The Man Who Loved Dogs (83 page)

His ability to resist in silence and almost arrogantly maintain what everyone knew was a lie gave him back the power and convictions lost in the days before his act. From inside, a feeling of superiority was growing in the certainty that they would not break him. More than once he thought of Andreu Nin and of the hard work he made for his captors when he wouldn’t admit to the faults they tried to lay on his head. Ramón knew that if the promised protection arrived, and if none of those venal policemen or the prisoners with whom he would soon live received the order to eliminate him, he could resist for as long as necessary, in the conditions and with the specifications they imposed on him, since he knew that his life depended solely on that resistance. And, at least at the beginning, Kotov seemed to have come through, although he could only see that at the end of seven months of isolation and harassment, when they allowed him at last to receive a visit from his lawyer, Octavio Medellín Ostos, hired the day after the fatal assault by a woman named Eustasia Pérez. That woman, whom the lawyer had not seen again, had handed
him a large sum of money for him to use for Ramón’s case until she or a designee of hers got in touch with him. Ramón then understood that he was not alone, and when Medellín Ostos asked him to tell him the truth in order to help him, he repeated again, word for word, the content of that letter he had handed to the police.

“Do you expect me to believe you, Señor Mornard?” the lawyer said to him, looking into his eyes.

“I only expect you to defend me, Counselor. In the best possible way.”

“It has already been proven that everything you’re saying to me is nothing but lies. You’re not Belgian, nor does Jacques Mornard exist; you were never a Trotskyist, nor did you plan the murder a week before. It’s very difficult this way . . .”

“So what can I do if, despite what everyone wants to believe and say, that is the only truth?”

“We got off on the wrong foot,” the man lamented. “Let’s break it down: the Mexican government is going to push until you confess, because your crime has caused an international scandal. For weeks here, people even forgot about the war. Did they tell you that Trotsky’s funeral had the largest crowds seen in this country for the death of a foreigner? They know that your identity is false and that you understand Spanish as if it were your native language. All of this they have demonstrated by conceding you the honor of giving you the first polygraph test done in Mexico. They’ve proven that the story of your meetings with Trotsky to prepare attacks in the Soviet Union is a lie, since the house’s visitors book confirms that you didn’t spend more than two hours total with him, the majority of that time in front of other people. Everyone knows that your friend Bartolo Paris is a ghost and that the letter you handed over and have repeated to me is a mockery. Whoever wrote that letter is a cynic with the greatest disdain for intelligence, since he knew that those lies would be discovered in ten minutes. With all of this against you and with the government insistent on getting the truth, how can you expect me to defend you if I know that you’re a liar?”

“You’re the lawyer, not me. I killed him for the reasons I say in the letter. That is all I can say. And I need you to do me a favor. Buy me some prescription glasses, since I can’t see anything lately,” he said, willing to face all the consequences.

Ramón experienced a shock when Roquelia came out to the balcony with a glass of water and a cup of coffee on the colorful Uzbek tray.

“What does that man want from you now?” she asked while Ramón Pavlovich drank the water.

“To talk, Roque, only to talk,” he said, and gave her back the glass, ready to drink the coffee.

“Do you need to roll around in the past? Isn’t it better to live in the present?”

“You don’t understand me, Roque. It’s been twenty-eight years of silence . . . I have to know . . .”

“Ramón, you have to recognize that things are not good. Look at Czechoslovakia . . . Do you think they’ll ever let you leave here?”

“Forget about that already, please. You know they’ll never let me leave. Besides, I don’t have anywhere to fucking go . . .”

He took the first sip of coffee and looked at his wife. Not even Roquelia, after fifteen years together, could understand what that meeting with his old mentor meant to him. From the beginning, even when he was convinced that Roquelia had been sent to him by his distant bosses, he had decided to keep the woman at the margin of the deepest details of his relationship with the world of shadows, since not knowing was the best way to be protected. He had taken the same attitude with his brother Luis, since they had met again in Moscow and the latter had confided in him, very secretly, his aspiration of one day returning to Spain.

