The Man Who Loved Dogs (76 page)

Tom returned to his armchair and continued dictating. Ramón felt himself getting lost in the labyrinth of lies that his mentor was weaving so easily, as if he were telling some truth in which he had lived. He rejoined the story’s narrative thread when Tom was going into the section about the young Trotskyist’s disillusionment: the famous revolutionary revealed himself to be a cruel and ambitious being when he proposed to him, whom he barely knew, that he travel to the USSR to commit acts of sabotage and, above all, to assassinate Stalin. Tom added that his anti-Soviet action would rely on the support of a great foreign nation, which obviously was financing the traitor. Ramón felt that those words seemed familiar, as if he had read them or heard them before.

“That’s the tactic, not only eliminate the enemy, but cover him in shit, lots and lots of shit; let the shit overflow.” Tom got excited and elaborated on the Exile’s intrigues against the Mexican government and its leaders, seeking the destabilization of the country that had given him refuge. But Trotsky had to be even more corrupt, and so he had expressed to Jacques
his disgust for all the members of his own group who didn’t think exactly as he did and even confided in him the idea of eliminating those dissidents. Although Mornard had no proof, he was sure that the money to buy and fortify the house where Trotsky lived did not come from those blind followers but rather came from another source and the person who knew it was the consul of that great imperialist nation who visited him frequently.

“Has anyone seen that consul?” Caridad asked.

“This is a country of blind people,” Tom responded, “and we’re going to give them some of what they like.”

Tom shifted to melodrama when he had Jacques travel to Mexico with the young woman he loved and whom he wished to marry. If he went to Russia to commit the crimes planned by Trotsky, he would have to break his engagement, which the Exile encouraged him to do, since he considered the young woman a traitor to the true Trotskyist cause. And he finished off the letter with an unexpected twist:

“ ‘It’s probable that this young woman, following my act, will not want to have anything else to do with me. Nonetheless, it was also for her that I decided to sacrifice myself by taking the head of a man who didn’t do anything but harm the workers’ movement, and I am sure that not only the party but also history will agree with me when they see the most incarnate enemy of the world proletariat disappear . . . In case something should happen to me, I ask for the publication of this letter,’ period.”

With the last keystroke, the apartment became silent. Ramón, still standing, felt a shudder come from the depths of his soul. He no longer had the impression that he had heard those words before, since the lies accumulated by his mentor had the same tone as the accusations that, for years, in successive proceedings, articles, and speeches, had been launched against Trotsky and other men who were tried and sentenced. Didn’t truths, real events, exist on which to base a young revolutionary’s decision to sacrifice himself and commit a crime to free the proletariat of the influence of a traitor? Something murky emanated from each one of the words of that letter, and Ramón Mercader understood that his shaking was not only due to the fear caused by the act of falsification that he had just witnessed. He had discovered that he feared the ones who were sending him to execute a man as much as the consequences that his act could bring. If he still needed it, that letter was the last proof that, for him, there was no other way out of the world than to become a murderer.

He stopped the car near Coyoacán. He opened the trunk, removed the raincoat, and placed it over his shoulders. At that moment, as if the weight of the raincoat were trying to drown him, Jacques Mornard felt revulsion and barely had time to lean over to avoid being stained by vomit. The liquid, a mixture of coffee and bile, smelled of rancid tobacco, and its stench caused a new bout of dry heaving while his skin broke out in a cold sweat. When his stomach had calmed down, he cleaned himself with his handkerchief and opened the bag in which he kept the English dagger and the ice axe and moved them to the interior pockets of his raincoat. The Star revolver with nine bullets he placed in the small of his back, tucked in the waistband of his pants. He confirmed that the sheets of the article were in the left outside pocket of the raincoat and returned to the car.

