He arrived at the Moika—Youssoupov’s house on the Moika Canal in Petrograd—at eleven in the evening. Dmitri was already there, and Soukhotin and Pourichkevich came soon afterward. Felix took them to the basement apartments of the palace, and the five conspirators stood around a bit awkwardly. Everyone seemed acutely conscious of the fact that in these rooms Rasputin would spend his final moments.
The large main room was divided in two by an archway so that one half was a sitting area and the other, the larger half, a dining room. A stairway led up from the sitting area to private quarters, and halfway up this stair was a door that led to the courtyard. Felix had been in the process of refurbishing the apartment, but he had taken great pains to make sure the place was finished, or at least convincingly furnished, tonight so it would have a lived-in look. It was well lighted, a samovar was steaming on a sideboard, and the dining table had the appearance of a recently finished meal.
“I told Rasputin,” Felix explained, “that when we had guests, we took our meals here.”
He didn’t need to explain. They had been over these details many times. He had also told the starets they would be coming there tonight to meet Felix’s wife, who was actually in the Crimea, and that she might be entertaining upstairs when they arrived. But Felix was nervous and repeated it all again.
Then he showed them a beautiful cabinet of inlaid ebony, with delicate bronze columns backed by mirrors. It was quite unique—and quite deadly. He had stored the poison in it. As Felix opened it, Yuri noted the crystal and silver crucifix that stood on top of the cabinet, an expensive piece of Italian Renaissance art. It seemed an appropriate sentinel to stand guard over the room.
Felix’s hand shook as he gave the packet of cyanide to Yuri, and Yuri’s shook no less as he took it. He carefully put on rubber gloves and ground the poison into a fine powder. The others watched as if in a trance. Yuri was certain that, like him, none of his companions felt a sense of reality. It was as if they had climbed aboard a train and were proceeding along a set track, unable to stop, unable to veer from the predetermined path.
A plate of cakes sat on the table. Yuri opened each one and liberally sprinkled them with cyanide. The poison in one cake would be enough to bring down several men. Yuri would mix more poison with liquid and put it into three glasses, but he would wait twenty minutes after Felix left to get Rasputin. He did not want to take the chance of having the poison evaporating away.
Yuri took off the contaminated gloves; he had an extra pair for later. Without thinking, he tossed them into the fireplace. The hot fire immediately melted the rubber and sent awful smoke and fumes into the room.
“What have I done?” Yuri groaned.
Everyone ran around opening windows and the door to the courtyard to air out the room. Yuri kept thinking it was a bad beginning. Someone even voiced that thought.
“No harm done,” Felix said. “Just be sure to close the windows before I return so the place doesn’t freeze.”
Finally everything was ready. The fire in the hearth was once more burning cheerfully, and the rooms looked very inviting. Felix had done a fine job in getting the apartment ready. The innocuous appearance of the place helped dull the impact of what was about to happen there.
Soukhotin put on a chauffeur’s uniform in order to drive Felix across town to pick up the starets. They wanted everything to appear as normal as possible, but of course didn’t want the real chauffeur to be involved. Rasputin must suspect nothing. Yuri, however, could not help wondering if the holy man’s reputed “second sight” would come to his rescue tonight. The scientist in Yuri wanted to write off the man as a total charlatan, yet, as a spiritual man he knew the mystical, the miraculous—even the occult—did exist. As Katya had said, it was possible that at one time Rasputin had indeed been anointed of God. He might have been a true healer, even a prophet. But down deep, Yuri thought that if the man had ever had any power, it very likely had never been from God. Perhaps he was even a type of Antichrist.
Once again Yuri tried to console himself. He was ridding not only his country of a great evil, but perhaps even the world.
After Felix and Soukhotin had gone, Yuri prepared the wine, then he, Dmitri Pavlovich, and Pourichkevich went upstairs to wait in Felix’s private sitting room. Dmitri turned on the gramophone, playing “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” They were supposed to play lively music and give the impression that a party was going on. They tried to talk, but every attempt at conversation fell flat. They would have to do better than that when Felix returned with his guest if they were going to be convincing.
