C3
Russia was the last place Henry wanted to spend Christmas. And judging by the hardscrabble faces on the streets of Petrograd,4 it was the last place the Russians wanted spend their Christmas, too. Now, instead of enjoying a good book at home, by the light of an electric lamp (powered by Tesla’s AC current, naturally), he was freezing in the heart of the Russian Empire, standing on the snowy banks of the Neva River, which had frozen over. Russia had been electrified since 1886, and Petrograd had become something of a national showroom for incandescent light, with buildings and streetlamps eschewing their gas lines in favor of electric cables and strings of bulbs glowing in crisscrossing patterns above the city’s main streets and marketplaces. But now, with a war on, power was being rationed, and the streets were dark enough to see the stars slipping away, as a wall of dark clouds moved in from the ocean to the west. Henry watched them roll in. It would snow soon.
“This is absurd, absurd, absurd,” said a voice beside him.
Nikola Tesla stood shivering just to Henry’s left. The two of them surrounded by snowdrifts on a dark street, in a city they’d never been to, waiting for men they’d never met.
Twain had ridden off on his comet5 and left me to deal with Tesla by myself, the bastard.
I wish I could say [Twain] and I had seen a lot of each other in those last ten years, or that we’d written each other diligently. I wish I could say that we’d gotten into more adventures together, or traveled the world righting wrongs. But the truth is, other than a few [letters] here and there, and one brief visit to his home in Connecticut, I didn’t see Twain much after that year in New York. Life is often like that. We write the fantasy of what will be in our heads, and more often than not, reality falls short of our wild expectations. But I was grateful, all the same. Just as it’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved before, it was better to have spent a year with one of your heroes than not.
Tesla had just turned sixty. No longer a young man but, to Henry’s consternation, still young enough to find himself in trouble.
I’d invited [Tesla] along as a translator. He spoke a little Russian—just enough for us to get by without drawing too much attention. Really, I think I just hated the idea of spending Christmas in Russia alone and wanted a familiar face around—even if it was Tesla’s face. I remember him being excited when I confided the details of my mission. He insisted on bringing one of his inventions along. Something he’d been working on but hadn’t tested in the field yet. But once we arrived in Petrograd, all he wanted to do was drink and play cards and drink some more. It was like the proximity to his homeland had awakened the young man in him. He was a brilliant inventor, but good God Almighty, he was a terrible spy.
Henry Sturges had become an unofficial one-man branch of the United States government, and he’d spent the first decade of the twentieth century as something of an errand boy to presidents—first Roosevelt, then Taft, and now Woodrow Wilson. His “diplomatic missions” had been innocuous, for the most part: helping the White House assess the numbers of those “friendly” vampires living within its borders; traveling abroad to gather information about possible “problem vampires.” On occasion, though, Henry was dispatched to send a “message” to one of these problem vampires on behalf of the president of the United States.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. I’d spent much of the nineteenth century sending a future president out to hunt vampires. Now, in the twentieth century, presidents were sending me out on the same errands. But where Abe and I had been trying to prevent an overthrow of the United States, the threat was less direct this time, and the enemy almost impossible to identify. As [Theodore] Roosevelt had said, it was a war that was being fought slowly, unfolding in dark alleys and sitting parlors.
Hiding somewhere in that murk, moving chessmen on a checkered board, was Grander. Between us were pawns and knights and bishops, each of them manipulated by his invisible hand. Most didn’t even know they were part of the game.
In 1914, Henry’s “missions” suddenly took on a new urgency, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, were assassinated by a young Serbian radical named Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo. As a result of the assassination, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, which led Russia to move against Austria-Hungary, which led Germany to move against Russia, which led to the First World War.
Princip had succeeded in doing what Leon Czolgosz had dreamed of—he’d fired a shot that started a war.
President Wilson opposed direct American involvement in the Great War, which was raging in Europe. However, he did agree to send Henry on a crucial errand in the winter of 1916. Though he was English by birth, it can be argued that Henry Sturges was the first American soldier to enter World War I.
It was Christmas Eve, but Petrograd seemed devoid of joy. Henry thought the Russians a largely joyless people. It wasn’t just the rationing of light, either. The previous year, with more than a million and a half of its troops already dead, and with millions more freezing and starving due to poor supply lines, the Russians had been forced to give up their occupation of Warsaw and fall back, in what became known as “the Great Retreat.” Humiliated, the tsar had dismissed his generals and taken direct control of the army. But many suspected that the tsar wasn’t even in control of his faculties, let alone his army. There were rumors that another man was pulling the strings behind the scenes. A man who possessed strange abilities.
These rumors had reached the tsar’s first cousin, King George V of England, who ordered his intelligence service to investigate. The more they learned about the tsar’s mysterious shaman, the more unnerved MI6 became. There were multiple accounts of his having performed “impossible” acts: healing the sick, reading minds, even emerging unscathed from an assassination attempt that “no mortal could have survived.”6 And if these sources were to be believed, this man had put the tsar and his family under some kind of spell.
His name was Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin.
