Eye of the Red Tsar

by Sam Eastland

  “Why wouldn’t he,” said Kirov, “if he only knew what his father had told him?”

  “Precisely, and as Grodek grew into a young man, he made no secret of his hatred for the Romanovs. He was the perfect candidate for leading an assassination attempt.”

  “But how could a person like that be persuaded to work for the Okhrana? That seems impossible to me.”

  “That is exactly why Zubatov chose him. First, he had Grodek arrested in a public place. News of this soon spread. A young man, grabbed off the street and roughly shoved into a waiting car. Anyone witnessing such a thing, and Zubatov made sure there were many of these, would feel sympathy for Grodek. But once Zubatov had him in custody, the real work began.”

  “What did he do to the boy?”

  “He blindfolded Grodek, put him in a car, and drove him to a secret location. When Zubatov removed Grodek’s blindfold, the Tsar himself was standing there in front of them.”

  “What was the point of that?” asked Kirov.

  “Zubatov brought Grodek face-to-face with a man who had become only a symbol to him. But to see him there, as a man of flesh and blood, instead of what Grodek’s father had made him out to be, that was the beginning of the process. The Tsar explained his own version of events. Together, they looked over his father’s record books, which showed, in the father’s own handwriting, how his family’s wealth had been squandered. Of course, Grodek had never seen any of these things before. It left a deep impression on them both to be reminded that they were part of the same family.”

  “And was Grodek convinced by all this?”

  “Yes,” replied Pekkala. “And it was then that Zubatov explained his plan to Grodek. He was to be what is known as an ‘agent provocateur’ and would act as the ringleader of this fake terrorist cell. It was extremely dangerous. If any of these assassins caught wind of the fact that Grodek was really working for the Okhrana, his life would have been over in a second. But young men are attracted to danger, and when Grodek agreed to lead this band of terrorists, Zubatov believed that he had chosen wisely. In reality, it turned out to be the greatest mistake of his life.”

  “Why?” Kirov was fascinated.

  “Over the next year,” continued Pekkala, “Grodek underwent training with the Special Section of the Okhrana. In order to be convincing as a terrorist, he had to be able to behave like one. They taught him how to make bombs, how to shoot, how to fight with a knife, just as they taught me. Soon after the terrorist cell was activated, people came forward to enlist. Grodek was a natural. He possessed a kind of energy that drew people to him. In the months ahead, while the membership of this cell continued to grow, Grodek surpassed every goal Zubatov had set for him. He never missed a meeting with his contacts, and the information he supplied was so accurate that Zubatov spoke of Grodek as the person who would one day take his place at the head of the Okhrana. But Zubatov had made one great miscalculation. After proving to Grodek that the blame for his family’s misfortune belonged entirely with his father, Zubatov had assumed that Grodek’s hatred of the Tsar had been extinguished. What Zubatov did not realize was that Grodek, after seeing the evidence laid before him, had decided to blame them both.

  “In the meantime, Grodek had also made a mistake. He had fallen in love with one of the women he recruited. Her name was Maria Balka. She was fifteen years older than Grodek and, in many ways, more dangerous than Grodek himself. She had already carried out several killings in the name of various anarchist groups. Grodek kept their relationship a secret from Zubatov, and when Zubatov mentioned to Grodek that Maria Balka would certainly receive the death penalty after she was arrested along with the other members of Grodek’s organization, it made what happened next almost inevitable.”

  “What did happen?” asked Kirov.

  “Zubatov decided that the trap could only be sprung after an attempt on the life of the Tsar. This would provide justification for the arrests which would follow. Of course, it was arranged that Grodek would carry out the attempt. It would be made to appear that the Tsar had actually been assassinated. Other members of the terrorist cell would be stationed nearby, in order to witness the staged killing. The assassins would then rendezvous at their safe house, where they would be arrested by agents of the Okhrana.

