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great effort and great expense, sometimes of funds and sometimes of life. In most cases, the
investment did not pay off. The young men married or took up professions and became caught within
the maw of personal ambition. They moved on, their revolutionary days a mere memory, something
they would brag about behind closed doors and after much drink. Only a small percentage of the boys
recruited remained long enough to progress within the group and even they could not always be
trusted.
Yulian was the perfect example. At Gregor’s insistence they had gotten him inside the palace
and through the boy’s own gift for dance he had thrived there. But then came the girl, the damn girl
who wanted nothing more than to dance in that whore of a city called Paris, and Yulian’s head had
been turned. We will kill the tsar after the tour, he told them. Katya and I must go to Paris first. It
means so much to her. Yes, this was the impudence of the boy. He looked into the face of a man who
had offered his body up to a bullet and said that yes, he would help them, but that he wanted to go to
Paris first.
Paris first.
That is what the boy said.
The revolution could wait until his holiday was complete.
And then he had added casually, almost as an aside, the remark which sealed his fate. “Katya
understands I must someday return and do my duty. I tell her everything, you see.”
Here was the secret that only one man kept: the death of Yulian Krupin came at the hands of the
cause he served.
The day he decided he must eliminate one of his own was a dark day indeed, but Filip had long
ago accepted the need to make difficult decisions. You could hardly take the boy without the girl; the
two had argued quite convincingly to everyone within earshot that their fates were linked. Yulian had
died as he lived – blindly - and Katya had followed with remarkable ease, almost cooperatively,
almost as if she understood that for Russian women, romantic love was generally a death sentence.
Even when one is a member of a collective there are times when one must act alone. Filip
understood that no one in the Volya could ever know of his decision, and nor could anyone within the
palace. Keeping his secret had already proven difficult, for Gregor had many unanswered questions
about his brother’s death. At the memorial service he had approached Filip and held out a
handkerchief saying “So that you might weep for my brother, comrade.”