Office of the Imperial Minister of Justice, Ministry Building, 62 Malaya Morskaya Street. Saint Petersburg.
Ivan Grigorievich Shcheglovitov, sixty-two years old, Minister of Justice of the Russian Empire since 1906, member of the Council of State, bearer of the Order of St. Vladimir, First Class, slid his already arthritic fingers across the paper of the decree, and upon reading it for the third time, he felt the same certainty he had felt the first: this was the death certificate of the Empire, elegantly drafted and sealed with imperial wax.
Outside, the January night had turned the windowpanes into a sheet of frost, and the wind seeping through the joints made the flame of the oil lamp dance beneath the icon. Everything conspired against him. The cold, his age, the sciatica that gripped his back and, above all, the infamy printed on that document he had just let fall onto the dark oak desk.
"Prohibiting child labor… paying peasants so their children can study…" he murmured, savoring each syllable like a poison that grew more bitter with repetition. "It is pure socialism, disguised as reform. The Tsar has been bewitched by that unnatural child."
At the words "that child," his lips curled into a grimace of contempt. He never used the Tsarevich's name. He would not grant him that standing, not even in the privacy of his office.
He rose heavily, one hand instinctively going to his back, and walked with slow steps toward the great icon of Saint George the Victorious that hung on the eastern wall, perpetually illuminated by a votive oil lamp whose scent of burnt olive permeated the room. Beneath the golden halo, the saint speared the dragon with an expression of divine fury, an image Shcheglovitov found deeply comforting in moments of tribulation. He crossed himself three times, brushing his forehead, his chest, and his shoulders with the slowness the liturgy demanded, and murmured a prayer in the Old Church Slavonic he had learned from his grandfather, a rural priest.
He was not a corrupt man in the worldly sense of the term. He did not steal from the treasury to buy yachts, nor allow himself to be greased with envelopes by the rich, nor wallow in the weaknesses of the flesh the village confessionals knew. His corruption was deeper and, therefore, more dangerous: it was ideological. He believed, with the faith of an ascetic, that the Autocracy must be an iron fist, that the peasant needed terror to submit, and that any whisper of liberal reform was a step in the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy bent on annihilating Holy Russia.
The humiliation of Kiev still burned in his memory. Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna, a creature barely the age of his granddaughter, had burst in like a Valkyrie to dismantle the Beilis Case he had so painstakingly built. She had freed the Jew Beilis, sent his beloved patriots of the Black Hundreds to rot in a cell, and left his judicial system trampled under the hooves of horses. The worst part was that now, whenever anyone addressed him, he thought he saw a glint of mockery in their eyes. His reputation was a cracked house.
The shrill ring of the black bakelite telephone interrupted his vengeful thoughts. With a gesture of annoyance, he lifted the heavy receiver.
"Minister." The discreet voice of his secretary, Konstantin, came through the line. "Mr. Vladimir Purishkevich has arrived as scheduled, and he brings with him the… foreign guest we discussed."
"Show them in through the private side door," Shcheglovitov ordered, feeling a tingle of anticipation. "And make sure no journalist is lurking around the block."
"Of course, Your Excellency."
Moments later, preceded by the echo of his footsteps in the marble corridor, Vladimir Mitrofanovich Purishkevich entered the office with the energy of a bloodhound just given a scent. His bald head shone under the electric light like a billiard ball, and his round spectacles magnified eyes that burned with a fervor about to spill over. He was dressed in black from head to toe, his uniform of the wrathful prophet.
Behind him, breaking the harmony of shadow and chasubles in the office, came a man who seemed made of a different cloth. His impeccably cut English gray tweed suit clashed like a rose in a dung heap. He smoked a briar pipe whose aroma of Turkish tobacco soon competed with the smell of oil from the votive lamp, and wore a heavy gold watch and chain, the universal symbol of capital that need not explain itself. His smile was that of a man about to buy a country.
"Minister Shcheglovitov," he said in correct Russian but with an unmistakable British accent. "I am Mr. Charles Sterling. I represent international commercial interests deeply concerned by the… dangerously radical… drift of your current government."
"You are from those British, of course." Shcheglovitov indicated the chairs opposite his desk with barely concealed disdain. "I know who you are. You block our international credits when we do not bow to your preferences. Why the devil should I receive an economic enemy of Russia in my office?"
Sterling sat down with insulting deliberation, crossing his legs as he adjusted the stem of his pipe.
"Because you and my employers," he replied with a thin smile, "share a far more dangerous enemy, Minister. Pyotr Stolypin. And that unnatural child who calls himself Tsarevich."
He paused to draw on his pipe, letting the smoke drift in the charged air.
"The reforms they are implementing… these labor decrees, these subsidized schools… represent an existential threat not only to our commercial interests but to the civilized social order in general."
With the theatricality of a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat, Sterling extracted a high-quality bank check, watermarked, from his jacket and placed it on the desk. The sum, written in ink as black as Purishkevich's cassock, was obscenely generous, fifty thousand gold rubles, made out to the "Charitable Foundation for the Preservation of Traditional Russian Values," an entity as phantom as the decency of the one financing it.
