The Man Who Loved Dogs (45 page)

“Jacques is a photographer,” Gertrude explained. “Are you still working for
Ce Soir?”

“Whenever they ask me to,” he said nonchalantly.

Gertrude turned to the women and explained:

“He’s one of those lucky ones who doesn’t have to work to live.”

“It’s not like that,” he clarified modestly.

“But let me tell you that these friends here”—she pointed at Sylvia and Ruby—“prefer workers, all sweaty and hairy . . . They’re Marxists, Leninists, and several more ‘-ists’ . . .”

“Trotskyists.” Sylvia barely smiled, but she couldn’t help herself. “I’m a Trotskyist,” she repeated, and the woman’s warm but sharp voice entered Jacques’s ears.

“She sings ‘The Internationale’ in the shower,” Gertrude Allison concluded, and they all, even Sylvia, smiled, relaxed.

“I congratulate you,” he said, making his lack of interest obvious. “I love people who believe in something. But for me, politics . . .” and he backed up the phrase with a shrug of his shoulders. “I’m more interested in shower songs . . .”

The table was set and Jacques took charge of ordering the dishes and distributing the silverware. Half an hour later, when Gertrude and Marie left, he decided to stay in the company of the tourists for a while longer,
and when they said goodbye, they agreed to meet to go to the Hippodrome, where he had to take some photos of the races the next day. And if they didn’t have any other engagements, he offered to show them the Parisian night life once his work was done.

Jacques Mornard’s charm, his splendid way of spending money, his car, his knowledge of Parisian night life, and his apartment with a bohemian air just off the boulevard du Montparnasse, where they ended the night drinking a glass of port, turned out to be irresistible, especially for someone like Sylvia Ageloff, who didn’t understand why that young man (who obviously was not even twenty-eight years old, as he said he was) seemed to prefer her over Ruby Weil when it came to directing his flirtatious comments.

The following morning, a phone call from Tom got Jacques out of bed and they agreed to meet for a meal at La Coupole. As they drank an aperitif, Jacques told him all was going according to plan and the only thing left for him to do was ask Sylvia Ageloff to take off her pants. So that everything would work as efficiently as possible, the best thing to do would be to take Ruby far away from Paris, and Tom told him George would take care of it.

“Now let’s eat something, I don’t know when I’ll be able to sit down at a table again.” Tom placed the cigarettes alongside the ash tray. “Orlov showed up.”

Jacques waited. He knew Tom would only tell him what he could.

“He’s in Montreal, requesting a visa to enter the United States. When he came through Paris, he realized we have people watching the U.S. embassy, so he went to the Canadian one. He had more passports on him than a consular office and they were all very good . . . I had gotten them for him myself.”

“And how did you learn he was in Canada?”

The waiter arrived and they ordered their food.

“Orlov is the most son-of-a-bitch son of a bitch there ever was in the world.” Tom’s voice was a mixture of anger and admiration. “Just barely arrived, he sent a communiqué to Comrade Stalin with a copy to Yezhov. He proposes a deal: if they don’t take any reprisals against his mother and his mother-in-law, who live in the USSR, he’ll give the U.S. secret services just a little bit of bait and keep the big stuff to himself. And what he knows is very, very big. He could destroy years of our work. But if something happens to one of those women, his wife, his children, or him,
a lawyer will be in charge of making a public statement of everything he knows that is already being kept in the vault of a bank in New York.”

“So what do they say in Moscow? Do they think he’ll keep his end of the deal?”

“I don’t know what they’re saying there, but I think so. He knows we can make his mother and his mother-in-law’s lives very difficult and that we can find him wherever he goes. You know what? Because of Yezhov, we’ve lost the most intelligent and cynical devil we had. I think Beria is about to reach an agreement with him.”

“What about the operations in Mexico?”

“That whole operation is being quarantined, until we see how things fall. Comrade Stalin asked me, in the meantime, to go to Spain and try to fix the disaster Orlov left behind.”

