A REASSURING SEARCH.
The capture of the man with the Greek name proved disastrous to the
Executive Committee. It was the first link in a chain of most important
arrests. The trap set at his house caught the very tall man with the
Tartarian features; this led to the arrest of Purring Cat, and the
residence of Purring Cat, in its turn, ensnared a pretentiously dressed
man, in whom the superior gendarme officers were amazed to find their
own trusted secretary, the man whom Makar knew as "the Dandy." Makar's
arrest at Miroslav had tended to strengthen the Dandy's position
somewhat, but now that he was in the hands of the enemy himself,
it seemed as if the medical student's sweeping system of
"counter-espionage" had burst like a bubble. Makar was in despair. He
spoke of new plans, of new sacrifices, until Zachar silenced him.
"All in due time, my dear romanticist," he said to him. "A month or two
later I shall be delighted to be entertained with the fruit of your rich
fancy; not now, my boy."
The four arrests were a severe blow to the undertaking of which Zachar
had been placed in charge. He was overworked, dejected, yet thrilling
with nervous activity. But his own days were numbered. An air of
impending doom hung over the Czar and his "internal enemies" alike.
Good fortune seemed to attend the state police. While the gendarmes of
the capital were celebrating their unexpected haul an intellectual
looking man was locked up in a frontier town as a "vagrant," that is, as
a man without a passport, who subsequently proved to be one of the
active Terrorists the detectives had long been looking for. He was the
"grave bard," one of the twin poets of the party. Shortly after his
arrest the Russian government received word from the police of the
German capital that a prominent Russian Nihilist known among his friends
as "My Lord," a sobriquet due to his elegance of personal appearance and
address, had spent some time in Berlin and was now on his way to St.
Petersburg. A German detective followed the man to the frontier and
then, shadowed by Russian spies, he was tracked to a house on the Neva
Prospect, the leading street of St. Petersburg. There it was decided to
arrest him Friday, March 23.
A little after 4 o'clock of that day Zachar and the ex-Governor's
daughter left their home, where they were registered as brother and
sister, and took a sleigh, alighting in front of the Public Library, in
the very heart of the city. Instead of entering the library, however,
which the sleigh-driver thought to be their destination, they parted,
continuing their several journeys on foot.
It was an extremely cold afternoon. The beards of pedestrians and
sleigh-drivers and the manes of horses were glued with frost; their
breath came in short painful puffs. It was getting dark. The sky was a
spotless, almost a warm blue. To look at it you would have wondered
where this sharp, all-benumbing cold came from. There was an air of
insincerity about the crimson clearness of the afternoon light.
Zachar wore a tall cap of Persian lamb, flattened at the top, and a
tight-fitting fur coat. He walked briskly, his chest thrown out, his
full pointed beard hoary with frost, his cheeks red with the biting
cold.
Presently he found himself shadowed by a man in civilian clothes whom he
knew to be a gendarme in disguise. It was evident, however, that the spy
was following him merely as a suspicious person without having any idea
what sort of man his quarry was, and Zachar, with whom a hunt of this
kind was a daily occurrence, had no difficulty in "thrashing his trail."
He was bound for the cheese shop on Little Garden Street. This was
within a short walk from the Public Library, yet on this occasion it
took him an hour's "circling" to reach the place.
About ten minutes after Zachar entered the cheesemonger's basement, the
head porter of the house met two police officers round the corner. One
of them was the captain of the precinct and the other, one of his
roundsmen. The Czar was expected to pass through this street in two
days, so one could not be too watchful over a suspicious place like
this.
"There is somebody down there now," the head porter said to the captain,
with servile eagerness. "A big fellow with a long pointed beard. I have
seen him go down several times before. He looks like a business man, but
before he started to go down he stopped to look round."
This stopping to look round was, according to a printed police circular,
one of the symptoms of Nihilism, so the roundsman was ordered to watch
until the suspicious man should re-emerge from the cheese shop.
When the captain had gone the roundsman brushed out his icicled
moustache with his finger nails, and said with an air of authority:
"Well, you take your post at the gate and I'll just go and change my
uniform for citizen's clothes in case it's necessary to see where that
fellow is going. Keep a sharp lookout on that cursed basement until I
get back, will you?"
When he returned, in citizen's clothes, he found that the suspicious man
had left the store and that the head porter had set out after him,
leaving his assistant in his place.
