The Margin of Evil! (50 page)

During this time Julia made herself indispensible to the Bolsheviks, the party that she hadn
't actually joined yet, but, in the heady days of nineteen seventeen, nobody seemed that bothered about the 'Finer details' of party membership. As long as you weren't a Menshevik, Social Revolutionary or Kadet, then everything was O.K. She transcribed Party ciphers and codes, and took the committee meeting minutes, of the now all powerful Petrograd Soviet. Then she passed them on to Sidney Reilly. During this period the British Government found itself in possession of top grade information, Julia's controller often knew about events in Petrograd, often before, some members of the Central Committee.

Even her ap
pearance had undergone a full transformation.  From the tall, willowy, Estonian Teacher of English, needlework and French from that previous autumn, she had now managed to change herself into the 'New' Soviet woman, and this was before the phrase was even coined, of the revolution.  Her long locks had been cut, the skirts had been ditched in favour of cavalry boots and army fatigues. In that era of 'Anti Fashion', and the pooh, pooing of all things bourgeois, Yulia Kilduff still managed to turn heads, no matter what she was wearing!

'
July Days' came and went and the Kornilov debacle petered out; but it was during the staging of the October Revolution that Julia Kilduff really came into her own. The location of the 'Old Ladies' flat was crucial as one of the staging posts for the taking of 'The Central Post Office.'  Throughout this period, chalk marks appeared amongst all of the other graffiti and a steady flow of information found its way, via Sidney Reilly, to the British Government. Julia Kilduff felt that here in Petrograd she was really coming into her own.

But events moved
so fast from September onwards, Julia found that she was in jeopardy of getting side-lined in the wake of such monumental changes, especially when the focus of everything 'Bolshevik' shifted over to Moscow. So, after the second revolution, she resolved to change the situation, in a way Julia had presumed too much and, in doing so, she had rather jumped the gun. That was no problem; she would just have to move to the centre of all things 'Revolutionary'. So, leaving the keys on the table and the front door of the flat ajar, Julia Kilduff set off for Moscow.

In her haste
to leave, Julia didn't bother to tell Reilly where she was going, she just went down to the Petrograd Soviet. After obtaining a letter of introduction, she headed for the Moscow Station and caught a train to the new capital. The journey was fraught with many difficulties. The train broke down on several occasions and, at one point, all of the passengers had been given shovels and had spent days at a time digging the locomotive and her stock out of the snow. Seven days later she arrived in Moscow.

Whoever had said that,
'Time waits for no one', in this instance was one hundred percent right. Events had indeed moved so fast that Julia, as an almost unimportant bit part player, had by now been left so far behind as to almost appear completely insignificant. She reported for duty at the Kremlin, but nobody would or could help her. Messages from her to 'Committee Members' went unanswered and, in the end, Julia Kilduff gave up with the direct approach and decided that, if she was going to get a slice of the action using her own initiative, she would have to go out and get it somewhere else.  That in itself actually proved, not to be too much of a problem. Using the skills that had made her so indispensable to the Petrograd Soviet, Julia inveigled her way into the Moscow one.

She took comprehensive minutes and notes at local
'Soviet' meetings. Furiously networking all the way, she gradually wormed her way back into, and up, the party hierarchy. But there was a problem. Julia in her haste to leave Petrograd had not told anyone where she was going. Not a problem she thought, her rationale was that if everybody moved with the centre of Soviet power, then everybody else would follow. So, in her mind, it was only a matter of time before she made contact with Reilly again. The problem was, however, that she was beginning to obtain crucial information and, as of yet, there was no one to pass it on to. She had been forbidden, by her controller, to make direct contact with British Embassy officials. She would just have to wait. Julia reasoned that this was not an altogether a bad thing, because, if she was playing 'The Game', there was always going to be a certain amount of risk attached to playing 'The Intelligence' game. So for the time being she had decided to throw her hand in and go underground for a while. In light of what was going to happen, and Julia Kilduff, ever the watchful discerning student of history, began to notice that certain correlations between the Russian and French Revolutions were beginning to appear.

Her intention was
that, if she ever got out alive, that she would write a book based on her own experiences during the Russian Revolution. The book itself would be on 'Revolution's', the tract would closely examine all of the trends and all of the main motors for change. Maybe if she was lucky enough, she might discover some 'Scientific Rationale' behind it all. The work would be a definitive 'Blueprint' on this and all other revolutions. But that all lay in the future, the main task as Julia Kilduff now saw it was to get back to her main brief; and that was to restart the flow of, 'Solid Gold', information back to London.

The Moscow at the beginning of nineteen eighteen was not the bleak wasteland that it became during the following year.
For the first few months, certainly up until April, the bourgeoisie, those that had not taken immediate flight, still walked the streets, albeit they toned their appearances down. Theatres remained open and concerts were still staged at most of the main venues. Seizing the opportunity, Julia Kilduff made sure that she went too as many as she could.

It was at one of these, after a performance of Rimsky Korsakov
's, 'The Russian Easter Festival Overture', that Julia felt a tap on her shoulder, then a voice said, 'Don't you think that this fits in rather well with our new 'Political Masters', Nationalistic Mood ... Miss Kilduff you're not an easy person to find. I've been looking for you all over the shop!'

Not entirely surprised that her only,
'Friendly', contact should choose the break between the third and fourth movements to announce his return to the political scene.

'
How long have you been here,' she said.

'
Not as long as you! But long enough,' he said.

