in their network. Break him. Immediately."
The agent nodded and rushed out. Trotsky turned back to Menzhinsky with a triumphant smirk. "You see, Menzhinsky? Simple, effective police work. That is what brings results."
An hour later, the results came in. The man they had arrested was a low-level black marketeer, a pathetic creature who had broken the moment a Cheka officer had raised his voice.
The interrogating agent entered the office. He handed Trotsky a small, grease-stained package wrapped in brown paper. Inside was a single, half-melted bar of German-made chocolate.
"He says the Finn sells him luxury goods," the agent reported, his voice flat. "Chocolate, coffee, French stockings. That's all he does. A simple smuggler of comforts. He swears he knows nothing about spies or nurses."
The lead was a complete dead end. A waste of time.
But Trotsky's mind, blinded by his desperate need to be right, interpreted the failure as a success. It proved the Finn was a nobody. It proved Menzhinsky's grand theory of a hidden strategy was wrong. It proved that the nurse was truly isolated.
He felt a renewed, unshakeable sense of confidence. He was on the right track. Koba had tried a desperate, chaotic gambit, and it had amounted to nothing.
"Double the surveillance on the nurse," Trotsky ordered Menzhinsky, his voice filled with cold certainty. "Koba's stunt has failed. She is all he has left. We will watch her every breath until she makes a mistake."
He left the Lubyanka, convinced he had weathered the storm. He strode out into the city of whispers, completely unaware that the false lead was the entire point. A perfectly executed feint, designed by a woman he had never met, to make him stare so intently at the magician's right hand that he never saw the blade concealed in the left.