"The Tsar's new labor decree is a catastrophic mistake," Sterling continued with the confidence of a merchant discussing investments. "It weakens the natural social order established by God, and in weakening it, creates impossible expectations in the lower classes. That is the breeding ground of revolution, Minister. My employers wish… to ensure… that His Majesty sees clearly that the true Russian people reject these reforms. We need noise in the streets, a palpable demonstration of discontent."
"An abomination against the natural order!" Purishkevich burst out, leaning forward and spitting the words with such fury that his saliva spattered his own spectacles. "That decree will turn the ignorant children of peasants into godless engineers who will question the authority of the Church and destroy the divine hierarchy. The Jews and the Masons are behind this, Minister. As always. Stolypin has Jewish advisors. The doctor who attends the Tsarevich is a Jew! It is the same old conspiracy!"
Sterling nodded, though in his pale eyes there shone a cold, professional disdain for the fanatic's rant. He cared nothing for Jews. He cared about the profit margins that the damned Romanov boy was destroying with his state factories and self-sufficient reforms.
Shcheglovitov looked at the check, and for a few seconds the only sounds were the crackling of the tiled stove and the whistle of the wind at the window. He hated the heretic English as much as Purishkevich hated Masons, but his hatred for Stolypin was deeper, purer. If, to save Holy Russia from atheistic modernization, he must accept the gold of a soulless Protestant, Saint Paul had already justified that sacrifice centuries ago.
"What do you suggest specifically?"
Purishkevich's eyes lit up with the flame of a fanatic who at last sees his moment.
"A massive demonstration of patriotic force. My men in the Black Hundreds are ready. We can mobilize ten thousand souls within twenty-four hours." He rubbed his hands together. "We will march through the entire city with torches and chants, shouting that the labor decree is a Jewish trap to ruin honest Russian merchants and that the doctors vaccinating children are injecting them with the Mark of the Beast. We will burn a few shops of Hebrew proprietors to set the mood, smash the windows of liberal industrialists, storm the printing presses of progressive newspapers… we will create enough controlled chaos that the Tsar, dead with fear, will have no choice but to dismiss Stolypin to restore order."
The plan was a classic provocation, a melody the court knew well. Shcheglovitov stroked his long gray beard, savoring the scenario.
"Your men will need legal protection," he said slowly. "If the metropolitan police arrest them, the plan collapses and the liberals will scream."
"We only need the police to look the other way for twenty-four hours," Sterling interjected with his investor's pragmatism. "Nothing that can be traced. Just a convenient absence."
The Minister, with fingers that did not tremble, folded the check and locked it in his drawer. Then, taking up his pen, he began to write.
"I can reassign the district prosecutors to administrative conferences outside the city, and send the central district police units to special training at the Gatchina barracks. That will leave the center of Saint Petersburg orphaned of police presence for some six critical hours." He paused. "But there is a stumbling block. The ISD. Grand Duchess Tatiana and her damned bloodhounds. They do not answer to my chain of command."
"The ISD!" Purishkevich let out a scornful guffaw. "Two hundred desk agents, spies, and filing clerks against ten thousand patriots singing 'God Save the Tsar'? What are they going to do? Shoot into a sea of icons and torches? That would turn them into monsters."
It was true. Shcheglovitov knew it. The ISD could infiltrate a cell, but it could not stop a tidal wave. His beloved Russia, the Russia of tsars and kneeling peasants, was crumbling under the weight of engines and secular schools. This had to be stopped at any price.
"Do it," he ordered with ministerial authority, and wrote the order that would empty the capital's streets the following day. "Let Saint Petersburg burn with patriotic fervor. Let Nicholas hear the roar of his Orthodox people rejecting his reforms."
He handed the document to Purishkevich, who took it as if it were a sacred chalice.
"We will cleanse the city of undesirable elements, Minister," he promised, his eyes bright with hysteria.
Sterling rose, smoothing his tweed suit, and extended his hand to Shcheglovitov. The minister shook it with the tips of his fingers, as one touches a necessary pest.
"On behalf of my consortium, I thank you for your unwavering patriotism," the Englishman said, with an irony so fine it was barely perceptible.
When the two conspirators left through the side door and were swallowed by the snowy night, Shcheglovitov was left alone. The silence of the office fell over him like a leaden cloak. He felt dirty, stained by contact with those heretics. He rested his trembling hands on the desk, and his gaze drifted once more to the icon of Saint George.
"It is for a greater good," he said aloud, to convince himself. "Sometimes it is necessary to ally with the lesser evil to defeat the absolute evil. Stolypin and that child are destroying the Russia of God. This must be stopped."
He crossed himself again, murmured a prayer, and switched off the desk lamp, leaving the room bathed only in the reddish glow of the votive lamp.
What Shcheglovitov did not know, what his blind faith prevented him from even conceiving, was that on the cornice of an apartment building opposite his window, an ISD agent with a latest-model Leica camera had just immortalized, in seventeen perfectly focused snapshots, the exchange of the check, the delivery of the order, and the faces of the three traitors.
And what he also did not know was that his own secretary, Vera Konstantinovna, that gray, faithful woman who had served him tea for a decade, was at that very moment in the ladies' washroom on the third floor, with a notebook in her trembling hands, transcribing a few phrases…
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