The World That Never Was (72 page)

It was perhaps fortunate for the sake of Nicoll’s sanity that he did not know what the agents of the Paris prefecture had reported about the comings and goings of the London anarchists in Paris in the weeks before the Henry and Bourdin bombings. Had he done so, his paranoia would surely have reached a dangerous pitch. He would have been disturbed enough to learn that Dumont, an ex-colleague of Ravachol who was now part of the clique around Coulon that Nicoll had named as provocateurs, had been troublemaking in the city: indeed, early in January, Charles Malato had been so infuriated by Dumont’s incendiary rhetoric in Paris that he had threated to go there ‘to sort him out’.

What, though, would Nicoll have made of the reported meeting between Emile Henry and a ‘Bourdin Brother’ only days before the attack on the Café Terminus? If it were Martial Bourdin who had crossed the Channel to meet his fellow bomber, that would surely point simply to some coordination of their attacks. But what if it was Henry Samuels who had made the trip to meet Henry, using his wife’s name as he sometimes did, not least when applying for the British Museum Library card that was used to gain entry to specialist works on the manufacture of explosives? Both recent bombs could then have been linked to one suspected agent provocateur, with others in the background. And what questions might then have been asked about the true provenance of the earlier attacks in which Henry had been involved, or that committed by Vaillant, or even those carried out by the anarchist Christ, Ravachol, Dumont’s late friend?

No such doubts about who truly benefited from the self-sustaining cycle of anarchist terrorism seem to have troubled Emile Henry’s associate Louis Matha, whom Agent Z6 had reported leaving London on the day of the Greenwich bombing to rejoin Henry’s brother Fortune in Paris, where they meant to stage another dynamite outrage. Exactly a month later, however, while Henry read
Don Quixote
to pass the time as he awaited trial, it was another of his old accomplices by the name of Pauwels who set out for La Madeleine, in what was to have been the latest of a series of attacks on ecclesiastical targets in Paris. Yet in a near repeat of the accident that had befallen Bourdin, the device he was carrying exploded prematurely as he entered the church.

If the two events suggested a consistent flaw in design or manufacture
of bombs supplied to the anarchists, however, whether accidental or preconceived, it did not deter the part-time art impresario Félix Fénéon – who had earlier stored bomb components in his desk at the war ministry on Henry’s behalf – from venturing what seemed like a small-scale attack on his own initiative. The bomb he concealed in a flowerpot on the windowsill of the Café Foyot, just across the road from the Senate chamber in the Palais de Luxembourg and a favourite watering hole of its members, exploded as intended, but injured only his old friend Tailhade who happened to be drinking nearby. That it took out his eye seemed oddly like poetic justice for the man who had so coldly acclaimed Henry’s destructive artistry, and yet the bomb’s effect was to sustain the widespread sense of terror.

Paris once again lived in fear, as it had after the attacks by Ravachol and his gang: the bourgeoisie stayed at home and policemen handed in transfer requests, while the sound of scenery collapsing backstage at the Gaîté theatre was enough to send the audience rushing for the exits. The Third Republic and its new left-leaning government, patently incapable of defending the institutions of politics or religion against the anarchist bombers, and with the general public now in the firing line, had been further destabilised. For Henri Rochefort, dining with anarchist friends in London on the very day that Pauwels had blown himself up, the situation must have seemed quite satisfactory.

The previous year had seen Rochefort substantially repair his relationship with the anarchists themselves, telling
Le Gaulois
that they were more sinned against than sinning: ‘the true anarchist is not dangerous for he tolerates without complaint the promiscuous presence of agents provocateurs’. Furthermore, Louise Michel had recently extracted a large donation from him on their behalf, while police agents reported that anarchists and nihilists regularly visited his home to solicit his largesse. Did this generosity, that might be considered material assistance to those involved in the violence, buy him the kind of malign influence enjoyed by Conrad’s fictional Comrade X? If so, it might have made for a rather uncomfortable evening on 15 March, when his fellow diners included Constant Martin, a linchpin of the campaign of robberies that had involved Emile Henry, and Emile Pouget who had been sent to prison with Louise Michel for the bread riots a decade earlier. For on their way to the dinner from the Charlotte Street enclave, some would have passed the window of the undertaker’s shop in Tottenham Court Road, where the image of Martial Bourdin’s face, photographed as he lay in his coffin and showing all the puncture marks of the shrapnel from his
bomb, offered a grim reminder of what waging war against the state could cost.