  “The attack was to take place as the Tsar took an evening walk around the grounds of the Summer Palace. Zubatov made sure that the Tsar stuck to a regular route on these walks, in order to make the terrorists confident of success. The Tsar would be shot as he passed between the gates which surrounded the palace and the Lamski Pond. This was a relatively narrow area, which offered the Tsar no protection. Firing through the gates, Grodek would only be a few paces from the Tsar.”

  “But wouldn’t it seem suspicious that the Tsar would be out walking by himself?”

  “Not at all,” replied Pekkala. “He set aside a portion of each day to exercise. Sometimes it was riding, sometimes swimming, but often he would walk the grounds of the palace, whatever the weather, and at those times he insisted on being alone.”

  “But what about the other assassins? Wouldn’t they be armed as well?”

  “They were instructed to fire only if Grodek missed his target. The Tsar would be seen to fall, struck by several rounds, but of course only blank ammunition would be used.

  “At this point, no one had any doubts about Grodek’s loyalty to the Okhrana. After all, he had delivered the names of every member of the organization he had helped to create. He had betrayed them all, as he had promised to do from the beginning.

  “What nobody in the Okhrana knew was that Grodek had switched out the blanks for real bullets.

  “The night of the shooting, everything went like clockwork. The terrorists were allowed to approach the palace grounds. They hid. The Tsar set out on his walk. Meanwhile, dozens of Okhrana agents waited to swoop down on the safe house. The Tsar reached the narrow walkway between the gates and the Lamski Pond. The sun had set. A cool wind blew across the pond. Grodek stepped out of the shadows. The Tsar paused. He had heard the sound of branches rustling. Grodek stepped up to the gate, reached between the bars, the gun in his hand. The Tsar never moved. He stood there, as if he didn’t understand what was happening.”

  “And he missed?” stammered Kirov. “Grodek missed at a range of three paces?”

  Pekkala shook his head. “Grodek did not miss. He emptied the cylinder. All six shots found their mark.”

  Now Kirov jumped to his feet. “Do you mean to tell me that he shot the Tsar six times and did not kill him?”

  “The man Grodek killed was not the Tsar.”

  “Then who …” Kirov narrowed his eyes as the truth dawned on him. “You mean a double? Grodek shot a double?”

  “Zubatov made many mistakes, but he would not go so far as to actually endanger the life of the Tsar. That was the one part of the plan Zubatov never discussed with Grodek. When Grodek pulled the trigger, he did not know he was killing a double.”

  “But still a man died,” Kirov insisted.

  “Somebody usually does,” replied Pekkala.

  Pekkala and the Tsar stood in the darkness on the balcony of the Palace, looking out over the grounds. They could see the Chinese Bridge and Parnassus Hill. In the Gribok gardens, straight ahead of them, leaves rustled in the night breeze.

  At that moment, they knew, the Tsar’s double would be walking just inside the gates of the Palace grounds, between the Great Pond and the Parkovaya Road.

  Neither man had spoken for a while.

  The air was tense as they waited for the shooting to begin.

  “Can you imagine how it is,” asked the Tsar, “that I cannot venture out beyond the gates of this palace without knowing I would probably be killed? I am the ruler of a country along whose streets I cannot walk alone.” He waved his hand back and forth out over the grounds, in a way which reminded Pekkala of a priest swinging an incense holder. “Is it worth all this? Is it worth anything at all?”

  “It wil
l be over soon, Excellency,” said Pekkala. “By tomorrow, the terrorists will have been arrested.”

  “This is about more than just one group of terrorists,” replied the Tsar. “It’s the war which has brought us to this. I think back to the day it was declared, when I stood on the veranda of the Winter Palace, looking out across that sea of people who had come to show their support. I felt that we were indestructible. The notion of surrender had not even crossed my mind. I could never have imagined the defeats we would suffer. Tannenburg. The Masurian Lakes. The names of those places still echo in my mind. I should have listened to Rasputin.”

