The Lacuna

He would have asked Jacson to sit down opposite him in the armchair. But instead he stood, probably a little nervous to have this great man examining his syntax and logic. Fidgeting, annoying Lev to no end. Fingering things on Lev’s desk: the glass paperweight, wedding gift from Natalya. Cartridge cases in the pen tray, souvenirs of the Siqueiros raid in May. Jacson laid his raincoat on the table.

And we heard the roar. A scream or a sob but really a roar, indignation.

Joe and Melquiades scrambled down the ladder from the roof, and everyone else from everywhere. Natalya cried out from the kitchen, “Lev?” Two baby rabbits fell to the ground and squirmed in the dust. The strangest sight had appeared in the window of Lev’s study: Lev standing with his arms around Jacson—he seemed to be embracing the man—and screaming. There was blood. Joe and Lorenzo and Natalya all were shouting at once. Somehow Joe got there first, on his long legs, and already had Jacson pinned to the floor, and Natalya was white as chalk, collapsed against the door. Lev was seated now at his desk, glasses off, his face and hands covered with blood. On the floor lay a strange small pickax, with its handle cut short. Not a kitchen tool. Some other thing.

“You’re going to be all right, old man,” Natalya said quietly. Melquiades had his rifle cocked, trained on the writhing man on the floor. Joe was kneeling on Jacson’s chest, grappling to control the man’s flailing arms.

Lev spoke: “Don’t let Seva in. He mustn’t see this.”

And then Lev said to Joe, or Melquiades, “Don’t kill him.”

“Lev,” Joe said, almost sobbing the word. He had Jacson’s wrists pinned now, his own large knuckles white against the stained floor. Lorenzo eased the Colt .38 out of Lev’s desk drawer. It was always kept there, with six bullets in the magazine. A .25 automatic had also been lying on the table by the Dictaphone, within easy arm’s reach of where Lev had sat reading Jacson’s paper. And the security alarm bell is wired under the desk. They don’t come the same way again.

Melquiades didn’t lower the rifle. Both guns were trained on the man on the floor, aimed at his head. Intermittently he bucked and twisted under Joe’s knees.

Lev held his hands away from his face and stared at the blood. There was so much of it. His white cuffs were soaked like bandages. It dripped onto the papers, this morning’s typed drafts. Very slowly he repeated, “Don’t kill him.” It was an impossible spectre, an impossible request.

“It’s no time for mercy,” Joe said, his voice strange.

Lev closed his eyes, obviously struggling for words. “There is no hope they will…tell the truth about this. Unless. You keep that man alive.”

When the Green Cross ambulance came, Lev was alive but half paralyzed, his body suddenly seeming terribly thin and strange to the touch, colder on that side when lifted onto the stretcher. Reba, Alejandro, and most of the others stayed at the house with Seva. Natalya rode in the back of the ambulance. It was dark. Streetlights were on. At the hospital Lev began to speak in French, and later in Russian, just before they took him to surgery. Languages fell away, a long exile peeled from him like the layers of an onion.

The surgeons found that the blade had penetrated through Lev’s skull, seven centimeters into the brain itself. He died the next day without waking again. Yesterday.

His last sentence in English had begun, “There is no hope.” Natalya remarked later that those words were so strange to hear, from a man who lived decades on nothing but hope. But hope was not the issue, nor was mercy. There is no point discussing it with Natalya or Joe, but that was a clear instruction: No hope they will tell the truth, unless you keep that man alive.

He meant the newspapers. A dead assailant could become anyone, a victim himself. Another mad artist hired by Trotsky in a plot gone wrong, his final practical joke. Lies are infinite in number, and the truth so small and singular.

Lev was right; the man lives, and the world will know what he was. The police have him, already they’re starting down the trail that now spools backward through our memories as a terrible thread: Reba running into him in the Melchor market last week, not by chance. Driving Natalya to Veracruz, not a whim but a calculation. The gift he gave Seva that day, the little glider: a chance to get inside the house, memorize the rooms. His attachment to the Rosmers’ old friend Sylvia, and then befriending the Rosmers themselves. Driving them everywhere in his elegant Buick. Even his possession of the Buick. Where did he get such money? We didn’t think to ask.

In custody he admitted it proudly, right away: he is a trained agent of Stalin, in the pay of the GPU for many years. Jacson is not his only name, or his real one. How many avenues did he have to try, before finding one door ajar? The trail goes back years, even back to Paris, his stalking of Frida, waiting outside her gallery with the bouquet of flowers. So much careful work, for the chance to sink a blade into the brain of Lev Trotsky.

The New York Times, August 25, 1940

U.S. Forbids Entry of Trotsky’s Body

No Specific Reason Is Cited, but Fear of
Demonstration Is Believed Cause

SOVIET CALLS HIM TRAITOR

PRESS SEES DESERVED END FOR EXILE–
ACCUSED SAYS HE HAD NO ACCOMPLICES

Special to The New York Times

WASHINGTON, Aug. 25—The State Department announced today that the body of Leon Trotsky would not be permitted to be brought to the United States from Mexico.

There was no reason offered, but it was assumed that the possibility was foreseen of Communist and anti-Communist demonstrations, if the body were brought here.

“In response to an inquiry from American Consul George P. Shaw in Mexico City,” the announcement said, “the department has informed him that it perceives no reason for bringing Trotsky’s body to the United States and that it would not be appropriate to do so.”

SOVIET CHARGES PERFIDY

MOSCOW, Aug. 24 (AP)–The Soviet press, giving the Russian people their first word today of the death of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City last Wednesday night, proclaimed it the “inglorious end” of a “murderer, traitor and international spy.”

It was the first mention of the attack since a brief dispatch on Thursday reported that an attempt had been made on the life of the exiled Communist leader by one of his followers.

The Communist party organ, Pravda, charged Trotsky with sabotaging the Red Army during the civil war, plotting to kill Lenin and Joseph Stalin in 1918, organizing the slaying of Sergei Kiroff and plotting to kill Maxim Gorky, and with having served in the secret service of Britain, France, Germany and Japan.