“You are God,” a woman replied meekly. “You are Christ, and I am your lamb.”
I stepped around the screen to witness the most disturbing of sights. Madame Lokhtina, wearing a loose, white dress that was extravagantly decorated with ribbons, was kneeling in front of my naked master. She was holding on to his erect manhood while he beat her mercilessly.
“What are you doing?” I shouted to him as I tried to intercede on her behalf. “You’re beating a woman.”
He pushed me aside and did not interrupt his beating. “Leave me be. The skunk, she won’t let me alone. She demands sin. She needs to be cleansed.”
I left in shock.
He is frequenting many women. Duchesses and wives of the highest officials fawn over him and kiss his hands openly. They are constantly at his side, whether at the apartment he now occupies here in St. Petersburg or on his trips to Verkhoturye or to his newly built home in Pokrovskoye. They even accompany him to the bathhouses. And that is not all. Aside from spending all this time with these high-placed ladies, he is frequenting prostitutes. He takes them to hotels or to the bathhouses. There have been occasions when I have known him to hire several of them in a single day.
Accusations are being voiced more and more openly, questioning his morality, claiming he is a scoundrel and a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” even accusing him of being in a state of spiritual temptation.
When I questioned him about this, he shrugged and said, “Don’t believe what these people say, Misha. They’ll never understand.”
“I don’t understand,” I told him, fearful of the answer.
He fixed me with his deep-set eyes, then he said, “Sin is a vital part of life. We cannot ignore it. God put it there for a reason.”
“I thought sin was the work of the devil,” I countered, confused.
“Sin is a necessary evil, Misha. There can be no true life, no joy without profound repentance, but how can our repentance be sincere without sinning? Do you see? We cannot be true to God without sin, and it is my duty at the command of the Holy Spirit to help these women rid themselves of the demons of lechery and pride that live within them.”
And that was when I started to understand. Father Grigory drives out sin with sin. The crude peasant is taking these poor women’s sins onto himself, selflessly toiling and debasing himself for their redemption and for their purification. These women know to heed my master’s cautions and not say anything to their confessors, whom he considers simpletons. He has warned them that it would only confuse the poor men and, worse, make them commit a mortal sin by passing judgment on the Holy Spirit.
“Each of us must bear his own cross,” he told me, “and that is mine. So pay no heed to these wicked tongues. The impure will always stick to the pure. They shall answer to God. He alone sees everything. He alone understands.”
My master’s understanding of God’s will is truly beyond compare, or reproach.
He is God’s emissary. The empire, and the royal family, are lucky to have their “Blessed One” as their protector.
Yes, the monarchy needs us, Rasputin mused after he left Misha.
The royal couple need saving if they are to remain my patrons and my conduits to power and gratification.
He thought back to the times that had shaped him, back when he was a precocious, impatient young man in Pokrovskoye. He had seethed with jealousy and contempt every time the gilded aristocrats thundered by in their sumptuous carriages, on their way to some distant monastery for a frivolous cleansing of their souls. He’d heard about the riches in the big cities, about the motorcars and the ostentatious parties and the lavish lifestyles of the court. It had all festered within him after he’d left his village, during his travels, and it was still with him when he’d heard about the empress’s problems and superstitions. She was the most religious, and the most credulous, of them all, even more so than the wretched souls who flocked to Saint Simeon’s grave and rubbed themselves with its crusty soil in the belief that it would cure whatever ailed them.
It was a credulity that was begging to be exploited. And the insights he’d gleaned from the myriad encounters he’d experienced during his wandering years had turned him into a master of exploitation.
One chapter had marked him most of all, and that was his time with the Khlysti in a remote corner of the Siberian outback. He would always remember that first ritual among the sect of resurrected “Christs” who believed repentance was pointless unless it was about repenting for a major sin, which usually took the form of fornication. The chants, the dancing, the frenzied whirling, all of it culminating in the rite of “rejoicing”-the wild orgies, during which the Holy Spirit would, they were told, descend upon them. It was all mind-boggling.
What a concept, he thought. Rejoicing through group sinning. Abstention through orgies. The purification of the soul through wanton copulation. The boundless debauchery that, according to their beliefs, allowed every man the potential to turn into a Christ and every woman into a mother of God.
It was so twisted and ingenious, it was no wonder the Orthodox Church had moved quickly to stamp it out. But it survived, in the dark corners of the empire, its “arks” connected to each other by secret messengers-the “flying angels,” or seraphs who wandered the land.
For a while, Rasputin had become one such seraph. And with Misha’s assistance, he would take the rituals of the secret sect of the poor from the forests of Siberia and unleash his own version of them on the high society of St. Petersburg and its polished, unsuspecting women.
It was a far better life than any of the illiterate peasant of Pokrovskoye had ever dared dream of.
29
Sokolov unlocked the van’s back door and swung it open.
The rear compartment was empty inside, except for a large metal box. It was a bit smaller than an under-counter fridge, and it was bolted to the van’s floor behind the partition. It had a metal bar across it with a large padlock holding it shut. He checked the padlock. It was still locked and seemed undisturbed, as did the rest of the equipment in the back of the van.
He closed the rear door, popped the engine lid open, and reconnected the battery. Then he climbed in and turned the ignition key. The engine churned to life, sounding far healthier than it looked. Sokolov had always been fastidious with its maintenance. He pumped the gas pedal gently a couple of times and let the engine warm up a little, then he got out and opened the roller door, backed out, and lowered and locked it again.
Within minutes, he was on his way, headed for the Triboro Bridge, thinking about the phone call he would soon have to make, and not feeling any more confident about what the night would bring than he had been before collecting his van.
SHORTLY BEFORE EIGHT, Sokolov pulled his panel van into the alleyway behind the Green Dragon. The refrigeration unit bolted to its roof made it look like any other vehicle delivering supplies to the back doors of the restaurants that lined the block.
Jonny sized it up with a sardonic look, then he lit up a cigarette and asked, “So what’s with the meat wagon?”
Sokolov shrugged. “It was cheap. Get in. We should go.”
Jonny climbed in and took the outside seat of the two-passenger bench that was next to the driver’s seat.
Sokolov slid a small, sideways glare at the cigarette, then pulled out and turned into Thirty-second Street.
Jonny looked around the cabin. There was a partition behind the three seats. It had a narrow door built into it that reminded Jonny of the lavatory doors on commercial airliners. The door had a small window cut into it, about ten inches square. Everything else was pretty standard for an old van like that, apart from a small panel on the dashboard that had a couple of switches on it and seemed slightly out of place.