“Chief,” I said, “we’re all pretty anxious to get at the truth of this queer thing we’ve been up against. But what I want to know more particularly is what idea the man had, why he called himself an Emperor, why he dabbled in drugs, and why he stole the girls and ran that place at all. It seems to me that he was running his neck into a noose for nothing.”
The Chief laughed.
“Well, I’ll tell you most of the details that we have learned about the man and his gang, and you can draw your own conclusions.
“In the first place, he was a Russian aristocrat who turned renegade to his class under the Bolshevik régime, and was given command of a big commune somewhere in Eastern Russia after the defeat of Kolchak. We have traced him back that far, through one of his men whom we captured. The fellow would not talk at all until we assured him that this Emperor of his was dead. And even then we had to drag the details out of him. The Emperor, as he called himself, seems to have had a tremendous personality. My own view is that he was mad.”
“Was the whole thing the dream of a madman then?” asked Natalie.
“Perhaps so, Miss Van Cleef,” answered the Chief. “But there was a lot of method in his madness, I’ll say that for him.
“It seems that he was a traitor to every one but himself. He was a man of immense wealth before the Revolution. He saw the Revolution coming and salted a good deal of his wealth away in the form of valuable drugs, jewels and minerals. It seems that he had extensive connections in Siberia before and after the Revolution, and he had built up a considerable trade in opium smuggled into China. He had also refined the manufacture of synthetic drugs to an extent that had never been equaled, importing them from Germany and refining them. Besides all that, he was a mechanical and electrical engineer of no mean order.
“When the Revolution came, he retained his liberty by joining the Bolsheviki, even, apparently, gaining a high place in their councils. Later he came to America, either with affiliations with the Bolsheviks or actually as their accredited agent, for the purpose of bringing about a Bolshevik Revolution in this country.”
“Great Scott,” I said, “was that what he was after?”
The Chief laughed. “Wait. It seems that that was only part of it. From what we can learn from his papers and from the men he had under him, his dream was a greater dream than that.