Julia looked at Reilly; photographs really didn
't do him any justice at all. To her he always reminded her, with his greasy hair and grimy shirt collars, of an uglier version of, the then, disgraced playwright Oscar Wilde. There was also something of the slimy and the nauseating about this individual. Julia Kilduff stood there looking at his long, bean shaped face and those ridiculously arched eyebrows; the, almost, sweaty pallor; as she stood there in the foyer looking at him, she thought that, there was something wholly unpleasant about this man. Which is why he was probably, in her mind, very good at his job.

Reilly stressed the importance of
regular contact and then, furtively looking around him, said he had to go. They met regularly throughout nineteen eighteen. On several occasions, Julia had expressed the desire to him, that she wanted go home. It had been two years since she had any leave. He stressed that his political masters in London had told him that she was more valuable, as an asset, placed where she was. So that was it, she thought, stuck here on the wrong side of the tracks. Obviously, if she found a reason, or a way, to get back home, then her controller really had no grounds to object. The way in which Reilly had told her, told Julia that he was lying. He was a liar, simple as that; she was no mug and she knew when she was being lied to. But on reflection, that meeting was a crucial one; the germ of an escape plan had been sewn.

Later
, in one of his more frank and open moments, fuelled by too much vodka, Julia found that he had jumped to the same conclusions that she had. That when the Bolshevik epicentre had moved from Petrograd to Moscow, that was going to be the place where the political bounty was had and that was going to be the place where they were going to resurrect their business partnership. According to him, and he said that he had shadowed her for a couple of weeks, before he decided all was clear. But Julia suspected, and rightly so, that she was not so high on his list of priorities and assumed that he was lying to her again, and had inadvertently bumped into her at the theatre. Nevertheless contact between London and Moscow was re-established.

In many ways prior to the arrival of Sidney Reilly, Julia had actually thrown herself, body and soul, into the task of infiltrating the lower echelons of the Bolshevik hierarchy.
Now there was always the danger that someone could report her, as so many others had been, for being a 'Class Enemy'; 'A Spy'; 'A Wrecker'; 'Enemy of the Revolution', or any other silly title that some petty functionary might come up with. They were
all
preposterous and quite meaningless, why didn't they just say 'Criminal' and be done with it?

From time to time throughout nineteen eighteen Julia had good reason to think about this political book
that she had intended to write, that's if she ever could get away from Russia.

After April
, political events began to take on a downward term. It was clear from the beginning that the Bolsheviks and their allies were only interested in one thing and that was power. Secondly, after the failed Lenin assassination of that August; and the subsequent arrest of Fanya Kaplan
[32]
, events began to take on a more sinister turn. It was the excuse that certain immoral persons had been waiting for. The Terror
[33]
had begun in earnest. Innocent women and children were dragged out onto the streets to be summarily executed. As with the French revolution, old scores had to be settled, so whilst armed gangs roamed city streets, bands of peasants roamed around the countryside burning, killing and looting. If you were an ordinary person, it was not a good time to be living in Moscow, but that was of no worry to her, all was apparently well, for Julia was now working in an embryonic version of the Cheka. On many an occasion Julia Kilduff, and her fellow confederates, watched innocent people die by the hundreds, as they were thrown out to the wolves, the 'So-called' Bolshevik 'Street Toughs'. At one point that November you considered yourself lucky if you got a trial; in any one of those kangaroo courts, that had sprung up by the dozen on every street corner.

Then one day in early nineteen-nineteen, at one of their weekly meetings; an ecstatic Sidney Reilly told her that he had got hold of some information, which if it was to become pub
licly known, held the potential to blow the Bolshevik party apart. Yulia noticed that he was almost beside himself with happiness, but when she pressed him further he refused to tell her; saying, 'All in good time Julia ... all in good time!'

If he was not going to tell her, then she would have to do some digging around on her own.
She got nowhere, so she turned her attention back to the source. This time after plying him with some vodka, she got Sidney Reilly to spill the beans. After he had finished, she laughed her head off and told him to get out of her little six by nine bedsit. But Reilly just sat there, shaking his head, saying that what he had just told her was the truth. And if Julia wanted to dispute it with him, then that was fine, but he was quite prepared, even in his intoxicated state, to get a copy of Engels and Marx's 'Das Capital', and swear that what he had just told her, 'so help me Lenin', was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but he truth; 'Comrade!'  By now Julia was in hysterics, nothing had made her laugh like that, since the day she had seen, as a child, her nanny get her knickers in a twist on a day out to the Bournemouth beach. But slowly she could see that the poor man might just be telling the truth for once in his life. Once she had pushed him out of the door, the ramifications of what Sidney Reilly had just told her, began to sink in; Julia Kilduff's mind started to go into overdrive.

If this was true, and she now had every reason to think that it might be, considering the last laugh now seemed to be at her expense, not Reilly
's, Julia wanted a slice of the action. But Reilly had told her that his facts were still quite sketchy, but it all seemed to hinge on the unreliable account of a small time criminal that went by the name of Goldstein. Also if it was true, and since his last meeting with her he was in no doubt, that it was; but as was the case before, when Sidney Reilly became excited, Julia found him difficult to follow. This investigation went from street level all the way to the top of the rotten heap. It was more than a scandal, not only did it contain the potential to blow the roof off the Kremlin, but it might realise his own personal dream of a free democratic Russia with Sidney Reilly holding the tiller.

At the
next meeting Reilly told Julia that his hunch as to the importance of this was, most definitely, not wrong. Apparently the criminal Goldstein had disappeared from Cheka custody but before he had had time to fill him in on the nature of the investigation. But, also, Lenin's close friend Sverdlov, the man charged by Vladimir Ilyvich to secretly conduct the investigation, he too had mysteriously died.

'
Come on, come on,' Sidney Reilly said, 'What does this tell you Julia?'

'
It tells me nothing,' she icily replied.