He remembered that there was a pharmacy on the way and, upon seeing it, stopped the car. He bought a bottle of mouthwash, another one of cologne, and a box of painkillers. On the street, he rinsed his mouth several times, to get rid of the taste of vomit, and chewed a pair of pills. He never experienced headaches and suspected that perhaps his blood pressure was responsible for that pressure in his skull that hadn’t left him for the past two days. He rubbed the cologne on his neck, his forehead, and his cheeks, and got back behind the wheel.

When he took the dusty Avenida Viena, Ramón understood that he still hadn’t gained back control over Jacques Mornard. The conviction that it was just about a rehearsal, that he would enter and leave the house as quickly as possible, did not provide him with the expected relief. He still doubted whether it wouldn’t have been better if Tom had allowed him to carry out his job that very day. What was going to happen would happen, and the sooner the better, he told himself. His hate for the renegade, which should have been his best weapon, was dissolving amid fear and doubts, and he didn’t know anymore whether he was moved by irreversible orders (the imprisonment of the painter Siqueiros and the possibility of a public trial had alarmed Moscow, according to Tom) or by a deep conviction that was getting more and more difficult to recover in his mind. Because of that, upon seeing the ocher-colored fortress, Ramón decided that that would be his last visit to Coyoacán.

He stopped the car after turning around and placing it in the direction of the highway to Mexico. He doused the handkerchief with cologne
and cleaned his face again. He took several deep breaths and left the car. From the front tower, Jake Cooper waved hello and asked about Sylvia. Jacson responded that he was only coming for a few minutes and, considering how talkative Sylvia could be, had preferred to leave her at the hotel. Cooper, smiling, confirmed that his wife was arriving Monday evening.

“So we’ll see each other on Tuesday,” Jacques yelled as the bulletproof door opened before him.

Joe Hansen, the renegade’s secretary, shook his hand and let him in.

“My mother always used that German cologne,” he remarked. “Was the Old Man expecting you earlier?”

“I’m ten minutes late. I got delayed because of Sylvia.”

“He’s working now. Let me ask him if he can still see you.”

Hansen left him in the yard. He took off his raincoat and folded it carefully over his arm. In a corner of the garden, close to the fence that overlooked the river, he saw Melquíades, the handyman, at work on the house. The rooms occupied by the secretaries and bodyguards had their windows open, but no movement could be seen. He then had a very strong feeling that, yes, definitively, this was his day. In order not to think about it, he concentrated on contemplating the bullet holes in the house’s walls, until he noticed a presence very close to him. He turned around and found Azteca, who was sniffing at his shoes, and saw that they were splattered with vomit. Being careful with the position of the raincoat, he bent down next to the animal and with his free hand caressed his head and ears. For a few minutes, Jacques lost all sense of time, place, and what he had set to do as the animal’s fur ran between his fingers, causing a feeling of well-being, confidence, and calm. His mind was blank when he heard the man’s voice and he reacted with surprise.

“I’m very busy,” the renegade said as he wiped his glasses with a red handkerchief that was embroidered in one corner with a hammer and sickle.

“I’m sorry, I got delayed,” he said, standing, as he looked for the typed pages in the outside pocket of his raincoat, careful that the garment, pulled down by the weight of the weapons, would not fall from his arm. “I won’t take much of your time.”

Jacques handed him the pages, still devastated by the poor quality of the text. Without taking them, the Exile gave a half turn.

“Come on, let’s see the article.”

Jacques Mornard entered through the doors of the house for the first
time. From the kitchen came the sounds of activity and the smell of cooking, but he didn’t see anyone. Following the renegade, he crossed the dining room, where there was a large table, and entered the workroom. He observed that on the desk were several papers, books, fountain pens, a lamp, and a bulky dictaphone, which the man moved aside to make space.

“And your wife?” he dared to ask.

“She must be in the kitchen” was the dry response of the renegade, who was already sitting in front of the desk. “Let me see this article.”

