Chapter 37: From the Highest Place

Lies are addictive.

No small number of the people who live with a falsehood always on their lips end up addicted to the lies they themselves invented, or start behaving as though those lies were real.

Rasputin was not much different.

He himself had never expected to be able to cure the Tsesarevich’s illness.

The gift of healing he claimed to possess amounted, from the start, to nothing more than dazzling people with plausible-sounding words.

Honestly, a wandering monk who had come up out of Siberia was hardly likely to possess any great medical insight, was he.

At best, all he could manage was to dress up the folk remedies handed down among the peasants in impressive wrapping.

But somehow, it worked.

And it worked perfectly.

“Rasputin! Rasputin! My child… my Alexei….”

Dragged along by the Empress’s screaming, Rasputin looked over the Tsesarevich’s condition and got the general picture.

‘The society ladies definitely said there were cases among the royal houses of Europe of a curse-like illness where the bleeding never stops.’

That the Tsesarevich had that illness was no longer a suspicion but a certainty.

The problem was that Rasputin, being nothing more than a common conman, had no idea how such an illness ought to be handled.

“My Alexei struck his arm on the corner of a table and the bleeding won’t stop. The court physicians have been giving him aspirin, but why in the world won’t it stop….”

“Ah, yes. Aspirin….”

Aspirin was the finest painkiller of the age, a so-called cure-all, the very drug of God; naturally it was prescribed first and questioned later, even for an infant.

But the bleeding did not stop.

If anything, it grew worse.

When an hour had passed since the aspirin was administered and the bleeding showed no sign of easing, the court physicians went white.

And the Empress, of course, was going half mad.

“Should we not give him more of the drug?”

“Any more than this and the strain on the young Highness’s body would….”

“Then what would you have us do! If the bleeding doesn’t stop, my child will….”

The Empress had to grit her teeth and watch the four men said to be the finest physicians in the country put their heads together and produce no answer at all.

Then, at that very moment, pressed forward by the Empress’s gaze begging him to do something, anything, Rasputin stepped up.

“First, send the doctors out.”

The firmness of his voice silenced the reception room.

“Stop the medication. Do not touch the child; let him rest in peace and quiet. The Lord will heal him.”

In Siberia, when a horse’s bleeding would not stop, there was a method the peasants used in place of a veterinarian.

Give it no medicine, do not touch it, simply leave it in quiet and let it rest.

If the method worked on a horse, might it not have an effect on a person as well?

The doctors’ medicine was doing no good anyway, so what could get worse by leaving the boy alone?

And as long as nothing got worse, he could talk his way out of the situation well enough.

“What! Stop the medication, in a situation like this….”

“Do you mean to refuse the word the Lord has handed down, with your feeble human knowledge?”

The court physician tried to protest, but Rasputin only bowed his head to the Empress with the gravest solemnity.

“Your Majesty, trust me. This is the path the Lord has shown.”

The Empress closed her eyes for a moment, then slowly nodded.

The doctors’ medicine had failed anyway, and even the aspirin wasn’t working.

Her heart ached so badly that she could not bear to imagine what would become of her son if this went on.

“For now… send the doctors out.”

A servant took the Empress’s order and cleared the physicians from the room.

In the bedroom there remained only the Empress, Rasputin, and the infant who would not stop crying.

Rasputin knelt at Alexei’s bedside, closed his eyes, and began to pray.

One hour.

Two hours.

Three hours.

Long hours passed, and when the day broke.

Astonishingly, the bleeding had stopped.

“Dear God….”

Tears sprang up in the Empress’s eyes.

Rasputin himself, the man at the center of it all, was of course every bit as astounded.

He had only thought it would be nice if the bleeding slowed a little, and here it had gone and stopped altogether.

Naturally this was no miracle of any kind; it was nothing more than a perfectly ordinary scientific process.

The aspirin the court physicians had been administering to a hemophiliac patient acts to obstruct the clotting of blood.

