Chapter 39: A Tree with Rotten Roots

The ringleaders who had plotted the assassination of the Tsar were arrested on the scene.

That single sentence should render any tedious, pedantic elaboration unnecessary.

Not merely Petersburg but the whole of Russia was turned upside down, the nobles rose up in fury, and the Orthodox Church trembled with terror.

“Did I not say so! Those socialist bastards are a breed that has to be wiped out root and branch, I told you!”

“Last time it was His Imperial Highness the Grand Duke, and now they go after His Majesty?”

“All of them! Every last one of them must be put to death! This time, without fail!”

And this was hardly the first time socialists in Russia had tried to kill an Emperor.

Nicholas II’s own grandfather, Alexander II, had died in a socialist terror attack.

When the Grand Duke was assassinated, the framing of the man as an embezzler of 30 million rubles had swallowed everything else, but this time was different.

The perception was spreading far and wide that Nicholas II was a wise ruler, a man who had led the country to victory in the Russo-Japanese War, punished the corrupt Grand Dukes without mercy, and promised to improve the lot of the workers.

And revolutionaries had tried to assassinate an Emperor like that?

Naturally the citizens raged that such a thing was unthinkable.

“Hang these rotten swine at once!”

“The Grand Duke is one thing, but they dared to touch our own Majesty?”

“Hanging? Forget hanging, the firing squad is the only answer!”

A rare spectacle unfolded, the opinion of the common people falling into perfect step with that of the nobility.

“Savinkov! Chernov! In the name of His Majesty the Tsar, bring the hammer down on these wretches who have outraged heaven and man!”

“Death! Death! Death!”

Still, in this whole affair Savinkov’s arrest was no more than the appetizer.

Because the main course, naturally, belonged to Rasputin.

Under arrest, Rasputin denied the charges with everything he had.

“I know nothing about any of it! Those men came to see me on business, that is all!”

Of course, not a soul believed him.

There was simply too much evidence out of his study.

Dozens of letters exchanged with Savinkov; a sketch map marked with the Tsar’s routes and the deployment of the Imperial Guard; and on top of that a detailed plan setting out the schedule of the assassination itself.

At that point even Rasputin’s own family would have had no choice but to believe he had meant to kill the Tsar.

And having been seized on the spot together with Savinkov, playing dumb was physically impossible.

Caught alongside the highest-ranking terrorist in the country, a man with a record of blowing a Grand Duke to pieces.

And with the letters the two of them had traded stacked thick in his study, who could possibly doubt the connection between them?

There was only one conclusion to be drawn.

Rasputin was a sympathizer of the revolutionaries who had approached the imperial palace by design, from the very beginning, in order to assassinate the Tsar.

In the audience chamber where the news arrived, the air sank cold with confusion and shock.

Together with Section Chief Yakov, I knelt before the imperial couple and recited every detail of it, from beginning to end.

“Your Majesty, and Your Majesty the Empress. I am sorry. I should have told you sooner, but until I had certain proof I could not open my mouth carelessly.”

“…Misha, what on earth are you talking about?”

The Tsar’s voice was shaking uncontrollably, as though he still could not believe it.

“You mean you suspected the holy man Rasputin… no, Rasputin… you suspected him? All this time?”

“Yes. While I was tidying his study I found that he had a cabinet with a false back. Something felt wrong, so I looked, and I found those strange documents piling up inside. I discussed it with Section Chief Yakov and we put him under secret surveillance.”

Section Chief Yakov followed with his own report.

“Your Majesty, in the course of the surveillance we established that Rasputin was in contact with figures of every description, and in the end we struck the moment Boris Savinkov, head of the Socialist Revolutionary Party’s Combat Organization, and its theorist Viktor Chernov set foot inside Rasputin’s house.”

“Savinkov, the one who blew Alexandrovich to pieces….”

“Yes, Your Majesty. That Savinkov.”

The Tsar’s fist trembled.

Embezzler or not, the man who had killed his uncle had come this time for him; of course it sent a chill down his spine.

And the one who had opened the door for that man was Rasputin, whom he had trusted.

