The Man Who Loved Dogs

by Leonardo Padura

  “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.

  The following day, when Ramón, full of doubts, with his radio on and surrounded by newspapers, opened the door certain that he would find Caridad there again, the smiling face he ran into had the effect of immediately returning the calm he had lost for a day and a half.

  “A master move,” Tom said, and patted Ramón’s shoulder as he walked by his side. “An incredible move . . .”

  “Were you in Moscow?” The anxiety still ruled him.

  “Would you make some coffee?” The recently arrived swept the newspapers on the sofa aside with one hand without putting any special emphasis on this action: he was just cleaning a
place where trash had accumulated in order to make himself more comfortable, with a sigh, as if he were very weary. “I’ve barely slept in two days,” he remarked, and Ramón understood the order. He went to the kitchen to make some coffee and listened to Tom from there. “Tell me the truth. What did you think? It will stay between you and me.”

  Ramón noticed that, despite the heat, his hands were cold.

  “That Stalin knows what he’s doing,” Ramón said.

  “Really? Then I congratulate you, because Comrade Stalin has never been more sure of anything. He’s even sure of the European Communists’ doubts.”

  “I’m a Spanish Communist,” Ramón replied, and heard Tom roar with laughter.

  “Yes, of course, and you’ll recall that a year ago, the European democracies silently accepted it when Hitler bit off a piece of Czechoslovakia. And now they don’t want Stalin to protect the Soviet Union?”

  Ramón came out with the coffee, served in two great mugs, and almost in a hurry Tom began to drink his.

  “Listen to me, kid, because you should understand what happened and why it happened. Comrade Stalin needs time to rebuild the Red Army. Between spies, traitors, and renegades, they had to purge thirty-six thousand officers from the army and four thousand from the navy. There was no other choice but to execute thirteen of the fifteen troop commanders, taking out more than sixty percent of those in command. And do you know why he did it? Because Stalin is great. He learned the lesson and now he can’t allow the same thing to happen to us that happened to you in Spain . . . Now, tell me, do you think you can fight against the German army like that?”

  Ramón tasted his coffee. A hint of logic was beginning to slice through the thickness of his doubts. Tom leaned toward him and continued.

  “Stalin cannot allow Germany to invade Poland and reach the Soviet border. First would be the morale factor: that would be like handing over a piece of us. And, from Poland, the fascists would be just one step from Kiev, Minsk, and Leningrad.”

  “So what guarantees the pact?”

  “For starters, that eastern Poland will be ours. It’s the best way to keep them far from Kiev and Leningrad. With the Germans that far away and with a bit of time for Stalin to better prepare the Red Army, perhaps they’ll decide not to attack the Soviet Union. That is what Stalin is seeking with the pact. Are you beginning to understand?” Ramón nodded and Tom, leaning back, continued: “The numbers are clear. The German army has eighty divisions. They have enough to launch an attack against the West or the Soviet Union, but not both fronts at the same time. Hitler knows it and that’s why he agreed to sign it. But that piece of paper doesn’t mean anything; it doesn’t mean we’ll renounce anything. Look at it like a tactical solution, because it has just one goal and that is to gain time and space.”

  “I understand,” Ramón said as he felt his tensions diminishing. “In any event—” he began, but Tom interrupted him.

  “I’m glad you understand, because you’re going to have to accept many things that could seem strange to other people. The war is just around the corner, and when it begins, we’re going to have to make very serious decisions. But remember that the Soviet Union has the right and the duty to defend itself, even at the expense of Poland or whoever . . . Fortunately, we have Comrade Stalin, and he sees farther than all the bourgeois politicians . . . so far that he gave the order for you to go into action.”

  Ramón felt a shudder go through him. The unforeseen twist in the conversation, which suddenly included him in a gigantic political maneuver, erased the last trace of doubt and filled him with pride.

  “He already gave the order?”

  “We’re getting close . . . It all depends on what happens in the coming months. If the Germans sweep Europe, we’ll go into action. We can’t run the risk of the Duck staying alive. The Germans can use him as the head of a counterrevolution. And he is so desperate for power, so full of hate for the Soviet Union, that he wouldn’t hesitate for a second to lend himself as Hitler’s puppet in an offensive against us.”

  “So what do we do?”

  Tom fished in the pocket of his shirt and removed a passport.

