The Obedient Assassin: A Novel (28 page)

“Are you sure?” asked Trudy as Sylvia got out in front of the Café Swastia.

“It's okay. I've been around enough anti-Semitics. They'll think I'm German.”

When she came out ten minutes later, complaining about that terrible Miss Noriega at the Montejo, Otto and Trudy were standing on the sidewalk waiting for her.

“I thought we might as well walk to the Banco Ejidal,” explained Otto. “It's just a couple of blocks.”

“But you said the bank would be closed,” Sylvia reminded him.

“Someone might be working late. If Viñas is the manager, they'll know how to find him.”

“Viñas might not be the manager. I'm not really sure.” She pulled the fur coat close against the night. “And he might know Jacques by another name. His name isn't really Frank Jacson. It's Jacques Mornard.”

There were almost no pedestrians on that stretch of Reforma—an occasional Indian woman wrapped in a shawl holding a child by the hand, men in white pajamas and sandals sweeping the pavement with brooms made of twigs. The avenue felt vast, a broad median running down the center, double rows of eucalyptus trees on either side. The traffic—taxis and
colectivos
—seemed to pass now in schools, as if there was safety in numbers.

The bank was closed as anticipated, but they could see a janitor mopping the floor. Otto began to tap on the plate glass window inside the steel grate. “Viñas! Viñas?” he shouted so that the janitor came closer to the window.
“Señor Viñas! Es gerente del banco?”

No, I don't know, the man gestured. The bank was closed. He shrugged his shoulders and turned away.

“Well, that doesn't mean anything,” said Sylvia. “He probably doesn't know who the manager is and he wouldn't know the names of businessmen who are associated with the bank. I suppose we might as well go to the hotel. Jacques is probably there by now.“

They continued walking and when they came to a telephone booth Otto stopped. “I'm making a call,” he announced. He dialed the number for the house at Coyoacán, which was what he wanted to do all along. He knew that Mr. Jacson went to the house without Sylvia and didn't understand her confused objection. He deposited his coins and gave the operator the number, then listened to the recurring burr of the phone ringing at the opposite end.
“Bueno!”
someone shouted at the opposite end.

“Hello! Hello! This is Otto Schüssler. Who am I speaking with?”

“Nilton. I live next door.”

“What are you doing there?”

“No one is here.”

“Where are Hansen and Cornell?”

“They're gone. Everyone is gone.”

A wave of static came over the line as a school of taxis began to pass. Otto could make out the word
hospital
and understood that someone had attacked Trotsky. “What about Frank Jacson, a Canadian businessman? Was he there? We've been trying to find him.”

“Yes, he was here.”

“Do you know where he is now?”

“They took him to the hospital.”

The connection was bad and with the sound of traffic from the street Otto wasn't sure how much he understood.

Sylvia shook her head, beginning to weep. “But who attacked Trotsky? And what was Jacques doing there? That makes no sense. Is the Old Man okay?”

“I don't know.”

“We should go to the hospital.”

“I don't know which one. We'd better go to the house to find out what's happening.”

Sylvia wept quietly in her corner of the taxi, occasionally moaning softly to herself, ultimately sinking into silence, the strange city passing by in the night, all of her defenses unraveling. As they approached the house, people stood along the street talking, discussing something that had happened. There was an unusual glare of bright lights in front of the house, which looked like a film set with police cars blocking the entrance, neighbors and townspeople watching from the shadows. Sylvia felt as if she were floating, detached as they got out of the taxi and started across the dirt road to the house. The gate stood open. They followed the path up to the bougainvillea bower, where a yellow porch light burned. Sylvia felt weak, as if she were going to faint. She was terribly afraid. Afraid to ask questions, to find out what had happened. She noticed Otto speaking to a man wearing a dark suit, that they kept looking her way. She needed desperately to sit down. She needed to go to the toilet but the way through the dining room was blocked by a large dark stain on the jute rug.

