The new safe house was a step up from the squalid tenement, a small, clean apartment above a bakery that always smelled of fresh bread—a scent so alien in their world of cordite and damp wool that it was almost disorienting. It was here, in this pocket of false domesticity, that Jake chose to set his stage. He had his men bring Anna Dolidze at dusk.
She was not brought in a sack or at gunpoint. Two of Kamo's most unassuming men, dressed as simple workers, had approached her on her way home from the merchants' district, with a quiet, non-negotiable message: "A man has important news for you about your husband. Come with us and you will not be harmed." Curiosity, and the sheer, weary exhaustion of a life with nothing left to lose, had made her comply.
She entered the room not with the terror of a kidnap victim, but with the defiant, world-weary anger of a woman who had been prodded by fate one too many times. She was thin and wiry, her knuckles swollen and red, her face a mask of hard-won wrinkles. Her eyes, the only soft thing about her, were a deep, exhausted brown, and they swept over Jake with a look that was equal parts suspicion and contempt.
"So," she began, her voice a low, raspy thing, rough from years of shouting over the noise of the slums. "You are the 'man with news.' You look like all the rest of them. Troublemakers with your pamphlets and your secret meetings. What do the likes of you want with me? If you think Pyotr owes you money, you can dig him up and ask his corpse for it."
Jake gestured to a chair opposite him. Kamo stood by the door, a silent, monolithic guard. "Please, sit, Anna Ivanovna," Jake said, his voice calm, respectful. He did not use the tone of a commander or an interrogator, but of a sober-minded professional, a lawyer perhaps, about to discuss a difficult inheritance.
She remained standing, her arms crossed over her chest. "I will stand."
Jake nodded slightly, accepting her defiance. He would not waste time circling the subject. He would deliver the truth like a clinical, precise incision. "Your husband, Pyotr Dolidze, is alive," he said.
He watched her face, expecting shock, perhaps a flicker of old, forgotten grief. He saw neither. Her expression hardened, her jaw tightening, and the look in her eyes was not of sorrow, but of pure, undiluted, and very old rage.
"That bastard," she spat, the word a poisoned dart. "So he didn't even have the decency to die in whatever ditch he crawled into. He is alive?" A bitter, humorless laugh escaped her lips. "Of course he is. Only the good die young. Cowards and drunkards live forever."
Jake let her anger fill the small room. He did not try to soothe it. He needed it. Her rage was the fuel his engine required.
"He is alive," Jake continued, his voice still even, "and he is living in a fine hotel in St. Petersburg. The Hotel Astoria. He is a guest of the state. He eats three warm meals a day. He wears fine new clothes." He let each detail land, a small, sharp stone aimed at the raw wound of her poverty.
"The Tsar's secret police, the Okhrana, have him," he went on, carefully framing the narrative not as a political struggle, but as a personal injustice. "They are parading him in front of newspapers. They are calling him a hero. They have given him a new life, a new name, while you scrub other people's floors to earn enough kopeks to buy bread for your sons. His sons."
He could see it working. The fury in her eyes was beginning to smolder, to find a specific target. The abstract bitterness she felt towards her worthless husband was now being focused into a sharp, hot point of outrage. The injustice of it was a poison she was drinking in, and he was the one pouring the cup.
"A hero?" she sneered, her voice dripping with a lifetime of scorn. "That man? The only battle he ever fought was with a bottle, and the bottle always won. What has he done to earn a fine hotel?"
"He has told a story," Jake said. "A very useful lie for the government. And for this lie, they have rewarded him. They have made him a celebrity. While you and your boys have been forgotten."
Now, he leaned forward, his voice dropping, becoming more intimate, more conspiratorial. He was no longer just an informant. He was an ally. "I am offering you something, Anna Ivanovna. Not for the party, not for the revolution. For you. I am offering you a chance for justice. A chance for revenge. And a chance for a new life."
She was silent now, her anger giving way to a wary, intense curiosity. She was listening.
"I want you and your boys to go to St. Petersburg," Jake said, laying the plan out with a brutal simplicity. "The party will arrange everything. Safe passage, a clean room, new clothes. Every day, for one week, you will do one simple thing. You will go to his hotel. You will stand on the street, across from the main entrance, where all the journalists and the important people can see you."
