Chapter 25 - All Out Of Wine

In search of a bomb manual

We’re 25 chapters published on here! That’s a lot! I hope it’s been enjoyable to read so far. And I hope the free behind-the-history of the chapter are interesting to you as well. I have a longer preview for yall today.

This chapter has us seeing Hemachandra Das in Paris, looking for bomb recipes among anarchist circles. There are strangely not too many details available about this whole episode, and I had to actually make it up. You’d think I’d be more comfortable doing that given I’m writing fiction, but every time I made something up, the real history would turn up, and it’d be completely wild compared to what I imagined.

All I knew was that Hem sold his house in Midnapore and came to Paris, where he was mentored by an older anarchist called Libertad, and was helped along in his quest by the famous anarchist Emma Goldman, and that he hit up against many walls before he found the right bomb manual. I only recently found out that he was also sponsored by Sardarsinh Rana, who was an associate of Madame Cama and Shyamji Krishna Varma.

I tried to see what the anarchist scene in Paris was like, and it seemed like a lot of the main characters were folks born into some kind of wealth and then drawn to anarchist ideals and fascinated by the Bolshevists from the Russian revolution. Hem’s mentor Joseph Albert, aka Libertad, OTOH, was an orphan who lost his legs to disease in his childhood, but used his crutches as weapons when the cops came for him... which is wild. Could I have made up a character like that? Sure, but you’d think it was too on the nose.

My husband read an early draft of this and said jokingly, “You need to have him say ‘I came to Paris to drink wine and make bombs, and I’m all out of wine’”. So I had to add that line to the chapter, it’s on the nose in the right way. What do you think?

All Out Of Wine

1908, Paris

Hem stood outside the red door of a nondescript apartment in Montmarte, matching the number on the door with the piece of paper in his hand. He was at the right place, wasn’t he? The gas lamps were dimming down, it was hard to see. All the apartments looked the same, with peeling facades, faded anarchist posters asking to burn the world down. A cold wind was blowing, taking away the stench of old boiled cabbage and coal, and he pulled on his muffler tighter.

He knocked and waited.

He had been in Paris for about a year now. It had been hard at first, but he had the money from having sold his house. Still, he had been frugal, except when it had come to socializing. He had met Madame Cama, who had set him up with some introductions, said yes to every party he was invited to, and made his political opinions known to one and all. It had worked. Within two months, he had come across the well-known wealthy anarchist Libertad, and he had agreed to sponsor his education at the University of Paris.

It had been wonderful to be seen as being close to Libertad, of course. It opened doors for him he hadn’t even known had existed. He had been invited to meetings of groups he couldn’t in a million years had known of.

Most of the people he had met at them, however, seemed like spoilt European and Middle Eastern heirs and heiresses looking to ‘find themselves’ before they inevitably settled down with a spouse and children, a share of the family business, or a career in law or publishing, which would all eventually lead into politics.

But there were also other sorts. There were Americans, closer to him in age, who had had several brushes with the law in their land for plotting against the State, and who had slipped away to Europe for a new start. Usually they had abandoned husbands, wives, and children to do so. There were also Russians, usually highly educated, cockily confident, and yet, somehow, unassuming. There was a whole spectrum among the Russians, ranging from veterans of the Revolution and Bolshevists who had experience with arms, bombs, and organizing people, and were on the run for political crimes, to criminals and conmen who posed as the former.

Early in his time in Europe, Hem had learned that he needed to look for a Russian bomb doctor in order to learn how to make bombs. There were some Italians who were apparently good at it, but they were all too old and cantankerous, and the best of them were all dead anyway. The Russians were the ones with the most recent experience, with their success in the Revolution of 1905. But somehow, finding a real bomb doctor was proving to be a real challenge. He had had several wild goose chases that had left him with less money, but slightly more wisdom on avoiding Russian conmen and conwomen. Many more highly educated men from the colonies were trying to learn the art of the bomb, enough that a whole industry had sprung up around them.

Today would be different, he hoped.