The Man Who Loved Dogs (70 page)

The renegade, after drinking a sip of tea, finally left his cup on the table and nodded.

“You’re right, Jacson. A man like that could be unstoppable.”

“Please, Liovnochek,” Natalia interrupted, trying to change the course of the unpleasant conversation.

“Dear, we can’t be like ostriches,” he said, smiling, and observed his visitor. “Don’t smoke so much, Jacson. Take care of that marvelous youth you have.” And with a wave of his hand to indicate he was leaving them, he took the path leading to the dining room and from there added: “Don’t let him smoke, Sylvia. You can’t find a good man like that every day. Will you forgive me? Goodbye! . . .”

Sylvia’s face reddened and Jacques smiled, also embarrassed. He crushed his cigarette and looked at Natalia, who seemed amused.

Less tense already, Jacques Mornard told several stories about his Belgian family, brought to mind by the recollection of his father, a smoker of Cuban cigars. Natalia spoke of Lev Davidovich’s first exile in Paris and how they had met, and the three smiled hearing about the Exile’s observation that Paris was fine but Odessa was much more beautiful.

“Mr. Trotsky should rest more,” Jacques remarked when the conversation was flagging. “He works too much.”

“He’s not a normal person . . .” Natalia looked at the house before continuing. “Besides, we live off of what the newspapers pay. That’s what we’ve come to,” she finished, her voice thick with nostalgia and sadness.

When the sun set, Jacson and Sylvia bid goodbye. Natalia again apologized
for her husband and promised to find an opportune moment for another meeting. They had so few friends left, so few they received, and she would love to have them at the house again, of course with Lev Davidovich tied to a chair, she said, and shook Jacson’s hand and kissed Sylvia’s cheeks twice.

When they returned to the hotel, Jacques found that Mr. Roberts had called him and was begging him to get in touch, urgently. From his room he asked for a number in New York and Roberts himself answered.

“It’s Jacques, Mr. Roberts.”

“Are you alone?”

“No. Talk to me.”

“Come tomorrow. I’ll wait for you at eight o’clock at the Hotel Pennsylvania bar.”

“Yes, tell Mr. Lubeck I’ll fly tomorrow . . . Thank you very much, Mr. Roberts.”

Smiling, he turned to Sylvia and said to her:

“We’re going to New York for a few days. Lubeck is paying.”

The stay in New York ended up being brief and had precise goals: the time for preparations had ended and Moscow was demanding that the operation be carried out at the earliest opportunity, keeping in mind the progress of the war, which had already allowed Hitler to dominate Europe almost without shooting. The greatest novelty was that Mr. Roberts gave him a new raincoat that had three interior pockets of a very curious design.

On August 7, Jacques and Sylvia settled in at the Hotel Montejo once more, and the following morning the young man ran out with the excuse that he had to see the contractors tasked with remodeling the offices. At the wheel of his Buick, he went in the direction of the tourist complex and looked for the unpaved road that he had traveled a few weeks before. The mound of porous rocks where he had left the ice axe was to the right of the path, and as he entered through the road he asked himself whether he hadn’t confused the place, since according to his calculations, the rocks were two or three minutes from the highway, and he had already gone for more than five and he still had not located them. He thought of going back and confirming that it was the right road, although he was sure it was. Anxiety began to overcome him, and to calm down he told
himself that in any store in the city he could buy a similar ice axe. But not finding that exact ice axe seemed like a disastrous omen. Where could the fucking rocks be? He continued on and, when he was ready to turn around, discovered the pile and breathed in relief. He climbed the rocks and saw the metallic shine. When he managed to take the ice axe out and have it in his hands, he felt something visceral unite him to that steel weapon, and the act of holding it gave him confidence and certainty.

Back in the city, he parked his car in front of a carpenter’s shop in the Colonia Roma and asked the salesclerk to saw off about six inches from the ice axe’s wooden grip. The man looked at him strangely and he explained that he felt safer climbing with a shorter grip. Twine in hand, the man measured the six inches Ramón had indicated, made a mark in pencil, and returned it to him to confirm whether that length was more comfortable for him. Ramón took the ice axe and made a gesture as if he were driving it into a rock over his head.

