A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (26 page)

Brazul knew Krasovsky from his days as Kiev’s chief detective. He had approached him over the summer and tried to persuade him they should work together on the Yushchinsky case, but Krasovsky was, not surprisingly, uninterested. They remained in touch, however, and Krasovsky confided to Brazul his frustration at the arrest of an
innocent man. He could not share any specific information, but he gave Brazul one piece of advice. “I’ll put it simply,” he told him. “The whole case, the whole riddle lies with Vera
Cheberyak. Focus yourself on Vera Cheberyak, and the case will be cracked.” Brazul, who could be dense, apparently failed to understand what Krasovsky was trying to tell him: that he believed Cheberyak was behind the crime. Brazul understood him to mean only that Cheberyak had useful information. Still, on that assumption, he began to focus on her with single-minded intensity.

Brazul took the opportunity to introduce himself to Cheberyak
at Zhenya’s funeral and express his condolences. When the young journalist contacted Cheberyak again sometime in mid-September, she did not know quite what to make of him—or how to take advantage of him. That would take time to figure out. Meanwhile, she accepted his invitations to go out to eat and drink with his friends, which would at least allow her to enjoy some fine free meals. As they met over the next few weeks, she talked a great deal about her dead children, who she was sure had been poisoned by someone. Her husband had been let go from his job at the telegraph office, and she had to work, picking up the odd client as a
midwife and “healer.” (She had taken some classes in midwifery as a young woman but never completed the course.) The rest of her time was taken up by the endless summonings of investigators. She was being persecuted, she said, by Fenenko and Lieutenant Colonel Ivanov, who unjustly suspected her of involvement in Andrei’s murder. She complained of feeling hounded and harassed. She was exhausted. “
I’m a woman,” she told him. “I have a little girl, I need to be home.” Blind to her scheming nature, Brazul may have been unduly moved by her plight.

For two months, Cheberyak continued to deny her involvement in the crime and said nothing of what she might know about who had killed Andrei. Then, on November 29, according to Brazul, she told him that, while she didn’t know who the culprit was, she was in a position to find out. She suggested that there was truth to the original theory that Andrei’s stepfather and uncle had been involved. Brazul believed her. A colleague who joined Brazul for one of these evenings told him bluntly, “This is a woman who always lies. She lies even when she’s telling the truth. And if she’s
talking in her sleep, then while she’s talking she probably also lies.” Brazul ignored the warning. He continued to insist Cheberyak was not involved in the crime but could find the killer.

On December 1, Brazul dropped by Vera Cheberyak’s house and was surprised to find her lying in bed, “half dead,” as he recalled, her head wrapped in bandages. “That’s it,” she told him, “yesterday I really
got it good.” Cheberyak said that she had been coming home at night when two men assaulted her, one of them beating her with an iron “chocolate bar.” (Cheberyak’s speech was always peppered with criminal slang.) Bandaged and bloody, she now revealed to Brazul what she said were her true suspicions regarding who had killed Andrei. The night that she was ambushed, it had been too dark for her to see her attackers, but she was sure that one of them had been Pavel Mifle, the
lover she had blinded six years earlier by throwing sulfuric acid in his face. She was certain he had organized the vicious assault because he knew that she was trying to find out who had killed Andrei. Cheberyak said she had told Mifle she was going out to buy candles that she would use to divine the murderer’s identity—the villain’s face, she told him, would appear before her in the candles’ glow. Upon hearing that, she claimed Mifle said, “Don’t you start
divining.” Mifle had to have been involved in Andrei’s murder, she claimed to Brazul, along with Andrei’s stepfather, Luka, and others, including Mifle’s brother and mother, but she explained that she had to go to a prison in the city of Kharkov to talk to a convict who had more information. To Brazul, this all made perfect sense.

