The Man Who Loved Dogs (60 page)

Jacques Mornard patted the straight reddish fur with the pads of his fingers with real satisfaction. He allowed his hands to be licked and, in a voice inaudible to the rest, said some words of affection in French. For a few moments he was disconnected from the world, in a corner of time and space in which only he, the dog, and some memories he had thought buried existed. When he regained his bearings, still kneeling, he lifted his gaze toward Seva and asked him the pet’s name.

“Azteca,” the kid said.

“He’s beautiful,” Mornard admitted. “So he’s yours, right?”

“Yes, I brought him when he was a puppy.”

“When I was a boy, I had two. Adam and Eve. Labradors.”

“Azteca is a mutt. But my grandfather always had Russian wolfhounds.”

“Did he have borzois?” The question was filled with admiration.
“They’re the most beautiful hounds in the world. I would’ve given anything to have one.”

“The last one was called Maya. I knew her.”

“So you’re going for a walk with Azteca?” he asked as he petted the ecstatic animal’s ears.

“We’re going to the river . . .”

Jacques stood up and smiled.

“I’m sorry, I haven’t introduced myself. I’m Jacson, Sylvia’s boyfriend.”

“I’m Seva,” the young boy said.

“Have fun, Seva . . . Goodbye, Azteca,” he said, and the dog wagged his tail.

“He likes you,” Seva said, smiling, and walked toward the nearby intersection. At that moment Jacques Mornard could feel in the air how the fortress’s bulletproof door was beginning to melt before him. He was making more and more friends behind those walls.

One afternoon at the end of February, when he turned down Morelos toward Viena, he noticed that Sylvia was waiting for him by the door to the house, in the company of a couple he immediately recognized thanks to the photographs he had studied so many times. As he always did, he stopped the car on the other side of the street, got out, and kissed Sylvia. She introduced him to Alfred and Marguerite Rosmer, reminding him that a year and a half before, when he had taken her to Périgny for the founding meeting of the Fourth International, he had been in front of the couple’s house.

“Yes, of course . . . Beautiful house,” Jacques said with his usual lightness. “Are you vacationing in Mexico?”

Alfred Rosmer explained to him that he had traveled to accompany Seva Volkov, who until recently had lived in France (“I already know him, him and Azteca,” the Belgian pointed out, smiling). They spoke about the situation in Paris, of the military mobilization of young Frenchmen, and when they said goodbye fifteen minutes later, the Rosmers and the Mornards promised to dine together at one of the city’s restaurants the young man knew. With a touch of bourgeois boastfulness, Jacques made it clear that he was treating.

When Mademoiselle Yanovitch was able to return to her job, Sylvia ceased to be indispensable, but Jacques and his Buick returned frequently to the fortress on Avenida Viena, where no one thought his presence unusual anymore. Once a week they stopped by to pick up the Rosmers to
go and dine in the city center or, if they were willing, to the nearby city of Cuernavaca, and on the occasional Sunday to the farther-off Puebla. During those outings, they talked about the human and the divine and Jacques had to listen, with admiring attention, to stories about the great friendship between the Rosmers and the Trotskys, begun before the Great War—“Huh, when I was learning to read,” Jacques commented one day, though in reality he had already studied the details of that relationship—and, with obvious boredom, the conversations between the Rosmers and Sylvia about the disastrous Soviet invasion of Finland and the imminent Nazi offensive in Western Europe, the growing aggressiveness of Mexican communist propaganda against Lev Davidovich, and even matters of internal politics of the not-very-healthy Fourth International. He showed greater interest when he learned that Trotsky owned a hardy collection of cacti and devoted a couple of hours a day to raising rabbits. But Mornard’s favorite topic was bohemian life in Paris, to which he had introduced Sylvia during the months they lived in France, and about which he ended up being much more in the know than the Rosmers.

One night after Jacques had gone down to get cigarettes and returned to the hotel room, Sylvia told him that a Mr. Roberts had called him: he needed to see him urgently over a business matter. The following morning, when Jacques arrived at the apartment in Shirley Court, Tom himself opened the door to him. His mentor informed him that Caridad was in Havana and would return in a few days. He had had some very important meetings, he added, his eyes fixed on Jacques.

