The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  At the beginning of July, Tom and Mink disappeared and those days of pleasant summer waiting for moment zero were for Jacques Mornard slow days, darkened by the galloping crisis affecting the government coalition of the Popular Front in France. Above all, he was bothered by the worsening news that came from Spain, where the evacuation of International Brigade volunteers had begun without the Popular Army, despite the intrepid campaign of the Ebro, managing to push back the pro-Franco troops or kick them out of the strip they’d opened up to the Mediterranean. The vestiges of Ramón still beating within Jacques couldn’t help but be irritated by those failures, but his discipline allowed him to keep himself far from the places where the evacuated volunteers gathered before returning to their respective countries. Ramón would have liked to have heard their stories.

  On July 15, without Jacques expecting him, a pale and agitated Tom went to see him at the apartment on rue Léopold Robert. Without even saying hello, Tom told him that a serious complication had arisen: everything seemed to indicate that Orlov, head of the Soviet intelligence advisers in Spain, had deserted. At that moment, for the first time, Jacques would see a streak of weakness in that man whom he admired so much for his aplomb in any circumstance. But very soon he understood the dimensions of the disaster tormenting him.

  “We’re after him, but the son of a bitch knows all our methods and how we do things. We know he’s in France, perhaps even right here in Paris, and the truth is that I think he’ll escape us.”

  “Are you sure he deserted?”

  “He had no other choice.”

  “Wasn’t he your right-hand man?”

  “So much so that he knows the entire network of Soviet espionage in Europe.”

  Jacques felt a tremor go through him.

  “Does he also know about me?”

  “No,” Tom reassured him. “You’re beyond his reach. But not the comrades who are in Mexico. You can’t imagine what Orlov knows. As they say in Spain, that swine left us with our asses hanging in the air . . . It’s a disaster.”

  “I swear I don’t understand. Orlov was a traitor?”

  Tom lit a cigarette, as if he needed that break.

  “No, I don’t think so, and that’s the worst part. They forced him to desert. What happened was that crazy Yezhov sent Orlov a telegram telling him he should come to Paris, take a car from the embassy, and show up in Antwerp to board a ship where there would be a very important meeting with an envoy of his. Orlov didn’t even need to be too intelligent to realize that if he showed up, he would end up dead, like Antonov-Ovseyenko and other advisers that Yezhov had called for. On the eleventh, he left Spain and disappeared.”

  Jacques Mornard felt his head spinning. Something too sick and out of control was happening and, based on what Tom was saying, the consequences could be unpredictable.

  “If Beria and Comrade Stalin don’t stop Yezhov, everything is going to get fucked up.”

  “So why don’t they just stop him, goddammit?” Jacques cried out.

  “Bloody hell, because Stalin doesn’t want to!” Tom yelled, throwing his cigarette to the floor. “Because he doesn’t want to!”

  Tom stood up. The fury possessing him was unfamiliar to Jacques, who remained silent until the other man, back in control of himself, again spoke.

  “Your plan is still on. Orlov doesn’t even know you exist and that’s our guarantee. Now it’s more important than ever that you do everything right. As long as we don’t know where Orlov is and what information he’s going to release, we’re up in the air. For now, we’ve put three of the comrades in Mexico in quarantine and have taken the other one out for good . . . Orlov knew that agent personally. He himself recommended him for a job with the utmost responsibility.”

  Jacques remained silent. He knew that Tom needed to get out all of those tensions and that he was doing it in front of him because he trusted his discretion and required his intelligence, perhaps more than ever before.

  “I’m going to tell you something you were going to find out at some point, and it doesn’t make sense anymore for you not to know. The agent we removed from Mexico is a woman and she was working under the name Patria. When the time came, if it had been necessary, you and she would have worked together . . .”

  Ramón gave a start. Was it possible that Yezhov’s foolish act had deprived him of something so beautiful that he couldn’t have even dreamed of it?

  “Are you talking about . . .?”

  “África de las Heras. When you arrived at Malakhovka, she was in cabin 9. She left there two months before you. Orlov doesn’t know where she is, but he knows her and we can’t risk her. She’s too valuable.”

  Ramón Mercader stood up and went to the window from which he could see the boulevard du Montparnasse. Evening was falling and the cafés, with their tables in the sun, had filled with locals, carefree and pleasant, who would talk about the great and small things in their lives, perhaps anodyne, but theirs. To know that for weeks he had had África thirty yards away from him without being allowed to see her was not a comforting piece of news. It was a mutilation, one more, of the many he’d had to endure to reach the dark point of his life in which he found himself: without a past, without a present, with a future in which he would depend on others, on the impalpable paths of history. Ramón turned around and looked at Tom, who, with his head down, was smoking again.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of my responsibilities. I’m not going to fail you . . . So, is she well?”

  Behind the bar’s counter was the longest, cleanest, and most precise mirror Ramón Mercader would see in his whole life. It was the mirror against which he would compare every other mirror in the world, the mirror in which he wanted to see himself, especially the frozen Moscow morning of 1968 that, feeling the abrasive pain in his right hand and observing his reflection in the new glass walls of the mausoleum of the god of the world’s proletarians, he saw the emptiness pursuing his shadowy life. He thought that if he’d been in front of that magic mirror at the Ritz, he would have surely seen himself, as he did on those afternoons in 1938, when he was Jacques Mornard and he walked around with his faith and his health intact, wearing a suit of muslin or twill that was crisp because of the starch, swollen with pride at knowing he was at the center of the battle for the future of mankind.

  Before he left, Tom had explained to him, with his usual meticulousness, how that first meeting with Sylvia Ageloff and Ruby Weil would go. On the afternoon of July 19, Jacques would run into the women at the bar of the Hôtel Ritz, where Ruby and Sylvia would go in the company of the bookseller Gertrude Allison, so that he, taking advantage of his client relationship with Allison, would be introduced to the tourists and invite them for a drink. At that moment, Sylvia would fall in the Belgian’s sights; from that moment on, the way in which she was gunned down would depend only upon the abilities and the steady hand of Jacques Mornard.

  But that afternoon, seated in front of the gin and tonic barely sprinkled with gin, he was again thinking that perhaps África’s brusque change in attitude, when they separated in Barcelona, had nothing to do with other men and was only due to orders to cut off her old relationships before getting involved with her new mission. Relieved by that thought, he watched, through the mirror, the noisy and smiling entrance of four women. He recognized Allison, the blond Ruby Weil, and told himself that the tall, young one must be Marie Crapeau, a French friend of the bookseller’s. He then focused on the freckly one with glasses, with milky skin, who hid her extreme thinness below a wide, pleated skirt and a flounced blouse, and he felt how the glass perfectly reflected back the overwhelming ugliness of Sylvia Ageloff. He saw her sit at a table and decided to turn around in order to observe, like the other patrons, the women who came in with such a ruckus. He understood at that moment that Jacques Mornard was about to grow up.

  Gertrude Allison gave a cry of authentic surprise:

  “But look who’s here! Hi, Jacques!”

  Smiling, with his glass
in hand, he approached the women, allowing his personal charm, his elegance, and his cologne to spread and start his work. Gertrude made the introductions and when he shook Sylvia’s hand, he had the feeling of touching a small and feeble bird. Gertrude Allison explained to him who her friends were, two Americans on holiday in Paris, and invited him to sit down. He didn’t want to interrupt their party, but if she insisted . . . on the condition that they allow him to buy them all drinks.

  “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 . . .”