  “What has this to do with him?” Pekkala had met the Siberian mystic, who supposedly possessed the magical ability to cure the hemophilia that afflicted the Tsar’s only son, Alexei. In Pekkala’s judgment, Rasputin was a man who understood his limitations. It was the Tsar, and even more so the Tsarina, who had demanded from Rasputin a wisdom he did not possess. He had been called upon to judge matters of state about which he had little knowledge. The best he could do, most of the time, was to offer vague words of comfort. But the Romanovs had fastened on those words, stripping them of vagueness, turning them to prophecy. It was no wonder Rasputin had become so hated by those who sought the favor of the Tsar.

  Pekkala had been there, on a bitterly cold morning in December of 1916, when the Petrograd police fished Rasputin’s body from the Neva River. Rasputin had been invited to a private party at the house of Prince Yusupov. There he was fed cakes which, with the help of a doctor named Lazoviert, had been laced with enough potassium cyanide to have killed an elephant. When the poison appeared to have no effect, Yusupov’s accomplice, a government minister named Purishkyevich, shot Rasputin several times and stabbed him in the throat. Then they both rolled him in a heavy carpet and dumped him in the water where, in spite of everything which had been done to him, Rasputin died by drowning.

  “Grief without end,” said the Tsar. “That is what Rasputin said the war would bring us. And look how right he was.”

  “All wars bring grief, Excellency.”

  The Tsar turned to him, trembling. “God spoke through that man, Pekkala! Who speaks through you, I’d like to know.”

  “You do, Excellency.”

  For a moment, the Tsar looked stunned. “Forgive me, Pekkala,” he said. “I did not have the right to speak to you that way.”

  “Nothing to forgive,” replied Pekkala. It was the only lie he ever told the Tsar.

  KIROV’S VOICE SNAPPED PEKKALA BACK TO THE PRESENT.

  “What about Grodek?” asked Kirov. “What became of him?”

  “When Okhrana agents surrounded the safe house, a gunfight broke out. The Okhrana found themselves under fire from weapons they themselves had supplied to Grodek. After the battle, of the thirty-six members of the terrorist cell, the Okhrana found only four survivors among the dead. Grodek was not one of them, and neither was Maria Balka. The two of them had simply disappeared. That was when the Tsar sent for me, with orders to arrest Balka and Grodek before they had the chance to kill again.” He let out a long sigh. “And I failed.”

  “But you did find him!”

  “Not before he had killed again. I tracked them down to a small lodging house on Maximilian Lane in the Kasan district of Petersburg. The owner of the house had remarked on the difference in age between the woman and the man. He assumed they were simply having an affair, a thing proprietors of places like that are sometimes obliged to overlook. But they kept bringing boxes into their room, and when the owner asked what was in them, Balka told him it was only books. Now people who are having an affair do not spend their days shut away and reading books. That was when the landlord notified the police. Soon we had the house surrounded. I waited at the back of the house. Okhrana agents went in the front, expecting that Balka and Grodek would try to leave through the rear, where I would apprehend them.

  “Unfortunately, having been trained in police work, Grodek noticed the agents moving into place. When the agents kicked down the door to the room, they set off a bomb which tore away the whole front of the building. Grodek had made it, killing the same people who had trained him in the art of bomb making. We lost four agents and sixteen civilians in the blast. I myself was knocked almost unconscious. By the time I got up, Balka and Grodek were running out of the back of the building.

  “I chased them along Moika Street, by the banks of the Neva. It was the middle of winter. The streets were ankle deep in slush, and snow had piled up on the sides of the road. I could not get a clear shot at them. Eventually, Balka slipped. She must have broken her ankle. I caught up with them on the Potsuleyev Bridge. Police were coming from the other way. There was no cover. I had them in my sights. They had no place to go.” Pekkala paused. He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “And what I saw next, I have never been able to get out of my head. They stopped at the crest of the bridge. I could hear the police shouting at them from the other side. Balka was obviously hurt. Grodek had been alternately carrying her and dragging her for several blocks, and he had become exhausted. It was clear that they couldn’t go on. I called to them. I said it was time to give up. Grodek looked at me for a long time. Balka stood beside him with her arm over his shoulder. Then Grodek embraced her, lifted her up and set her on the stone rail of the bridge. The water below was choked with ice. I told him there was no escape that way.”

