A Child of Christian Blood: Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Russia: The Beilis Blood Libel (13 page)

A theory of the case was assembling itself in Mishchuk’s mind. The boy, it was clear, had seen Zhenya on the day he disappeared. Vera Cheberyak, it had been rumored, had taken advantage of the 1905 pogrom to loot fabulous amounts of property during the chaos. He formulated a hypothesis that Andrei’s murder was committed “with the goal of simulating a ritual murder and inciting a pogrom.” That part of the scenario could be considered wild conjecture. But he rightly believed Cheberyak had to be considered a leading suspect and that intense attention should be focused on her and her gang. For better or worse in the Russia of 1911, detaining suspects in order to press them to confess was standard procedure. But when Mishchuk recommended arresting Vera Cheberyak, Chaplinsky, the chief prosecutor, scolded him: “Why are you torturing an innocent woman?”

At the same time, Mishchuk began scheming against Krasovsky, just as the other detective had feared. Mishchuk may have felt his intrigue was justified, however. In a letter to the Kiev police chief on June 13, he accused Krasovsky of attempting to suborn witnesses against Andrei’s stepfather. The chief of police forwarded the letter to the governor, who sent it to Chaplinsky, who scrawled on it, “
Relations between Krasovsky and Mishchuk are very bad.” But no action was taken against Krasovsky who, strictly speaking, did not fabricate testimony, though he would come very close to the line.

Krasovsky was now free to turn his attention to Andrei’s family. He prepared to exhume their delusions and bitter rifts and turn them into his own theory of the case.

Nikolai Krasovsky believed the evidence against Luka was accumulating. In June, a search of his workstation at the bookbinder turned
up
clippings from right-wing newspapers about ritual murder, along with a slip of paper tucked into a book with notes on the anatomy of the blood vessels in the temple—the area of the skull where Andrei was stabbed some thirteen times. Krasovsky ordered Luka arrested on June 26. Also arrested were Luka’s brother and, possibly to exert excruciating emotional leverage on the suspects, their blind father.

Krasovsky supervised as the police ordered Luka to dress in new clothes and try on various hats. A barber shaved Luka’s beard, gave him a haircut (Luka noticed the barber paid particular attention to shearing the right side), and dyed his hair and eyebrows black. One of Krasovsky’s deputies personally attended to curling Luka’s mustache. When tears rolled down his face, the police raised their hands threateningly and told him, “Don’t you dare cry, you so-and-so … your tears will make your mustaches unwind.” The suspect was brought to the exact spot on a street bordering the area of the caves where the stove repairman Yashchenko said he had seen the man he described as “dark” and “dressed like a gentleman” (a description that in itself made it improbable the man was Luka). Despite the rather drastic makeover, Yashchenko still did not positively identify Luka as the man he had seen. Looking at him from one angle, he thought Luka might be the same person, but some facial features, particularly the nose, he said, were different.

Krasovsky was not about to let himself be defeated. The truth that he so strongly suspected lay hidden in Luka’s guilt-ridden heart would be coaxed out into the open—with a small white lie easing its path.
In Luka’s presence, two “witnesses” (actually officers in civilian clothes) positively “identified” Luka as being at the crime scene. Shaken, at this point Luka said something like, “I’m obviously not going to avoid the gallows, but at least let my sick father go.” These words were interpreted as a confession. Krasovsky believed he had his man.

The local prosecutor, Brandorf, was also a firm opponent of the “ritual” theory of the
Yushchinsky murder. But he had reached a different and much more well-founded conclusion: that Andrei died at the instigation of Vera Cheberyak. Golubev, by identifying Zhenya Cheberyak as a witness, had unintentionally led the authorities to the
mother. Everyone who had talked to Zhenya believed he lived in fear of his mother and that he knew more than he was telling. It was clear to all, even to Chaplinsky, that she must be investigated as a suspect.