Brazul felt he was in possession of valuable, sensational information. As it happened, he also knew
Margolin well. They had worked together at two of Kiev’s progressive newspapers. Margolin regarded Brazul with a mixture of admiration and condescension, remarking that “his work was notable for its
quixotic character, in the best sense of the term.” When his friend told him that he was on the trail of Andrei’s killer, Margolin was skeptical. Brazul was honest and well intentioned, but he was no detective. So Margolin at first refused when Brazul suggested setting up a meeting with Cheberyak, but Margolin did visit Fenenko to share what Brazul had told him. “No sooner than I had mentioned the name of Cheberyak,” Margolin recalled, “than Fenenko repeated literally the same words I had heard from [Brazul]:
‘Cheberyak knows everything about this case.’ ” Fenenko was still tight-lipped about specifics, but Margolin correctly understood that he meant Cheberyak was not just a witness who “knew” things but rather was an accomplice to the crime.

Fenenko’s office was in the building of the Kiev Circuit Court and
Margolin had some other business to take care of at the court that day, December 3. As he passed Fenenko’s office again, someone pointed out “a
small, thin restless figure” waiting to be interrogated. It was Vera Cheberyak. “The upper portion of her head and one eye were bandaged,” Margolin recalled in his memoir of the case. “It was sufficient, however, to see only that one eye to gain an idea that she was a dangerous woman. She was casting feverish, hateful looks in every direction, scrutinizing everybody suspiciously.” Margolin, like so many people who crossed Cheberyak’s path, appears to have been overwhelmed at the mere sight of her, by the malevolence her physical presence conveyed. Margolin had not intended to get personally involved in the investigation. In the event that
Beilis was indicted, he would be one of the defendant’s attorneys, so it would only be prudent to keep his distance from potential witnesses. But now his fascination with Cheberyak was beginning to overpower his caution.

The next day Margolin told Brazul that he would meet with Cheberyak, though only if measures were taken to protect his identity. As it happened, he was going on business to
Kharkov, about three hundred miles east of Kiev, and could meet with Cheberyak there. Margolin later claimed, unconvincingly, that he merely wanted to avoid having Cheberyak find him in Kiev and pester him, but he must have known that what he was about to do carried tremendous risks: it could lead to the unmasking of Andrei’s killers and exonerate Beilis. Or it could end in catastrophe for the defense, lending credence to the idea that cunning Jews were secretly conniving to pin the case on a Christian woman.

Kiev’s Jewish leaders maintained their wariness, as Fenenko found when he officially deposed
Margolin’s father, David, who was the vice chairman of a group known as the Representation for Jewish Welfare of the Kiev Executive Authority. (The very name of this body, as cumbersome
in Russian as it is in English, suggested that Jews were an alien presence, requiring something in the nature of a foreign mission to their own government. Indeed, Jews were officially classified by the regime as an “alien” people.) Rumors had apparently reached the authorities that certain Jews might be meddling in the case. Fenenko, almost certainly on orders from above, questioned the elder Margolin about whether this allegation had any basis in fact. The
industrialist, in all sincerity, assured Fenenko that no such unofficial investigation
was being conducted and that he himself would oppose such an effort because the matter was the responsibility of the proper authorities. But Fenenko himself had by this time lost faith in the authorities, felt powerless to resolve the cases, and was, in fact, encouraging the elder
Margolin’s son to do whatever he could to push the
investigation forward and prevent an
innocent man from being indicted.

Arnold Margolin arrived in Kharkov by express train on December 7 and checked into a suite at the luxurious
Grand Hotel where he presented his internal passport, which all citizens needed for travel, copying down the requisite information in the register, including that he was “of the Jewish faith.” Brazul arrived on a different train with Cheberyak, having treated her to a first-class compartment, and secured her a room in the somewhat less-grand Hotel Hermitage. Accompanying them was a former police officer, Alexei Vygranov, disguised in a university student’s uniform, who had been Krasovsky’s assistant and was now helping Brazul with his investigation.

Margolin was given to mocking Brazul’s pretensions to be a detective, but his own efforts to conceal his identity were remarkably clumsy. He received Cheberyak in his own rooms at a hotel where he had registered under his own name. Brazul presented the esteemed gentleman to Cheberyak as a member of the Kharkov city
Duma, failing to explain why a resident of the city would be staying in a hotel.