“Yes?”

Otto was speaking to her now. Someone was touching her arm. The man in the dark suit was taking her arm. She couldn't understand what Otto was saying.

Was she married to Frank Jacson?

That was complicated. Everything was so complicated. She tried to explain but the logic kept getting tangled.

“Don't worry, Sylvia! You will be all right,” Trudy kept saying, patting her on the shoulder.

“The detective wants to know if your name is Sylvia Ageloff.”

“Yes.” She felt the pressure on her arm. “Otto! Tell him to stop!”

T
he pain was excruciating, but it focused him on the present, obliterating the memories that made him shudder and writhe—the blood-curdling shriek, the crunch of bone, the spray of blood. “No! No! It hurts!” he cried as the nuns in white cassocks worked over him. Straps held him to the bed. No matter how he tried he couldn't get away from the dabs of cotton, the stinging alcohol and iodine. He could see nothing from his left eye, which had swollen shut. His mouth was cut and bruised. His face and head ached within and without. His hand throbbed where Trotsky sank his teeth into his flesh. He felt alone as never before and frightened. Everything had gone wrong. It was all a disaster.

He was thinking about Eitingon and Caridad when a familiar-looking man came into the room, a Mexican with thinning hair and that fleshy, vaguely feminine face of a villain, a distinctive mole at the corner of his mouth. He wore a flashy chalk-stripe suit with a matching vest. He looked at Jacques, amused.
“Quien te mandó?”
he said.

Who sent you?

Jacques froze for a moment facing his adversary

“Joven, qui
é
n te mandó?”

Young man, who sent you?

“No Spanish!” said Jacques. “No Spanish.” He winced, trying to evade the sisters' hands, the stinging pain in the cut above his eye. “English,” he said. “English or French.”

The Mexican studied him for a moment, then walked to the window, gazing out. The rain was still coming down, and lightning flashed from time to time. “You wouldn't believe the throng of reporters down there,” he said in Spanish. “The international press, every paper in the city, every radio station. The entire world is watching us tonight! We are at the center of the stage.”

Jacques pretended not to hear, then noticed one of the nuns coming toward him with a large hypodermic needle. “No! Not that! No truth serum!” He struggled but the straps held him tight. Eitingon had warned him. If he talked, the GPU wouldn't save him. His eyes became very large as he felt the needle go in, then he leaned forward and bit the edge of his gown, his eyes working back and forth.

The man smiled.
“Es para la infeción. No vas a hablar
.
”

The sisters proceeded with their work and began taping a large cotton pad over his swollen eye.

“No hablas Castellano?”

Jacques ignored the question, refusing to be tricked.

“Entonces, espera me un ratito! No andas!”
The Mexican smiled again, amused by his humor, then left the room

Jacques waited for the drug to take effect but felt nothing. A few moments later, the Mexican returned with a second man, dressed in a dark suit with thick black hair. “This is Detective Morales, who will translate for me. I believe his English is excellent. He spent part of his childhood in Los Angeles.”

He waited, giving Morales time to catch up, then went on in his amiable way. “And, of course, I should introduce myself. I'm Colonel Sanchez. Perhaps you have heard of me. I'm chief of special affairs in Mexico, which to most people means the secret police. You should probably know where you are, your general circumstances.”

Jacques kept his face immobile, waiting for the translation. The sisters had begun to wrap his forehead in gauze, which covered his face a bit.

“This is the Cruz Verde, the municipal hospital,” Colonel Sanchez continued. “And this floor is my jurisdiction. Officers are always posted at the desk in front of the elevators, and tonight two armed men are standing guard in front of your door. I've posted them there, not because we fear you will escape, but for your protection.” He smiled maliciously. “We don't want one of your people to come in and kill you. That's how these things usually work, the surest way to keep you from talking. That is somewhat standard for the GPU. Of course, it wouldn't be one of your trusted comrades, no one who recruited you. It would be a stranger, someone you've never seen before. It might be an orderly, a nurse. Or even a police officer.”