  “What did he do?” asked Kirov.

  “He kissed her. And then he pulled a gun and shot her in the head.”

  Kirov rocked back. “He shot her? I thought he was in love with her.”

  “I did not understand how far he was prepared to go. Maria Balka fell into the river and drifted under the ice.”

  “And Grodek? Did he surrender?”

  “Only after he had failed to kill himself. He put the gun to his own head and pulled the trigger, but the cylinder had jammed.”

  “Why didn’t he jump?” Kirov asked. “He might have been able to escape.”

  “Grodek was afraid of heights. Even though the distance to the water was only three or four times the height of a man, Grodek became paralyzed by fear. He tried to rush past me, and I knocked him out with the butt of my gun. It put a gash in his forehead. For the entire length of his trial, he refused to wear a bandage. The scar, with its line of dark stitches, looked like a purple centipede crawling up into his hairline. Every day as he left the proceedings on the way back to his holding cell, Grodek would shout to the journalists who had gathered outside the courthouse that the police had tortured him.”

  “And Balka? What happened to her body?”

  “We never found it. In the winter that river runs fast below the ice. The current must have carried her out into the Baltic Sea. I had a team of divers search that river more than a dozen times.” Pekkala shook his head. “She had vanished without a trace.”

  “And Grodek? After what he had done, why did they put him behind bars? Why did he not receive the death penalty?”

  “He did, at first, but the Tsar overruled the decision of the judges. He believed that Grodek had been a pawn, first of his father and then of Zubatov. Grodek was still a young man. In a different world, the Tsar felt, it might have been his own son facing execution. But it was clear to the Tsar that Grodek could never go free. So he was locked up for the rest of his life with no chance of parole in the Trubetskoy Bastion of the Peter and Paul Fortress.”

  “But I thought all prisoners were released during the Revolution.”

  “Political prisoners, yes, but even the Bolsheviks would have known better than to set free a man like Grodek.”

  “What made Grodek so different from the other killers they set free?”

  Pekkala thought for a moment before answering.

  “Almost anyone,” said Pekkala, “can be driven to kill if the circumstances are forced upon them. But there is a difference between those people who react to situations and those who create the situation for which murder is the outcome. Those
are the ones we have to fear, Kirov, because they enjoy the act of killing. And in all my years as a detective, I never met a killer who enjoyed what he did more than Grodek.”

  The fire wheezed and crackled.

  “Where will you go when you are free?” asked Kirov.

  “Paris,” he replied.

  “Why there?”

  “If you have to ask that question, you have never been to Paris. Besides, I have unfinished business there.” It felt strange to think of the future. Each time he watched the sun go down in the valley of Krasnagolyana, he knew he had outpaced the odds of his survival. He had measured his survival in increments of days, not daring to hope for more. The idea that he might stretch those increments from days to weeks, to months and even years, filled him with confusion. It took Pekkala a moment to realize that what he was feeling was actually hope, an emotion he had once believed that he would never feel again.

  At last, Kirov’s breathing grew heavy and deep.

  Lightning flashed in the distance.

  Pekkala slipped away into the river of his dreams, while thunder rolled across the clouds.

  BY SUNRISE THE NEXT MORNING, THEY WERE ON THE MOVE AGAIN.

  Their route intersected with a road known as the Moscow Highway which, in spite of its grand name, was only a two-lane strip of dirt laid out across the undulating steppe.

  While turmeric-colored dust blew in through the open windows, Anton sat with the map, squinting at the thumbprint whorls of hills, the veins and arteries of roads, and the dense bone mass of forests.

  By noon, they had reached the intersection Anton was looking for. Without any signposts, it resembled nothing more than a horizontal crucifix of mud. “Turn here, Kirov,” he ordered. “Turn here.” And then again. “Turn here.”

  Their course took them away along the edge of a shallow stream and through a grove of white birch trees before the ground opened out into a field. The woods which ringed the field were dark and gloomy-looking. Kirov eased the car along an old wagon track which cut across the field, the Emka’s bumper swishing through the tall grass.