Neither the doctors nor Rasputin, not one of them, knew this, but the drug obstructing blood clotting had been withdrawn, and so the bleeding eased for the moment.

Still, who could ever have imagined that aspirin, revered as a miraculous new drug, carried an anticoagulant effect?

“Rasputin… you truly are….”

“Ohhh! Rasputin! Thank you for saving our Tsesarevich! You have saved this imperial house!”

Once miracles like this actually began piling up one after another, Rasputin gradually fell into the delusion that even God was on his side.

An illness the finest physicians in the country could do nothing about had been cured by a single prayer of his, so it would have been stranger if he had not come to believe it.

After the Tsesarevich’s condition improved, Rasputin rose at the speed of light to become a central figure of the imperial household.

The Empress began venerating him outright as a holy man, and things reached the point where even the Tsar would nod along to whatever Rasputin said.

And there was one more trusted confidant who lent wings to this current.

“Holy Father Rasputin, look what I brought today.”

Misha, who followed Rasputin more devotedly than anyone at the palace, had started organizing what he learned at the intelligence service and bringing it to him.

It was a top-secret document, no less, one that neatly summarized the web of connections in the imperial court and aristocratic society, right down to the leanings and personal tastes of the Orthodox Church’s leading figures.

“Misha, isn’t this the sort of thing you’re not supposed to show to other people?”

“But you’re God’s own man, Holy Father, so you’re not other people. I only wanted to help so that you could help more people.”

At the smile of the nine-year-old gazing up at him with eyes brimming with innocence, Rasputin laughed in satisfaction and stroked the boy’s head.

“What a good child you are. The Lord will surely bless you.”

To think this little one would one day hold the country’s intelligence agency in his hands; where was there a more pleasing investment than that?

“I’ll leave these papers here. I’ve put some things in order in your study too, Holy Father, so you can look at them whenever you need them.”

“Yes, yes. Such admirable devotion you have, Misha.”

Rasputin’s residence grew more lavish by the day, and people of every sort came and went through it daily.

Noblewomen vied with one another to call on him, bribes from petitioners piled up, and when night fell the place overflowed with vodka and women.

At the palace he wore the mask of the most pious of saints, and in his own house he tested the limits of indulgence; the double life went on without end.

But as he saw it, this was not hypocrisy.

He sincerely believed that a man sent down by God had no need to be bound by the rules of the profane world.

All he had to do was go on as he was now, using those naive imperials to widen his own position.

“Misha, from now on, do you think you could put the papers in my study in order without my having to ask? It is what the Lord desires.”

“Yes, of course! Leave it to me, Holy Father.”

Once this child, who looked up to him like an idol, became head of the Okhrana in the future, all of Russia would fall into his hands.

Never had Rasputin so wished for time to move faster.

People of every kind came to flatter him and offer bribes, and happiness stacked higher and higher inside the house.

Perhaps that was why.

He never noticed that in one corner of his room, directives of unknown origin were piling up, neat layer upon neat layer.

* * *

Confession was a truly convenient institution.

A religious rite that granted a legitimate reason to speak alone with a priest in a sealed room, and one whose contents nobody ever pried into.

“Young Master, I’ve finished putting it together as you instructed.”

Through the lattice of the confessional, Gapon passed over a folded sheet of paper.

It was packed with the names of the revolutionaries most violently opposed to M’s line.

“These are all names I know.”

Most of the names on the list belonged to the side that championed radical violence and assassination.

“It’s serious, from what I’ve learned. With the Grand Dukes swept away, they don’t hesitate to argue that killing the Tsar alone will bring the Romanov house down of its own accord.”

“I can follow the logic. With the Grand Dukes gone, they figure that if the Tsar is removed there’ll be no pillar left to hold up the imperial house.”

“Yes. And so they go as far as to say that M’s methods are nothing but an obstacle to them. Strengthening the Tsar, they call a betrayal that delays the revolution.”