"There is another man down there now," the assistant porter whispered.
Presently the new visitor came out of the basement. As he mounted the
few steps and then crossed over, through the snow, to a sleigh standing
near by, he kept mopping his face with a handkerchief, thus preventing
the two spies from getting a look at his features. Seeing that he
boarded a hackney-sleigh, the roundsman did the same, ordering the
driver to follow along as closely as possible, but at this he lost time
in persuading the hackman that he was a policeman in disguise. The two
sleighs were flying through the snow as fast as their horses could run.
The policeman was far in the rear. For some ten minutes his eyes were
riveted to the suspicious man. Presently, however, the vehicle he was
shadowing turned a corner, and by the time he reached that point it was
gone. All sorts of sleighs, their bells jingling, were gliding along in
every direction, but the one he wanted was not among them.
The head porter, who had started after the first man, in the absence of
the roundsman, had met with a similar defeat. After awhile the hackman
who had driven the second suspicious man returned to his stand. In
answer to inquiry he told how his fare had twice changed his
destination, finally alighted on a street corner, and turned into a
narrow alley.
Meanwhile Zachar had called on My Lord. It was about seven o'clock. The
two revolutionists sat chatting in a cheerful gas-lit room, when the
host was called out into the corridor. As he was long in coming back,
Zachar went to the door, prepared for the worst. He found the corridor
full of gendarmes and police. It was evident that they had fought shy of
raiding My Lord's apartments for fear of violence, and had been
patiently waiting until his visitor should come out of his own accord.
Several of the gendarmes made a dash at Zachar, seizing him by both
arms. One of these was the spy from whom he had "circled" away near the
Public Library, soon after he had taken leave from the ex-Governor's
daughter three hours ago. Zachar's presence here was a surprise to this
gendarme, but the full importance of the man was still unknown to him.
The officer in command, however, knew who his prisoner was.
"What is your name?" he addressed himself to Zachar, with the exaltation
of a man come upon a precious find. He knew but too well how anxious the
government was to capture him, but he had come here to arrest My Lord
without the remotest idea of finding this revolutionary giant in the
place.
"Krasnoff," Zachar answered with dignity, in his deep-chested voice.
"I beg your pardon," the officer returned, with a twinkle in his eye. "I
once had the pleasure of arresting you. Your name is Andrey Ivanovitch
Jeliaboff."
"Oh, in that case I am pleased to meet you," the prisoner said with
playful chivalry.
Jeliaboff's arrest made a joyous stir not only in the gendarmerie, but
also at court. Apart from the attempt to blow up an imperial train in
the south, in which he had played the leading part, he had been
described to the authorities as the most gifted and effective agitator
in the movement.
The police at Little Garden Street were unaware of all this, but the
conduct of the two men who had visited the cheese shop that afternoon
seemed decidedly suspicious and lent a glare of colour to the
irrelevancies that seemed to enfold the place.
The next morning Pavel called on the Koboseffs. As he entered the cheese
store he saw that the adjoining room was crowded with police officers.
In his first shock he was only conscious of the gleam of uniforms, of
Urie's and somebody else's voice and of his own sick despair. But the
sick feeling ebbed away, leaving him in a state of desperate, pugnacious
tranquillity, his mind on the revolver in his pocket.
"Hello there!" he shouted, with the self-satisfied disrespect of a man
of the better classes addressing one of the lower, and at this he
surveyed the store with an air of contempt, as much as to say: "What a
den I did strike!"
"Wife," he heard Urie's voice, "there is a gentleman in the shop."
Baska, who had been calmly emptying a barrel of cheese into some boxes,
wiped her hands upon her apron and stepped behind the counter.
"Is your Holland cheese any good?" Pavel asked, sniffing. "Are you sure
you can give me a pound of decent stuff?"
She waited on him, simply, and after some more sniffing, at the wrapping
paper as well as the cheese, he let her make up the package. As he
walked toward the door his heart stood still for an instant.
He was allowed to go. Whether he was followed by spies he did not know.
At all events, when he approached his "legal" residence at the house of
his high-born relative, after an hour's "circling," he felt perfectly
free from shadowing. He was greatly perplexed to think of the way Urie
and Baska had been allowed to continue in their role of a cheesemonger
couple; but, at all events, even if the true character of their shop had
not yet been discovered by the police officers he had seen there, it
seemed to be a matter of minutes when it would be.