It was a long wait, and Yuri began to wonder if something had gone wrong. He almost hoped it had. Perhaps the starets was too suspicious and refused to come. He had been quite cautious lately—after all, he knew half the country wanted him dead. But just as Yuri was thinking they could all go home with the sense that at least they had tried, he heard the courtyard door open and the sound of voices. A few moments later Soukhotin joined them.
With the music blaring in the background, they had to raise their voices in order to question him about what had happened. Now it did sound like a party.
“What took so long?” asked Dmitri.
“He kept trying to get Felix to go to the gypsies instead. Felix had to do some smooth talking to get him here. Then we drove a roundabout way here to ensure we weren’t followed by the police.”
“I’ve got to see what’s going on,” said Pourichkevich, opening the door and creeping out to the landing.
The others followed, but they could only hear a dull murmur of voices. They returned to the sitting room. Dmitri put on another song. They tried to talk, they tried to laugh as if they were having a good time. Soukhotin poured them wine, but Yuri took one sip and felt sick. His stomach was in knots. The others seemed a little calmer. But Dmitri and Soukhotin were both soldiers, trained to have nerves of steel. Pourichkevich, the oldest, had never showed any faltering of his zeal for this task.
But all the men paced; no one could sit still. Someone produced a deck of cards, and they tried to play for a while. Someone else kept pouring wine. Before long the noise level had risen. It seemed to Yuri to be more like a horrible nightmarish scene—the incessant, cheerful notes of “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” the bantering voices of card-playing men, the clink of glasses. Suddenly the room began to close in on him.
“Yuri, are you all right?” said Dmitri.
Yuri felt the blood drain from his head, and his insides churned. He jumped up from his seat, and the room started to spin. Dmitri caught him. When he was steady, he rushed out into the courtyard, and thus no one had to watch him lose what little there was in his stomach.
Yuri was still trembling when he returned to his coconspirators. He felt like a fool but took a little comfort in noting that Dmitri looked rather pale as well.
On his way back to the sitting room from his ordeal in the courtyard, Yuri heard Felix singing down in the basement. What was happening down there?
While the others played cards, Yuri paced and watched the minutes tick by on the mantel clock. An hour passed.
After a while Felix came up. “He wouldn’t eat the cakes. I forgot he doesn’t like sweets. He finally had one and nothing happened!”
“What about the wine?” Yuri asked.
“I made the mistake of pouring it into a clean glass, then he wouldn’t take a new glass when I changed the variety of wine. I had to drop the glass to get him to take one of the poisoned ones. But still there has been no effect!”
“Give him more wine,” said Pourichkevich.
“This is taking too long,” said Dmitri. “He’s sure to get suspicious.”
Felix returned to the basement, and another hour and a half dragged by. They were all nervous wrecks now. Yuri felt wretched. He had to hurry out to the courtyard once more. Something definitely must have gone wrong. They had failed. But why was Felix staying away? Maybe the starets had hypnotized Felix. Maybe Felix was dead. They began to discuss whe
ther they should take matters into their own hands. Taut nerves and short fuses quickly turned the discussion into a lively argument.
Then the door burst open. It was Felix. He, too, was a wreck, wild-eyed, shaking, pale.
“The poison isn’t working!” he exclaimed, only by great effort keeping his frantic voice down.
“That can’t be!” said Yuri. “How much has he taken?”
“Several cakes and all of the wine!”
“But the dose was huge,” Dmitri said.
Yuri frowned. “Even if it lost half its potency, that much still should have . . . killed him instantly.”
“But he still sits there,” Felix said, “smiling, laughing, getting drunker and drunker. He seemed to have difficulty swallowing at one point, and some shortness of breath, but that’s all. And now he’s getting impatient. He wants to meet my wife.”
“What can we do?”
“Let’s all go down there,” Pourichkevich suggested. “Together we can take him down and strangle him.”