Rasputin was a wandering monk, traveling from village to village, offering his services as a faith healer. His past was a patchwork of myth and mystery. Some said he’d been born in remote Siberia and raised his own family before abandoning them to pursue his calling. Others said he was an orphan, delivered to the doorstep of a monastery in the Ural Mountains, and that he’d bewildered the monks with his abilities from a young age.
A self-purported “mystic,” Rasputin claimed that he could pray away many common ailments and see visions of the future. He seems to have made his living doing just that, wandering from village to village at the turn of the twentieth century, presenting himself to the local priest or mayor, setting up a temporary “clinic,” and accepting donations in return for his services. It was said that he could walk for “days on end, without want of food or rest.” In 1903, whether by chance or by design, his wanderings brought him to Russia’s capital city. A city obsessed with the occult, as many cities were at the turn of the century.
It was not publicly known at the time, but the tsar’s youngest child and only son, Alexei, had been born with hemophilia—a common disease among European royalty, due to the frequent intermarriages of first and second cousins. Young Alexei was given to fits of vomiting. His joints ached horribly. There was often blood in his urine. Once, when he was three, he had fallen off the back of a toy wagon that one of his sisters had been pulling. The next day, his entire body was swollen and covered in black bruises that lasted for weeks.
Not even the tsar’s personal army of doctors could help poor Alexei, and he was given long odds of surviving childhood. Desperate, Tsarina Alexandra ignored her royal advisers (and her husband’s skepticism) and sent for a mystic to heal her son. Rasputin had already gained a reputation among the elite during visits to Kiev and Petrograd. After meeting with Rasputin, the tsarina declared herself impressed and invited him into the royal household.
Rasputin was able to give Alexei some relief, but it was only t
emporary. After a day or two of feeling fit, Alexei would succumb to fatigue again, followed by more pain and bleeding. Rasputin insisted that he could “cure” the young grand duke, but to do so, he would have to be alone with him for several days. At first, the tsar refused. He wasn’t going to send his only son off with some relative stranger, no matter what “powers” he seemed to possess. But when Alexei took a turn for the worse, Alexandra begged her husband to let Rasputin try. The tsar relented, and when Rasputin returned with the young grand duke four days later, Alexei Romanov seemed miraculously healed. The mystic had cemented his place in the royal household.
Of the many vampires who meddled in world affairs in the twentieth century, few were more famous or more successful in their aims than Rasputin. Posing as a faith healer, mystic, and spiritual adviser, he would eventually gain the trust of Russia’s tsar and almost single-handedly bring about the fall of the Romanov dynasty.
But while Rasputin was working in secret to undermine the tsar, it seems that he wasn’t working on his own behalf. In the summer of 1916, the head of MI6, a man with the incredibly English-sounding name Captain Sir George Mansfield Smith-Cumming, sent a secret cable to Tsar Nicholas II on behalf of King George.
BELIEVE 7 WORKING IN CONCERT WITH KAISER. HAVE EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT. REQUEST MEETING IN PERSON.
It was unclear what a Russian mystic and the German government could have in common, or how they could have run across each other in the first place. But it hardly mattered. By then, Rasputin had cast his spell and secured his hold on the Romanovs and those around them. King George’s cable never reached the tsar.
Henry and Tesla waited for their contacts to arrive, Tesla grumbling and shivering and Henry carrying a newspaper under his left arm—the signal that had been prearranged. It was well after ten p.m., and Henry’s newspaper was soaked through from the snow that had begun to fall, when two men in long black coats came walking across the bridge and stopped a few feet away.
There was no CIA to speak of in 1916. The army and navy had their own intelligence-gathering units, but they weren’t espionage services in the way we think of them today. The British, however, had recently formed the Directorate of Military Intelligence, Section Six, or MI6, for short, and had agents operating in every corner of Europe.
And so naturally, I’d expected our contacts to be Brits. I was surprised when the first man spoke with a thick Russian accent. I was even more surprised when he gave his name: “Prince Felix Yusupov.”
The Russian prince was then twenty-nine years old. Like many members of the royal family, he’d grown concerned by Rasputin’s influence over his uncle, the tsar. The other man introduced himself as Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, twenty-five years old and the tsar’s cousin. Both were handsome, both dressed in their military officers’ uniforms, over which they wore heavy fur coats, with fur hats upon their heads.
Yusupov had that “royal demeanor”—I guess you could call it swagger, or arrogance. He’d studied at Oxford, and had a solid grasp of English, which he spoke with a less pronounced accent than the grand duke.
It had been a mutual friend from his Oxford days who’d first reached out to Yusupov about working for MI6. Yusupov had jumped at the chance, excited by the prospect of being a spy, and recruited his cousin the grand duke. Together, they’d spent nearly two years trying to root out German spies in Russia’s high society, and they’d proven effective at gathering information and passing it on to MI6 agents. But they’d never carried out a murder.
Henry introduced himself, then introduced Tesla, who didn’t offer a hand, and said, through chattering teeth, “U nikh yest’ chasy v Rossii?” Do they have clocks in Russia?
