The Man Who Loved Dogs (53 page)

“Don’t worry. I have that hate nailed right here,” and he pointed at his own chest, where he felt hate beating, very close to where his pride was throbbing.

“Starting now, Caridad is part of the operation. She, you, and I are a team. What we do, only we will know about. George Mink will be outside this circle . . . Listen to me, kid: we’re at the center of something very big, something historic, and perhaps life will give you the opportunity to render a priceless service to the struggle for the revolution and for communism. Are you ready to do something that could be the greatest glory for a Communist and the envy of millions of revolutionaries around the world?”

Ramón Mercader watched Tom’s eyes for a few moments: they were so transparent that he could almost see through them. He then remembered Lenin’s corpse and the glasses in which he had seen himself, superimposed on the face of the Great Leader. And he knew he was privileged.

“Don’t doubt it for a second,” he said. “I’m ready.”

Ramón felt more comfortable ever since he could live with Jacques Mornard as if he were a suit that he only wore on special occasions.

During the weeks of waiting, which turned into months, he forced the Belgian to write frequently to Sylvia, always promising a quick reunion. He walked around Paris and visited the woman’s friends, especially Gertrude Allison the bookseller and the young Marie Crapeau, with whom he went to the cinema several times to see Marx Brothers comedies, where he laughed so much that he cried. Jacques went to the Hippodrome, which had turned into a meeting point for the hundreds of spies of all possible nationalities who milled around the city, and to Les Deux Magots and other sites favored by the Parisian bohemia, wonderfully removed from the dangers on the horizon.

In the meantime, Ramón, in Caridad’s company, traveled with young
Luis, recently returned from Spain, and with the reappeared Lena Imbert to Antwerp, where the young people left for the Soviet Union so that Luis could continue his studies and grow as a revolutionary in the homeland of the proletariat and amid the Spanish Communists trapped in exile. On several occasions they visited his sister Montse, living in Paris with her husband, Jacques Dudouyt, whose only notable quality, according to Caridad, was his ability to cook.

Looking for signs of the new times, Ramón and Caridad followed with interest the information coming from Moscow, where Comrade Stalin was leading a new party congress before which, with his usual bravery, he dared to criticize the excesses of certain civil servants during the purges and proceedings of previous years. As they already expected, the greatest reprimands came down on Yezhov’s head and they foretold a fate similar to that of his predecessor, Yagoda. But the most important thing for the Soviet Union, at that time before the threat of imperialist wars, was obtaining the perfect unity of the people behind a monolithic party, like the one that emerged from a congress in which the general secretary dismissed more than three-quarters of the members of the Central Committee elected four years before and substituted them with men of unbreakable revolutionary faith. The demands of the present had imposed themselves and Comrade Stalin was preparing the country for the most ironclad ideological resistance.

Ramón discovered in that time that his relationship with Caridad was taking on a different nature. The fact that he was now the one at the center of a mission whose proportions she couldn’t even fathom on the morning that she presented it to him in the Sierra Guadarrama, placed him at a height that his mother could not reach. In the face of powers that were beyond her, she had to check her habit of trying to control his destiny. Perhaps Tom’s influence had contributed to that change, demanding that she remain in a triangular relationship that depended so much on the balance of all of its parts. To see how Caridad ceased to be an oppressive presence relieved him and helped to make his period of forced inactivity less complicated by unnecessary quarrels.

As frenetically mobile as ever, Tom had left for New York and Mexico at the beginning of April, shortly after the definitive entrance of Franco’s troops in Madrid. When he returned, at the end of July, the agent came back with a mix of satisfaction and concern over the progress of an operation that was still unfolding at a cautious rhythm.