The Colonel took a pack of cigarettes out of his breast pocket and lit one, dropping the match on the floor as he waited for Morales.

“Trotsky is on the floor above us.”

Jacques closed his eyes. “No, don't say that name! Please! I can't bear it!” The scream made his head swim and he and saw the old man and woman on the floor covered with blood.

“I see you understand something. But yes, Trotsky,” again the malicious smile, “is in critical condition. His wife is with him, the poor old woman. You can't imagine her sorrow. She was covered in his blood when they came in. Now they're surrounded by their friends and comrades. The Fourth International is sending a famous surgeon from Washington. People are calling from the United States and Europe, all over the world.

“But you are alone. No one calls to ask about you. No one comes to the hospital. No one shows any sign of caring. That's always the way it is with the assailant.” He removed Jacques's passport and the letter from his pocket, and made a show of studying both. “What is this?” he asked, holding up the letter.

“A letter,” Jacques answered after Morales translated the question.

“Did you write it?”

Again the pause.

“Yes.”

“What does it say? You don't know? Nothing? I'll have it translated into Spanish and we'll see soon enough.”

The Colonel made a show of peering at the signature, then opened the passport. “This is signed by Jacques Mornard, but your Canadian passport is in the name of Frank Jacson. What is your name?”

“Mornard. I am Jacques Mornard.”

“And the passport?”

“A fake I bought in Paris.”

“We'll talk about the letter after I read it. You should know that we have arrested your accomplice Sylvia Ageloff. She's in a room just down the hall.”

Jacques froze. He couldn't react, let them know he understood. But finally, “No, not Sylvia! She's innocent. She knows nothing.”

“She was hysterical when they brought her in. She had been with one of Trotsky's secretaries and his girlfriend. She led them on a goose chase all over the city, looking for you. Kept insisting you had a meeting with a banker, that you would never go to the house in Coyoacán alone. The secretary said that Miss Ageloff became very quiet in the taxi, then went to pieces when she saw the blood on the floor in Trotsky's office.”

Jacques closed his eyes. “No, Sylvia is good. She's innocent. Please leave her out of it.”

The Colonel dropped his cigarette on the floor and stepped on it. “Reporters are waiting for me. I'll be back as soon as your letter is translated, and we can continue our little game of cat-and-mouse. We have much to discuss.”

T
hrough the fog of fatigue and pain, Jacques groped toward some of the things Eitingon had told him, but he had nothing specific to hold on to, nothing more than the kindness in Eitingon's eyes and the tone of his voice. Caridad promised she would come to his rescue. It was Mexico, she'd said. They would bribe judges and break him out of prison if it came to that.

Despite the overhead light glaring into his eyes, he was dropping off when Colonel Sanchez and Detective Morales returned. “Let us begin again,” the Colonel said, once more through the translator. “Your name is Frank Jacson.”

Again, the pause.

“No, Mornard. My name is Jacques Mornard.”

“But this says your name is Frank Jacson.” Sanchez held up a passport, again waiting for the translator.

“That's false. I'm Jacques Mornard. I'm not Canadian. I'm Belgian.”

“Where did you get a Canadian passport?”

“I bought it in Paris.”

“Why did you want a false passport?”

“To come here. The man who sent me told me to get it.”

“But who sent you?”

“A man in Paris, a member of the Fourth International. He asked me to come here to work for Trotsky. He made the arrangements and paid my expenses.”

“What is this man's name?”

“I don't know. He never told me. It's all in the letter. I put it in the letter.”

“But I don't believe you wrote it. I want you to tell me so that I'll know.”

The lag between Spanish and English gave Jacques a moment to think, but it meant that he had to mask his reactions and endure the tedium of the back-and-forth, which was almost enough to make him confess.