He paused, letting her imagine the scene. "And you will hold a sign."
He slid a piece of paper across the table. On it, he had written two simple, devastating phrases in block letters.
"The sign will be simple," he continued, his voice a cold, precise instrument. "One day it will say, 'PYOTR DOLIDZE, YOUR SONS ARE STARVING.' The next day, perhaps, 'PAPA, WHY HAVE YOU ABANDONED US?' You will not shout. You will not weep. You will not speak to him, even if he tries to speak to you. You will simply stand there, in your poverty, and let him see you. Let the world see you. You will be a ghost at his feast. You will shame him, and you will shame the powerful men who are protecting him."
Anna stared at the words on the paper, her rough, chapped lips moving as she read them. The beautiful, perfect, and exquisite cruelty of the idea began to dawn on her. It was a weapon more potent than any knife or gun. It was a way to reclaim years of humiliation, to turn her suffering into a public spectacle that would destroy the man who had caused it.
She finally looked up, her hard eyes narrowed. She was a practical woman. She had learned long ago that nothing in this world was free. "And what do I get?" she asked, her voice sharp as flint. "For this… performance?"
"When you return from St. Petersburg," Jake said, "the party will deposit a sum of money into a bank account in your name. Five thousand rubles."
The amount was staggering, a fortune beyond her wildest dreams. It was enough to buy a small house, to start a business, to feed her children for a decade. It was enough to escape.
"You can take your sons and disappear," Jake concluded, offering her the devil's bargain. "Move to Odessa, to Kiev, anywhere you want. Start a new life, a clean one, free of him and the memory of this city. All you have to do is stand on a street corner for a week and hold up a sign that tells the truth."
He was not offering her revolutionary ideals. He was not asking for her loyalty. He was offering her a straightforward, commercial transaction: her grief and rage, weaponized for one week, in exchange for a lifetime of freedom. He was empowering her to destroy the man who had ruined her life, and he was paying her for it.
Anna Dolidze was silent for a long, long time. She looked at Jake, at the quiet, intense man who had appeared from nowhere and offered her this impossible, terrible choice. She thought of her cold, damp room, of the constant, gnawing hunger in her sons' bellies, of the endless, back-breaking work that was her life. And she thought of Pyotr, warm and comfortable in a fine hotel, being celebrated as a hero.
A slow, bitter, and utterly determined smile spread across her face. It was the smile of a woman who had been handed the perfect tool to exact a lifetime's worth of revenge.
"When do we leave?" she asked.
The scene shifted, cutting across the empire to the sunlit streets of St. Petersburg. Pyotr Dolidze, impeccably dressed in a new suit provided by the state, his face clean-shaven, was being escorted by two smiling, plain-clothed Okhrana agents from the grand entrance of the Hotel Astoria to a waiting carriage. He was a state asset. A celebrity. He walked with a new confidence, the adulation and comfort of the past few weeks a soothing balm on his fractured soul. He was beginning to believe his own fiction. He was Luka Mikeladze, the noble dissident.
As he stepped onto the pavement, the sunlight made him blink. He smiled for a journalist's camera. And then he saw them.
Across the street, standing silently on the curb, was a haggard woman in a worn shawl and two thin, ragged boys. The woman's face was a half-remembered nightmare. The boys were strangers, but their hungry eyes were his own. The woman was holding a crude, hand-painted sign.
He squinted to read the words.
PYOTR DOLIDZE. YOUR SONS ARE STARVING.
His real name.
He looked from the sign to the woman's hard, unforgiving face, and then to the two boys who stared at him with a mixture of fear and curiosity. The world of Luka Mikeladze, the grand fiction of heroes and state protection and fine hotels, did not just crack. It shattered into a million pieces of razor-sharp glass. His mind, already a fragile construct built on a foundation of lies and alcohol, was hit by a wave of reality it could not possibly reconcile.
The Okhrana agents, seeing his face go white, tried to hustle him into the carriage. "Ignore them," one of them hissed. "Just some revolutionary scum trying to cause a scene."
But he was frozen on the spot, his feet rooted to the pavement. His carefully constructed new identity was dissolving like sugar in water, leaving only the raw, exposed horror of who he really was. He stared at the ghosts of his past, and his face, the face of Stolypin's prize witness, became a mask of utter, soul-destroying horror.