During a week that, at Tom’s suggestion, they all spent in Aix-en-Provence, as well as going over Cézanne’s route and enjoying the subtleties of Provençal food, which the adviser adored, Ramón and Caridad learned the details of the machinery that had been put into motion. In parallel to what they were doing, Tom explained, Comrade Grigulievich (from the beginning, Ramón would ask himself if that was George Mink’s new name) had established himself in Mexico and begun to work with the local group that would eventually carry out an action against the Duck. Relying on a Comintern envoy, they had begun by trying to obtain the Mexican party’s support, only to discover (to no great surprise) that two of its leaders, Hernán Laborde and Valentín Campa, didn’t dare to join a possible action, holding up the excuse that they considered Trotsky to be a political corpse and that any violent act against him could complicate the party’s relations with President Cárdenas. That hesitancy by the leadership had not prevented them from achieving two other objectives: finding a group of militants willing to carry out an armed attack against the renegade, and the preparation of a massive campaign rejecting Trotsky’s presence in Mexico, with which they sought to create a state of hostile, even aggressive opinion against the Exile.

Meanwhile, in the United States, Tom’s colleagues had managed to infiltrate several young Communists into the ranks of the Trotskyists with the intention of getting one of them sent as a bodyguard to the Duck’s lair. That man, if he managed to be placed inside the renegade’s home, would have the mission of informing on his movements and, according to one of the prepared plans, would even facilitate the entrance of a commando or solitary agent charged with perpetrating the attack. As Tom himself had been able to confirm, Trotsky’s new house was practically impregnable. Apart from the features of the house itself (high walls, bulletproof doors, a river running alongside it that made it nearly impossible to access it by one side), there was also a watch system composed of seven armed men, in addition to which there were Mexican policemen protecting the residence, and an electric mechanism that activated lights and sounded alarms.

“Until we have a man inside there, the cook who works in the Duck’s house will keep us informed. She’s a party agent.”

“And where does Jacques fit into those plans?” Ramón wanted to know; he didn’t see himself anywhere on that mortal chessboard, sketched out
in all its details, in which the renegade seemed perfectly surrounded, without the possibility for escape.

“Everyone has his place. Jacques is going to keep moving forward, don’t worry,” the adviser said, and drank from his glass of wine.

Tom, Caridad, and Ramón sat at one of the tables that the restaurant owners, taking advantage of the summer season, had placed on the sidewalk on the town’s main street. They had already selected their dishes—Ramón, out of pure coincidence, had opted for a duck-based dish—and ordered a light, fresh wine that awakened their palates. They conveyed the image of three pleasant middle-class people on holiday and Caridad and Ramón’s table manners, Tom’s Panama hat, and the worldly gastronomical tastes each one had would have placed them in the category of the illustrious bourgeois, people familiar with the pleasures of life that are bought with money.

“When they give me the orders, the three of us are going to Mexico,” Tom said, and looked at Ramón. “Jacques Mornard’s role in this hunt will depend on many things that are still far-off. But it could be crucial for Sylvia to be able to get him into the house. We still don’t know if we will get the American spy in there, so the possibility of Jacques being close could be important. And, if necessary, if everything we’re planning fails or is not safe for one reason or another, then Jacques would go into action.”

“Why not use the cook?” Caridad asked. “She could poison him . . .”

“That’s a last resort. Stalin has asked for something resounding, an exemplary punishment.”

“But couldn’t the American do it?” the woman insisted.

Tom looked at her and served himself more wine.

“In principle, yes. He could be a disillusioned Trotskyist who fought with his leader . . . but what if it fails and he’s detained? Who can guarantee that man’s silence?” Tom allowed for an expectant pause before answering himself. “It’s a risk we can’t take . . . Never, in any case, can the Soviet Union and Comrade Stalin be visibly involved in the action. Do you hear me, Ramón?” The man’s voice had broken its monotonous rhythm to turn emphatic. “That’s why we’re working with Mexicans, so it looks like something to do with politics and local quarreling. The Mexicans would have no information about Grigulievich’s connection to me and even less of my own connection to Moscow. We’re thinking that some man
of ours, a supposed Spanish Republican who met them in the war, will help Grigulievich and control things from the inside. If they do things well, then congratulations, the work is done and we’ll have had a vacation in the tropics.”