“The time to hunt the Duck has come,” he said.

Ramón felt the impact of those words in his stomach. Tom gave him time to process the news and then told him about his most recent meeting with Comrade Stalin, this time at a dacha he owned about sixty miles from Moscow, where he held the most secret meetings. In addition to Tom, Beria and Sudoplatov had been there, and regarding what was discussed there, Ramón only had to know—he noted that he had called him “Ramón” but always spoke French—what concerned him directly, since they were vital matters for the Soviet state. The young man nodded and lit a cigarette, consumed by anxiety.

“The renegade is preparing the great betrayal,” Tom began, looking at his hands. “An agent of ours passed on the fact that the Germans and the traitor are reaching an agreement to use him as the head of a takeover government when the Nazis decide to invade the Soviet Union. They
need a puppet, and there is none better than Trotsky. Through another channel, we learned that he’s willing to collaborate with the Americans if they’re the ones who, if the war goes in that direction, end up invading the Soviet Union. He’s even willing to make a pact with the devil.”

“Goddamn him!” Ramón said, unable to control himself.

“There is more . . . ,” Tom continued. “In the Soviet Union, we’ve arrested two Trotskyist agents under orders to assassinate Comrade Stalin. They have both confessed, but this time it has been decided not to publicize it, because with the war you have to move with the greatest caution.”

“So what’s the order?” Ramón asked, wishing to hear only one response.

“The order is to take him out of the game before the end of the summer. Hitler is now going to attack the West and he’s not going to try anything against the USSR, but if he advances through Europe as quickly as we think he will, in a few months he can turn against us.”

“Despite the pact?”

“Do you believe in the word of that crazy protector of Aryan purity?”

Ramón shook his head for a long time. Hitler was not his concern and his mentor’s subsequent words confirmed it.

“In a few weeks, our American spy arrives in Mexico. From that moment everything is going to move quickly. First we’ll play the Mexican group card. Last night I was already with Felipe and he thinks that if the American does his job, they will be able to do theirs.”

“So what do I do?” Ramón’s disappointment was obvious.

“Keep moving forward as if nothing has happened. I know you have become close with the Rosmers, and they and your beloved Sylvia are going to open the doors of the house for you.”

“Sylvia has to go back to New York in a few days . . .”

“Let her go. You will go on like you have until now, and when the Mexicans’ attack takes place, whatever happens, you will continue that routine. If things turn out as we expect, then we all leave in a few days. If it fails, you bring Sylvia and we start with another plan.”

Ramón looked at the adviser and said, with all his conviction, “I can do it better than the Mexicans.” Tom’s blue eyes were like two precious stones: happiness made them shine and gave them that sharp, translucent clarity.

“We’re soldiers and we follow orders. But don’t feel sorry for yourself: this is a long struggle and you are worth a lot . . . Comrade Stalin knows
you are the best we have. That’s why we want you on the bench: so that if we need to, you can go in and score the goal. And in the future, remember, every damned second of your life, that the most important thing is the revolution and that it deserves any sacrifice. You are Soldier 13 and you have no mercy, you are not afraid, you do not have a soul. You are a Communist from head to toe, Ramón Mercader.”

Jacques Mornard spent several days examining himself: he wanted to know where he had gone wrong for Stalin to order, and Tom to allow, that others be in charge of the operation. He was so close! Sylvia’s return to New York was a relief and allowed him to wallow in his depression. He lamented how Orlov’s desertion had prevented África from being with him in Mexico at that moment. With her at his side, he would at least have had a real consolation and more concrete possibilities of having been selected. He and África, together, would have been capable of bringing down the walls of the traitor’s house and freeing the world of that louse who had sold himself to the fascists.

Before traveling, Sylvia had made him promise that he would not go to the Exile’s house until she returned. The unbridled aggression of the Mexican Stalinists forced the fortress guards and the police to be on maximum alert, and Jacques’s presence, with a false passport and without any concrete motive to go to the house, could cause problems with the Mexican authorities that she preferred to avoid. He promised her that he would not go to Coyoacán, since he had plans to take advantage of his beloved’s absence to travel to the south, where Mr. Lubeck wanted to set up some new business.

