The White Terror and The Red: A Novel of Revolutionary Russia

by Abraham Cahan

  CHAPTER XXXI.

  A REASSURING SEARCH.

  The capture of the man with the Greek name proved disastrous to theExecutive Committee. It was the first link in a chain of most importantarrests. The trap set at his house caught the very tall man with theTartarian features; this led to the arrest of Purring Cat, and theresidence of Purring Cat, in its turn, ensnared a pretentiously dressedman, in whom the superior gendarme officers were amazed to find theirown trusted secretary, the man whom Makar knew as "the Dandy." Makar'sarrest at Miroslav had tended to strengthen the Dandy's positionsomewhat, but now that he was in the hands of the enemy himself,it seemed as if the medical student's sweeping system of"counter-espionage" had burst like a bubble. Makar was in despair. Hespoke of new plans, of new sacrifices, until Zachar silenced him.

  "All in due time, my dear romanticist," he said to him. "A month or twolater I shall be delighted to be entertained with the fruit of your richfancy; not now, my boy."

  The four arrests were a severe blow to the undertaking of which Zacharhad been placed in charge. He was overworked, dejected, yet thrillingwith nervous activity. But his own days were numbered. An air ofimpending doom hung over the Czar and his "internal enemies" alike.

  Good fortune seemed to attend the state police. While the gendarmes ofthe capital were celebrating their unexpected haul an intellectuallooking man was locked up in a frontier town as a "vagrant," that is, asa man without a passport, who subsequently proved to be one of theactive Terrorists the detectives had long been looking for. He was the"grave bard," one of the twin poets of the party. Shortly after hisarrest the Russian government received word from the police of theGerman capital that a prominent Russian Nihilist known among his friendsas "My Lord," a sobriquet due to his elegance of personal appearance andaddress, had spent some time in Berlin and was now on his way to St.Petersburg. A German detective followed the man to the frontier andthen, shadowed by Russian spies, he was tracked to a house on the NevaProspect, the leading street of St. Petersburg. There it was decided toarrest him Friday, March 23.

  A little after 4 o'clock of that day Zachar and the ex-Governor'sdaughter left their home, where they were registered as brother andsister, and took a sleigh, alighting in front of the Public Library, inthe very heart of the city. Instead of entering the library, however,which the sleigh-driver thought to be their destination, they parted,continuing their several journeys on foot.

  It was an extremely cold afternoon. The beards of pedestrians andsleigh-drivers and the manes of horses were glued with frost; theirbreath came in short painful puffs. It was getting dark. The sky was aspotless, almost a warm blue. To look at it you would have wonderedwhere this sharp, all-benumbing cold came from. There was an air ofinsincerity about the crimson clearness of the afternoon light.

  Zachar wore a tall cap of Persian lamb, flattened at the top, and atight-fitting fur coat. He walked briskly, his chest thrown out, hisfull pointed beard hoary with frost, his cheeks red with the bitingcold.

  Presently he found himself shadowed by a man in civilian clothes whom heknew to be a gendarme in disguise. It was evident, however, that the spywas following him merely as a suspicious person without having any ideawhat sort of man his quarry was, and Zachar, with whom a hunt of thiskind was a daily occurrence, had no difficulty in "thrashing his trail."He was bound for the cheese shop on Little Garden Street. This waswithin a short walk from the Public Library, yet on this occasion ittook him an hour's "circling" to reach the place.

  About ten minutes after Zachar entered the cheesemonger's basement, thehead porter of the house met two police officers round the corner. Oneof them was the captain of the precinct and the other, one of hisroundsmen. The Czar was expected to pass through this street in twodays, so one could not be too watchful over a suspicious place likethis.

  "There is somebody down there now," the head porter said to the captain,with servile eagerness. "A big fellow with a long pointed beard. I haveseen him go down several times before. He looks like a business man, butbefore he started to go down he stopped to look round."

  This stopping to look round was, according to a printed police circular,one of the symptoms of Nihilism, so the roundsman was ordered to watchuntil the suspicious man should re-emerge from the cheese shop.

  When the captain had gone the roundsman brushed out his icicledmoustache with his finger nails, and said with an air of authority:

  "Well, you take your post at the gate and I'll just go and change myuniform for citizen's clothes in case it's necessary to see where thatfellow is going. Keep a sharp lookout on that cursed basement until Iget back, will you?"