“Which is also a declaration that they mean to take even more extreme action from here on.”

I read the list through once more, carefully.

Boris Savinkov.

Head of the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR) Combat Organization, the man who blew senior politicians to pieces with bombs, and the same man who sent Alexandrovich off to the kingdom of heaven.

He had meant to dispatch the younger brother, Sergei, along with him, but we struck Sergei first, before their side could act, so from Savinkov’s point of view the situation must be less than welcome.

“Currently a fugitive abroad….”

Next, Viktor Chernov.

Chief theorist of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and a man of note whom even the British ambassador personally judged ‘a dangerous and untrustworthy character’.

Above all, this one was said to be leading the charge in tearing M down, which in a way made him even more of a nuisance than Savinkov.

The problem was that they were all abroad, beyond the Okhrana’s reach, while the extremists operating inside the country could not easily be touched for want of evidence.

-Guys at Savinkov’s or Chernov’s level? No way they set foot back in the country unless something seriously big goes down.

“Father, may I ask you one thing?”

No intention of coming into Russia? Then I’d simply have to give them a reason, wouldn’t I.

“Would there be a way to send word to these men? Not under M’s name or under yours, Father, but in the name of a third party.”

A name like Rasputin’s, for instance.

Gapon was silent for a moment on the far side of the lattice.

“…With a friend’s help, I believe it can be done. The revolutionaries’ network of contacts runs along several separate branches, so if the route is chosen well the source can be concealed.”

“Then I’ll leave it to you.”

Having heard his answer, I folded the list and tucked it inside my coat.

I turned to walk out of the chapel just as I was, and Gapon finally couldn’t hold it in and let a priest’s anger pour out.

“Young Master, then allow me one more question of my own.”

“Yes, anything.”

“A conman like Rasputin goes about smearing filth on the face of the Church, and as if that were not enough he is deceiving Her Majesty the Empress as well. Why do you not put a stop to it right now? Do we not have more than enough evidence already?”

I could feel, in every syllable, the fury of a man for whom simply having to keep watching a fraud like that, as an Orthodox priest, was agony.

For Gapon, who helped and cared for the hardest-pressed people more than anyone, having a creature like that swagger about calling himself a fellow priest must have been an unbearable insult.

Of course I understood. It turned my own stomach now and then, so how much worse must it have been for Gapon?

“I understand exactly how you feel, Father. But right now Rasputin is in the middle of his climb.”

“…So, you’re waiting on purpose?”

I leaned my back against the wooden wall of the confessional and looked up at the ceiling.

“From the highest place, that’s where you push him off.”

The greater the drop, the bigger the shockwave when that piece of garbage hits the ground.

“That’s the only way all the filth tangled up with him gets dragged down along with him when he falls, one after another.”

“When you say filth… surely not?”

“Yes. Running around making noise about revolution is one thing, but getting into bed with men who directly target His Majesty is something I can never forgive.”

In a time like this, with lunatic revolutionaries running loose declaring they’ll assassinate His Majesty the Emperor.

Was it really a coincidence that a swindler out to deceive and defraud the imperial family had walked right into the palace?

“Anyone can see it couldn’t be a coincidence, right? It’s manufactured.”

“Sorry? Ah, yes. The timing certainly is….”

“And on top of that, I’ve been keeping Rasputin’s study in order, and as it happens, an awful lot of suspicious papers have been piling up there lately.”

Only then did Gapon grasp what I was driving at, and his eyes glittered with excitement.

“Good heavens… I had my suspicions, and it seems they were well founded after all. Of course no priest of our Orthodox Church could be such garbage. He must have been a subversive element wearing a priest’s mask.”

Quite so, quite so. It would be far stranger for a man brazen enough to swindle the Emperor and Empress to be running loose with nobody behind him.

I’d finally caught the tail.

Wicked commies, the whole lot of them.

I’ll tie them all together in one bundle and send them straight to the incinerator.

~~~

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