The Margin of Evil! Read Online Free

him.
    ' Read on 'Comrade' Radetzky,' she said.
    He carried on reading. Apparently she had spent a lot of time with the Lenins in Switzerland.   She had negotiated with the German government on behalf of the Bolsheviks. She had later travelled through Germany on the sealed train and subsequently through Sweden and Finland.     One case officer had written in the margin that this woman was poison; all those whom came into contact with her sooner or later fell by the wayside.  He was right. For a moment Georgii pondered on his own fate, as probably had the war not intervened, he would have gone the way of all the others.
    Georgii remembered her Okhrana nickname and snorted, 'It was 'The Granite Faced Slag'.  He also remembered the time when she had told him that she had loved him. He had come to arrest her.  He had told her that the game was up and then she had made one last request. 'The right', she had told him, 'of all condemned prisoners' and then she had slipped right through his fingers.  She had had connections in very high places.  When it was convenient she used them to hide behind the law.  They had pulled strings and had engineered her escape.  Or, as he seemed to remember at the time, when Gerhardt had broken the news to him there were other things going on of which he, Georgii, was to know nothing. His investigations and those of others were interfering with other matters of national importance. So be it, he'd thought at the time, no use crying over spilt milk, if that is the way they wanted it, that was the way it was going to be! After all, he reasoned, the 'Big-Man' gets to call the tune.
    ' You're not a fellow traveller are you Georgii?'  She said in a mockingly seductive tone.
    ' A Bolshevik you mean? he replied.
    ' Yes.'
    ' No ... But I'm a patriot!'  He felt that she was playing with him.
    ' I see ...' she pondered his comments. Then added. 'So you think that we're not,' Trofimov said throwing the cat right amongst the pigeons.
    ' I didn't say that! I said that I'm a patriot. I want what's best for Russia,' he said, adding indignantly, 'maybe something good will come out of this rotten mess.'
    ' So do we, Comrade Radetzky!'  She then changed her tack; 'I've often thought about you Georgii, what became of you in recent years. I've often regretted not saying goodbye ...'  She banged her finger down on an open page.'  I see you worked with Brusilov ... The pair of you almost won the war - shame that no one in the Imperial Army backed you up. I suppose they were all too busy curtseying to Alexandra and hanging onto the Tsars coat tails whilst Rasputin [6] danced a merry jig around all of them,' she said mockingly. 'Just as well for us that you didn't. Which brings me as to why I’ve asked you, in here, for this informal chat? I know you are not one of us but the sad thing is we need the help of people like you. That's fine, Georgii Radetzky, but you play by our rules and those rules are that whatever you are working on you run by my aides or me first. I want daily updates from you, and we will be, as of now, assigning cases for you to work on, we reserve the right at a moment's notice, to veto, or take over any investigation that you might be working on.  If you do not abide by these rules, I will personally see that you and others like you will share the fate of The Traitor, Timoshkin!'  She gave him one of her legendary stares.
    ' Timoshkin was no traitor! He wanted what was best for everyone.  He didn't discriminate,' he said.
    ' Then why was he caught helping bourgeois non-citizens flee Moscow?'  She said curtly.
    ' People are leaving Moscow every day. The city is virtually surrounded by the Whites. There is no food: rations are reduced on a daily basis!  Why would anyone in his or her right mind want to stay? The only food you can get is on the blackmarket ... conditions are worse than they were during the war!'
    ' Why do you stay Georgii?'  She said.
    ' Because I've got nowhere else to