“Mexico City isn’t quite tropical, shall we say,” Caridad dared to correct him, and Tom laughed heartily.

“My dear, the tropics are anywhere you don’t have to spend half of the year cursing and damning the cold to hell and walking in the fucking snow.”

Paris seemed to be at the point of melting under the sun and fear. The temperatures of war, incredibly high during that hot August, had at last put an end to the politicians’ indifference and had given way to a nervous preoccupation with the growing aggressiveness of Nazi speeches, which had already caused the mobilization of the army and the reserves. Alarming news of great concentrations of troops in Germany circulated and people were discussing what the next objective could be of an aggressive empire that had already swallowed up Austria and part of Czechoslovakia and now had an exhausted but loyal ally to the south of the Pyrenees. After many delays and self-deception, the imminence of war settled into the fears of the Parisians.

Tom had disappeared again without announcing where he was going. Ramón, using Jacques Mornard more often, insistently wandered the world he had shared with Sylvia, as he found in Trotskyist circles a level of alarm that bordered on hysteria. From Mexico, the Exile had launched a warning campaign about the looming military conflagration, and on each occasion he expressed his fears over Soviet defensive weakness caused as a result of the purges to which the Red Army had been subjected in the past two years. Jacques Mornard, always removed from political passions, listened to those arguments and couldn’t help but notice in them an underground incitation to the enemies of the Soviet Union to take advantage of the situation about which the renegade was so insistent.

On the morning of August 23, a nervous and shaken Caridad, appearing as if she had returned to the murky days of the past, turned up at Jacques’s apartment. The young man, who was drinking a pot of coffee to try to dispel the effects of the champagne he had consumed the night
before, guessed the gravity of the events that the woman would immediately reveal and snapped out of his fog through pure alarm.

“The Soviet Union and the Nazis signed a pact,” Caridad whispered in Spanish, and although the young man didn’t understand what those words meant, what madness they referred to, he felt that it was Ramón who, already completely lucid, was listening to his mother. “They’re saying it on all the stations. The newspapers are going to run a midday edition. Molotov and Ribbentrop have signed it. A pact of friendship and nonaggression. What the hell is happening?”

Ramón tried to process the information, but he felt that something eluded him. Comrade Stalin had made a pact with Hitler? What the Duck predicted had happened?

“
What else are they saying, Caridad? What else are they saying
?” he yelled, standing before the woman.

“That’s what they’re saying,
collons
! A pact with the fascists!”

Ramón waited a few seconds, as if he needed the shock to dissolve amid the reasons he desperately started to search for, like those pigs who sniffed for truffles in the Dax of his adolescence, and he clung to the most solid argument he had at hand:

“Stalin knows what he’s doing; he always knows. Don’t rush into things. If he signed an agreement with Hitler, it’s because he has reason to do so. He must have done it because of something . . .”

“At Concorde and on Rivoli, they’ve burned Soviet flags. Many people are saying they’re going to resign from the party, that they feel betrayed . . .” Caridad licked her wound.

“The fucking French can’t speak of betrayal, dammit! Ribbentrop was chatting with them here in Paris while Franco was massacring the Republicans.”

Caridad let herself fall on the sofa; she lacked the energy to refute or support Ramón’s words, who, despite the conviction he had just expressed, could not overcome the dizziness that had taken hold of him. Where the hell was Tom? Why wasn’t he here with his reasoning? How could he have left now, of all times, when he most needed him?

“
So when in the fuck is Tom coming
?” he yelled at last, without being fully conscious of the extent to which he depended on his mentor’s words and ideas.

For years Ramón would remember that bitter day. With all of the
preconceptions underpinning his beliefs broken, he faced the inconceivable. The rapprochement between Stalin and Hitler was what Trotsky had prophesied for years. As he would come to know a few months later, the deception ended up being so painful that various Spanish Communists, imprisoned in Franco’s jails, committed suicide out of shame and disillusionment upon learning of the accord. It was the last defeat their convictions could take.