By April, it was once again Meunier’s dossier that topped the pile on Chief Inspector Melville’s desk. With the bomber of the Café Véry said to have returned from Canada, the hunt was resumed. The associates of known militants found themselves under pressure to provide information, presumably in return for indemnity from prosecution. Bourdin’s close friend Charpentier was arrested for burglary, while Rousseau, the watchmaker who had given Henry work, was also detained. In due course, he and Coulon were considered the most likely candidates to have betrayed details of Meunier’s movements.

Melville’s coup in Walsall had briefly won him celebrity status and now the chance finally arrived for him to cement his reputation for decisive action. Having forewarned journalists, on 12 April the chief inspector and his troops staked out the boat train preparing to depart from Charing Cross station. Then, just as Meunier was about to board, Melville himself appeared from his hiding place and wrestled the outlaw to the ground. Lively representations of the scene were rushed out in the illustrated magazines: real-life detective heroism for a public whose appetite for such things had soared since the
Strand
began publishing the Sherlock Holmes stories by Conan Doyle in episodic form two years earlier. But where the phenomenal popularity of the fictional sleuth was based on regular monthly instalments of his adventures, Melville would have been confident, as he escorted Meunier out of Charing Cross station, that he could provide his public with a dramatic sequel far sooner than that.

In fact, it was only two days after Meunier’s arrest that Inspector Sweeney took a seat at the front of a bus bound for Clerkenwell, next to a twitchy Italian teenager. For the previous fortnight Special Branch agents had been watching the eighteen-year-old Francis Polti, knowing that some weeks earlier a middle-aged anarchist drifter calling himself Emile Carnot had approached Polti to take part in a bomb plot. Since then, the police had shadowed him up to the hospital in Highgate, where his wife lay dangerously ill after the recent birth of their twins, and around pharmacists’ shops closer to his home in Saffron Hill, observing as he assembled the necessary components.

It was ‘a weary and thankless task’ for the surveillance agents, Sweeney would complain, ‘telegraphing for relief to come to one place when you’ve already had to leave to go halfway across London in pursuit’. Finally, however, they had tailed him to Mr Cohen’s iron foundry in
Clerkenwell, from where he and Carnot – whose real name was Giuseppe Farnara – had commissioned the bomb’s casing. Realising that once Polti was back in the slums of the Italian quarter he might ‘easily give his pursuers the slip in the maze of alleys and courts’, and fearing that the device might prematurely explode as Bourdin’s had done, Sweeney moved to make the arrest as soon as he saw Polti’s hand enter the bag.

The motive for his planned attack, Polti declared, was to avenge himself on the British tourists who deluged the cities of his native Italy in droves each year: those Cookites who were ‘destroying the natural beauties of the place and making scorching, sunbaked boulevards where were formerly olive-shaded lanes’. The outraged eloquence, though, was that of a journalist writing in a
Pall Mall Gazette
article two years earlier; Polti’s explanation appeared quite bathetic in light of the bombs that had recently shaken the ministries in Rome in revenge for the government’s brutal suppression of the anarchist uprising. An unsent letter from Polti to his parents left no doubt that he had indeed planned a suicide attack for the following day, but his words lacked the brazen clarity of Farnara’s ‘I am guilty; I wanted to kill capitalists.’ Perhaps, to the impoverished teenager, the glory of martyrdom in the anarchist cause simply offered an escape from the burden of fatherhood. What seems certain is that he was a dupe, his reference to the ‘Royal Exchange’ rather than the ‘Stock Exchange’ as the intended target, an obvious example of poor rote learning. The crucial question was on whose behalf, if any, Farnara had put him up to it.