“No, it’s still too long. Cut it around here,” he said, and pointed to the place.

The carpenter shop salesclerk shrugged his shoulders, walked over to a saw, and sawed the wood. With a piece of sandpaper he smoothed the edges and handed the ice axe to Ramón.

“How much is it?”

“It’s nothing,
señor.”

Ramón put his hand in his pocket and withdrew two pesos.

“That’s too much,
señor.”

“My boss is paying. And thank you.” He said goodbye.

“Climbing with a grip that short is dangerous,
señor
. If you slip . . .”

“Don’t worry, comrade,” he said and lifted the ice axe to eye level. “Now it looks like a cross, right?” And without waiting for a response, he walked to the corner where he had left the Buick, out of the carpenter’s sight.

He went in the direction of Chapultepec and entered the forest. From the car’s trunk, he withdrew the bag where he kept the khaki-colored raincoat that Tom had given him in New York and dropped the ice axe into it. He walked between the trees until he found a place where he assumed no one would see him and put on the raincoat. On the left side, below the waist, they had sewn a long narrow lining, almost in the shape of a knife. At stomach height, on the same side, was a smaller pocket designed to hold a medium-caliber revolver. On the right side, running
from the armpit, was the third lining, triangle-shaped, with the narrowest angle below. Ramón placed the ice axe in the pocket and confirmed that, with the trimmed grip, it sank farther than he considered comfortable for rapid extraction. He verified, nonetheless, that if he kept his hands crossed over his abdomen, his own right arm hid the weapon’s lump, and that was the most important thing. He placed the raincoat over his forearm and noticed that the depth of the pocket prevented any movement. He carried out several tests and concluded that if the renegade had his back to him, he could extract the ice axe in just a few seconds without taking his eyes off his objective.

Ramón folded the raincoat over his arm when he got close to his car. During that whole morning, he had barely thought of Jacques Mornard, and that memory lapse worried him. To cross all of the barriers to enter the fortress in Coyoacán and to be ready at the instant in which he would extract the ice axe, he needed the Belgian man’s entire presence, his clumsy comments, his shyness, his insipid smile. Because Jacques was the only one capable of leading Ramón to the most grandiose moment of his life.

When they met in Moscow, almost thirty years later, and talked about what had occurred in those days as well as what happened later, Ramón asked his mentor if he had conceived of that perfect concatenation of events or if coincidence had worked in his favor. The man assured him, with the greatest seriousness, that he had planned it all, but that the devil had been collaborating with them. Each detail sketched out two, three years before had been shaped and would fit in such a perfect way that no man, only an infernal plan, could have made it thus, because in the end the events happened as if that ice axe, Ramón’s arm, and Trotsky’s life had been pulling at each other like magnets . . .

On Tuesday, August 13, Sylvia at last decided to face the difficult moment of going to Coyoacán and communicating to Lev Davidovich some important messages that she had received during her stay in New York. Two hours later the woman left the house with a smile on her lips. Jacques, who was waiting for her in the street, had spoken to almost all of the bodyguards in turn, showing a loquacity that only a few days later would seem significant to those men for whom Frank Jacson was an innocuous presence. He had even made plans with Jake Cooper to have dinner the following Tuesday when Cooper’s wife, Jenny, would be arriving from
the United States. Jacson was treating, of course, and he would take care of picking a restaurant that would be to Jenny’s liking.

Sylvia had reason to feel happy, although her relations with the renegade were going through a period of crisis caused by her attraction to the new political group that Burnham and Shachtman, Lev Davidovich’s former comrades, had formed in the United States. Nonetheless, the old man, so sensitive to splits—more so at a time when he needed all of his sympathizers—did not seem put out with her and, after hearing that Sylvia had spoken with Shachtman in New York, had asked her to come back in two days, with her boyfriend, for tea, since he wanted to apologize for not having attended to them during the previous visit.