“A man in Paris offered to pay my expenses if I would travel to Mexico to work for Trotsky,” said Jacques. “Trotsky was my political hero, so of course I said yes. But when I got here, I began to see that Trotsky was a fraud. He cared nothing for workers. He said despicable things about the people who supported him. All he cared about was himself. When he asked me to go to Russia to assassinate Joseph Stalin, I explained that I couldn't abandon the woman I loved. That's when he told me that I was to break it off with her. That was when I was completely disillusioned.”

“Who typed this letter?” the Colonel asked.

“I did.”

“Where did you get a typewriter with French characters? You don't find them in Mexico.”

“From a man I met at the Kit Kat Klub.”

“What is his name?”

“Perez or Paris. I don't know.”

“Who is he?”

“A guy, the type you meet in any big city who can get you whatever you want.”

“Where is the machine now? We've searched your room at the Hotel Montejo and didn't find a typewriter.”

“I gave it back to Perez.”

“Where did you write the letter? In your hotel room?”

“No, in my car in the Woods of Chapultepec.”

The Colonel put the letter aside. “I was with Madame Trotsky a few moments ago. I wish you could see her suffering. She's like a saint sitting at her husband's bedside, hoping he will wake from his coma.”

Jacques's eyes became still as if he were cornered.

“Yes, a terrible thing for a wife to experience after all of these years. I've had the good fortune to observe them closely since they arrived in Mexico. People talk about Trotsky as the great intellectual and writer, but I always regarded him as a soldier and fellow officer. I'm not a Communist, but many of us think of him as a true hero.” He smiled. “So strange that you would choose that weapon. When you struck him with the ax, you drove the prong two inches into his brain.”

Jacques felt sweat breaking out on his face.

The Colonel held up thumb and index finger to measure the distance. “Perhaps he will survive. Stranger things have happened, but if he dies, then you are guilty of murder.”

Jacques shook his head from side to side, once more hearing the horrible scream. “No! Please stop! No!”

“And you did it because of Sylvia Ageloff?”

“No! Yes!”

“And you love her?”

“Yes, more than anything. I couldn't abandon her. I couldn't leave her to kill Stalin.”

“And she loves you?”

“Yes! She is innocent. She didn't know.”

“Then you deceived her.”

“Yes. I deceived her.”

“The poor girl is still in hysterics, out of her mind. The doctors believe she's having a nervous breakdown. You know how delicate intelligent people can be. They tend to be anxious. They're susceptible to ideas, to psychological problems. You must have broken her trust in reality. They say that can happen when the mind has been deceived too long and too cruelly.”

“No, not Sylvia. No! No!”

“Yes, Sylvia is in a room down the hall, and Trotsky is upstairs surrounded by his wife and his secretaries, all of the people you deceived. It's rare that a case comes together like this.” The Colonel lowered his eyelids. “Yes, rather extraordinary; imagine the fun we can have. It's like one of those English mysteries, where the detective has all the suspects in the same house.”

Colonel Sanchez glanced at his wristwatch. It was three in the morning, but he was only a few minutes' drive from Colonia Doctores, where he lived. He calculated how long it would take to feed the reporters clamoring for his attention and how long it would take to get home to bed. The Colonel took out a pack of cigarettes, extracted one, and offered another to Jacques, who winced with pain when he put it to his broken lips.

“Come, I can see you're a man of intelligence. Let's not waste time. We know David Siqueiros was working for the GPU. We even know where David is, hiding in the mountains near the village of Hostotipaquillo. He's been making a fool of me for months, planting articles in newspapers as if he's still in the city. The famous artist fumbled the job, so the GPU sent you to finish it.”

“No. I don't know anything about the GPU.”

“The GPU hired you to win Trotsky's trust, to be the snake in the grass. When Siqueiros failed, they sent you to drive an ax into Trotsky's skull.”

Jacques began to weep. Tears streamed down his face. “No! No! I can't stand it!” he cried, twisting his face to the wall.