The Margin of Evil! (49 page)

Jul
ia, sounded out all of the main 'Central Powers' players on the embassy circuit, to which she was always invited and, managed to supply her boss with the 'Solid Gold' information he sought. He, in turn, passed on Kilduff's reports to the Foreign Office. Early in nineteen fifteen a firm offer was made to the Italians over Trieste. Whilst 'The Central Powers', had dithered, even though it later had transpired that the Italians would have preferred to have done business with them. Yulia's information, had given 'The Allies' the edge and had enabled them to pip, 'The Central Powers', to the post.

From Rome, Julia Kilduff was recalled to London.
Her boss was pleased with her on two counts. First, his hunch about her at the dinner table was confirmed and, secondly, he now had an extremely resourceful agent working for him. As well he knew, agents like her were almost impossible to find.

But still her controller
's mind reflected back on to that first meeting. Julia had said something at that dinner; what was it? He thought long and hard. Aah yes, it was the Talleyrand comment about the people being the main threat to stability and order. Yes, waking the 'Sleeping Giant!' He called over to his secretary and asked her to pencil in Miss Kilduff for an appointment.

At the meeting he had asked Julia to elaborate on the comments that she had made at that meal.
To Julia's credit she did her best to explain to her controller the rationale behind her thinking.  When she had finished and, after he had walked her over to the door of his office, her boss sat down and thought again about what she had said. There was no doubt about it that this girl had a very fine mind.

As far as he knew nobody had considered what might happen if the workers refused to manufacture goods and soldiers refused to fight.
From Kilduff's analysis two countries seemed to be priming themselves for revolution. The Russian, and Austro Hungarian empires; but in the Whitehall village of nineteen fifteen, nobody really wanted to hear such talk, especially when it concerned a 'much' valued ally, and everybody seemed to be missing out on the opportunity to strike at the weak underbelly of the 'Central Powers'. Maybe Julia and her controller; were simply getting ahead of themselves, they would simply have to wait until everybody else caught up. In the meantime there was a war to fight!

By mid nineteen sixteen Julia Kilduff had been recalled from a tour of duty in Holland.
Posing as an American widower, she had provided the allies with much needed information on 'Blockade' runners. It had been a long tour and the feeling of her controller was that prolonged activity would expose his much valued, asset. So he recalled her, there was also something else playing on his mind.

Yulia was going to be sent to St Petersburg, now called Petrograd.
The political situation in Russia was beginning to change. Alarming reports had been coming in to London that the German 'High Command' had been trying to woo Vladimir Illyvich Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik Party. Overcoming initial resistance, especially from the Russians, they had seen the value of the Central Powers' proposition; so had London. If they were successful in this, the scales of war would easily be tipped in their favour; the war would be lost if the Germans moved their armies in the east over to the west. This could not be allowed to happen. There was a feeling of helplessness in London but, in the world of espionage, Julia's controller recognised that Russia was going to be the place where the next move was going to be made.  So with not much of a brief, only to keep the information flowing, his much valued agent was dispatched, by way of Sweden, to the Russian Empire.

This time she was going to be an Estonian school teacher from Narva.
Her 'Legend' had been left deliberately vague; the idea had been that she could develop it as she went along. But there were certain key points from which Julia Kilduff, now Yulia Klimtsov, could not stray. The first was that both her parents had died. The father had been a Russian sea captain and the mother a native Estonian had been a school teacher in Narva. Her mother had died, during the summer of nineteen sixteen of a combination of the sweating sickness and malnutrition, Yulia, after arranging for payment of her mother's medical bills with what little monies were left, had gone to look for work in the Russian capital. To ready-herself for this, Julia's controller had sent her to prepare at the 'Russian School', in London for three months.

Shortly after her arrival in Petrograd
, Yulia got a job as a teacher in a small independent girls school just off Zagorodny Prospekt and had a rented a room from an old widower, in an apartment block between St Isaacs Cathedral and the Central Post Office. The location of which would bode well for her in the future. As well she knew this would bring her into contact with like-minded liberals and others from across the political divide and in this she was later to be proved right.

Her main contact, in the Petrograd of nineteen sixteen, was none other than one Sidney Reilly.
The arrangement was that chalk marks would appear in certain locations across the city, when either had something they wanted to tell the other. So it really came as no surprise to the inhabitants of Petrograd, those that could be bothered to scan every inch of wall space, to see, every now and then, upside down squiggles chalked upon the sides of certain city fortifications.

Events moved fast in Petrograd and Moscow.
But, of all the places she found herself to be in, for Julia it was in the microcosm of the classroom that Yulia was able to gauge and study the mood of the Russian people before, during and after the revolutions of nineteen seventeen.  Providence was again to play its hand here, as it was to do on many an occasion in Julia's chosen career of secret agent.

Petrograd of the late summer of nineteen sixteen was a curious place.
The Tsar was away at the front, trying to run the war and the Tsarina had been left in charge of domestic affairs. Both were unsuitable for matters of state; but both, whether they were aware of their personal shortcomings, and out of their ill conceived senses of loyalty and duty and the jumble of meaningless, Coronation oaths, tried to deal with the everyday running of the failing Autocratic State. But when it came, it was a combination of bad advice and ministerial leapfrogging that caused the ailing, Tsarist state to collapse. Julia now found herself in exactly the right place at the right time. She was there to see her dinner prediction come true.

When he was around, her contact Si
dney Reilly had proved most helpful in furnishing her with contacts; but there were long periods when he would simply disappear. Looking back on it now, Julia remembered that her 'Controller', had pointed out that, at no time was she to make contact with the British embassy. The brief and the legend were deliberately left vague in this respect. One thing he did say was that he wanted her to be his eyes and ears and he also wanted her to keep a firm eye on Reilly. He had said to her that he could be trusted most of the time but he suspected, and these were exact words, 'that he might swing both ways'. He later had to explain these words to Julia; she was bright in most areas, but not that bright!