Both of them were clearly surprised that the Nikola Tesla was standing before them.
“Mr. Tesla is a close friend,” said Henry. “He’s come to be my translator, but I’m the one who will be helping you with your problem.”
“I appreciate that you have come to help,” said Yusupov, “but we do not need this help. We have a plan. A very good plan. The grand duke and I, we are able to carry this plan out by ourselves.”
Yusupov laid it all out for us. (It was clear he’d rehearsed this presentation, and it was even clearer that he was pleased with himself for thinking it all up.) First, Yusupov would send word that his wife, the beautiful twenty-one-year-old princess, was eager to speak with Rasputin concerning strange, erotic dreams she’d been having. Felix knew Rasputin was a man of few weaknesses, but women—especially young, married ones plagued by repressed erotic desires—were one of them. Once Rasputin arrived at the palace (and with the princess safely miles away in another residence), Yusupov and Pavlovich would stall him while feeding him pastries and wine that had been laced with cyanide. When he died of poisoning, they would burn his clothing, take his body to the river, and toss it in. Ta-da—no more Rasputin. The royals would finally be free from his spell, they would both be hailed as heroes, and the Russian Empire would enjoy a thousand years of uninterrupted glory.
“With all due respect,” said Henry, “your plan has no hope of success.”
“I know why you say this,” said the prince. “Rasputin has survived assassination before, yes. He is very strong and can heal himself, yes. I know all of this. But this is why we will use enough cyanide to kill five men.”
“Indeed, indeed. But you may as well use enough cyanide to kill a hundred men, for I doubt very much that he’ll accept your offer of wine and pastries.”
The prince and the grand duke looked at him, confused.
“Come,” said Henry. “Let’s find someplace warm where we can talk.”
It took a few days of preparation, but by the evening of December 29th, the conspirators were ready for Rasputin. As night fell, they gathered in a large room in the basement of Yusupov Palace—a room chosen specifically for its distance from where the other royals would be sleeping. “A lovely room for a murder,” as Henry told his accomplices when they’d first shown it to him. It had been a formal dining room prior to the palace’s 1830s restoration and had more recently been used for storage. Its walls had once been covered by mirrors, now cracked and painted over, obscured by large pieces of furniture and art that had been piled against them, all covered by white cloths to protect them from the dust. A small table and several chairs had been set up in the center of the vast room. Above it, hanging from a high ceiling, was the sole source of light—a chandelier that had been converted to electricity. Nearly half of its forty bulbs were burned out, and the power was prone to fluctuations, the result being a dim and ever-flickering glow that tapered off into darkness near the edges of the room.
For a time, part of Yusupov Palace had been converted into a field hospital for wounded Russian soldiers. But the prince’s mother, Zinaida, complained that “[the wounded solders’] crying out at all hours disturbed her sleep, and their blood stained her floors,” so the hospital was moved elsewhere. But for all the hype about its grandeur, Henry found the inside “utilitarian and uninspired.” It reminded him of virtually every other palace, château, or manor he’d ever had occasion to visit.
There were all the usual touches: grandly carved stone staircases and long hallways, a private theater with red velvet curtains and gold leaf, ornate ceiling moldings, priceless works of art collected over the centuries through both legitimate and illegitimate means, but like most things Russian, it valued function over form.
After Prince Yusupov and Grand Duke Pavlovich had recovered from the initial shock of learning that Rasputin was an immortal (and after all the attendant questions about God and the universe and the meaning of it all that usually follow such a revelation had been addressed), Henry had given the prince and the grand duke a two-day crash course in vampire hunting.
There wasn’t much I could do in two days, so I focused on the basics, which amounted to: (1) don’t get near the head, and (2) when in doubt, run away. They were royals, and they’d been trained in swordplay and shooting. Trained to be confident an
d brave their whole lives. Still, I wondered if they would be able to keep their cool when the time came. I was especially worried about Pavlovich. When I’d shown them my vampire form—in part to convince them that vampires were, in fact, real, and in part to prepare them if Rasputin showed his—Yusupov had let out a little yelp and jumped back but quickly recovered. Pavlovich, however (and I feel comfortable saying this only because he’s long dead), had pissed himself in spectacular fashion.
Henry had assumed that it would fall to him to kill Rasputin. That was, after all, why the Americans had sent their “asset,” as the memos so warmly referred to him.
My plan began exactly as Yusupov’s had—the prince would send word to Rasputin on behalf of his wife. Rasputin would travel to the palace to meet with her.
Only, in this version of events, Rasputin would never arrive. En route, his coach would be ambushed by a small group of radicals—the Bolsheviks,8 no doubt—and Rasputin would be attacked and beheaded in the street.
But Yusupov was opposed to this approach. He didn’t want Rasputin’s death to have any political connotations. Things were shaky enough for the royals as it was without some foreign vampire assassin stirring up tensions between the tsar and the Bolsheviks. Yusupov was adamant—Rasputin had to disappear without a trace, leaving everyone perplexed and no one to blame.