  “We can’t risk you getting stuck if they seal the borders . . . You’re going to New York . . . Jacques Mornard is leaving because the war is about to start and he’s not willing to fight for others. You bought this Canadian passport for three thousand dollars and you’re going to see Sylvia before you go to Mexico, where you have a job as the agent for a businessman, a certain Peter Lubeck, importer of raw materials . . .”

  “Will I then be Jacques Mornard again?”

  “Full-time, although with two names. According to this passport, you’re Frank Jacson . . . And don’t worry, Caridad and I are going to be nearby the whole time.”

  Ramón looked at the passport. Beneath his photographed face, he read his new name, and he felt happy knowing that he was getting close to the battlefront where the future of the socialist revolution could be decided. When he lifted his gaze, he saw that Tom had fallen asleep, with his head hanging over his shoulder. From his mouth, a deep snore began to reverberate. Ramón left him to recover his energy. For them, the war was about to begin.

  In the days pierced by the doubts that would arise, and in the very difficult years that would follow, Ramón Mercader spent many hours recalling the life of Jacques Mornard and came to discover that he felt admiration and pity for him in similar measure. What Jacques did on that occasion, for example, was something mechanical, a decision that, at that moment, seemed to be the only possible one: as soon as he disembarked in New York, he went to see Sylvia. He didn’t even consider the possibility of taking a couple of days to enjoy the city without having to drag around the deadweight of that taxing woman. Definitively, Jacques was a little foolish and obeyed Ramón’s puritanism and Tom’s orders too closely, he would think when he was in a position to examine Jacques from a critical distance and see how he could have acted differently.

  When she opened the door and saw him, Sylvia was on the verge of passing out. Despite the letters in which he confirmed his love, his promise of matrimony, and the proximity of their next encounter, that woman—dazzled as she was and would be until she was brutally removed from her dream—had trembled every day their separation lasted, fearing that that gift from the sky would disappear and return her to the solitude of an ugly thirty-something with no expectations. During those months of distance, she had suffered every moment thinking that Jacques could fall in love with another woman or that he wouldn’t fit into her regular life, so full of meetings and political work, or that Jacques was too much of a man for so little a woman . . . Now the happiness of having him before her made tears spring to her eyes, and she kissed him as if she wanted to make him definitively real with the warmth of her lips.

  “My love, my love, my love,” she kept repeating, like a woman possessed, as she began to drag Jacques toward the bedroom of her small Brooklyn apartment.

  That night, her appetites fulfilled, Sylvia was at last able to find out that her lover had turned into a deserter. He explained that his sustained decision not to enlist in the army had led him to buy a passport on the black market, thanks to which he was able to leave France. His mother’s generosity had provided him the money for the purchase of the passport (“They’ve gotten so expensive because of the war,” he said) and for the trip, along with a few thousand dollars more to bring with him so that they could live on in New York until something economically satisfactory came up. Faced with the decision of her man who had come searching for her after burning all his bridges, Sylvia felt giddy with happiness.

  Jacques insisted they go out to dinner. She suggested a nearby restaurant, as she planned the outings they would make to familiarize her lover with New York. At the newsstand, the vendor was ready to close the blinds and Jacques hurried to buy an evening paper. As he arrived at the stand, the headline repeated on all the evening papers burned itself into his retinas, Germany had invaded Poland.
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  With various newspapers in their hands, they entered the humble restaurant, furnished with Formica tables, settled in, and commented that that was, without a doubt, the start of the war. The British and French reactions to the German invasion were of a tone that could only lead to a formal declaration of war, and there was speculation about whether the United States would join. As he read, Jacques understood that, once again, Tom had analyzed the Soviet strategy keenly and knew that he now found himself a few steps closer to carrying out his mission.

  Sylvia ended up being an excellent guide to the city. Because of her political work and her community-based activities, she knew every inch of the metropolis. Jacques could see with his own eyes the cohabitation, in a limited space, the dazzling splendor and miserable poverty on which that mirror of capitalism sustained itself. With Tom still in Europe, he dedicated all of his time to Sylvia and felt proud that he was able to satisfy the needs of a constantly hungry woman.

  As he and Tom had decided, starting on September 25, Jacques went on alternate days to a bar on Broadway where, at some point, Tom would find him to pass on his new instructions. The pretext he gave Sylvia for his absences was that he needed to find an old classmate who had been living in the city for years and who was connected enough to find him a good job.