The Man Who Loved Dogs (44 page)

Caridad looked at him and, with a caution that was uncharacteristic of her, said:

“There’s a rumor among the people that the advisers are going to leave us to our fate. They even talk about the ill will of some . . .”

“The ones saying that are ungrateful . . . I want to leave because I have another mission. I’ve sweat blood in Spain and put my own skin in front of Italian tanks in Madrid when no one could give a damn about the city . . .” Tom drank from a glass of wine that had been served and looked at the tablecloth, startlingly white, as if he were looking for a nonexistent stain. “No one can say that I want to abandon you.”

Silence settled over the table and Mink seized upon it as he refilled his empty glass.

“I know that the situation in Spain hurts, but we have some other minor problems, like what we’re going to order, right? I recommend the Alsatian
choucroute
; the sausages are first-rate. Although I’m opting for the
cassoulet
, I love duck . . .”

Before Tom stepped back into Kotov’s skin and returned to Spain, Jacques received advice that was really an order: he was to erase Spain and the war from his head. To Jacques Mornard, what was happening to the south of the Pyrenees was just news read in the papers. Ramón could not allow that passion to crack his identity, not even in the most intimate circles, and as a preventative measure Tom forbade him from seeing or talking to
Caridad until he authorized it. The subtle machinery that he had put into motion made Ramón’s sentimental, patriotic gaffe unacceptable. Ramón Mercader had proven to be capable of placing himself above those weaknesses and his passions should not see the light of day until they were called upon for a greater cause, perhaps the same greater cause.

George Mink, the son of Ukrainians who emigrated to France in the days of the Russian Civil War, became responsible from then on for placing Jacques in the Parisian world that befitted him. They spent weeks going to the bohemian haunts of the Rive Gauche, and the Hippodrome, where Jacques practiced his theoretical knowledge of betting; they wandered the historic and now dilapidated streets of Le Marais, got close to the chorus girls of the Moulin Rouge, inviting them to champagne; and they surveyed at the steering wheel the streets of Paris learned from the maps Jacques studied in Malakhovka. As if he were visiting a sanctuary, George took him to Le Gemy Club, where Louis Leplée was presenting his great discovery,
La Môme
Piaf, a volatile and rather scruffy little woman who, with an enormous voice, sang songs full of vulgar phrases and daring metaphors that, nonetheless, left the Belgian bored and speechless. With Jacques at the wheel, they visited Brussels and Liège, the fabulous castles of the Loire basin, and trained the young man’s palate with Belgian chocolates, French wine and cheeses, hearty Norman plates, and the subtle aromas of
provençal
cuisine. The apartment on rue Léopold Robert took on a bourgeois and informal air, and Jacques dressed himself in the wares of some German Jewish tailors recently installed in Le Marais, ending up with twelve hats in his closet. The whole time they remained removed from French political circles, the world of Russian émigrés, and the haunts of Spanish Republicans, where the spies of the whole planet’s secret services milled about as if they had been gathered for a general convention of the shadow world.

When Tom returned at the beginning of June, he observed with satisfaction how his creature had progressed and felt pleased at having known how to find in a primitive Catalan Communist that diamond he was now polishing to perfection. Once his time in Spain was up, Tom had returned to New York, to learn that the Sylvia Ageloff line had been activated and that it would begin to run in the month of July when the girl, a high school teacher, took her summer vacation and, thanks to the enthusiasm and economic generosity of her old friend Ruby Weil, embarked on
the trip of her dreams to Paris. Without telling him who the person in the photograph was, Tom gave Jacques a picture of Ruby Weil and saw that the young man’s eyes lit up.

“She’s not bad,” he admitted.

Tom smiled and, without saying anything, gave him a second photo of a woman close to thirty, with rounded, Coke-bottle glasses, a thin face covered in freckles and straight hair falling gracelessly, through which the points of her ears stuck out.

“Every wine is not a Bordeaux, Jacques,” Tom said, continuing to smile. “This is Sylvia Ageloff, your hare. If you cook her well enough, she’ll even taste good.”

