The Romanov Conspiracy by Glenn Meade Read Free Book Online Page A

misting the air.
    “Thank you, comrade.” Sorg tipped his Trilby hat and pulled up the thick collar of his long black Chesterfield coat against the freezing March morning.
    His journey should have taken no more than forty minutes by steam train but the previous night the train drivers’ union declared a strike until midafternoon, so Sorg was forced to hire a carriage for the outward journey. As it passed a bakery with a long queue of hungry people, his attention was drawn by screams and shouts of angry pain.
    Sorg stared in horror as two starving women tried to kill each other over a loaf of bread. The brawl lasted only long enough for the women to punch and bite, and tear out hair, until the pitiful loser left the street in tears, clutching a sore head and dragging her two crying children behind her.
    They were gone into the crowded backstreets before Sorg could climb out of the carriage and pursue them—he wanted to give the pitiful woman a handful of coins. Everywhere in Russia, it seemed, starving people were scavenging for survival.
    It was easy to understand why. A pound of butter cost a day’s wages. A loaf of bread—if you could find a bakery open—cost almost as much. Trams ran only intermittently. Among a hungry population, prostitution and theft were rife. Sorg included all this in his secret reports to Washington, the minute and intimate details of a city’s life, the kinds of things that mattered to a spy in a foreign country.
    Unusual things—like the fact that despite the revolution, or because of it, foreign visitors were everywhere. The hotels and backstreets were crowded with an odd assortment of people—well-intentioned aid workers come to help alleviate food shortages, and international revolutionaries and communists desperate to offer their support. Still others werenewspaper correspondents or foreign businessmen hoping to make a quick profit in the turmoil.
    Over an hour later as Sorg’s carriage clip-clopped past a huge village mansion he witnessed more turmoil—the building being ransacked by a looting mob. Peasants dragged out their spoils: chairs and paintings, tapestries, even plumbing. One cackling old woman hauled out a wooden toilet seat, wearing it around her neck like fair-day prize, while the crowd fell about laughing.
    It was common knowledge that Scandinavian antique dealers scoured the city for bargains as the great houses of the rich were plundered. The wealthy former occupants were gone, fled into exile with whatever jewelry and valuables they still possessed.
    Those who didn’t care and still had money whiled away their time in the beer halls or nightclubs where gypsy bands played, or in smoky gambling casinos. St. Petersburg and Moscow had taken on decadent, wild atmospheres.
    “We’re here, sir.”
    Sorg came out of his daydream as the horses snorted and the carriage drew to a halt. He looked around him. Tsarskoye Selo never failed to awe him.
    Whenever he thought of Russia, Sorg thought of this city built by Catherine the Great. It was a testament to her vanity, a stunning concoction of imperial grandeur. Cobbled lanes, postcard-pretty wood-framed houses painted amber and duck-egg blue, gilded Orthodox churches with cupolas. The kind of fairy-tale Russia his father used to get sentimental for when he drank too much vodka. This despite the fact that Sorg’s mother was only too glad to leave Russia when the tsar’s brutal pogroms slaughtered Jews wholesale and made countless millions of them homeless refugees.
    At the end of a broad avenue Sorg spotted the pièce de résistance—the grand Alexander Palace, the tsar’s summer residence, sixteen miles from St. Petersburg, with its magnificent wedding-cake colonnades.
    So close, so very close.
    He clutched his worn leather Gladstone bag, climbed down from the cab, and handed the driver a silver coin. “Thank you, comrade.”
    The driver took it, kissed the silver, and grinned as he tucked it in his pocket. “Thank you ,