"He is growing dangerous," growled Rasputin. "What you say is perfectly true." Then turning to me, he said: "Feodor, bring those papers which Manuiloff brought me a week ago--the papers used for the arrest of Professor Buchman in Warsaw." I obeyed, well knowing how that file of incriminating correspondence with an Anarchist group in Zurich had been forged by Stuermer's secretary Manuiloff, and how it had been found among the professor's effects. "The necktie of Stolypin," was Azef's playful allusion to the ever-ready gallows to which he, plotting with Rasputin, Manuiloff, Guerassimof, and others, was so constantly sending innocent persons. Truly, Russia was a strange country even before the outbreak of war. The immediate object of Azef's activities, combined with Rasputin's, was at Germany's direction to extend the Terrorist action and thus cause trouble and unrest in the Empire. By every fresh success he obtained more money from Berlin, and at the same time strengthened his privileged position in the ranks of the Terrorists, while his worth was increased in the eyes of both the Minister of the Interior and of the Emperor. The scoundrel's revolutionary career and his police career were inseparable. He was a Terrorist to-day, a police official to-morrow, but, like Rasputin, a secret agent of Germany always! Terrible as it may seem, the Okhrana, with the connivance of the Wilhelmstrasse, and with the Empress's full knowledge--of this there is no doubt, because documentary evidence exists which proves it--caused the highest personages in Russia to be murdered or hanged in order to prove to those lucky ones who survived how necessary was the organisation for their own existence! A hundred dramas could be written upon the intrigues of Grichka and Azef. Some of them were amazing; all were disgraceful. The life of the most upright and honest man or woman was not safe if marked down by the pair of scoundrels. The attempt upon Admiral Dubassof, in which Count Konovnicin met his death; the attempt upon General Guerchelman, Governor-General of Moscow; the assassination of General Slepzof at Tver, with half a dozen other murders of the same kind, were all the work of Azef. Why? Because both Azef and General Guerassimof, chief of the Secret Police, were in the toils of Germany. The Wilhelmstrasse paid well, but threatened exposures if this or that person were not removed. Hence Azef, as one of the heads of the Terrorists, received his orders through Rasputin, and, obeying, was paid his blood-money.