Princess Zara

by Ross Beeckman

"My God! And even now there may be others of the same sort in the palace."

"No; I hardly think that. The nihilists would not be likely to send more than one at a time on such a dangerous errand."

Morét confessed to me the following day, and I speedily was convinced that my suppositions concerning him were correct. He had not had the brutal courage to carry out his orders; and already he had received several warnings from his compatriots that if another week passed without his accomplishment of the design, his own life would pay the forfeit. He was in that room awaiting my arrival when he heard me approaching with the prince, and had concealed himself behind the curtain without any definite purpose other than to hear all that he could.

It is hardly necessary, and there is not space, for me to go into the details of my subsequent talks with Morét. Suffice it to say that the information I gleaned in that way, proved of inestimable value to my work. From it I learned the names of all the leading nihilists of St. Petersburg and Moscow, their meeting places, their passwords, and several of their ciphers. Concerning their plans for the future, beyond those in which he was personally engaged, Morét knew almost nothing; but he did put me in the way of finding out nearly all that I wished to know. Nor is it necessary that I should describe my subsequent interviews with the emperor. My plans were adopted almost without a correction—and most of those I suggested myself—so that by the time I had been an inmate of the palace for a week, the reorganization of the Fraternity of Silence was well under way, and ere a month had passed it was an established fact.

There was one point upon which Morét stubbornly refused to talk, and that was concerning the woman who had led him into the difficulty, and who, he confessed, was the brains and the real head of the society. I questioned him very closely and so decided in my own mind that she was prominent at the capital; but at the last he positively refused to answer any further questions concerning her, saying that he would rather go to Siberia and have done with it at once, than to betray her. I desisted, therefore, believing that ultimately he would denounce her to me without knowing that he had done so, and events proved that I was right although they also demonstrated that it would have been much better for all concerned had he trusted me implicitly in the beginning.

Thus, at the end of a month succeeding the night of my ride from the hotel to the palace with the prince, I was prepared to commence work in earnest; but it must not be supposed that I had been idle, personally, during that time.

In fact I was never so busy in all my life as during those four weeks of preparation for the stupendous task I had set myself; and you will understand that there were countless things to do, unnumbered details to arrange, and a thousand and one ramifications of the work to be planned and plotted and thoroughly comprehended, not alone by myself, but by the men I would gather around me to work under my direction.

The organization of a secret service bureau, no matter how general may be its duties, is at least a monumental task; but the organization of such a bureau as this one whose very existence must remain a secret from all the world, presented difficulties not to be met with or contended against under any other circumstances.

It was necessary that I should become the chief over an army of men, and it was equally imperative that not one person among the rank and file of that army should know of my existence, as it was related to them. With the chiefs of departments and sections, it was necessary that I should have intercourse and interviews, but I had already made my mental selection of persons to fill those positions, when I arrived in St. Petersburg, and the organization of the several departments was to be left in their hands.

I was determined that there should be no phase of Russian life which could hide itself away from the skill of my investigating forces; from palace to hovel, from the highest official in the Russian diplomatic service and in the army to the meanest servant or laborer, my sources of knowledge must extend, and every detail of it all must necessarily be so complete as to render it not only exact, but absolutely under my personal control and direction, without however in any way creating the suspicion that I was personally interested. Presently you will understand more perfectly how this all came about, and in quite a natural way it would seem, for always things accomplished seem easy enough to the casual observer; and you who read are only observers after all. You are receiving a bit of unwritten history which closely concerned the Russian empire and without which the assassination of Alexander would undoubtedly have happened many years before it did, for I give to myself the credit of having extended the days of that really great but much misunderstood Moscovite gentleman.