The Minister of Evil Part 27

"We cannot afford to allow evil tongues to speak of us; neither can we afford the vulgar scandal that some would seek to create.

If you, O Father, feel apprehensive, then act boldly in the knowledge that you have your devoted daughter ever at your side and ever ready and eager to place her power as Empress in your dear hands. Therefore strike your enemies swiftly and without fear. Lips prepared to utter scandal must be, at all costs, silenced.

"Our friend Protopopoff has returned from England and tells me that Lloyd George and his friends are exerting every effort to win the war. Those British are brave, but, oh! if they knew all that we know--eh? They are in ignorance, and will remain so until Germany conquers Russia and spreads the blessing of civilisation among the people.

"Nikki is returning. A seance is to be held on Sat.u.r.day. You must be back in time. He is sending a messenger to you to urge you to return to us to give us comfort in these long dark days. Anna and the girls all kiss your dear hand.--Your devoted daughter, ALIX."

On the following day a middle-aged, fair-haired, rather well-dressed man, who gave the name of Nicholas Chevitch, from Okhta, a suburb of Petrograd, was brought to me by the monk who acted as janitor, and explained that he had private business with Rasputin.

I left him and, ascending to the monk's room, found him extremely anxious to meet his visitor.

"I will see him at once, Feodor. I have some secret business with him.

Here is the key of a small locked box in your room. Open it and take out ten one-thousand rouble notes and bring them to me after you have brought in Chevitch."

This I did. Having admitted the visitor to Rasputin's presence, I opened the small iron box which the Starets always carried in his supposed "pilgrimages," and took out the money, leaving in it a sum of about twelve thousand roubles.

The ten thousand I carried to Rasputin, but as I opened the door I heard the fair-haired man say:

"All is prepared. The wire is laid across the river. We tested it five days ago and it works excellently."

"Good! Ah, here is my secretary Feodor!" the monk exclaimed. "He has the ten thousand roubles for you, and there will be a further ten thousand on the day your plan matures."

I wondered to what plan the Starets was referring. But being compelled to retire I remained in ignorance. The man Chevitch stayed with the monk for over an hour, and then left to return to the capital.

Later on I referred to the visit of the stranger, whereupon Rasputin laughed grimly, saying:

"You will hear some news in a day or two, my dear Feodor. Petrograd will be startled."

"How?"

"Never mind," he replied. "Wait!"

We arrived back in Petrograd on the following Friday morning, but although the Empress sent a messenger to the Gorokhovaya urging the monk to go to Peterhof at once, as she desired to consult him, he disregarded her command and did not even vouchsafe a reply. Indeed, Rasputin treated the poor half-demented Empress with such scant courtesy that I often stood aghast.

"The woman is an idiot!" he would often exclaim to me petulantly when she was unusually persistent in her demands.

Next evening, however, we went to the palace, whither another French medium, a man named Fournier, had been summoned, having, of course, been administered palm-oil to the tune of some thousands of roubles to give a "message from the dead" in the terms required by the wire-pullers in Potsdam.

I was not present at the seance, but later that night, when Rasputin was sitting alone with me over a bottle of champagne which an "Araby" flunkey had brought him, he revealed that the "message" from the Tsar's dead father had been precise and much to the point.

"Nicholas, I speak unto thee," the spirit had said. "Though thou art brave and thine armies are brave, yet thine enemies will still encompa.s.s thee. Loss will follow upon loss. The great advance will soon become a retreat, and the hordes of William will dash forward and Poland will become German. Yet do not be afraid. Trust in the good counsel of thy wife Alexandra Feodorovna and in thy Father Rasputin, whom Heaven hath sent to thee. Believe no evil word of him, and let his enemies be swept from his path. Such is my message to thee, O my son!"

As Rasputin repeated those words with mock solemnity, he laughed grimly.

The pity of it was that Nicholas, Tsar of All the Russias, believed in those paid-for messages, uttered by those presented to him as mediums and able to call up the spirit of his lamented father.