“B-but isn’t it strange? Rasputin certainly did heal our Alexei’s illness….”

There was still a faint hope in the Empress’s voice that something in all of this must be mistaken.

Unfortunately for her, it was a question I already had an answer prepared for.

“Your Majesty, what Rasputin did to ease Alexei’s illness was no miracle at all.”

The Empress’s head snapped around.

“Wh-what are you saying? The doctors couldn’t heal him and Rasputin did. You saw it with your own eyes.”

“I thought it was strange too, so I looked into it. The trouble was a drug called aspirin that the court physicians were giving to His Imperial Highness the Tsesarevich.”

“That medicine they call a cure for every ailment is the trouble?”

“Yes. Aspirin really is a wonderfully effective drug, but they say it has a side effect that keeps blood from clotting. And when we tested it ourselves, it turned out to be true.”

To interfere with the clotting of blood meant to worsen the very symptom of bleeding that would not stop.

For a hemophiliac it could only be the worst possible drug in the world.

“What the doctors administered believing it a miracle cure was in fact making His Imperial Highness’s illness worse.”

The blood drained from the Empress’s face.

“When Rasputin threw the doctors out and told them to stop the medicine, that was just the habit of a Siberian peasant who doesn’t trust doctors. It happened to line up by chance. He didn’t do it because he knew anything.”

The Empress’s lips quivered.

That the man she had believed a holy man, the man who had saved her son, was not only a fraud but a confederate of those who meant to kill her husband.

And on top of it, the revelation that even the healing of her son had been nothing but coincidence.

I could see the Empress’s world collapsing as she was forced to accept the truth.

“Oh, and one more thing.”

“There is more…?”

“Rasputin also told me that if I followed him faithfully, he would see me married to one of the Princesses someday.”

The Tsar’s eyes, which I would have sworn could open no wider, went wide enough to fall out of his head.

“Wh-what did you say? You and the Princesses, what?”

“He said that if he recommended it to Your Majesty, you would agree at once. He even told me to choose which one I liked best. Isn’t that absurd?”

The temperature in the audience chamber dropped another degree.

Yakov, who did not know I was the Tsar’s illegitimate son, took it simply as an insult to the imperial house. The Emperor and Empress could not.

“A true holy man would never say something so ridiculous, would he?”

“Yes… you are right. I was blind.”

At last the tears spilled from the Empress’s eyes.

Rage or shame or perhaps both, the emotion ran down her face without pause.

The Emperor took her hand in his and spoke heavily.

“Section Chief Yakov.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“You have done well. Had it not been for the Okhrana, this imperial house would have come to terrible harm.”

“Not at all, Your Majesty. It was the Young Master who first found the strange documents in Rasputin’s study, who proposed the surveillance, who set the timing of the arrest. I merely did as the Young Master instructed.”

My old man was the sort of person who, the more brilliance I displayed, the more he took it as proof that God was blessing him personally.

Now that matters had come this far, no matter how much more I dazzled him, he wasn’t going to suspect a thing.

“Protecting Your Majesty and the imperial family is the reason for my life and my mission. That’s why I couldn’t simply let it pass when I saw something even a little suspicious.”

“Ohh….”

The Tsar, unable to control himself at last, rose from his chair and slowly took me by the shoulders.

“Misha….”

Beside him, as words failed him, the Empress took my hand for the first time.

“Thank you, Misha. Truly… thank you.”

It was the warmest greeting I had received since coming to this palace.

“Thank you, Your Majesty. But things are still in confusion, and Your Majesty’s assassins must be pulled up by the roots quickly, so I would like to go and speak with the Okhrana a while longer. May I?”

“Yes, yes. I will give the Okhrana full authority. Handle it together with Section Chief Yakov, and simply report to me afterward.”

I walked out of the audience chamber without bothering to look back.

-No way the Empress keeps hating on us after this. In a way that might be the biggest win of the whole thing.

Literally, we had caught, at the scene, a commie who had wormed his way in by design to assassinate no less a man than the Emperor, and the revolutionary who had assassinated a Grand Duke.

