With that, he opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out a revolver. He laid it down, then took out three sealed packages of paper money. The first one contained a thousand rubles. It was a bribe demanded by Peters’s predecessor in this very office, a handsome, debonair young person who rattled off French as rapidly as he did Russian. I had met him only a few days before, when he proudly announced that his name would go down in history. Now he was reposing in jail, and waiting for the Military Revolutionary Tribunal to get around to his case. The chance to become rich as well as famous had proved too much for him. He called one night at a vaudeville theater which produced clever satires on current politics, and ordered the place closed on the ground that one of the playlets was counter-revolutionary. Later, through an agent, he made it known to the manager that the payment of a thousand rubles would suffice to keep the place open. The Bolsheviki discovered what he was doing, dismissed him from office, and placed him under arrest. The second envelop contained fifteen thousand rubles which had been taken the night before from a food speculator, caught in the act of trying to ship a large consignment of flour through Finland to Germany. He offered a bribe of a thousand rubles to a soldier at the Finlyansky Station. The soldier hurried to Smolney with the money and the news. He could not write, so he made his mark upon the complaint to which he swore. A detail of half a dozen soldiers and Red Guardsmen was sent to help him. The man was arrested, and evidence secured that unearthed a whole nest of speculators. There was no longer a secret police in Russia. The _Okhranka_ had gone with the Tsar into oblivion. But the people themselves were on the watch for evidences of anything that might threaten the power of the Commissaries. There was little that went on in the city that did not soon reach the ears of Jacob Peters’s Committee. A servant girl was sent to the Fortress of Peter and Paul with a cake for her master imprisoned there. Wrapped in a parcel, lying on the table near the cake, was a bundle of papers that had been carefully collected to be put out of the way of prying Bolshevist eyes. The servant apparently inadvertently took the wrong package to the prison, where it fell into the hands of the prison authorities. That the servant was not as inadvertent as she seemed was indicated a few days later, when she reported that Stephenovitch, whom the Bolsheviki were trying to find, would sleep that night in such a place, at such an hour. When the Red Guard was sent to search, it was as she had predicted.