The office of the Minister of Justice still stank of Turkish tobacco and the turpentine the servants used to polish the parquet. That was the first detail Vladimir Zhukov registered upon crossing the threshold at a quarter to eight in the morning, and it was no small detail. It was the imprint of another man, a presence that, after five years of bureaucratic ostracism, refused to vanish in the vapors of the wax. 'The ghost of Shcheglovitov', he thought, 'still clings to the draperies like the smoke of a snuffed-out candle.'
Zhukov set his leather briefcase on the side meeting table with the care a jurist reserves for an important document, and remained standing in the center of the room, inspecting the territory.
The main desk was a mass of oak with walnut inlays, legs turned like an elephant's, its surface covered by a green felt mat already worn at the corners.
'The kind of furniture'. he told himself, 'That has heard too many confessions and sealed too many infamies'.
He sat down. The chair was uncomfortable, far too low, forcing him to hunch over like a punished schoolboy. Shcheglovitov must have been shorter.
'We'll have to order a new one before noon,' he thought, 'or I'll end up with the hump of a medieval scribe.'
He opened the central drawer. An ink bottle with its cap poorly closed, half a ream of paper with the ghostly letterhead of the previous administration, three pens of various calligraphy, and a protocol manual from 1887 so moth-eaten it was coming apart on its own. He closed it. He opened the left drawer. Folders, seventeen dossiers gathering dust and neglect: Council of State, Unresolved Correspondence, Judicial Cases Under Review, Overdue Appeals, names of judges awaiting a signature that never came. He stacked them in an orderly column as a first wave of nausea washed over him.
'This is the intestine of an Empire blocked by the laziness and bile of a fanatic'.
He knocked twice on the inner door.
Stepan Popov entered within thirty seconds. Mid-fifties, gray hair combed with water, thin-rimmed spectacles, and an expression as neutral as a cold samovar. Ministers came and went, Popov remained. An institution within the institution.
"Stepan Vasilievich Popov." Zhukov addressed him by name and patronymic, a first gesture of respect that made the old secretary raise an eyebrow. "I need a summary of these folders by actual urgency. Fifteen minutes."
Popov sat down without asking permission, a sign of veteran standing that Zhukov appreciated. The fifteen minutes stretched to twenty, but the summary was a perfect X-ray of the chaos. When he finished, Zhukov went to his briefcase, pulled out a dark green hardcover notebook, and wrote four lines.
"I'm going to need six typists". he said, putting away his pen.
Popov blinked.
"Six, Your Excellency?"
"Or as many as we have. The more, the better. And tell them to bring enough paper for a long day." He paused, and a thin smile appeared on his lips. "If they ask, tell them it's to transcribe the memoirs of our previous Minister. That will bring them in fast. Everyone wants to know the gossip."
Popov sketched a half-smile, the first glimpse of humanity on his face as an eternal functionary, and vanished through the door. Zhukov remained alone for a moment, watching the gray light coming through the window. He had heard the rumor in the corridors: that Shcheglovitov had "resigned for health reasons."
'The health of his conscience,' he told himself, recalling a joke going around about a politician who had "fallen" out of a window after accepting an envelope. 'At least the old fanatic only fell upward, into oblivion.'
The six typists arrived in two waves, their Underwood machines in tow and with the wariness of someone stepping onto freshly mined ground. They set up in the adjoining meeting room, and Zhukov entered with his green notebook, standing at the head.
"Good morning. We are going to draft three decrees. What you type goes straight to the Imperial Printing Press. There are no drafts. If you make a typographical error, tell me and we correct it. Understood?"
Six heads nodded, somewhere between astonished and fascinated. Some glanced sidelong at each other. Rumor had it the new Minister was fast, but not so fast as to turn the bureaucracy into a horse race.
"First decree. Law for the Protection of Industrial and Intellectual Property of the Russian Empire. Take this down."
Back in his student days in Heidelberg, Zhukov had admired the precision of the Swiss patent system, which protected the process and not just the product, and the aggressiveness of the German model, which inspected before punishing. Over the course of forty minutes, he dictated a text that established a mandatory registry with technical examination, twenty years of renewable protection, and fines calculated on lost profits. But it was when he reached the final clause that his voice took on a special edge.
