The Accidental Anarchist (22 page)

Although I tried to look unobtrusive, I suddenly felt an angry hand grab my arm. Before I could reach for my revolver, I found Meyer’s soured features scowling at me. Outraged to find me walking the streets wearing my own face, he shoved me into the nearest barbershop and ordered the pitiless removal of my lovingly grown mustache.

Next he hauled me up three unlit flights of stairs to an apartment where another comrade instructed me to take off my clothes and put on a dress, a blond wig smelling of camphor, and a pair of ladies’ shoes that could only have fit a ballerina. To make me feel more comfortable about such idiocy, he also smeared some womanly paint on my face.

Luckily, the apartment had no mirror or I would have put a quick end to this clown show before they could tell me the news: My name was on a new list of people the
Okhrana
considered dangerous enough to arrest on sight. Furthermore, if the source was to be believed, I had, in fact, already been condemned to death. 

To me, this could only mean that I’d been “whistled out.” I demanded to know by whom, though I suspected that I knew. My comrades pleaded ignorance. I kept pressing until they admitted that they didn’t want to tell me. And why not? Because they knew I would go and “Have a word with him.” And why shouldn’t I? As I was sternly reminded, we were a workers’ party with ideals and standards, not a pack of hooligans like some of our more radical competitors.

It didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out that the informant was none other than Left-handed Stepan. Bowing to Party discipline, I applied for permission to kill him. Permission denied. Incensed, I threatened to behave like an “anarchist” – a label they loathed – and do the job without their approval.

This moved them sufficiently to acknowledge that the Party had already passed sentence on Stepan, but owing to its lofty ideals, it felt obliged to follow a certain “protocol.” To keep things “businesslike,” two professional assassins had been brought in from Odessa to do the job. In consolation for not being allowed to shoot the man who’d gotten me arrested, I was allowed to go along, but only as a lookout.

As I watched one of the assassins execute his assignment, I could only surmise that the laws of physics must have been different in Odessa than they were in Warsaw, because our imported experts seemed surprised to discover that revolver shots made noise, and noise tended to attract attention. As we scattered in different directions, one of the shooters, blinded by panic, headed straight into the arms of the police.

Before I could shout a warning, someone clubbed me from behind.

Chapter 18: The Interrogation

I opened my eyes to an abyss of darkness. My head felt like a balloon about to burst. Pressing in on all four sides of me were the icy walls of a windowless cell. If the objective was to make a strong impression, it succeeded. That night I didn’t close an eye.

In the morning, with wrists and ankles chained, I was led into a small room with a barred window. It was furnished with little more than two chairs and a cigarette-scarred table. After being kept waiting long enough to imagine the worst, a tall, bitter-faced man in civilian clothes joined me.

He did not trouble to introduce himself, but vanity prompted me to assume it was the dreaded Konstantinov, himself, the local head of the
Okhrana
who, thus far, had survived three well-deserved attempts on his life.

My inquisitor offered me a cigarette. I didn’t care for his brand but, given the circumstances, thought it best not to be choosy. He lit a match for me and sat back with the comfortable air of a man who had all the time in world. Then, as though it had just occurred to him, he inquired whether I would like to go home.

I confessed that I had no objection.

“And where is that?”

“Where is what?”

“Where you live?”

“Vishogrod.”

“I mean in Warsaw?”

“I just arrived.”

He chilled me with his skull’s-head grin. “Very well. You may go.”

I offered my wrists to him to unshackle.

“As soon as you answer a few questions.” I settled back with a look of eager stupidity.

“To begin with, why are you here?”

“Don’t you know?”

He shifted to a more direct approach. “Who sent you?”

“Where?”

“To kill.”

“Kill? I heard shooting, and I ran the other way.”

“We caught the other two men, you know. Tell me their names, so I’ll know you’re telling the truth.”

“I saw two men running. Who knows who they were?”

He leaned in toward me, spraying saliva onto my face. “Who is the leader of your Party?”

“What ‘Party?’”

So it went for several days. Konstantinov was furious, but in truth he did not physically mistreat me. Could it be that those attempts on his life had shaken his confidence? Or was he unsure whether I was the man they wanted?

Without warning, on the tenth day of my imprisonment, I was brought before a three-man military court. My judges were two retired colonels and a mummified general whose nose could have been mistaken for a raw carrot.

To my surprise, there was also a lawyer to represent me, a well-spoken civilian who told the court that he was hired by my parents. I distrusted him immediately; my family had no idea where I was. Later, the lawyer whispered to me that the Party had sent him.

This, too, may have been a lie, a trap. Especially when, during the few minutes they allowed us for consultation, my advocate comforted me with the forecast that I was almost certain to be sentenced to death. Therefore, the only thing worth doing was pleading, in view of my military record and my obvious youthful ignorance, to be let off with ten years of hard labor.

I can’t say I was charmed by his readiness to bury me alive, although in time I would learn that getting a “tenner” was practically the equivalent of being found “not guilty.” But from the moment the trial got under way, I could see that my lawyer had been, if anything, overoptimistic.

My three judges put on their spectacles to study the charges. Wasting no time on what I might have had to say for myself, they retired to consider their verdict.

After a leisurely five minutes, they returned and pronounced sentence. The blood raced in my ears, but I had no trouble hearing the words, “firing squad.”

Rather than dawdle about it for months or years as the courts did in Columbus’ Country, the appeal my lawyer had wisely prepared in advance was already scheduled to be heard the following day.