In late May, Krasovsky and three other
officers searched the Cheberyaks’
home. The presence of a citizen witness was a part of standard procedure and the long-suffering landlord,
Stepan Zakharchenko, was summoned to fulfill that role. Zakharchenko wanted nothing more than to remove the whole Cheberyak family from his property. He was tired of harboring this villainous woman and had had enough of her raucous, drunken parties. He didn’t think much of her children either, who pilfered fruit from his orchard. What is more, he likely had recently learned Cheberyak had been chiseling money for years from his daughter, who ran a grocery store up the street, buying on credit and then paying back less than she had been charged. (His daughter inexplicably let Cheberyak maintain the account book.) His daughter had filed a complaint with the authorities, something Cheberyak probably did not yet know, and they were preparing to bring fraud charges against her. The landlord’s relationship with Cheberyak was also fraught in one more respect that would grow in importance: he was friendly with Mendel Beilis.

As Zakharchenko went up the stairs to the Cheberyaks’ apartment to join the
police officers, Cheberyak’s downstairs neighbor
Zinaida
Malitskaya followed him. She and Cheberyak had once been great friends, but their relationship had gone bad, as evidenced by their violent public quarrel some weeks earlier. (Cheberyak said Malitskaya had taunted her with a rumor she’d “spent the night” somewhere—she didn’t appreciate the intimation that she was a loose woman.) Sensing trouble, Zakharchenko waved Malitskaya off, but she went up anyway, explaining that she wanted to witness the “big day.” Upon seeing her, Cheberyak said, “What do you want?” Malitskaya said, “I came to see your big day.” Cheberyak said, “Go away, you know I’m an anxious woman.” Then she threw herself on Malitskaya and slapped her in the face. An officer pulled Cheberyak off and the search got under way.

While Krasovsky and two officers examined the premises, the third officer struck up a conversation with Zhenya and asked him about the murder. “He wanted to tell me something,” the officer, a police supervisor named
Evtikhy
Kirichenko, recalled, “but suddenly stammered and said that he didn’t remember.” Kirichenko talked to the boy while sitting in a chair at the threshold between two rooms. Cheberyak was standing in the same room as Zhenya, across the threshold, off to the side but out of view. “When I asked Zhenya who killed [Andrei] I noticed that his face convulsed,” Kirichenko reported. Leaning down
in his chair, Kirichenko managed to catch sight of
Cheberyak “standing and with her hand and with her whole body making threatening gestures.” He and Zhenya caught the gestures at the same moment. Kirichenko, an experienced officer, was so overwhelmed that he broke his professional composure. It was as if he had come in touch with the “evil force,” the woman the neighborhood children believed could cast spells. He immediately halted the conversation with Zhenya and rushed to a fellow officer to share his powerful intuition that this woman must have been involved in the crime. Nothing else, he felt, could explain the vision of sheer malevolence he had witnessed at the mention of the dead boy’s name.

Brandorf had argued to Chaplinsky a number of times that Vera Cheberyak should be arrested but Chaplinsky had refused his request, as he had Mishchuk’s. Brandorf felt he had no choice but to maneuver behind Chaplinsky’s back to have Vera
Cheberyak detained. He tried to convince investigating magistrate Fenenko, who shared his views, to act. But in the face of the opposition of his superior, Chaplinsky, and in the absence of clear evidence, the hypercorrect Fenenko would not take the risk.

As a last resort, Brandorf schemed to have Cheberyak detained by the Corps of Gendarmes, which had the power to take practically anyone into custody if he or she was deemed a possible threat to “state security.” The powers of the Kiev Gendarmes had been further enhanced in anticipation of the upcoming official visit of Tsar Nicholas, along with Prime Minister Stolypin, at the end of August to unveil a statue of Nicholas’s grandfather,
Alexander II. The authorities were determined to clear the city of troublemakers. The deputy interior minister, General Pavel Kurlov, who had so decisively intervened to stop a pogrom in the wake of Andrei’s murder, personally headed security for the visit. Nothing would be allowed to disrupt the majestic honor of the sovereign’s presence
in Kiev.

Therefore it attracted little attention when, on June 9, gendarmes led away one more potential troublemaker on the pretext that “suspicious persons, taking part in a political movement, gather at her home.” In fact, the only people gathering at Vera Cheberyak’s home were her young
lovers and other assorted
criminals. Brandorf had high hopes that he had the killer. “I firmly expected that if she sat in jail for a few days,” he later testified, “the whole case would be solved.”