"Poor idiot!" Rasputin remarked, first glancing to see that the door was closed. "He must have something to occupy his shallow brain. That is why the Empress arranges the sittings. But Feodor," he added, "I must see this enemy of mine, Ivan Naglovski. He is not a person to be disregarded, and it seems from what you told me he has a number of important friends.

We will discuss the matter to-morrow."

He afterwards dismissed me with a wave of his dirty hand, and I retired to bed in a room at the farther end of the long softly carpeted corridor.

At noon next day we had news of a terrible disaster. Precisely at half-past eleven the city of Petrograd had been shaken to its foundations by a terrific explosion, followed by half a dozen others, which shattered windows and blew down signs and chimneys in all parts of the city. At first everyone stood aghast as explosion followed explosion. Then it transpired that the great munition works at Okhta, across the Neva, opposite the Smolny Monastery, had suddenly blown up, and that hundreds of workers had been killed and maimed and the whole of the newly-constructed plant wrecked beyond repair.

I was just entering Rasputin's room at the palace when a flunkey told me the news.

When a moment later I informed the Starets he smiled evilly, remarking:

"Ah! Then that further ten thousand roubles is due to Nicholas Chevitch.

If he calls when we return to Petrograd this afternoon, you must pay him, Feodor. He has done his work well. Russia will be crippled for munitions for some time to come."

On our return to Petrograd we found the city in the greatest state of excitement. The succession of explosions had caused the people to suspect that the disaster was not due to an accident, as the authorities were fondly declaring, but the wilful act of the enemy. Rasputin heard the rumour and piously declared his sympathy with the poor victims.

Yet we had not been back at the Gorokhovaya an hour when the man Chevitch called, and at the monk's orders I handed him the balance of his blood-money.

That same evening Hardt, the secret messenger from Berlin, arrived, having travelled by way of Abo, in Finland.

"I have a very urgent despatch for the Father," he said when he was ushered in to me, and he handed me a letter upon strong but flimsy paper, so that it could be the more easily concealed in transit.

At once I took him up to the monk, who was washing his hands in his bedroom.

"Ah, dear friend Hardt!" exclaimed the Starets, greeting him warmly. "And you are straight from Berlin! Well, how goes it, eh?"

"Excellently well," was the reply of the messenger from the Secret Service Department in the Koniggratzerstra.s.se. "Germany relies upon you to a.s.sist us, as we know you are doing. Count von Wedell has sent you a letter, which I have handed to your friend Feodor."

"Read it, Feodor," said the monk. "There are no secrets in it that may be hidden from our dear friend Hardt."

He spoke the truth. Hardt was the confidential messenger who pa.s.sed between the Emperor William and Alexandra Feodorovna, and nowadays he was travelling to and fro to Germany always, notwithstanding that Russia was at war with her neighbour.

At Rasputin's bidding I tore open the letter, but found it to be written in cipher.

Therefore I sat down at the little desk and at once commenced to decode it. It was in the German spy-cipher, the same used all over the world by German secret agents--the most simple yet at the same time the most marvellous and complicated code that the world has ever known.

The keys to the code were in twelve sentences that one committed to memory. Hence no code-book need ever be carried. The cipher message, in its introduction, told its recipient the number of the sentences being used--a most ingenious mode of correspondence.

With the paper before me I discovered that in sentence number eight I would find the key. The sentence in question, a proverb something like "Faint heart never won fair lady," I wrote down, and then at once began to decipher the cryptic message from Berlin.

And I read out the following:

"MEMORANDUM NO. 43,286.

"From No. 70 to the Holy Father.

"If the blowing up of the Okhta Munition Works is successful, endeavour to get your friend C. [Chevitch] to do similar work at the new explosive factory at Olonetz, where a sub-inspector named Lemeneff is one of our friends. Tell this to C. and let them get into touch with each other.

"We approve of C.'s suggestion to destroy the battleship _Cheliabinsk_, and it is suggested that this be carried out at the same price paid for Okhta.

"From what we are informed you are in some danger from a man named Naglovski, who has shown himself far too curious concerning you of late. Steps should be taken against him.--Greetings, W."

The initial, I knew, stood for von Wedell, one of the directors at the Koniggratzerstra.s.se.