To soften the shock, Tom told him that he had also been in Mexico, where other parts of the operation had been set in motion. While the men from the Comintern had assigned the Communist Party the mission of raising popular spirits against the presence of the renegade in Mexico, four agents, all of them Spaniards, had been planted in the capital to carry out the operation if the order was given and if the possibilities for success were considered real.

“You are perhaps living the best vacation of your life, in Paris, far from the war, with money to burn. If you have to gnaw that bone”—he tapped the photographed face of Sylvia Ageloff with his nail and smiled—“and in the end you’re not the one to carry out the job, we’ll give you a good discount on your debts.”

Jacques thought there were worse sacrifices, and with that consolation he resolved to await the arrival of the woman who, if he was lucky, would be his channel to the remote Coyoacán and, perhaps, to history.

At the beginning of July, Tom and Mink disappeared and those days of pleasant summer waiting for moment zero were for Jacques Mornard slow days, darkened by the galloping crisis affecting the government coalition of the Popular Front in France. Above all, he was bothered by the worsening news that came from Spain, where the evacuation of International Brigade volunteers had begun without the Popular Army, despite the intrepid campaign of the Ebro, managing to push back the pro-Franco troops or kick them out of the strip they’d opened up to the Mediterranean. The vestiges of Ramón still beating within Jacques couldn’t help but be irritated by those failures, but his discipline allowed him to
keep himself far from the places where the evacuated volunteers gathered before returning to their respective countries. Ramón would have liked to have heard their stories.

On July 15, without Jacques expecting him, a pale and agitated Tom went to see him at the apartment on rue Léopold Robert. Without even saying hello, Tom told him that a serious complication had arisen: everything seemed to indicate that Orlov, head of the Soviet intelligence advisers in Spain, had deserted. At that moment, for the first time, Jacques would see a streak of weakness in that man whom he admired so much for his aplomb in any circumstance. But very soon he understood the dimensions of the disaster tormenting him.

“We’re after him, but the son of a bitch knows all our methods and how we do things. We know he’s in France, perhaps even right here in Paris, and the truth is that I think he’ll escape us.”

“Are you sure he deserted?”

“He had no other choice.”

“Wasn’t he your right-hand man?”

“So much so that he knows the entire network of Soviet espionage in Europe.”

Jacques felt a tremor go through him.

“Does he also know about me?”

“No,” Tom reassured him. “You’re beyond his reach. But not the comrades who are in Mexico. You can’t imagine what Orlov knows. As they say in Spain, that swine left us with our asses hanging in the air . . . It’s a disaster.”

“I swear I don’t understand. Orlov was a traitor?”

Tom lit a cigarette, as if he needed that break.

“No, I don’t think so, and that’s the worst part. They forced him to desert. What happened was that crazy Yezhov sent Orlov a telegram telling him he should come to Paris, take a car from the embassy, and show up in Antwerp to board a ship where there would be a very important meeting with an envoy of his. Orlov didn’t even need to be too intelligent to realize that if he showed up, he would end up dead, like Antonov-Ovseyenko and other advisers that Yezhov had called for. On the eleventh, he left Spain and disappeared.”

Jacques Mornard felt his head spinning. Something too sick and out of control was happening and, based on what Tom was saying, the consequences could be unpredictable.

“If Beria and Comrade Stalin don’t stop Yezhov, everything is going to get fucked up.”

“So why don’t they just stop him, goddammit?” Jacques cried out.

“Bloody hell, because Stalin doesn’t want to!” Tom yelled, throwing his cigarette to the floor. “Because he doesn’t want to!”

Tom stood up. The fury possessing him was unfamiliar to Jacques, who remained silent until the other man, back in control of himself, again spoke.

“Your plan is still on. Orlov doesn’t even know you exist and that’s our guarantee. Now it’s more important than ever that you do everything right. As long as we don’t know where Orlov is and what information he’s going to release, we’re up in the air. For now, we’ve put three of the comrades in Mexico in quarantine and have taken the other one out for good . . . Orlov knew that agent personally. He himself recommended him for a job with the utmost responsibility.”