“What do I do, then?”

“You’re still the great white hope. The chess game has already begun and the opening moves are usually decisive . . . and unrepeatable. You have all my trust, Jacques. Take care of Sylvia. We’ll take care of the rest.”

Sylvia Ageloff looked at Jacques Mornard’s nakedness and thought she was living a fairy tale. She knew that to think like that was tremendously corny, but it was impossible to come to terms with it in any other way. If that young man, the son of diplomats, refined, educated, beautiful, and worldly, was not Prince Charming himself, what else could he be? The passion with which Jacques awoke the rusted springs of her libido had pushed her beyond all imaginable ecstasy, to the degree of accepting his condition that they abstain from discussing politics, the one constant in her loveless militant’s life.

The days spent wandering around Paris, Chartres, and the Loire Valley; the weekend in Brussels, where Jacques showed her the sites of his childhood, although he refused (to Sylvia’s passing annoyance) to take her to his parents’ house; her lover’s limitless understanding (he agreed to take her to Barbizon so she could see, at the edge of the Fontainebleau Forest, the house called Ker Monique that had housed her idealized Lev Davidovich three years before)—all of this, complemented by nights in the most luxurious restaurants and the most popular cafés where bohemian Parisian intellectuals gathered (at the Café de Flore, Jacques showed a gowned Sylvia the table around which Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus,
Simone de Beauvoir, and other young people who called themselves existentialists drank and argued; at Le Gemy Club, he made her listen to Édith Piaf two tables away from Maurice Chevalier) and, above all, with those predawn hours in which Jacques Mornard’s virility hammered into the center of her life—in just a few weeks, turned her into a marionette whose movements originated from and ended with the fingers of one man.

Just one concern had remained with Sylvia during those days of glory. When she had just arrived in Paris, in mid-July, there had been a commotion in Trotskyist circles over the disappearance of Rudolf Klement, one of Trotsky’s closest assistants and the executive secretary of the planned Fourth Communist International. From Mexico, the Exile had sent his protest to the French police, since the letter in which Klement said he was resigning from the International and Trotskyism was, according to him, a crude hoax by the Soviet intelligence services. For that reason, when Klement’s dismembered corpse was found on August 26 on the banks of the Seine, Sylvia Ageloff fell into a state of depression from which she would only emerge to attend, as an interpreter, the founding meeting of the Trotskyist International in Périgny, in the outskirts of Paris.

In one of his fleeting appearances, Tom advised Jacques to support Sylvia emotionally and politically, to finish forging his dominion over her.

“There’s a problem,” Jacques said, looking at the waters of the Seine that had washed over Klement’s corpse. “Sylvia has to go back to her high school in October. What’s better, let her go or keep her here?”

“Orlov is already in the United States and it looks like he’s going to fulfill his end of the deal. But Beria has stopped special operations until they get Yezhov out of the way. I think the best thing is for you to keep her here and consolidate your position. Is it difficult?” Jacques smiled and shook his head as he threw his cigarette butt in the river. “So Sylvia is at peace, let’s get her some job. It’s better if she keeps herself busy and earns a few francs.”

“Don’t worry, Sylvia won’t make any trouble for us.”

Tom observed Jacques Mornard and smiled.

“You’re my hero . . . and you deserve a story I’ve owed you for a long time. Shall we have some vodka?”

They crossed the place du Châtelet toward rue de Rivoli, where some Polish Jews had set up a restaurant specializing in kosher dishes, Ukrainian and Belorussian, served in an abundance that would scare off their
French competitors. Once the vodka was served, Tom suggested to Jacques that he allow him to order, and the young man agreed. After having two stiff drinks, Tom lit one of his cigarettes.

“Are you going to tell me how you ended up lame?”

