Ace of Spies Read Online Free Page B

with connections to the court of the Tsar himself. Georgi and his older sister led a privileged life, being educated by tutors. To retain an air of mystery around this story, Reilly was always careful never to divulge the family’s name. At the age of sixteen, Georgi embarked on a three-year course in chemistry at the university in Vienna, where he made the acquaintance of Dr Rosenblum, his mother’s doctor. Here Georgi was a great success, excelling in his studies and living a somewhat debauched life to the full. He also became involved in a socialist political group which led to his arrest by the Imperial Russian Secret Police, the Ochrana. His family used their connections to secure his release, by which time his mother, who had been unwell for some time, had died. It was on the day of his release from prison that his uncle revealed to the assembled family that Georgi was in fact a bastard, the offspring of an adulterous relationship between his mother and Dr Rosenblum, the Jewish doctor from Vienna, who had treated her.
    Unable to come to terms with the shame of being a bastard, he disowned his family, adopted the name Rosenblum, faked his death in Odessa Harbour and stowed away on a boat bound for South America. For three years he went from job to job, before being recruited as a cook by three British army officers who were to lead an expedition to explore the Amazonian jungle. All went well until natives attacked the party. In typical melodramatic style, Rosenblum grabbed an officer’s pistol and with expert marksmanship fought off the natives single handed. As it turned out, one of the three officers, Maj. Fothergill, was a member of the British Secret Service and rewarded him with a cheque for£1,500, a passage to Britain, a British passport and a job with the Secret Service. As compelling a story as this is, it totally fails to stand up when subjected to scrutiny.
    Over and above the fact that the British Secret Service did not exist in the 1890s, birth records kept by the State Archives of Odessa Region contain no mention of a boy by the name of Georgi whose father was a colonel, for either 1872, 1873 or 1874. 20 No Dr Rosenblum is listed in the Vienna City Censuses during the 1890s, 21 and neither the University of Vienna nor the Vienna Technical University have any record of a student from Odessa, born in the relevant time period, studying chemistry. 22 Furthermore, newspaper and archive records in both Britain and Brazil fail to mention any Amazonian expeditions during the time period in question, neither are any references to be found to British army officers or to a Maj. Fothergill. 23 Such findings are hardly surprising, for Reilly’s family were neither Russians nor aristocrats.
    Abram Rosenblum was born in the Grodno gubernia around 1820. 24 He and his wife, Sarah, were the first of their family to leave Poland to settle in the Kherson gubernia, in which Odessa is located, in the early 1850s. His elder brother, Jankiel (Jacob), 25 married Hana (Henrietta) Bramson 26 in Lomza in the Bialystok province in 1840. Their sons Zeev (Vladimir) and Gersh (Grigory) were born in the province in 1843 and 1845 respectively. 27 Grigory married Perla (Paulina), a reputedly attractive girl some seven years younger than himself, who hailed from a well-to-do family in Kherson. By all accounts their marriage was ‘strained’. According to later family trees, they had three children, Mariam (Maria), Shlomo (Salomon – the future Sidney Reilly) and Elka (Elena). 28 Family speculation, however, raises the possibility that Grigory might not have been Salomon’s father. According to one account, Paulina had an adulterous liaison with a close relative of Grigory’s who was more of her own age. Another alludes to Paulina leaving her husband and returning to the south. Whether Paulina and Grigory were reconciled at a later date is uncertain. These rumours perhaps suggest that although the story Reillytold George Hill about his