* * * * *
In the morning of that day, a few hours before Pavel called on the
Koboseffs, the police captain of the Little Garden Street precinct had
asked the prefect of St. Petersburg to have the cheese shop examined
under the guise of a sanitary inspection. He was still uninformed of the
arrest of the big fellow with the pointed beard, much less of the fact
that he had proved to be one of the chieftains of the revolutionary
organisation, but the story of the two suspicious-looking visitors at
the cheese shop and their "circling" had made him uneasy. The Czar was
expected to pass through Little Garden Street on Sunday, which was the
next day, and one could not ascertain the real character of the
Koboseffs and their business too soon. Nevertheless the prefect was slow
to appreciate the situation. Indeed, it is quite characteristic of the
despotic chaos of a regime like Russia's that on the one hand people are
thrown into jail to perish there on the merest whim of some gendarme,
and, on the other, action is often prevented by an excess of red tape
and indolence in cases where there is ground for the gravest suspicion.
While hundreds of schoolboys and schoolgirls were wasting away in damp,
solitary cells because they had been suspected of reading some
revolutionary leaflet, the occupants of this basement, in whose case
suspicion was associated with the idea of a plot on the life of the
Czar, had not even been subjected to the summary search and questioning
to which every resident in Russia is ever liable.
Finally, after considerable pleading on the part of the police captain,
General Mrovinsky, a civil engineer of the Health Department, an elderly
man with a kindly, genial face, was assigned to make the feigned
inspection.
"Your Excellency will please see if they are not digging a mine there,"
the police captain said to him, respectfully. "The Emperor often passes
that shop when he goes to the Riding Schools or to the Michail Palace,
and that cheese dealer and his wife are quite a suspicious-looking
couple. His Majesty is expected to pass the place to-morrow."
The general entered the cheese shop accompanied by the police captain,
the captain's lieutenant and the head porter of the house. Koboseff came
out of the inner rooms to meet them. He turned pale, but this seemed
natural.
"His Excellency represents the Health Department," said the captain.
"There is dampness in the next house, and His Excellency wishes to see
if your place is all right."
"I am sorry to trouble you," said General Mrovinsky, kindly. "But
dampness is a bad thing to have in one's house, you know."
"There is none here that I know of, sir," Koboseff replied
deferentially, "but, of course, a fellow must not be too sure, sir."
Baska stood in a corner of the shop, bending over a barrel. While the
officers talked to Urie she threw a glance at the visitors over her
shoulder and resumed her work.
The uniformed civil engineer made a close examination of the walls. The
one facing the street was covered with planking, and Koboseff explained
that he had had it done as a safeguard against dampness, but that there
was none.
"But then cheese crumbs are apt to get into the cracks," urged General
Mrovinsky, taking hold of one of the shelves along that wall. "They
would decay there, don't you know, and that would be almost as bad as
dampness, wouldn't it?" He then inspected the two living rooms. In the
second of these he found a pile of hay.
"It's from our cheese barrels," Koboseff explained; and pointing at
another pile he added: "And that's coke, sir."
General Mrovinsky picked up a coal, examined it, threw it back and wiped
his fingers with some of the hay.
"Everything is all right," he said to the police officers, with a look
of intelligence. He led the way back to the store and then back again to
the middle room. Here he took a firm hold of the planking that lined the
wall under the street window. He tried to wrench it off, but it would
not yield, and he let it go.
"Everything is all right," he said to the captain, seating himself on a
sofa. A trunk and some pieces of furniture were moved from their places
and then put back. The general knew a merchant by the name of Koboseff,
so he asked the cheese dealer if he was a relative of his. Urie said no,
and after some conversation about the cheese business in general the
officials went away.
"There is no mine in that place. You can make yourself perfectly easy
about it," Mrovinsky said to the captain, as they made their way to the
adjoining basement.
It was while they were conversing leisurely, the old general seated on
the lounge, that Pavel came in. He was watched narrowly, but he played
his part well, and as the engineer had already intimated to the police
officers that there was nothing suspicious about the premises he was not
even shadowed.
Thus reassured, the police of the locality set to work preparing Little
Garden Street for the Czar's drive to the Riding School. This included
an investigation as to the character of the occupants of all the other
shops and residences facing the street, as well as getting the pavement
in good repair.