Inside they found the fresh corpse of a man lying in a pool of blood. It was the gay poet; and the woman was Hessia Helfman, the dark little Jewess with the frizzled hair who was married to Purring Cat. It was she and the man now lying dead from his own pistol shots who had been in charge of this “conspiracy lodgings.” Among the things found in the apartment were the two bombs which had been brought back from the scene of the assassination; the rough map made by Sophia on the morning before the attack and a large quantity of revolutionary literature.
The former “conspiracy lodgings” were now a police trap, and on the very next morning it caught a big burly man whom Rysakoff identified as Timothy Michailoff, the one mechanic among the four men who had been armed with bombs on the fatal morning. Michailoff’s memorandum book furnished the police some important addresses, but the great surprise of that eventful week did not come until the following day, March 17th, and when it did it was anything but a source of self-congratulation to the authorities.
About ten o’clock in the morning of that day the porters of the house on Little Garden Street where the Koboseffs kept their shop reported to the roundsman that the cheese dealer and his wife had not been home since the previous evening, and that their shop was still closed. The roundsman, who, like every member of the St. Petersburg police during those days, was overworked and badly in need of rest, made no reply. An hour later the porter accosted him again:
“The shop is still closed. Customers have been around and there is nobody in.”
“Oh, I have no time to bother about it.”
“But I think I saw something in that store, some strange looking tools,” pleaded the porter.
“The devil you did,” the roundsman said, as much with irritation as with amazement.
The statement was reported to the captain, who communicated it to his superiors, until finally an order was obtained to raid the shop. A search was made, more thorough than the first, and with quite different results. The lounge in the living room upon which General Mrovinsky had sat while speaking to Koboseff was found to contain a heap of earth, and when the planks under the window of the middle room were removed—the very ones which General Mrovinsky had made a feeble attempt to detach in the presence of Koboseff and the police—a large yawning hole presented itself to view. When this part of the wall had been torn down, the aperture proved to be the mouth of a subterranean passage enclosed in wood. Seven feet from the shop began a charge of a hundred pounds of dynamite with an electric battery near by and wires running along the gallery back to the middle room. Everything was in complete readiness. All that was necessary to explode the mine was to connect the wires.
As was learned subsequently, this mine had been the leading feature of the plot, the bombs having been added in case the Czar left Little Garden Street out of his route or the mine failed of its deadly purpose for some other reason. Of the existence of such a mine Rysakoff had not the remotest idea until he heard of it at the trial.