Which meant that from now on, no one could challenge the authority of my Okhrana.

Russian politics would be in an uproar for a while, but not a soul would be able to raise an objection.

Because all of it was in the service of catching the accomplices of the wretches who had been taken while trying to assassinate the Tsar.

* * *

Over the past several years, Section Chief Yakov had ridden violent swings of emotion.

The bewilderment of first meeting Mikhail, the awe that came after seeing the workings of that child’s mind for himself, and the loyalty that had built up as they worked side by side.

This time, though, the feeling was of a somewhat different kind.

“Section Chief, there are two places that took the worst of this Rasputin business, aren’t there?”

Mikhail tossed out the question naturally as they walked the palace corridor, and Yakov nodded.

“Yes. The revolutionaries, for one, must be in chaos.”

By the reports coming in, the state of the revolutionaries was disaster itself.

At the news that Savinkov and Chernov had been arrested at the same moment, the Combat Organization of the SR, the Socialist Revolutionary Party, had effectively been beheaded.

The organization’s blade and its head had gone in a single stroke; what could the torso do, even if it still lived?

The operatives who had come in with Savinkov were seized to a man in the streets around the house, and on the basis of the contact lists and safe house registers the Okhrana confiscated, a sweep operation was launched against the SR radical wing’s cells across the whole of Russia.

Moscow, Odessa, Baku, Kiev.

In less than 48 hours the SR Combat Organization’s strongholds in the major cities were uncovered one after another, and bomb workshops and weapons caches turned up in a steady stream.

The remnants of the Maximalists could not escape charges of complicity either, since they had helped Savinkov into the country.

Men who until now could not be touched for want of evidence were strung together one after another as accomplices in the case; the name of attempted assassination of the Tsar was nothing less than an invincible bullet that nothing could stop.

But in Yakov’s eyes there was somewhere else in far worse condition.

“And the Orthodox Church has it worse still.”

Rasputin had styled himself a priest of the Orthodox Church, and Bishop Feofan, a central figure in that church, had personally introduced him to the imperial house.

And a man like that had been in league with revolutionaries and had tried to assassinate the Tsar?

From the Church’s standpoint it could only be an emergency in which its very existence was under threat.

And indeed Bishop Feofan, the man who had presented Rasputin to the Emperor, was flat on the floor of the palace like a condemned prisoner awaiting execution.

With Mikhail in tow, Yakov made for the reception room where the bishop was offering up his apologies.

“Bishop, we will be coming in for a moment.”

The moment the door opened, Bishop Feofan’s complexion was one that not even flattery could call good.

He came at Yakov and Mikhail as though he might fling himself at their feet.

“Section Chief… and this is….”

“This is Young Master Mikhail. His Majesty is raising him to lead the Okhrana in the next generation. He is young yet, but he is also the loyal servant His Majesty favors above all others.”

“Ohh… Young Master… that such a person should come out here in person….”

Quite the reception.

Who could ever have imagined a bishop of the illustrious Orthodox Church clinging to them so abjectly.

“Bishop, first there is one thing I must confirm.”

Still, the work had to be done.

Section Chief Yakov spoke first.

“Did you have any part in conspiring in this affair?”

“Never! I swear it, never! I only introduced Rasputin. I never dreamed the man was in communication with revolutionaries!”

The bishop’s voice was shaking badly.

“I will submit to any investigation. No, I beg you, investigate me. I am truly nothing more than a victim deceived by Rasputin.”

Having poured out at length how unjustly he had been used, he caught his breath for a moment and spoke again.

“O-of course… being a victim does not mean one is forgiven everything. But I most certainly did not introduce him with the purpose of assassinating His Majesty. On my life, I swear it before God.”

Section Chief Yakov looked down at the bishop with a cold eye and spoke.

“I should like to believe you, Bishop, but the result is that a man who entered on your recommendation plotted His Majesty’s assassination. It will be difficult for you to escape responsibility.”

A capital crime, an attempt on the Emperor himself of all men, and how was anyone to wave it away with a single ‘I didn’t know’?