As summer passed to autumn Julia taught French, English and needlework to the daughters of the elite
's but she also noticed the ever-changing mood at the fee paying girl's school and further on she saw what was happening in the world beyond the schools French windows. In those months Julia watched the mood of the city change, especially at the beginning of the day during morning registration and at the end of the afternoon after the quiet period of reflection and light reading. Whilst the girls waited in her classroom to be dismissed, Julia could hear the voices of their parents, spoken through their children, start to assert them-selves in the classroom.

'
My father says that, The Autocracy will never fall,' one girl said.

Another replied wa
ving a pamphlet up in the air,' The 'Mad Monk' Rasputin fornicates with the Empress Alexandra!'

At that point
and completely in character, Julia grabbed the impudent girl by the arm and dragged the girl by the pigtail to see the headmistress.

The
'Head', after the girl's father had picked up his distraught daughter, confided in Yulia that this was not the first instance of such behaviour of this kind, in her school. Even on the street, pamphleteers were openly giving out this smut involving the Tsarina and the 'Mujik' of 'Holy Orders'. A year before, nay six months previous, an outburst of this nature would have been quite unthinkable. Now it was all too frequent.

On another occasion Julia witnessed the girls saying
. 'My Uncle Isaac says that only 'Constitutional Monarchy', along the English lines, can cure the ills of the nation!!'

A little church mouse of a girl
who, even at morning registration time, always had her head buried in a book replied. 'The ills of this nation are such that nothing short of a revolution can save the day!'

'
But why does the Tsar have to go off and play with his tin soldiers, whilst the nation starves? Last night, on my way home, there were workers standing on street corners shouting horrible things as we passed!'

'
How can you resuscitate an already dead corpse? It's not possible; Russia is already dead! Bury it in the ground now ... cover it over with dirt and maybe something good will come of it,' the Church mouse said.

Maybe in seventy or eighty year
's time, Julia thought. By the Christmas of nineteen sixteen going on seventeen, Julia felt as though she had lived in the city for years. Since her arrival, Julia had frantically networked. Evenings were spent going to public meetings in halls people's houses and out on the streets. Sidney Reilly would suddenly turn up, so she would debrief and then he would disappear as quickly as he had appeared.

But events rapidly took over; reports from the front indicated, and these were the reports of the pamphleteers, that the army was on the brink of collapse; the more literate of them, implied that it was nineteen hundred and five all over again.
It was the Russian people's destiny, no duty; it was a matter of historical importance, and it was an imperative duty, not to miss out on this opportunity a second time. The time had come, and the time was right for change. And indeed it had!

In Julia Kilduff
's mind the hand of fate was doing its damndest, and was succeeding brilliantly, in undermining the 'Old Regime'. There was no bread in Petrograd; the Autocracy was in a state of permanent paralysis, unable, seemingly, to make a decision. One leaflet summed it up and Julia immediately saw the comical side:

Memo from: Trepov & Golitsyn.

Shall we do this, shall we do that;
shall we do this?  I'm worn out!!!             

H
'mmmmm, shall we do that? Better do something, or that'll be that!!!

Sha
ll we do this, shall we do that? No, better go and pander to the fat-cats!!!

Pp, Nicholas,
Alexandra & Rasputin.  Xxx

The queues for bread went up and down streets. Food was simply running out, the girls at the school lived on soup and rice. It came as no surprise when 'The Head' summoned Julia to her office informed her that she was closing the school and sadly was going to have to let her go. In some ways it had been a relief, but then the writing had been on the wall for a long time. Diminishing numbers of girls attending was the reason, but Julia suspected that she wanted to pack her bags and go. In her class alone, Julia was down to three girls, the previous September she'd had thirteen. Other classes were empty, by her reckoning Julia had done rather well to work on for as long as she had.

The following day
when 'The Autocracy' collapsed there was dancing in the street, bonfires were lit and the people sang long into the night. But as Julia knew only too well, Talleyrand's words in mind, that this was only the beginning. The following day would be when the struggle for power began. In this she was not wrong!

Julia
's landlady said that she could stay for as long as she wanted. But she was not going to stay herself. She had a sister in Stockholm in Sweden and her memories of nineteen hundred and five were still all too clear for her to hang around and await the inevitable. So she was going to Sweden and to hell with them all. She left the keys on the table and said that Julia could live there for as long as she wanted. With that she was gone. After the slam of the door, Julia never heard from, or saw her again. In many ways the old lady had done Julia a great service, because in the months that lay ahead the front room of the house was used as a meeting place for some of the groups she had now aligned herself with. But out of all these groups, and there were many in Petrograd in that spring and summer of nineteen seventeen; the one group that had started to emerge as the main contenders for power was 'The Bolshevik' faction. For a start they were well organised, the others were not. They were led in Petrograd at the moment by the very able Lev Trotsky and later they were joined by their spiritual leader, the charismatic Vladimir Iilyvich Lenin. The latter seemed to Julia to be a man of vision; her money was firmly on these two men to lead Russia out of the abyss.

So it was that Julia made a beeline for the leader of the Bolsheviks.
At first she attended public meetings on the shop floors of factories. Her flat, under the shadow of St Isaacs Cathedral, was often used for meetings of the party's Central Committee and, on other occasions, was used as a bolt hole for those on the run from 'The Provisional Governments' secret police. Indeed that July, Lenin had shaved off his distinctive beard in Julia's bathroom, just before he fled to Finland.