Q. Great to have you on Mina's Bookshelf, John. What was the most surprising thing you
learned from your 10 years of research for the book?
A. One of the many
surprising things I learned was that Trotsky had almost absolute faith in the
power of the written word. Knowing that Joseph Stalin was attempting to have
him killed, Trotsky was attempting to defend himself by writing a biography of
Stalin. This had to set some kind of record for a problematic author-subject
relationship.
Q. What drew you to Trotsky that made you
decide to center a book around him?
A. Trotsky was a classical tragic character. He was known as
one of the “great minds” of his time, was considered the greatest orator of the
Russian language, and was a brilliant writer who, coming from nowhere, rose to
the greatest heights only to have everything ripped away because he had
slighted Stalin.
Q. THE OBEDIENT ASSASSIN is a story full of
personal relationships. Which relationship is most interesting to you?
A. The relationship between Ramon and Sylvia was
intriguing in that it developed slowly into a genuine romance, but what was
perhaps more fascinating and certainly more unusual was what occurred between
Ramon and Trotsky toward the end of the book. With little direct contact, from
opposite sides of the wall, they became intensely aware of each other and
it seemed that Trotsky all but collaborated with Ramon in his execution. As
Sylvia says at the end of the book about panic attacks, he certainly stopped
looking.
Q. How difficult is it to write fictional
dialogue and actions for characters that really existed in history?
A. Because so many of the characters were speaking a second
or third language, they needed to sound a bit foreign and that was fairly easy
because I’ve studied German, French, Italian and am fluent in Spanish. The
scene in the hospital room at the end of the book when there were so many
languages being spoken and simultaneously translated was tricky but the power
of the drama was worth the effort.
Q. What draws you to this particular period
in history?
A. The late 1930s were a romantic, dramatic and mysterious
time when the world powers were on a collision course, alliances were shifting,
and one could cast the story in terms of good and evil.
Q. If you could go back to one period in
history in any part of the world, what would you choose?
A. Paris in the years after the first World War.
Q. Why do you think that few have written
about Trotsky’s story?
A. The Kremlin’s propaganda machine destroyed Trotsky
reputation and wrote him out of Soviet history. There are famous
photographs from the Revolution that were airbrushed to remove Trotsky from the
picture. Many Russians today don’t know that Trotsky was a revolutionary hero.
Q. If Trotsky had not been assassinated,
how do you think the world would be different?
A. Trotsky provided a voice of reason and a humane face for
socialism, but the forces against him were so great, I doubt the world
would be any different.
Q. How did growing up in a small ranching
community in Texas impact your imagination as a child and your desire to write?
A. We were newcomers and outsiders in a deeply rooted and
tightly knit German community. We didn’t speak the language or know all that
much about the culture, so that understanding relationships required attention
and curiosity.
Q. After studying economics and history in
college, what inspired you to leave Texas and serve in the Peace Corps?
A. I wanted to have exotic adventures, speak a foreign language, and
help less fortunate people.
Q. How did your time in Peru impact your
storytelling?
A. I was the only foreigner and English speaker living in a
small desert village. At night, I read Henry James by candle light after the
town’s generator was turned off.
About the book
Ramón Mercader was plucked from the front of the Spanish Civil War by the Soviets and conscripted to murder the great intellectual Leon Trotsky, a leader of the Bolshevik Revolution who was exiled in the 1920s for opposing Joseph Stalin.As Ramón is trained for the task and assumes a new identity, he lives a lush life in Paris, befriending Frida Kahlo and other artists of the time. He falls in love with a left-leaning Jewish woman whom he is ordered to seduce as a means of getting at Trotsky.
From Barcelona to Paris and New York to Mexico City, the group controlling Ramón—including Ramón’s mother and her lover—guides the assassin on the inevitable resolution of his grim task as he must penetrate Trotsky’s compound.
(Released by Delphinium Books, on February 4th 2015. Hardcover 312 pages)
Ramón Mercader was plucked from the front of the Spanish Civil War by the Soviets and conscripted to murder the great intellectual Leon Trotsky, a leader of the Bolshevik Revolution who was exiled in the 1920s for opposing Joseph Stalin.As Ramón is trained for the task and assumes a new identity, he lives a lush life in Paris, befriending Frida Kahlo and other artists of the time. He falls in love with a left-leaning Jewish woman whom he is ordered to seduce as a means of getting at Trotsky.
From Barcelona to Paris and New York to Mexico City, the group controlling Ramón—including Ramón’s mother and her lover—guides the assassin on the inevitable resolution of his grim task as he must penetrate Trotsky’s compound.
