Trotsky (37 page)

These exertions ended up taking a toll on Trotsky’s health. His blood pressure was running extremely high. His lower back was giving him trouble, to the extent that he sometimes walked out into the patio in the morning doubled over. By late July, Natalia had become extremely worried about his condition. She said it was a recurrence of his old European illness, in fact one of his worst bouts yet, only without the fever. He had absolutely no stamina. A few minutes of conversation left him exhausted. Hansen alerted Dobbs on July 31 about Natalia’s concerns, adding, “They have no confidence in either doctors or hospitals down here on account of the Stalinists.”

Trotsky’s political struggles entered a new stage in the first days of August, when David Serrano, a member of the Politburo of the Mexican Communist Party who had been arrested in connection with the commando raid, gave a deposition asserting that Siqueiros was a Trotskyist and had carried out the self-assault as Trotsky’s paid agent. On August 6 Trotsky held a press conference in order to rebut this latest and most outlandish frame-up attempt. Another head of the Stalinist hydra had to be cut off, even though Trotsky understood that yet another would grow in its place.

Trotsky never appeared to lose heart. Shortly after the second Moscow trial in January 1937, he received a letter from an Old Bolshevik living in the United States whose spirit was breaking under the avalanche of false accusations manufactured by the Kremlin. To Trotsky such a reaction was unacceptable. “Indignation, anger, revulsion? Yes, even temporary weariness. All this is human, only too human. But I will not believe that you have succumbed to pessimism. History has to be taken as she is; but when she allows herself such extraordinary and filthy outrages one must fight her back with one’s fists.”

Now, in August 1940, as he anticipated the next eruption of lies and slander, Trotsky sounded the same defiant tone: “We await the new intrigue calmly. We don’t need to invent anything. We shall only aid in
elucidating the logic of facts. Against this logic the falsifiers will break their skulls!”

T
HE PICNIC ON
August 9 was supposed to provide a respite from these battles. Hansen drove the Dodge, with Trotsky seated beside him; the Ford followed, with Robins at the wheel. They headed up to the Lagunas de Zempoala in the mountains above Cuernavaca, but there the clouds thickened and the air turned chilly, so they got back into the vehicles and descended to a lower elevation. They chose a picnic spot on a slope in the forest, the same place where Trotsky had enjoyed a picnic more than two years earlier with Diego and Frida and Van. Afterward, they drove to Cuernavaca so that the first-timers could have a look at Diego’s murals. From there they continued farther southeast to the lowlands, almost to Cuautla, then headed north in the direction of Amecameca.

Trotsky slept much of the way—either that or he was lost in his thoughts. Upon rising in the morning he liked to joke to Natalia, as he opened the steel shutters on their bedroom window, that yet another night had passed without a visit from Siqueiros. Yet he worried about how Natalia would get along without him. Both their sons were gone. He was under no illusion that their younger son, Seryozha, could have survived Stalin’s terror, but he did not want Natalia to believe that all hope was lost. One day not long after the raid, he said to her with emotion he could barely contain: “My death…may lighten Seryozha’s situation.” “No, no, no,” Natalia refused to consider this grim calculus.

Memories of Lyova could easily make Natalia upset, and she sometimes heard her husband grieving in his study and understood the reason. An especially bittersweet memory of a private moment between father and son was one that Trotsky had described to Natalia years earlier, just after it happened. It was September 1933, shortly after they had moved from Turkey to France. He was living at the Sea Spray villa in Saint-Palais-sur-Mer, near Royan on the Atlantic Coast. Natalia had gone to Paris to see a doctor. A group of French comrades gathered at the house, and Trotsky engaged one of them in a lively discussion, with Lyova and the others looking on and then joining in. Trotsky was in fine
form—he felt once again like
le Vieux,
the Old Man—and several times he caught sight of Lyova’s adoring eyes locked onto him.

Afterward, Lyova came to his father’s room. They exchanged words about purely mundane matters—until suddenly Lyova stepped forward, placed his head on his father’s shoulder, and hugged him. “Papochka, I love you very much,” he said, sounding to his father just like a little boy. Trotsky held his son close, pressing his cheek against the boy’s head. Lyova could feel his father getting upset, so he turned and tiptoed out of the room.

