There are many particulars of his life that remain unclear; generally not through vagueness, but because he offered so many competing versions of it. His paradoxes are legion. An unbeliever, he consoled himself in those final seconds with the words of Isaiah: ‘For a small moment have I forsaken you; but with great mercies will I gather you.’ And in the shape of his disillusioned life, we catch the echo of another: a Jewish boy growing up by an inland sea, infatuated with dreams of the East, who saw that the world was made up of stories in arms and wanted only to invent better ones – stories of love and compassion and forgiveness.

AFTERWORD

THE NOVEL IS A LUNAR ART, borrowing its light from drama. Along with epigraphs and dedications, I’m sceptical of the need for afterwords and acknowledgements. I’m not persuaded of the value of seeing the sweaty actor-manager of a novel’s tiny theatre returning to the stage to give special thanks to their confidants and supporters. It always feels vaguely like boasting and, as a reader, I’m usually affronted that anyone could be more important to the author than me, the paying customer.

But if it were me reading this for the first time, I’d wonder how much of what I’d just been told was true.

The Protocols, of course, are all too true. Only circumstantial evidence connects the book to Rachkovsky – though it is very strong. Its baleful influence lingers. Norman Cohn’s Warrant for Genocide was my chief source and I winked at its title in the text. I also drew inspiration from Stephen Eric Bronner’s A Rumor About the Jews.

Rachkovsky was real, as was the Third Section, and the basement offices at Rue de Grenelle. I owe a big debt to Alex Butterworth’s excellent The World That Never Was. The CIA have made available online a declassified history of the Russian secret service in nineteenth-century Paris. I have taken huge liberties with the facts, but the essential truth of an arch-schemer working on the Tsar’s behalf profiting from a war on terror is, I believe, accurate.

Skobelev and MacGahan are loosely based on real characters. Januarius MacGahan (a man) was a correspondent for the London Daily News. Two volumes of the paper’s anthologised war correspondence were my chief sources for the Russo-Turkish War. The account of the massacre at Batak I drew from its pages. Skobelev was a Russian war hero but his later life took him to Central Asia, where he died. I have merged him with a character called Seliverstov who was murdered, probably on Rachkovsky’s orders, in Paris in 1887.

Bessie is a fiction, but the woman I’ve described as her sister, Gesya, was a conspirator in the assassination of Nicholas II and her death and that of her baby happened much as I recounted it.