Late the next morning, I was marched back into the courtroom, this time attached to three other prisoners who were also appealing their death sentences. Not a good sign.

One look at the bench and my heart sank. The judges who would rule on my appeal were the same three antiques who, only yesterday, had sentenced me to death. It would have surprised me very much if, overnight, each of them had had a miraculous change of heart.

What’s more, there was no sign of my lawyer. Instead, I was furnished with a military advocate, a pudgy-handed captain whose middle bulged like a pregnant barmaid. Barely glancing in my direction, he explained to the judges that he had not had time to study my file and asked for a recess for a quick consultation with me.

He took me to the adjacent room where he favored me with a well-fed smile, and said, “To defend you against these terrible accusations, I must have the full truth, you understand?”

Since I had no idea who this man was or which side he was working for, I was not quite ready to take him at his word.

“How many men have you killed?”

I did not find this a very encouraging question. Still, I answered as best as I could. “Probably dozens.” His eyes brightened. “In combat,” I added, “it’s difficult to keep an accurate count.”

“Fool, I meant in Warsaw. On orders from the Party.”

“What ‘Party?’”

He raised his voice. “Do you or don’t you want me to defend you?”

“Against what?”

“Don’t you know you’ve been sentenced to death?”

“What has that to do with you?”

“I’m your lawyer. I want the truth. All of it.”

“I told the truth. Yesterday. And look at where it got me.”

“You’re a damned Jew-faced liar!”

This, I confess, provoked me. “I want nothing to do with you. If they won’t let me have a proper lawyer, I’ll defend myself.”

My defender sucked in his breath and apologized for having, perhaps, expressed himself a little too heartily. What he would not do was admit that his only job was to extract a confession from me so that the judges could put away my comrades, too.

Sulking, he delivered me back into the courtroom where things had begun without us. Of the prisoners to whom I had been chained, two had already had their death sentences confirmed and were weeping. My turn was next.

The clerk read the charges against me once more. This time I listened more attentively to his monotonic recital of killings, robberies and such, each listed according to date and location.

It took me some moments to realize that nearly all of these charges dealt with crimes committed long before I arrived in Warsaw.

I tried to interrupt and point this out, but the clerk told me to be silent. It was my lawyer’s job to speak for me. I looked at my defender, who was goggling at a fly that had settled on his briefcase.

I called out to the court, “I don’t accept the man you have assigned to me. I want a civilian lawyer.”

“This is a military court. Here you can only be defended by an officer.”

“What happened to the lawyer I had yesterday?”

“That was a mistake. The man had no right to defend you. He will be severely punished for misrepresenting himself.”

While my doomed fellow prisoners looked greatly impressed by the depth of my depravity, my alleged lawyer went through the motions of pleading with the court to show some leniency to a man who had, in battle, repeatedly proven his love for, and loyalty to, the Czar.

True, he admitted in the same breath, I might have murdered some people in Warsaw, although perhaps not as many as the honorable Court had been led to believe. But surely the real criminals were the Party leaders who distorted my young mind and sent me out to commit these deeds without my fully understanding their seriousness.

He driveled on like this for I don’t know how long while the judges listened with all the patience of old men whose bladders were about to burst. The moment he was done, they scurried out to confer.

A few eternal minutes later, about as long as it would have taken each one to have had his turn at the urinal, they were back. The general, himself, read the verdict. It confirmed yesterday’s sentence – death by firing squad – to be carried out on the twenty-fifth of May, 1907, a date that has somehow stuck in my memory.

Much as I hated to give them the satisfaction, I staggered for a moment and nearly lost consciousness.

Chapter 19:
Three
Two Days Till “The Citadel”

Morning. Chained to 22 other bloodless ghosts, I was marched into a hall of vaulted brick. Seated on freshly disinfected benches, we learned we were about to have publicly read to us the one letter each prisoner was entitled to receive each month. To my total bewilderment, there was one for me.

“Dear Child,” it began. “Since your arrest, none of us closed an eye. First, because we know you are innocent. And secondly, because Aunt Reva, after a difficult labor, gave birth to a boy. Luckily, we were able to bring in two of the greatest specialists, and we feel confident that, with their help, she will soon be able to walk around again.”

Not one word of this made sense. I was, by no means, indifferent to the news of “Aunt Reva’s” troubled health; it was just that my only relative with that name was at least eighty years old, which most people would have considered well past childbearing age.

Therefore, I assumed that the letter was the Party’s way of letting me know I had not been forgotten. It might even mean that the Party had hired two “specialists” to defend me. But what could even the greatest lawyers do for me now?

My correspondent had also sent me a book of Psalms in Russian, presumably so I could pray for “Aunt Reva’s” recovery.

I was not greatly comforted to find that my comrades, so devoutly unreligious on principle, were suddenly concerned with my spiritual welfare. To be honest, I would have much preferred something a little more secular, like a warm blanket or a bar of chocolate, to ease the few days I had left.

Back in the blindness of my own four walls, my fingertips leafed irritably through the book and I found that the Party had not deserted its principles, after all. One of the endpapers felt poorly glued. Carefully peeling it back, I found five rubles, along with a note I barely had time to read in the dribble of light reflected off my morning bowl of black chicory.

It read, “COMRADE, DON’T DESPAIR. YOU ARE SAVED.”

I would have liked nothing better than to believe this excellent news. But their forecast seemed to me less a prediction than a flight of fantasy.