Jacques handed the sheets over and the man, with a thick grease pencil, began to correct, quickly, the first lines. Ramón managed to place himself behind his prisoner and observed the room. Behind him, against the wall, there was a long, low set of drawers on which were piled typed papers and where a globe rested. On the wall, a map of Mexico and Central America. On the desk was a folder with a label in Cyrillic that he managed to read:
PRIVATE
. From his position, he spied in the half-open drawer the dark shine of a revolver, perhaps a .38, and thought about how little the caliber of a weapon mattered to him that was not going to defend its owner. He stopped inspecting the site and forced himself to think about the fact that he was three steps behind the man, and his condemned head was a few inches below Jacques’s own shoulder. He always thought he’d have a more elevated position, but even so, if he managed to raise his arm, he could bring down a brutal blow in the middle of that skull on whose crown the hair was just beginning to thin. He stuck his hand in his raincoat and touched the metallic part of the ice axe. He could take it out quickly, in just a few seconds, and hit forcefully in the exact place where the scarcity of hair allowed him to see the white skin, almost shining, provocative. He closed his hand around the shortened grip and resolved to extract the weapon just at the moment in which he realized he had not removed his hat and the sweat had accumulated on his forehead, threatening to run into his eyes. He thought of looking for his handkerchief but desisted, to avoid a sudden movement. The window overlooking the garden was open, to make the most of the afternoon breeze, and from that angle he could only see the cactus pots and some flowering bougainvillea. He calculated that, if he hit him with precision, he would need just one minute, with rapid steps, to reach the exit door and ask that they open it for him, talk to the guard on duty for a few seconds, and leave the house. Until he got in the car, it would be two, maybe three minutes
in which his salvation would depend on his cool head and no one discovering the Duck’s body. But if the man didn’t die from the first blow or if his nerves faltered and he rushed too much, the fortified house would turn into a tomb from which he would never escape. He clutched the ice axe forcefully and concentrated on the skull in front of him. The old man was working, using his pencil frequently, crossing out or adding words, as his throat admitted sounds of disapproval. His head, nonetheless, was still there, in reach of Ramón’s arm.

“The poor French,” the Exile murmured.

At that instant, through the window, Ramón could hazily see Harold Robbins. The head of the bodyguard corps was looking at the study and then up at the watchtower. Slowly he took his hand out of his raincoat and decided to look for the handkerchief in the back pocket of his pants. His glasses had become damp with sweat. Without letting go of the coat, he dried his face and, with difficulty, took his glasses off and cleaned them.

The renegade’s head became clear again. It was still challenging him. In that head was everything that man possessed, and now Ramón had it at his mercy. Why hadn’t Kotov given him the letter he should drop as he went out? To Ramón, with his gaze fixed on the place where he was going to drive in the steel point, it now seemed obvious that the best thing would be to forget about the damned letter. He couldn’t keep on thinking; he was wasting the golden opportunity that had taken years to create—an occasion that was perhaps unrepeatable. But at the same time he understood that at that moment he wasn’t capable of executing the order, although his confusion prevented him from knowing why. Was it fear? Obedience to Tom’s orders? The letter he didn’t have? The need to prolong that sick game of power? Doubts about the probabilities of reaching the street? He discarded this last one, since, despite the solitude the renegade enjoyed, it was obvious that the chance of escape mentioned so many times by Tom had never gotten to thirty percent. Only if a miraculous combination of coincidences occurred would he manage to leave the house after dealing the blow, and he was certain that, if he dared to administer it, something would happen and he would be cut off from his escape options. The next time he entered the fortress, he would perhaps conquer his nerves and kill the most pursued man in the world, whose breathing he could hear two steps away from him, whose skull kept enticing him. Nonetheless, he was now completely sure that he would not
manage to escape. In reality, was the escape ever really foreseen? He convinced himself that his bosses without a doubt preferred that he leave the house, but whether he managed to or not was not important, and Ramón understood that they had destined him to commit a crime that, at the same time, would mean his death. Furthermore, his mentor had designed everything with such mastery that, in the end, the condemned man himself would be in charge of fixing the date of his own death and, to reach the maximum perfection, also that of his executioner. He understood that his inability to move was a result of that macabre situation that controlled his body and his will.