  When he returned, in citizen's clothes, he found that the suspicious manhad left the store and that the head porter had set out after him,leaving his assistant in his place.

  "There is another man down there now," the assistant porter whispered.Presently the new visitor came out of the basement. As he mounted thefew steps and then crossed over, through the snow, to a sleigh standingnear by, he kept mopping his face with a handkerchief, thus preventingthe two spies from getting a look at his features. Seeing that heboarded a hackney-sleigh, the roundsman did the same, ordering thedriver to follow along as closely as possible, but at this he lost timein persuading the hackman that he was a policeman in disguise. The twosleighs were flying through the snow as fast as their horses could run.The policeman was far in the rear. For some ten minutes his eyes wereriveted to the suspicious man. Presently, however, the vehicle he wasshadowing turned a corner, and by the time he reached that point it wasgone. All sorts of sleighs, their bells jingling, were gliding along inevery direction, but the one he wanted was not among them.

  The head porter, who had started after the first man, in the absence ofthe roundsman, had met with a similar defeat. After awhile the hackmanwho had driven the second suspicious man returned to his stand. Inanswer to inquiry he told how his fare had twice changed hisdestination, finally alighted on a street corner, and turned into anarrow alley.

  Meanwhile Zachar had called on My Lord. It was about seven o'clock. Thetwo revolutionists sat chatting in a cheerful gas-lit room, when thehost was called out into the corridor. As he was long in coming back,Zachar went to the door, prepared for the worst. He found the corridorfull of gendarmes and police. It was evident that they had fought shy ofraiding My Lord's apartments for fear of violence, and had beenpatiently waiting until his visitor should come out of his own accord.Several of the gendarmes made a dash at Zachar, seizing him by botharms. One of these was the spy from whom he had "circled" away near thePublic Library, soon after he had taken leave from the ex-Governor'sdaughter three hours ago. Zachar's presence here was a surprise to thisgendarme, but the full importance of the man was still unknown to him.The officer in command, however, knew who his prisoner was.

  "What is your name?" he addressed himself to Zachar, with the exaltationof a man come upon a precious find. He knew but too well how anxious thegovernment was to capture him, but he had come here to arrest My Lordwithout the remotest idea of finding this revolutionary giant in theplace.

  "Krasnoff," Zachar answered with dignity, in his deep-chested voice.

  "I beg your pardon," the officer returned, with a twinkle in his eye. "Ionce had the pleasure of arresting you. Your name is Andrey IvanovitchJeliaboff."

  "Oh, in that case I am pleased to meet you," the prisoner said withplayful chivalry.

  Jeliaboff's arrest made a joyous stir not only in the gendarmerie, butalso at court. Apart from the attempt to blow up an imperial train inthe south, in which he had played the leading part, he had beendescribed to the authorities as the most gifted and effective agitatorin the movement.

  The police at Little Garden Street were unaware of all this, but theconduct of the two men who had visited the cheese shop that afternoonseemed decidedly suspicious and lent a glare of colour to theirrelevancies that seemed to enfold the place.

  The next morning Pavel called on the Koboseffs. As he entered the cheesestore he saw t
hat the adjoining room was crowded with police officers.In his first shock he was only conscious of the gleam of uniforms, ofUrie's and somebody else's voice and of his own sick despair. But thesick feeling ebbed away, leaving him in a state of desperate, pugnacioustranquillity, his mind on the revolver in his pocket.

  "Hello there!" he shouted, with the self-satisfied disrespect of a manof the better classes addressing one of the lower, and at this hesurveyed the store with an air of contempt, as much as to say: "What aden I did strike!"

  "Wife," he heard Urie's voice, "there is a gentleman in the shop."

  Baska, who had been calmly emptying a barrel of cheese into some boxes,wiped her hands upon her apron and stepped behind the counter.

  "Is your Holland cheese any good?" Pavel asked, sniffing. "Are you sureyou can give me a pound of decent stuff?"

  She waited on him, simply, and after some more sniffing, at the wrappingpaper as well as the cheese, he let her make up the package. As hewalked toward the door his heart stood still for an instant.

  He was allowed to go. Whether he was followed by spies he did not know.At all events, when he approached his "legal" residence at the house ofhis high-born relative, after an hour's "circling," he felt perfectlyfree from shadowing. He was greatly perplexed to think of the way Urieand Baska had been allowed to continue in their role of a cheesemongercouple; but, at all events, even if the true character of their shop hadnot yet been discovered by the police officers he had seen there, itseemed to be a matter of minutes when it would be.