Jacques remained silent. He knew that Tom needed to get out all of those tensions and that he was doing it in front of him because he trusted his discretion and required his intelligence, perhaps more than ever before.

“I’m going to tell you something you were going to find out at some point, and it doesn’t make sense anymore for you not to know. The agent we removed from Mexico is a woman and she was working under the name Patria. When the time came, if it had been necessary, you and she would have worked together . . .”

Ramón gave a start. Was it possible that Yezhov’s foolish act had deprived him of something so beautiful that he couldn’t have even dreamed of it?

“Are you talking about . . .?”

“África de las Heras. When you arrived at Malakhovka, she was in cabin 9. She left there two months before you. Orlov doesn’t know where she is, but he knows her and we can’t risk her. She’s too valuable.”

Ramón Mercader stood up and went to the window from which he could see the boulevard du Montparnasse. Evening was falling and the cafés, with their tables in the sun, had filled with locals, carefree and pleasant, who would talk about the great and small things in their lives, perhaps anodyne, but theirs. To know that for weeks he had had África thirty yards away from him without being allowed to see her was not a comforting piece of news. It was a mutilation, one more, of the many he’d
had to endure to reach the dark point of his life in which he found himself: without a past, without a present, with a future in which he would depend on others, on the impalpable paths of history. Ramón turned around and looked at Tom, who, with his head down, was smoking again.

“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of my responsibilities. I’m not going to fail you . . . So, is she well?”

Behind the bar’s counter was the longest, cleanest, and most precise mirror Ramón Mercader would see in his whole life. It was the mirror against which he would compare every other mirror in the world, the mirror in which he wanted to see himself, especially the frozen Moscow morning of 1968 that, feeling the abrasive pain in his right hand and observing his reflection in the new glass walls of the mausoleum of the god of the world’s proletarians, he saw the emptiness pursuing his shadowy life. He thought that if he’d been in front of that magic mirror at the Ritz, he would have surely seen himself, as he did on those afternoons in 1938, when he was Jacques Mornard and he walked around with his faith and his health intact, wearing a suit of muslin or twill that was crisp because of the starch, swollen with pride at knowing he was at the center of the battle for the future of mankind.

Before he left, Tom had explained to him, with his usual meticulousness, how that first meeting with Sylvia Ageloff and Ruby Weil would go. On the afternoon of July 19, Jacques would run into the women at the bar of the Hôtel Ritz, where Ruby and Sylvia would go in the company of the bookseller Gertrude Allison, so that he, taking advantage of his client relationship with Allison, would be introduced to the tourists and invite them for a drink. At that moment, Sylvia would fall in the Belgian’s sights; from that moment on, the way in which she was gunned down would depend only upon the abilities and the steady hand of Jacques Mornard.

But that afternoon, seated in front of the gin and tonic barely sprinkled with gin, he was again thinking that perhaps África’s brusque change in attitude, when they separated in Barcelona, had nothing to do with other men and was only due to orders to cut off her old relationships before getting involved with her new mission. Relieved by that thought, he watched, through the mirror, the noisy and smiling entrance of four women. He recognized Allison, the blond Ruby Weil, and told himself that the tall, young one must be Marie Crapeau, a French friend of the bookseller’s.
He then focused on the freckly one with glasses, with milky skin, who hid her extreme thinness below a wide, pleated skirt and a flounced blouse, and he felt how the glass perfectly reflected back the overwhelming ugliness of Sylvia Ageloff. He saw her sit at a table and decided to turn around in order to observe, like the other patrons, the women who came in with such a ruckus. He understood at that moment that Jacques Mornard was about to grow up.

Gertrude Allison gave a cry of authentic surprise:

“But look who’s here! Hi, Jacques!”

Smiling, with his glass in hand, he approached the women, allowing his personal charm, his elegance, and his cologne to spread and start his work. Gertrude made the introductions and when he shook Sylvia’s hand, he had the feeling of touching a small and feeble bird. Gertrude Allison explained to him who her friends were, two Americans on holiday in Paris, and invited him to sit down. He didn’t want to interrupt their party, but if she insisted . . . on the condition that they allow him to buy them all drinks.