The meeting lasted a little less than an hour. Cheberyak, according to Margolin, immediately took charge of the conversation. She removed her bandage, displaying to all the gash on her head, and claimed she had been beaten by Pavel Mifle, who had poisoned her children, and declared her determination to get revenge on him. (Her story varied—she had also told Brazul that Mifle’s mother, Maria, had poisoned the children.) She presented herself, in Margolin’s words, as a “
noble avenger,” declaring, “I am prepared to let myself perish but I will destroy Mifle.” She repeated what Margolin had already heard from Brazul—that Andrei had been killed by his stepfather, his uncle, Mifle, and others, and that she was planning to meet with a prisoner in Kharkov who had more information about the crime.

On their return to Kiev, Margolin and Brazul compared their impressions. Brazul believed that Cheberyak’s story, if not entirely true, had a great deal of truth in it. True, she never met with her supposed informant in Kharkov, about whom she had been frustratingly vague, but
that did not necessarily undermine her story.
Margolin, on the other hand, was emphatic in his conviction that Cheberyak’s story was a total lie. He came away from the Kharkov trip confident that Cheberyak had been directly involved in Andrei’s murder. Cheberyak, he felt, had the demeanor of “a person who was
being hunted, who sensed danger” because investigators were on her trail. But in concocting a convoluted lie, had Vera Cheberyak possibly let slip part of the truth about Andrei’s murder? During their meeting, Margolin had mostly kept his silence, but he did probe Cheberyak about the supposed motive behind Andrei’s death. Why, he asked, had Andrei been killed? Andrei, Cheberyak claimed, had been eliminated by Mifle’s villainous “gang of thieves.” But why, Margolin pressed. Because, she said, the boy knew what they were up to: he was a “dangerous witness.”

During a visit to Kiev around this time, Gruzenberg got wind of Margolin’s involvement with Brazul and was greatly displeased. He told Margolin that he was taking unnecessary risks. “Why place our
untarnished case in jeopardy?” he argued. The accusers lacked credible evidence. They “would welcome the opportunity” Margolin was affording them to declare that the witnesses for the defense were tainted and their testimony the product of a Jewish lawyer’s conspiracy. The
trial would not settle their argument. Decades later Margolin would still be insisting that his “offensive” tactics had been a boon to the defense, while Gruzenberg continued to maintain that the consequences of the amateurish investigation had been disastrous.

What is indisputable is that the courtroom confrontation between Arnold Margolin and Vera Cheberyak would become a sensational highlight of the trial. Cheberyak, of course, could not have known that the clandestine meeting in Kharkov would lead to a headline-making moment around the world some two years hence. But before she returned to Kiev, she had taken steps toward turning the secret trip to her advantage. She was not going to give the important gentleman she had met any chance to deny their encounter. She removed a poster from the wall of her Kharkov hotel room and wrote her name on the wallpaper. She also mailed a postcard to her husband to prove the date she had been there. The rare missive to
Vasily Cheberyak from his despised and dreaded wife read, “
Thank God, everything is fine.”

Toward the end of December, it became clear to a despairing Fenenko that he had failed to thwart the effort to indict
Beilis for the murder of Andrei
Yushchinsky. He had been confident that, in the course of his investigation, the absurdity of the charges would become so overwhelmingly self-evident that the case would be dropped. But now
Chaplinsky stepped up the pressure on him to declare his investigation complete, a legal requirement before an
indictment could be drafted. The prosecutor undoubtedly desired to start off the new year with a case that would gain him national renown.

Chaplinsky, however, was still concerned by the scantiness of the evidence, which he himself had more than once admitted was “not completely firm.” More evidence quickly had to be found—or fabricated. To this end, there now emerged the strange partnership that would shape the entire case. Grigory Chaplinsky, chief prosecutor of the Kiev Judicial Chamber, would work in concert with Vera
Cheberyak, the terror of
Lukianovka and leading suspect in Andrei’s murder. Later they would meet and conspire. At this point, though, the collaboration was unspoken, arising naturally to fulfill the needs of the ambitious official and the criminal sociopath. In these days, the week before Christmas 1911, each of them executed a separate and mutually reinforcing plan to firm up the case.