“Don’t worry, they can’t do anything to me anymore. They already did it all,” he said, and finished his coffee.

“They can always do more. And now we have children . . .”

“Nothing’s going to happen. If I don’t talk . . . I’m going out to walk the dogs.”

With a cigarette in one hand and the leashes in the other, he got into the elevator with his wolfhounds and pushed the button for the ground floor. That building on the Frunze Quay, where he had moved just two years before, was inhabited by local party leaders, heads of business, and a couple of high-level foreign refugees, and had the privileges of an elevator, an intercom on the ground floor (diligently operated by the soldier employed as a doorman), granite floors, a bathroom in every apartment, a washing machine, and, above all, a magnificent location on the banks of the Moscow River, in front of Gorky Park and fifteen minutes by foot from the city center. Arturo and Laura, his children, were the ones who most enjoyed the park, where they ice-skated in winter and played sports in the summer. Ix and Dax also benefited from the park in the mornings,
but in the afternoons their walk was limited to the tree-lined path that ran next to the avenue on the quay, where their owner had taught them to run and jump without getting close to the street.

Ramón let the dogs go and made the most of an unoccupied bench under the shade of some lilac trees, their branches still loaded with bells of flowers. He liked to watch his wolfhounds run, observing how their brownish hair moved while their long legs seemed to barely touch the grass, how they trotted with perfect elegance. Ever since the absurd and cruel death of Churro, the shaggy little dog who got into his trench in the Sierra de Guadarrama, he had not had another opportunity to care for a dog. In the first years in Moscow, before the adoption of Arturo and Laura, he wanted to have a puppy, but the arrival of the children, so wished for by the sterile Roquelia, had forced him to postpone that desire, since space did not exactly abound in the Khrushchevesque building in the Sokol neighborhood where they were then living. Nonetheless, when his brother Luis, perhaps fulfilling some mysterious and unappealable mandates, appeared at his Frunze apartment with the two small borzois, Ramón knew that those dogs were a reward and at the same time a punishment he had to take on, like another burden of that enduring past—from the man who, with patience and treachery, had molded his fate.

Ramón remembered that, when they issued the sentence of twenty years’ incarceration, the maximum penalty allowed by the Mexican penal code, and transferred him to the dismal prison of Lecumberri (they were justified in calling it “the Black Palace”), the certainty that had sustained him until that moment suffered an upheaval; and in the creaking of that circular building, overpopulated by murderers of all kinds, his life was entering a suffocating tunnel. Only if Kotov’s promise still stood, and the silence maintained during those almost two years mattered, would his life find any support. Otherwise, he would be like a shipwrecked man in the place where a man’s life was valued at only a few pesos. The fear of dying, which had barely figured among his weaknesses, from that moment on came to accompany and torment him. Ramón knew that if he were dead he would be much less compromising for the men who, as the policeman Sánchez Salazar said, had provided his hands with the weapons. Nonetheless, the worst thing was thinking that protecting him or preparing his escape was no longer among the priorities of those same men, and less still of Kotov, who was surely enmeshed in other missions more important than protecting a soldier captured by the enemy and
considered a casualty of battle. With that painful certainty he faced each new day, and more than once he would open his eyes, with his pupils fixed on the oppressive ceiling of his cell, appropriating the words he had heard his victim say: “I’ve been given another day of grace. Will it be the last?” Ever since then, the impression that his fate and that of the man he was ordered to kill had become confused thanks to a macabre confluence had pursued him without rest, just like the incorruptible scream that resounded in his ears or the half-moon-shaped scar that, for exactly twenty-eight years and two days, he wore on his right hand.