“I think you made a good impression,” she said as they left rocky Avenida Viena and turned onto Morelos.

“Do you want me to tell you something?” Jacques smiled. “I thought that the old man was a proud and arrogant guy. But ever since I met him, I think he is a great person. And the truth is, I don’t know how it occurred to you to ally yourself with Burnham and Shachtman.”

“You don’t understand these things, dear. Politics is complicated . . .”

“But loyalties are very easy, Sylvia,” he said, and pressed on the accelerator. “And, please don’t tell me what I understand and what I don’t understand.”

The following morning Jacques went over to Shirley Court, where Tom and Caridad were staying. His mother received him with a kiss and offered him recently made coffee, which he refused. He felt jittery and only wanted to consult his mentor about the strategy they would follow the next day. When Tom came out of the bathroom wrapped in a robe, the three sat down in the armchairs of the small living room. Seeing how Tom and Caridad were drinking their coffee, Ramón perceived that some distance was opening between them, invisible but to him very tangible: it was the distance between the first and the second lines of command.

“You’re going to cause an argument about that matter of Burnham and Shachtman,” Tom said when he finished listening to his pupil. “You’ll take the Duck’s side against Sylvia. What he most wants to hear is that those dissidents are traitors, and you’re going to give him the pleasure. At some moment, tell him that you want to write about that split and about what is happening in France with the Nazi occupation.”

“He knows that Jacson isn’t interested in politics.”

“But he is so interested in it that he will open the doors of his house to
you again. Besides, he is so alone that if you write something in his favor, he’ll receive you again. And that will be our moment. You have to be careful, but at the same time you’ll seem resolved.”

“Sylvia could view it all as strange . . .”

“That imbecile doesn’t see anything,” Tom assured him. “If everything goes well, in two or three days you’ll go back to Coyoacán with your article . . .”

Caridad was following the dialogue in silence, but her attention was focused on Ramón. It was obvious that Tom’s enthusiasm and certainty clashed with her son’s patent lukewarmth.

“I’m going to get dressed,” Tom said. “I want you to practice with the Star revolver that you’re going to take the day of the party.”

Caridad served herself more coffee and Ramón decided to have a cup. Then the woman leaned forward and, as she poured his coffee, whispered, “I want to talk to you. Tonight. At the Hotel Gillow at eight.”

He looked at her, but Caridad’s eyes were fixed on serving coffee and handing him his cup.

Tom was able to prove that the abilities of Soldier 13 remained intact. In the small forest in the San Angel area where they had their practice, the young man fired at difficult targets and made three out of every four shots, despite the tension he was feeling. Tom talked nonstop about what would happen once the attack was carried out. The easiest escape would be through Cuba, where Ramón could lose himself among the thousands of Spaniards milling about Havana and Santiago. On the island, a pair of agents would be waiting for him with money and connections to guarantee his needs and protection. Perhaps he and above all Caridad, who adored the country where she had been born, would also drop in there and the three would cross the Atlantic together. Tom’s certainty, and the fact that his prognostics and plans tended to come true with surprising regularity, pushed aside Ramón’s doubts and fears until he was nearly convinced that escape was certainly possible.

The Hotel Gillow, in the area near the Zócalo, was a colonial building that had originally been built to house the nuns destined to serve the neighboring church of La Profesa. At midday, many of the workers from government offices tended to have lunch in the restaurant. In the evenings, in contrast, it was a place where successful hustlers and high-class prostitutes filled their stomachs before going out to face the night. It had a large hall, discreet lighting, and many tables covered with checked tablecloths.
As soon as he entered the place, Ramón recalled that afternoon of rejoicing and victory when, with África at his side, he had entered an old café in Madrid to meet with Caridad. Now he could make out his mother, who was huddled at a table, smoking with her head down. Ramón moved his chair and it was as if Caridad were waking from a nap.