The newspaper
Justice
was as forthright as it dared be: ‘Somehow it does seem to us that the great Melville has possibly engineered the whole thing. We don’t say that he has, of course. Nevertheless, we cannot but remember that a serious anarchist plot in England would be very convenient just now, especially an Italian or French anarchist plot.’ A plot by Russian nihilists would have been even better, of course, but they had learned to be more cautious than their impetuous and gullible anarchist peers. If the Polti and Farnara conspiracy was useful in some respects for the chief inspector, however, in others it represented a considerable personal risk, and its early interdiction was a necessary act of caution. For shortly after the Greenwich bomb explosion, the Home Secretary, Sir William Harcourt, had been overheard in the lobby of the House of Commons reprimanding the assistant commissioner, Sir Robert Anderson, whose responsibility it was to supervise Special Branch. ‘All that’s very well,’ he had said, ‘but your idea of secrecy over there seems to consist of keeping the Home Secretary in the dark.’

Ten years before, during his previous tenure at the Home Office,
Harcourt had adamantly opposed the use of agents provocateurs, arguing that ‘the police ought not to set traps for people’. It must have been clear to Chief Inspector Melville that were some terrible error in Special Branch’s management of a bomb plot to expose his illicit plans to undermine the principles of liberal Britain, he could expect no quarter from its political masters. And yet with each successive coup against the anarchists, Melville’s reputation rose, and with each outrage abroad, so too did the perceived need for robust policing of the émigrés. It must have been with some delight, then, that just a week after Polti’s arrest, when the air was still thick with awkward rumours of provocation, Melville received news of a series of explosions that had rocked the city of Liège in Belgium. His delight, however, would have been premature. Any hopes he had of presenting the Belgium bombings as final proof of an international terrorist network would soon evaporate.

Liège, nestling in the deep folds of hills close to Belgium’s industrial heartland, was no stranger to terrorism. Nor was it unfamiliar with the effects of agents provocateurs, with the Catholic and government conspiracy that had framed the socialist leader Pourbaix, seven years earlier, still fresh in many memories. More recently, in 1892, the city had been the first to be struck by the international wave of terrorism that had since reached from Barcelona to Rome, and Paris to London. Though largely unremarked upon outside Belgium, the attacks had been in response to the mayor’s decision to ban May Day demonstrations, and had targeted the more affluent areas of the city, causing considerable damage and alarm but no injuries. Moineaux, a leading Belgian anarchist, had been convicted of the bombings, together with fifteen other
compagnons
, but to the surprise of many in the city, a local cabaret owner called Schlebach, widely blamed for initiating the violence, had been acquitted on the judge’s instruction.

As May Day approached in 1894, mounting tensions and resentments appeared to augur a new round of trouble. A month earlier, a huge clerical march had roused the indignation of the local socialists, since when it had been reported that an anti-socialist organisation over 500 strong was planning to demand tougher restrictions on the labour movement’s activities. Against a backdrop of recent pit collapses at nearby coal mines which had cost many lives, and press reports of an army of tens of thousands of America’s unemployed converging on Washington, DC to demonstrate, the socialists of Liège, a powerful force, were not inclined to submit without a fight. Where normally the result might have been strikes and
demonstrations, however, the start of Emile Henry’s trial at the Court of Assizes appeared to inspire the anarchist faction to emulate his bloodier example.

The first bomb exploded on the evening of 1 May itself, the Saturday of the week in which Henry’s advocate had opened the case for his defence. Wedged into an angle of the right transept of the medieval pilgrimage church of Saint-Jacques, the sixty cartridges of dynamite, weighing more than six kilograms, produced a devastating blast. Windows were shattered, a large hole was blown in the floor and many of the great stones supporting the vaulted roof cracked; had the charge been positioned only slightly differently, the ancient nave would have been brought down. Within minutes, the sound of the explosion had drawn a crowd of several hundred. Troops from the Belgian army had to be drafted in to keep order, but the young man seen sprinting away from the blast escaped unrecognised.

Awaiting news of the attack at his lodgings in Schlebach’s cabaret club was the well-dressed Baron Ernest Ungern-Sternberg. A pale and rather corpulent figure with blond hair and a moustache tinted with red, his somewhat anomalous presence appears to have aroused no prior suspicion. Having arrived in Liège some months earlier, he had established himself as a charismatic presence in the anarchist community, equipped in advance with a descriptive list of its most significant members, to guide him in winning their trust. It was he who had commissioned one local activist called Muller to steal a sizeable quantity of dynamite from a store in nearby Chevron earlier in the year. And as witnesses would attest, ‘The joy of the Russian was fierce’ upon hearing of the damage caused by the Saint-Jacques bomb.