As soon as Sylvia left, Tom ordered Ramón to leave the Hotel Montejo and move to a tourist complex located near the Buenavista train station. At some point in the next few weeks, Tom would bring him some of the weapons that he could use in an attack on the Duck’s house, and the complex, with its wide tree-lined gardens, interior paths, and separate bungalows where different people came and went every day, was ideal for first hiding and then removing a travel trunk. Tom confirmed that none of those participating in the operation knew of his existence and that he personally would take care of bringing in and taking out the weapons.

Ramón stayed in his cabin for several days, smoking, sleeping, and
barely eating. An inertia caused by disappointment and forced inactivity lowered his spirits. He felt duped. It seemed unfair that almost two years of work, of planned movements, should only serve to make him the custodian of the weapons that others would use. Convinced that with a little more time he would be in a position to execute the order and even of leaving the act unscathed, he considered himself the best choice. That story about sending the Mexicans so it would look like a matter of local disputes was difficult to swallow. Was Caridad behind that decision? Did she doubt his ability or had she tried to keep him far from danger, with her unbearable propensity to control and decide the lives of her children? After several days of being holed up, the morning that he read in the papers that the German armies had begun their advance to the west, invading Norway and Denmark, he felt his anguish rising and decided that he, too, should go into action and besiege the enemy.

The afternoon he showed up in Coyoacán, it was Harold Robbins, the head of the renegade’s praetorian guard, who greeted him from the watchtower. A smiling Jacques explained that he had returned to the city the day before and needed to see the Rosmers. Robbins sent notice to Alfred and Marguerite and asked if he wanted to enter the house to talk more comfortably. Jacques felt so happy his chest burst, but he immediately told him not to worry, he would just be a few minutes.

Alfred and Marguerite received him at the door. He told them about his work trip and the letters in which Sylvia sent her regards, and gave Marguerite a sculpture of an indigenous goddess with a feline face and the body of a woman, purchased that morning in one of the city’s markets, telling her that he had seen it in Oaxaca and had immediately thought she would like it. Meanwhile, there was a change of guard in the watchtower and Robbins, before coming down to say goodbye to Jacson, ceded his place to a young man with light-colored hair and very pale skin whom the Belgian was seeing for the first time.

“Is he new?” he asked the Rosmers as he waved at the unknown man.

“He arrived a few days ago. His name is Bob Sheldon and he comes from New York,” Alfred Rosmer explained, and Jacques wondered whether that wasn’t the man Tom had been waiting for to release the pack of Mexicans.

Since he now had free time again, Jacques proposed seeing the Rosmers in two days for dinner. They had mentioned a French restaurant recently opened in the city center and he was eager to try it, but he didn’t
feel like going alone. The Rosmers accepted and said he should come pick them up on Friday at seven in the evening.

That Friday, April 18, two seemingly unrelated events confirmed for Ramón Mercader that his fate was to enter history as a servant of the cause of the world’s proletariat. In the morning, as he was walking through the gardens of the tourist complex, he found a mountaineer’s ice axe driven into a mahogany tree. The complex owner’s son, a kid with a slight stutter with whom he had spoken a couple of times, had told him he practiced mountain climbing and even insisted on showing him his equipment. The ice axe driven into the tree was with all certainty the mountain climber’s and, given the various wounds on the mahogany’s bark, the young man had undoubtedly used its straight, compact trunk for his training. Ramón had to pull hard to dislodge the ice axe from the tree trunk. When he had it in his hands and hefted it, he felt a current of emotion run through him. The spike was a lethal weapon. Ramón chose a place in the mahogany where the bark was a few inches thick. He stepped back and brought the ice axe down, sinking it just above the place he had aimed at. Again he worked hard to free the steel point from the tree, and when he had the ice axe in his hand again, he thought that it was the perfect instrument of death. When he returned to his cabin, he wrapped it up in a towel and put it in the suitcase he usually kept locked.