The Minister of Evil | Page 3

unkempt scoundrel, and, to my surprise, I found myself held mystified. Never before had any man or woman exercised such an all-powerful influence over me by merely gazing at me. That it was hypnotic was without doubt. The fellow himself with his sallow cheeks, his black beard, his deep-set eyes, and his broad brow was the very counterpart of those portraits which the old cinquecento artists of Italy painted of criminal aristocrats.
In the Pitti and the Uffizi in Florence, in the great gallery in Siena; in Venice, Rome, and Milan hung dozens of portraits resembling closely that of Gregory Novikh, the man who, to my own knowledge as I intend to here show, betrayed Russia, and destroyed the Imperial House of Romanoff.
In that look I had foreseen in him something terrible; I had read the whole of his destiny in his glance. His gaze for the moment overwhelmed me. Once or twice in my life--as it comes to most men--I have met with that expression in the countenances of those I have come across: it presaged crime, and the prophecy, alas! has been verified. Crime was in Gregory Novikh.
Perhaps Rasputin--as the world called him and as I will call him--knew that crime was in him. I think he did. By his eyes I knew him to be a criminal sensualist with murder in his heart.
I had heard a whisper of his sordid and miserable elemental passions, even though the Starets was, next to His Majesty the Tsar, the most popular man in all the Empire.
To be appointed his confidential secretary was surely great advancement at a single bound, for though sensuality was to him as natural as the air he breathed, yet he had the highest society of Petrograd already at his feet.
Compelled to accept my unwanted appointment, I bowed, and expressed gratification that I should have been chosen for such a post.
"You must be discreet, my dear Féodor," said His Excellency, throwing his cigarette end into the great bronze bowl at his elbow. "When I have sent you upon confidential missions you have been as dumb as an oyster. This new post I give to you because I know that you are a true patriotic Russian, and if you see and know certain things you will never chatter about them to the detriment of myself, or of our very good friend Grichka. To him, remember, everything is permitted. You will learn much, but rather than speak let your tongue be cut out. And that," he added, looking at me very seriously as he lowered his voice, "and that, I warn you, will be the judgment upon you in the fortress of Schlüsselburg if you dare to divulge a single secret of Russia's saviour!"
I stood aghast between this all-powerful War Minister in his glittering decorations, the Emperor's right hand and confidant, and the unkempt, ragged, wandering collector of kopecks--the man whose eyes held me in their fascination each time they met my gaze.
The suddenness of it all bewildered me. The salary I was to receive, as mentioned by His Excellency, was most generous, indeed, more than double that which I had been paid by the Ministry of War. It meant luxury beyond my wildest dreams; a life of ease, affluence, and influence.
Is it any wonder therefore that I accepted it, little knowing in those days of peace that I was a pawn in the great game of the Hun?
How shall I describe Rasputin? My pen fails me. He was one of a few great charlatans of saintly presence and of specious words, fascinators of women, and domineerers of men, who have been sent to the world at intervals through all the ages. Had he lived in the twelfth or thirteenth century of our era he would no doubt have been canonised. This rough, uncouth, illiterate Siberian peasant, who had been convicted of horse-stealing, and of immorality, who had served years of imprisonment in the gaol at Tobolsk, and who had only a month before we met been flung out of a monastery in Odessa and kicked half to death by its inmates as a fraud, had actually become the most popular person in Petrograd.
With the women of the aristocracy he was well-known, but to the Imperial Court he had not risen. Yet, being a protégé of Kouropatkine, matters were no doubt being arranged, although I was, of course, in ignorance of the traitorous plans in progress.
On the following morning, according to my instructions given me by my new chief, I called upon him at the small ground-floor flat which he occupied in the Poltavskaya, close to the Nicholas Station. The house, the remaining rooms of which were unoccupied, was a dark forbidding-looking one, with a heavy door beneath a portico, and containing deep cellars into which nobody ever penetrated save