The beer hall at Leningradsky Station had not changed much in the last thirty years. Perhaps the steam produced by sweat in the August heat had increased that afternoon to a new level, but it continued to be accompanied by the stink of fish, yeast, and the rancid urine of drunks fighting over a pitcher of beer to fill it with a stream of vodka. The floor was still sticky, and the faces of the locals, with their noses crossed by dark veins and their eyes degraded behind a hepatic veil, were like a photograph immune to the passing of time; that in reality did not move, as if it feared the future promised so many times, in the same manner as those men (once upon a time hopeful of being
new
) fled from sobriety and the evidence that it usually reveals. Only the figures of a limping being, some time ago called Leonid Alexandrovich, or Kotov, or Tom, or Andrew Roberts, or Grigoriev, and one who was over a hundred kilos and had never again been called Ramón Mercader testified that things were no longer the same.

“You’ve turned into a fatso, kid!” the first man said, and leaped into a hug that Ramón knew would end with a nauseating kiss from which he managed to escape.

“And you’re an old baldy!” he countered, and gave him the opening to trap him in a second immobilizing hug that prevented him from resisting the Russian’s kiss.

“Time and sorrows,” the Soviet man said, now in Spanish.

“Let’s leave; this is a goddamned latrine.”

“I see you’ve become picky. What do you think of our proletariat? They still need soap, right? But look at how you’re dressed! That clothing is foreign, right? It smells of the West and decadence . . .”

“My wife brings it from Mexico.”

“Does she have some to sell me?” he said, and laughed, guttural and sonorous.

“
They
also know that Roquelia brings clothing to sell?”

“
They
always know everything, kid. Always and everything.”

They went out onto the street and Ramón placed the medals on the lapel of his jacket and they were able to take the first taxi in the noisy line at the station. They ordered the taxi driver to leave them at Okhotny Ryad, in front of the Hotel Moscow.

“Why do you want to go in there? That hotel is full of microphones,” the Soviet man said in French when they saw the building’s façade, which the passing of years had turned even more incongruous and opaque.

“Make sure you avoid them.” Ramón smiled. “Wait a minute, what is your name now?”

The former Kotov again launched into his guttural laugh of old times.

“
Nomina odiosa sunt
. Remember? How do you feel about me being called Lionia, Leonid Eitingon?”

“They didn’t put you on trial with that name . . . Wasn’t it Nahum Isaakovich? Are you going to fucking tell me once and for all what the real one is?”

“All of them are as real as Ramón Pavlovich López. You even owe your name to me, Ramón . . .”

The Hotel Moscow was a symbol of the past that was still alive, like the two men who, thanks to their high-ranking insignias, entered the refrigerated bar that freed them from the Muscovite dogs. Leonid stopped Ramón and sniffed the air. He pointed at a table and, his limp more accentuated, led the way.

“We even have spaceships already, but the KGB microphones and the razors they sell us are from the Paleolithic age . . . Look, here’s something that I’m sure no one has told you.” Lionia smiled. “Many of the walls of this hotel are double, do you understand? They’re made up of two walls, between which a man fits. They built the hotel like that to hear what certain guests were saying. What do you think of that?”

Ramón asked for a pitcher of orange juice, a bottle of chilled vodka, a plate of strawberries, and slices of a Polish sausage that was only sold in stores for diplomats and foreign technicians.

“And bring us caviar and white bread too,” Eitingon demanded of the surprised waiter.

“Why did you call me? I thought you didn’t want to talk to me anymore.”

“You know I got out of jail three years ago, right?” Eitingon asked, and Ramón nodded. “When they let me out, they told me not to look for you, and I don’t need to tell you what the word ‘obedience’ means. But a while ago I asked a friend who still works for the apparatus if anyone cared much if we saw each other and talked about old times . . . So a week ago, when they let Sudoplatov out, the friend called me and told me that, no, it didn’t matter too much if I saw you . . . as long as I told them a few things later.”

“So are you going to tell them something?”

“After what they did to us, do you think I’m going to help them? Did you know that they had Sudoplatov put away for fifteen years?” he said, and added in Spanish: “They can go fuck themselves and their superwhore mothers . . . I’ll see what I make up for them. Is it wrong to say ‘superwhores’ to indicate there’s a lot of them and they really are whores?”