“You must be crazy!” Yuri protested. “We’ve had our chance and we’ve failed. I say we give it up.”
“Yes,” agreed Dmitri. “I’ve had enough for one night. I’m ready to go home.”
“We can’t leave him half-dead,” declared Pourichkevich. “We have to finish the job or we are all doomed—not to mention Russia! We must all swear together not to leave this place until the deed is done. There is no turning back.”
They looked around at each other. No one looked the least convinced. And they hardly looked like dangerous saviors of Russia. Yuri was sure he looked and felt far worse than Rasputin with his gut full of cyanide. He might yet have to make another dash to the courtyard. And if he did that, he would just keep on going. Honor alone held him back. He couldn’t run out on his companions—unless they all agreed to give it up.
That was not going to happen.
Felix said, “Well, we can’t all go in there. It would surely make him suspicious, and then he might escape. I’ll go myself.” And, to Yuri’s horror, Felix took Dmitri’s sidearm, a Browning revolver, and returned to the basement.
The others, unable to stand another moment waiting in that room, quietly descended the steps after Felix and waited, out of sight, at the courtyard landing. Yuri could hear but not see what happened next.
“The party is breaking up,” Felix said to Rasputin. His voice was stilted and hollow. If that didn’t arouse Rasputin’s suspicions, nothing would.
“Good . . .” came Rasputin’s reply in a gravelly, dull-sounding voice.
“Are you not well, Grigori?”
“I don’t think I am,” said the starets. “My head hurts and my stomach is burning. Give me another glass of wine. That will help.”
There was the sound of clinking glass as Felix obviously tended to the starets’ request.
In a few moments Rasputin said, “Ah, that’s better.”
Two or three more minutes of silence passed. The four conspirators, listening with very little remaining patience, held their breath so as not to risk being discovered in the silence.
Finally Rasputin said, “Let’s go visit the gypsies.”
“It’s so late.”
“Not for them. I often go after I’ve spent a late night at Tsarskoe Selo. It’s a release for my poor, tired body. The thoughts in my mind truly belong to God, but my body is my own. And the flesh must be appeased, don’t you think, Prince Felix?”
Felix mumbled something in reply. Yuri couldn’t believe that a man who had ingested such a massive dose of poison could be sitting there reflecting on religion! Perhaps the pharmacist had given Yuri worthless stuff. There had been no way to test it beforehand. But there might be other plausible reasons for the starets’ resistance to it. Yuri tried, but couldn’t think of any just then. Instead, what flitted through his distraught mind was the awful fear that maybe Rasputin was a messenger of God, after all, and God himself was protecting the holy man.
Yuri groaned. Dmitri, jabbing him in the ribs with his elbow, hissed at him to be quiet.
Finally Yuri heard a chair being pushed back and someone rise. After a moment, Rasputin asked, “Why are you staring at that crucifix?”
“It’s one of my favorite pieces,” Felix said.
“It must have cost a lot.” Another chair pushed back, and feet, much heavier than the first, shuffled across the floor. “I like this cabinet better,” Rasputin added.
Both men had to be standing by the cabinet now.
Then Felix said, “Grigori Efimovich, I think you would do well to look at the crucifix—and say a prayer, too.”
“What—?”
Suddenly a shot rang out, followed by the thud, hopefully, of a body falling to the floor. Yuri swayed on his feet and clutched Dmitri’s shoulder for support, but his companions left him and dashed down the stairs into the room. By sheer instinct, Yuri hurried after them. But he took only a few steps when suddenly the place went dark. Someone had accidently bumped into the light switch.
There was a mad scrambling of noise and fumbling until, a moment later, the lights flashed back to reveal Felix standing over the fallen form of Rasputin, holding Dmitri’s revolver.
“Is he . . . ?” said Soukhotin.
“He better be,” said Pourichkevich. “Well, Doctor, what do you say?”