  * * * * *

  In the morning of that day, a few hours before Pavel called on theKoboseffs, the police captain of the Little Garden Street precinct hadasked the prefect of St. Petersburg to have the cheese shop examinedunder the guise of a sanitary inspection. He was still uninformed of thearrest of the big fellow with the pointed beard, much less of the factthat he had proved to be one of the chieftains of the revolutionaryorganisation, but the story of the two suspicious-looking visitors atthe cheese shop and their "circling" had made him uneasy. The Czar wasexpected to pass through Little Garden Street on Sunday, which was thenext day, and one could not ascertain the real character of theKoboseffs and their business too soon. Nevertheless the prefect was slowto appreciate the situation. Indeed, it is quite characteristic of thedespotic chaos of a regime like Russia's that on the one hand people arethrown into jail to perish there on the merest whim of some gendarme,and, on the other, action is often prevented by an excess of red tapeand indolence in cases where there is ground for the gravest suspicion.While hundreds of schoolboys and schoolgirls were wasting away in damp,solitary cells because they had been suspected of reading somerevolutionary leaflet, the occupants of this basement, in whose casesuspicion was associated with the idea of a plot on the life of theCzar, had not even been subjected to the summary search and questioningto which every resident in Russia is ever liable.

  Finally, after considerable pleading on the part of the police captain,General Mrovinsky, a civil engineer of the Health Department, an elderlyman with a kindly, genial face, was assigned to make the feignedinspection.

  "Your Excellency will please see if they are not digging a mine there,"the police captain said to him, respectfully. "The Emperor often passesthat shop when he goes to the Riding Schools or to the Michail Palace,and that cheese dealer and his wife are quite a suspicious-lookingcouple. His Majesty is expected to pass the place to-morrow."

  The general entered the cheese shop accompanied by the police captain,the captain's lieutenant and the head porter of the house. Koboseff cameout of the inner rooms to meet them. He turned pale, but this seemednatural.

  "His Excellency represents the Health Department," said the captain."There is dampness in the next house, and His Excellency wishes to seeif your place is all right."

  "I am sorry to trouble you," said General Mrovinsky, kindly. "Butdampness is a bad thing to have in one's house, you know."

  "There is none here that I know of, sir," Koboseff replieddeferentially, "but, of course, a fellow must not be too sure, sir."

  Baska stood in a corner of the shop, bending over a barrel. While theofficers talked to Urie she threw a glance at the visitors over hershoulder and resumed her work.

  The uniformed civil engineer made a close examination of the walls. Theone facing the street was covered with planking, and Koboseff explainedthat he had had it done as a safeguard against dampness, but that therewas none.

  "But then cheese crumbs are apt to get into the cracks," urged GeneralMrovinsky, taking hold of one of the shelves along that wall. "Theywould decay there, don't you know, and that would be almost as bad asdampness, wouldn't it?" He then inspected the two living rooms. In thesecond of these he found a pile of hay.

  "It's from our cheese barrels," Koboseff explained; and pointing atanother pile he added: "And that's coke, sir."

  General Mrovinsky picked up a coal, examined it, threw it back and wipedhis fingers with some of the hay.

  "Everything is all right," he said to the police officers, with a lookof intelligence. He led the way back to the store and then back again tothe middle room. Here he took a firm hold of the planking that lined thewall under the street window. He tried to wrench it off, but it wouldnot yield, and he let it go.

  "Everything is all right," he said to the captain, seating himself on asofa. A trunk and some pieces of furniture were moved from their placesand then put back. The general knew a merchant by the name of Koboseff,so he asked the cheese dealer if he was a relative of his. Urie said no,and after some conversation about the cheese business in general theofficials went away.

  "There is no mine in that place. You can make yourself perfectly easyabout it," Mrovinsky said to the captain, as they made their way to theadjoining basement.

  It was while they were conversing leisurely, the old general seated onthe lounge, that Pavel came in. He was watched narrowly, but he playedhis part well, and as the engineer had already intimated to the policeofficers that there was nothing suspicious about the premises he was noteven shadowed.

  Thus reassured, the police of the locality set to work preparing LittleGarden Street for the Czar's drive to the Riding School. This includedan investigation as to the character of the occupants of all the othershops and residences facing the street, as well as getting the pavementin good repair.