“And two or three other things . . . Let’s see, the limp I owe to a Cossack from Denikin’s white army. He slashed me in the calf with a saber and severed my tendons. This was in 1920, when I was head of the Cheka in Bashkina. The doctors thought I wouldn’t walk again, but six months later, all I had left was this intermittent limp that you see . . . It had been a year since I’d left the Socialist Revolutionary Party and I’d become a member of the Bolshevik Party, although since the civil war started I was enlisted in the Red Army, always with the idea that I’d be moved on to the Cheka. Do you know why? Because a friend who had entered the Cheka overwhelmed me with what he told me. They were the whip of God, they had no law, and they got two pairs of boots per year, cigarettes, a bag of sausages. They even had cars for work. When I was able to enter, I saw that it was true, the Chekists gave us carte blanche and good shoes! But don’t go thinking it was easy to make my way up, and don’t think that I’m going to tell you the things I did to get my first stripes and make it to chief in a city within one month . . . When the war ended, they took me to Moscow, so I could go to the military school, and when I got out, they called me from the Department of Foreigners. As it happened, in 1926, I was working in China, with Chiang Kai-shek. When the coup against the Communists happened in Shanghai, we Soviet advisers fell into disgrace and they started killing us like rabid dogs. They put my boss, Mikhail Borodin, as well as other colleagues, in jail, accusing them of being ‘enemies of the Chinese people,’ and they were torturing them before killing them. I managed to rescue them and get them out of the country, but I had to return to Shanghai to avoid those sons of bitches razing the Soviet consulate to the ground . . . That really cost me. Chiang Kai-shek’s men beat me so badly, they left me for dead.
Bliat!
I was lucky. A Chinese friend picked me up: I traveled for twenty-two days in an oxcart, covered with straw, until they left me for dead at the border . . . For rescuing Borodin and the others, they gave me the Order of the Red Flag, which, incidentally, I should now return because they just executed Borodin after accusing him of being ‘an enemy of the Soviet people.’ ” Tom smiled sadly and threw back his vodka. “I had barely recovered when they sent me here, so I could start to penetrate what would be
my destiny, the West. Then something happened that you may already suspect . . .”

“You met Caridad,” Ramón said, who at some point in the conversation had ceased to be Jacques Mornard.

“She was a different woman. She was seven years older than me, but even when she denied it, had a fit, rolled around on the ground, you could see she had class. I liked her and we began to have a relationship.”

“That still continues.”

“Uh-huh. At that time, she was a little lost, although she sympathized with Maurice Thorez’s Communists. And I was working with them . . .”

“Did she join the party because of you?”

“She would have joined anyway. Caridad needed to change her life; she was screaming out for an ideology to center her.”

“Is Caridad a collaborator or does she work with you?”

“She started collaborating with us in 1930, but she became part of the staff in 1934 and did her first work in Asturias, during the miners’ uprising . . . That will clarify many things about her that perhaps you didn’t understand before.”

The young man nodded, trying to place certain memories of Caridad’s actions.

“That’s why she returned to Spain when the Popular Front won. And that’s why she’s here, in Paris. Or is it because she’s your lover?”

“In Spain she worked for us, and now she’s here because she will be very useful in this operation and because things there are going from bad to worse . . . The Republic is falling to pieces. In a few days, Negrín is going to propose the exit of the International Brigades. He still believes that Great Britain and France can support them, and that with that support they can even win the war. But Great Britain and France are shaking with fear and are courting Hitler and aren’t going to bet a dime on you. Forgive me for bringing the subject up, but I should tell you so you don’t have any illusions. The war is lost. They’re never going to manage to resist until a European war starts, as Negrín wants.”

“And you’re not going to give them any more help?”

“It’s no longer a question of weapons, although we don’t have enough to just go around wasting them. All of Europe is going to deny them everything, even water. And within the Republic, morale is fucked. When Franco decides to take on Barcelona, it’s all over . . .”

Ramón perceived the sincerity of Tom’s words. But he refused to give
him the pleasure of getting scolded for talking about the fate of his country. He felt how his usual fury gripped him and he preferred to move on to something else.

“You have a wife in Moscow, right?”

Tom smiled.

“Not one, two . . .”