N
EAR
A
MECAMECA, AT
the foot of the snow-peaked Popocatépetl, Trotsky was awake again. He remained alert for the ride back to Coyoacán. As they entered the neighborhood, he slid down low in the seat to hide his head from the windows facing the streets. He did not want to make himself an easy target for a Stalinist with a machine gun. “And what if Hansen were to be machine-gunned?”—the thought crossed Trotsky’s mind. “After this we must have two of the best drivers in the car,” he told Hansen as they pulled into the garage.

The guard now numbered seven, with two men on duty at all times through the night. Most of the guards performed secretarial tasks for some part of the day; all of them took turns cleaning in and around the chicken yard and rabbit hutches. Natalia, who before the raid had been strongly in favor of decreasing the number of guards, was now pushing for a threefold guard through the night, but they told her that the expense was prohibitive. Mexican comrades could not be enlisted for fear that this would leave Trotsky open to the charge of interfering in Mexican politics.

After Hank Schultz returned with his family to Minneapolis on July 24, he hit upon the idea of sending down to Coyoacán the one comrade he believed could provide the guard with the kind of military training necessary to withstand the next Siqueiros-style raid on Trotsky’s home. The man he had in mind was a legendary figure in Teamster circles, a Sioux Indian known as the Rainman.

The Rainman was Ray Rainbolt, the organizer and commander of the 600-strong Defense Guard of the Minneapolis Teamsters. Rainbolt had been one of several field organizers of the cruising pickets during the 1934 strike. He had considerable military training from multiple stints in the U.S. Army, and combat experience in the trade
union struggles of the 1930s. In recommending Rainbolt to Dobbs, Schultz called him the one man with “sufficient experience, prestige, and authority to take charge down there.” What Coyoacán needed was a commander to transform Trotsky’s guard into a disciplined military unit. “The old man, I’m absolutely sure, is of the same opinion.”

But it turned out that the Old Man was not of the same opinion—or rather, as so often in the past when it came to decisions about his bodyguards, he could not make up his mind. As before, a large factor was money. Trotsky doubted the value of the Rainman coming down for six weeks, preferring instead that a permanent guard be sent to replace Hansen, who was due to leave by the end of August. Trotsky’s reaction annoyed the comrades in New York and Minneapolis. Once again, on the vital matter of the guard, Trotsky was dragging his feet.

One of the considerations behind Schultz’s proposal to send down someone with sufficient authority to take charge was that Trotsky was not always the most cooperative subject to guard. He was fully on board when it came to building fortifications and keeping his head down in the car, but he could also be lax about his personal safety. The fact is, he was used to coming through unscathed, whether in prison, revolution, civil war, or exile. The dumb luck of the Siqueiros raid, even though it set in motion the transformation of the villa into a fortress, may have reinforced Trotsky’s fatalism. Concrete and steel replaced wood, yet he still refused to subject his visitors to the indignity of a personal search.

At a meeting of the guard shortly after the assault, Robins proposed that Trotsky always be accompanied when he was in the patio. A special source of concern was the row of tall eucalyptus trees on the far bank of the creek running along the north side of the house, which offered a perfect hiding place for a sniper. Trotsky objected and said that if the guard voted to endorse such a change he would refuse to go out to the patio at all. Robins was sympathetic to the Old Man’s situation: “His life was a sort of modified prison routine; no prisoner likes guards.”

On August 16, Trotsky was the recipient of two gifts from a comrade in Los Angeles: a bulletproof vest and a siren. The chain mail vest, which suited the household’s recent preference for medieval décor, had been “piously admired” by everyone, Trotsky wrote the comrade appreciatively, although he doubted that it was comfortable enough to sleep
in. “The siren provoked even more admiration. It is wonderful enough just in appearance.” They hesitated to try it out, however, lest they raise a ruckus, “for we are told that this siren can be heard from here to Los Angeles. I, personally, consider this an exaggeration.”

Trotsky closed this letter on a serious note. “More than two and a half months of my time has been almost exclusively devoted to the investigation,” he noted, referring to the contentious aftermath of the May 24 raid. The next day he would present the judge in the defamation suit a lengthy memorandum documenting in exhaustive detail the financial and other ties between the Mexican Stalinists and the GPU. “And now I hope to be able to go back to my book.”