Rasputin was not Yuri’s first corpse, but it was certainly the first he’d had a hand in causing. He didn’t want to look at it; he didn’t want to touch it. It took all the courage he possessed to bend over the body and lay his trembling fingers on the man’s neck. He did so quickly. It was really unnecessary. There was a bullet hole in the man’s chest.
“He’s dead,” Yuri said.
And Russia was saved. Oh, God, please let Russia be saved! Yuri didn’t want to consider the possibility that this gruesome patriotic deed might be for nothing.
62
Yuri would never know how he managed to complete the remaining part of the plan. He and Dmitri Pavlovich, with Soukhotin dressed in Rasputin’s coat and hat, returned to Rasputin’s flat, so it would appear as if the starets had come home, thus buying time for his assassins before Rasputin was discovered as missing. Then they had to return to the Moika in order to dispose of the body.
There, they were greeted by Felix and Pourichkevich and the most chilling tale yet. Apparently Rasputin had not been as dead as Yuri thought. While Felix was alone with the “corpse,” it had tried to attack Felix. A struggle had ensued in which the very-much-alive starets had been able to break free, get up the steps, and out into the courtyard. Pourichkevich grabbed the gun and chased after Rasputin, shooting him two more times. But these shots had roused the attention not only of a couple of servants but also of the gendarme who was making his regular nightly rounds in the neighborhood. Felix was trying to convince the policeman that the shots were merely horseplay among some of his partying friends when Pourichkevich, no doubt having had too much strain for one night, appeared and began to brag to the officer about killing Rasputin. Fortunately, the policeman was sympathetic and swore he would tell no one.
Yuri, his confidence all but gone, once again examined the body, which had been moved from the courtyard to the landing on the stairs, and verified that there were two new gunshot wounds in it. It seemed incredible that Rasputin could have survived the previous wound, much less tried to evade his pursuers. He appeared quite dead now, though Yuri had had so much wine and was so unnerved that even he did not trust his medical judgment. Still, there was no pulse, no breathing. He had to be dead! Nevertheless, Yuri was glad when they finally wrapped up the body in a rug to take it away.
Felix had been so distraught by the final struggle with Rasputin that he went to bed, nearly in a faint. It was left to the remaining four to complete the task. Yuri’s three comrades suggested that he, too, forego the job. His wounded leg was aching, and he was limping badly, and he looked decidedly green in complexion. But Yuri was determined to finish what he had begun. So, toge
ther they loaded the body into Dmitri’s motorcar and drove it to an isolated bend in the Neva, where they lowered it into a hole in the ice.
After all was finished, Yuri returned home. Yet he knew that would not be the end of it. Whether Rasputin had come back to life and attacked Felix, he did not know. But he did know that man would probably haunt them all for the rest of their lives.
It was six in the morning when he got home. Katya was awake and appeared not to have slept all night. When he knocked on her door and entered her room, she jumped from her bed and ran to him, but Yuri put up his hand to stop her.
“Don’t touch me,” he said. “I feel too dirty.”
“I’ll have a servant draw you a bath.”
“That might help,” he said without enthusiasm.
In another hour, after a soothing bath, he did not feel better. But he was able to hold Katya, and that was a tremendous help. A few days ago she had been the needy one, leaning upon his strength—now the tables were turned. And she rose up to meet his need, to comfort him, to love him. He wanted it to be enough. He wanted to lose himself in it. But his mind kept replaying the awful events of the night. The cold, dead face of Rasputin would not leave him alone. And, as if that were not bad enough, he kept thinking about all the mistakes he and his accomplices had made. There was blood in the Moika, blood in Dmitri’s motorcar in which they had transported the body, witnesses who had seen Rasputin leave his flat with Youssoupov, servants who could not all be trusted to be silent. They had forgotten to weight the body with the chains they had brought along before dumping it into the river. A shoe had been left in the boot of the car. . . .
How much more incriminating evidence had they left behind?
Yuri’s worrying did not make it easy for him to receive his wife’s comfort—not when he feared that at any minute a troop of police would be beating down his door to arrest him.
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