Bishop Feofan’s shoulders sagged.

Then Mikhail stepped forward.

“Section Chief, one moment.”

“Yes, Young Master.”

“Bishop Feofan has always had a good reputation, hasn’t he? He’s never been mixed up in any corruption, and even within the Orthodox Church he’s counted among the most austere and honest men there are.”

Yakov knew that as well.

Bishop Feofan really was a man of a purity and depth of faith rare in the Church as it stood.

Which was why, privately, Yakov had been thinking it a shame.

Mikhail looked Bishop Feofan straight in the face and asked carefully.

“Bishop, you know that His Majesty has been terribly disappointed in the Orthodox Church over this, don’t you?”

“…Yes. I can well imagine it.”

“Rasputin didn’t only plot His Majesty’s assassination. He traded on the name of the Orthodox Church to collect enormous bribes, and there are indications that some of that money flowed to the revolutionaries.”

That would take further investigation to know for certain, but that such a charge existed was beyond question.

“If you really are innocent, Bishop, and you want to ask His Majesty’s forgiveness, I think there’s only one way.”

“I will do it, whatever it may be. If you would only tell me the way….”

“You stake your life on the purification of the Orthodox Church.”

Bishop Feofan raised his head.

“The reason a man like Rasputin could make use of the Orthodox Church is that the Church was already rotten inside. He could take bribes from great ladies and play the holy man, and a man like you had no choice but to be deceived, because the Church’s whole process for testing people had completely broken down.”

There was no denying that the Church as it stood was a hotbed of corruption, one of the pillars of the filth eating away at Russia.

If a sound man like Bishop Feofan fell here and only the corrupt clergy remained, it would be putting the cart before the horse.

Mikhail’s voice gathered force.

“If you step forward yourself and help clean out the corruption inside the Orthodox Church, His Majesty will acknowledge that you are sincere. And as a devout believer myself, it really hurts me to see a man like you go through something like this.”

It was not a lie.

Bishop Feofan really was an honest man, and it was a genuine pity that such a man had been brought to this by a swindler.

“If you will only give me the grounds for it, I can go to His Majesty and Her Majesty myself and ask for leniency on your behalf. As it happens, His Majesty is troubled about what to do with the Orthodox Church just now, and if someone appears who will clean it out from the inside, I believe he will gladly give that person the chance.”

Become a whistleblower, or die.

The one hand of salvation a man who had stood ashen and shaking before the palace could possibly grasp had been held out to him.

“Th-thank you, Young Master. I will live up to your expectations, without fail, without fail.”

“Then could you put together some of the Church’s internal material and send it to me? A list of the corrupt clergy, evidence of wrongdoing, that sort of thing. Mainly the things nobody but an insider could know.”

“Yes. I will bring everything. Everything….”

Watching Bishop Feofan’s back as he scurried out, Section Chief Yakov spoke quietly.

“That was splendidly done, Young Master.”

“What did I do, really? It was only possible because men like you did such good work in the field.”

Mikhail smiled brightly and waved the praise away.

Looking at that smile, Section Chief Yakov traced the whole picture of the affair through once more.

Rasputin had fallen.

The workers’ hostility toward the revolutionaries had exploded, and the nobles, privately sore that the Tsar had taken the workers’ side, had seized on the attempted assassination to begin crying out for the defense of the Tsar in earnest once again.

And on top of that, the grounds for cleaning out the corruption rooted deep in the Orthodox Church had fallen into their hands.

The reorganization of the military after the Grand Dukes were swept away, labour law reform, and now the purification of the Orthodox Church.

At the center of every part of that picture stood that small child.

And the thing that raised the hair on his arms most of all was that, apart from a tiny handful of people like himself, no one knew it.

Watching Mikhail’s retreating back, Section Chief Yakov could not shake off a single thought.

If this child the Tsar so favored had been the Tsar’s own son.

If, instead of a Tsesarevich born with hemophilia, this Young Master had been the legitimate heir carrying the Tsar’s blood.

“…how much further could this country go?”

He could not suppress that irreverent thought as it rose in him.

~~~

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