"Add this," he said, reading from his notebook: "'Any foreign company making unauthorized use of industrial property registered in the Russian Empire shall automatically lose the protection of its own patents on imperial territory, its products becoming freely available to any Russian subject, without any compensation whatsoever.'"
Popov, from the door, could not contain a stifled exclamation.
"Your Excellency! That will make the Germans and the British raise hell."
"Correct," Zhukov answered without looking at him. "And when they protest, it will be officially recorded that they have been copying us for years without paying. Which reinforces the argument. It's like when you catch a child stealing jam, and he confesses by complaining that you're taking his bread away."
The typists let out a nervous giggle, the first of the morning.
The second decree was briefer but denser: the Law of Public Order and Civil Coexistence. Zhukov had spent three days in Heidelberg polishing the language, and what he now dictated was a masterpiece of juridical pragmatism. It defined sedition as incitement to violence against subjects of the Empire, but without mentioning religion or ethnicity. A pogrom was not a crime against Jews; it was an attack against merchants holding an imperial license, registered property owners, and citizens with tax obligations. The State did not defend their faith; it defended its tax base.
When he dictated the penalty, five to twenty years of hard labor, the machines clattered with greater force, and the typists shifted in their seats. It was one thing to copy a customs form, and another to feel part of a machinery that had just armored the Empire against its own demons.
The third decree, the civil rights of workers, took the longest. Collective representation, formal complaints with a mandatory response within ten days, prohibition of dismissal while a complaint was active, and the Fast Commercial Courts. Zhukov had rewritten it in four versions, and as he dictated its final article, he felt the weight of the morning on his shoulders. It was twenty past noon.
Popov collected the sheets, arranged them, and Zhukov reviewed them, marking four errata with a pencil. Then he took out his Waterman pen and signed all three decrees on the Minister's line. The red ink seal sounded like a gunshot.
"To the Imperial Printing Press. I want the typographic composition before two o'clock. Tomorrow, on the front page of the Gazette."
As Popov left with the documents, one of the typists, the eldest, stopped by his desk. Her voice was a whisper.
"Your Excellency. The Beilis case".
"What about it?".
"It's in the left-hand drawer of the main desk. I marked it myself when organizing the papers of the... of the previous. It's still awaiting review since November."
"I know," Zhukov said.
The woman nodded and left. Zhukov was alone, and for an instant, he allowed himself the luxury of closing his eyes. Mendel Beilis's dossier was thin, almost ridiculous for the noise it had generated. Sixteen pages, two contradictory medical examinations. Correspondence between Kiev and the ministry that stank of covert blackmail, what it called "additional instructional needs" was the euphemism of a prosecutor who knew he had no evidence and was asking for time to fabricate it. Zhukov read it in forty minutes. When he finished, he called Popov.
"Definitive dismissal. Case closed for non-existence of crime and fabrication of evidence. And a payment order from the Contingency Fund, I have realized that this case appears to have already been archived and the prisoner's release processed by the ISD."
Popov looked up from his notebook.
"Any problem?" Zhukov asked.
"None, Your Excellency," the secretary replied, and went back to writing with renewed energy.
Zhukov was still reviewing judicial appointments, approving three, rejecting a candidate from Ekaterinoslav with a record of servile rulings toward the mining bosses, when Popov returned with an envelope of cheap paper, found in the office's private mailbox.
Inside, a .38 caliber revolver bullet and a note composed of cut-out newspaper letters: TO THE DEVIL'S LAWYER. THE RUSSIAN CHRIST DOES NOT FORGIVE.
Zhukov weighed the bullet with his thumb and forefinger. Cold. Someone had taken the trouble to cut out seven words. 'What a crude way to write a letter of introduction,' he thought.
"Popov, today revoke all credentials from the previous administration. New passes with the ISD protocol. And send this to Director Tatiana Nikolaevna, in person. Let her see that justice, in this country, begins by shooting at judges before criminals."
When Popov left, Zhukov opened his green notebook.
He reread it. Then, in his small student handwriting, he added a line.
He closed the notebook, put on his overcoat, and went to lunch at the ministry dining hall, where some officials, Popov among them, watched him serve himself a double portion of stew with the serenity of someone who, with three signatures, had just begun to change the legal face of the Russian Empire.
A/N: By the way, this character is from a novel, some are from films. Many characters from novels I have read will appear because they lend a note of the essence of those characters within a plausible real-life context, and thus also provide clues that this is an AU.
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