Vera Cheberyak’s husband, Vasily, also had high hopes—that Vera’s
arrest would finally change his luck for the better. His life with Vera—the long overnight shifts at the telegraph office, punctuated by the humiliating oblivion of drinking binges among her lovers, and now the constant fear of police raids—had made him a desperate man. The appearance of the gendarmes at his doorstep must have seemed like a deus ex machina. “
I’ll be free of her,” he told a friend after his wife was arrested, “and I’ll be able to start living a normal life.”

But the hopes of both husband and prosecutor depended on an event that had not yet happened: a confession, or at least some slip, however small, under the pressure of hour after hour of questioning, which would implicate Cheberyak and her gang. Cheberyak possessed a fantastic and frightening capacity to intimidate, dominate, manipulate, and evade her accusers. (In her most recent such feat, she had
beaten the rap in the matter of the stolen dress she had sold to her sometime boarder by somehow producing three witnesses—two female friends and a baker named Abramov—who swore she had come by it honestly.) But Brandorf and the senior gendarme officer, Lieutenant Colonel Ivanov, believed that Cheberyak would be a different, more vulnerable woman now that she was under arrest “as a matter of state security,” a limbo where there were no lawyers and no means of appeal. While in confinement and under intense interrogation—something she had never experienced—they were confident she would crack.

Just as important, police could now question Zhenya Cheberyak out of his mother’s earshot. In previous interrogations, the boy had clearly betrayed a desire to reveal the truth. With his mother safely behind bars, gentle questioning might loosen the bonds of the boy’s fear. Indeed Zhenya, questioned a week after his mother’s detention, did let slip some details that converged with what other witnesses were saying. He now admitted that Andrei had come by the Cheberyaks’ house for some gunpowder. “
I was afraid to tell you about the gunpowder in the last questioning because I thought that you would beat me for that,” he admitted, “but now, when you explained that investigators can’t beat anyone, I’m telling you the truth.” And he confirmed that the last time he saw Andrei, the boy was without his coat, which was never found (a circumstantial detail that would grow in importance later in the investigation). But while he admitted that Andrei had visited him, he insisted that it was at two p.m., not in the morning, and denied that the day could have been March 12, the day his friend disappeared. The
investigators were frustrated that Zhenya could not seem to break his mother’s spell.

Zhenya, moreover, suddenly and suspiciously claimed to remember something that he had failed to mention in previous interrogations—and that implicated Andrei’s uncle Fyodor. On the evening of March 12, he said he had been sent by his father to the beer hall to fetch two bottles and had encountered a “
very drunk” Fyodor who, “seeing me, bent over and quietly said, ‘Andrusha is no more, he’s been stabbed to death.’ ” Questioned separately, his mother told a slightly different version of the story. Investigators found Zhenya’s testimony to be contradicted by many witnesses. Cheberyak had probably planned for this testimony when mother and son would be separated. It was likely the story was a well-crafted but imperfectly coordinated lie to divert suspicion away from her.

A pattern had emerged: Vera Cheberyak invariably pointed the finger at the leading or most convenient suspect of the moment. After Andrei’s mother was arrested, she was said to have spread stories about her abusive treatment of her son. When attention focused on the Jews, she avowed that they were the perpetrators. Now, when she believed Fyodor to be a prime suspect, she did what she could to pin the crime on him. The pattern would persist.

Cheberyak was held from June 9 to July 9 as a matter of “state security.” But the security organs could hold her no longer without formal charges. On July 9 Brandorf found it necessary to have Officer Krasovsky arrest her formally for suspicion in Andrei’s death. Her confinement could be kept secret no longer. Just five days later, she was released at the insistence of Chaplinsky after an indignant Golubev, greatly outraged that no Jew had yet been charged, demanded she be freed.

Little else is known about Cheberyak’s five-week confinement. But the break the prosecutor and her husband both hoped for never came. She did not crack, and she returned home to her hapless husband who, far from being rid of her, would now be drawn further into her machinations.

Krasovsky had been on the scene when Officer Kirichenko had his unnerving encounter with Vera Cheberyak and must have been briefed
about it. But he ignored it, even though Kirichenko was one of his protégés. He continued to prosecute his investigation of Luka Prikhodko with ruthless zeal. The tsarist justice system was not without checks and balances, and Luka could have complained about any mistreatment he had suffered when he was brought in to be interviewed by Investigator Fenenko. Asked later why he did not protest, Luka said, “If they had asked me that night what my name was I couldn’t have told them.”