Ramón Mercader and Sylvia were staying in room 113 of the Hotel Montejo, on the Paseo de la Reforma, registered as Mr. and Mrs. Frank Jacson. Sylvia was troubled by the changes she observed in Ramón’s health and his nerves. His light olive complexion had turned green. He was nervous and irritable. On August 15 he spent the entire day in bed with a fever. The next day, Sylvia wrote to her sister Hilda in New York that Jacson’s illness, together with the “Mexican mañana,” was delaying their departure for home.

Their plan was to travel to New York by plane, which would leave them enough time for a few days in Acapulco before she had to get back to work. “I’m glad I came from Jac’s point of view because he really looks terrible and needs care,” Sylvia wrote. “Jac has diarrhea something terrible—it just wears him out.” He told her that his intestinal problem had been diagnosed long ago and required surgery. So the sooner she could get him to her doctor in New York, the better.

Sylvia indicated to her sister that beyond the vacation in Acapulco, she had no desire to stay in Mexico. Four days earlier, on August 12, she had paid Trotsky a visit. The reception was cordial, she said, “but the O.M. immediately opened up on how we were worse than the Mensheviks, etc. Argument is useless—I suppose I’ll have to go there to
say goodbye but I don’t relish it.” Trotsky had expressed concern about her husband’s health. “The O.M. says that for the sake of the
majority
I should insist that Jac have an intervention chirurgical—(operation to you)—immediately—so I told him I had as much influence on him physically as I had politically.”

Jacson’s haggard appearance and nervous twitching were noticed by everyone at the house—although no one chose to remark on them. At this point there was only one man who could have stopped his progress: not the Sioux warrior from Minneapolis, but the Frenchman with the Dutch name who had left Coyoacán the previous autumn, after eight years by Trotsky’s side.

Van sent a telegram to Trotsky after the Siqueiros raid, offering to return and take charge of his security. His intervention might have made all the difference. Frank Jacson spoke French fluently, but his accent was not quite French: not Parisian, nor Belgian, nor Canadian. “This should have been detected by the Rosmers, except that they, especially Marguerite, had become infatuated with Jacson. Van’s sensitive ear and his canniness about the methods of the GPU gave him the best chance of unmasking the impostor. It was Trotsky himself who sealed off this possibility. “It would be really too cruel to force you to return to this prison,” he wrote to Van on August 2. “Now, after the reconstruction, it has become a genuine prison, not in the modern manner, it is true, but rather more like those in medieval days.”

On August 17 at 4:35 p.m., the iron doors of the prison gave way and Jacson was admitted into the patio. He was dressed in a suit and tie, as usual, and wore his horn-rimmed glasses. He also wore a gray hat and carried a khaki raincoat over his arm. It was sunny, but being the rainy season, the weather was changeable. Natalia was off in town. Jacson met Trotsky in the patio. He brought with him a short article he had composed, a rebuttal to Burnham and Shachtman’s revisionist line about the war and the USSR, and he asked Trotsky to read it.

Jacson-Mercader was invited inside. He followed Trotsky, walking from the patio toward the library at the top right of the T-shaped house. Ramón Mercader was five feet ten inches tall and wiry in build, his broad shoulders slightly stooped. The day before, Sylvia had written her sister that “he’s lost so much weight his clothes flop on him like
a scarecrow.” Trotsky, walking ahead of him, was six feet in his shoes, broad-chested, and despite his recent bouts of fatigue and an aching back, physically powerful.

The two men made their way through the library into the dining room and then into the study. It was the first time they had been alone in the house. Trotsky sat down at his desk, strewn with books, newspapers, and manuscripts, and began reading Jacson’s article. As he did so, Jacson walked over to the left side of the desk and sat on its edge, keeping his hat on and his raincoat over his arm. This was shockingly rude behavior, but Trotsky, even though he was very territorial about his desk, was too polite to say anything. Jacson sat beside the push-button switch to the alarm system. Nearby on the desk lay Trotsky’s .25-caliber automatic pistol, with six cartridges in the magazine. It had been oiled and reloaded only days before. Beside it were souvenir slugs from the Siqueiros raid.