“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 rôle 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 Michaïl 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.”