(Released by Delphinium Books, on February 4th 2015. Hardcover 312 pages)
About the author
Excerpted
from the book THE OBEDIENT ASSASSIN by John P. Davidson. Copyright © 2014
by John P. Davidson. Reprinted with permission of Delphinium Books.
All rights reserved
The men
could see the car coming on the road for a long time. It would appear on a
rise, then disappear, a black sedan moving through the
landscape of white limestone hills. The road was a rough track. Jeeps came that
way and trucks, mules, and wagons, but a car was rare.
It was
cold that afternoon, the temperature hovering near freezing. Rafts of
slate-gray clouds marched south. As far as one could see, the ground had been
stripped of anything that would burn; brush, trees, and even weeds had been cut
down or ripped up. Tin cans radiated out from the old farmhouse and the
entrenchments dug along the ridge. The smell of rotting garbage and human
excrement filled the air. Across the valley, on the opposite hillside, the
Loyalist camp looked like stone-age dwellings dug into earth. Occasionally,
soldiers the size of ants would appear, and a lone voice would echo through the
cold dry air. Or, with a resonant metallic snap, a loudspeaker would come on
and one of the Loyalists would drone on about General Franco saving Spain and
how the Republican Army was filled with comunistas y maricones—Communists and
queers. The sound of gunfire was desultory and usually distant—the pow-pow-pow
of a rifle or the staccato of a machine gun.
Lieutenant
Mercader lay huddled on his cot in a low stone shed that stank of sheep. He
heard the car arriving, the voices of men talking excitedly. “Es una dama con
su joven.” It’s a lady with a boy.
Women
didn’t come to the front, not even peasant women trying to sell food. The
lieutenant was cold and exhausted, but he put his feet to the ground and
reached for his steel-frame glasses. The shed was filled with gloom, the sound
of snoring. When he pulled the tarpaulin from the opening, he saw the Peugeot,
elegant despite the crust of white mud, sliding into the farmyard. As he
watched, his mother got out of the car. Tall, as tall as most men, she was
imposing and inevitable with her shock of white hair. As she walked to the
farmhouse, she wrapped a black shawl around her head. She knew the protocol.
She would see Commander Contreras first.
The
lieutenant considered going to the car to talk to the little boy, his
half-brother, sitting in the back. Instead, he let the tarpaulin drop and
returned to his cot to wait, pulling the wool blankets over his boots and up to
his chin. The ache of shame lay like a chunk of ice in the pit of his stomach.
His face rigid, his eyes moving rapidly from side to side, he thought of the
words he would say, the hard truths that must be told. Shivering, listening to one
of the junior officers snore, he inserted a hand into his pants to scratch at
the lice feasting in his pubic hair.
After a
while, voices came from the farmhouse, the sounds of departure. She was talking
to Commander Contreras, saying goodbye. Then, as was inevitable, she stood at
the opening to the shed. “Hijo, ven! Es
Caridad, tu mama.” Son, come! It’s Caridad, your mother.
“Voy,” he answered, his voice deep and
hoarse.
With a
blanket wrapped around his shoulders, he pushed the tarpaulin aside and stepped
out of the shed. He studied her face for signs of grieving and saw the flush in
her cheeks from drinking brandy at the commander’s fireside.
“Here,”
she said, handing him a pack of cigarettes.
“Where
did you get them?”
“Barcelona.”
“How?”
She
shrugged, refusing to commit.
“What are
you doing here? What do you want?”
“Is that
how you greet me?”
He didn’t
answer. The expression on his face did not change.
“I wanted
to see you. We have to talk.”
“About?”
“I need
to tell you about Pablo.”
“I know
what happened. What can you possibly say?”
“We have
other things to discuss.”
“What?”
“Where
can we talk? In private?”
“Not
here. In the car?”
“No,
there is the chauffer and Luis.”
“Then
come this way. It isn’t nice, but nothing is.”
He led
her down a path through the farmyard and around the corner of the barn. The
men, trying to get out of the north wind and looking for privacy, had been
shitting against the wall. So much shit accumulated, Contreras ordered them to
find another place. Now the dung was dry, frozen, and relatively odorless. Dead
rats hung from a wire fence, a warning to their surviving brethren.
She snapped open her handbag to
withdraw a second pack of cigarettes, offering him one along with a small box
of wax matches. He lit hers, then his, taking a deep breath. “This will make my
head spin.”
“What is
the ration?”
“Two a
day.”
“Keep
these as well. There are more in the car.”
Mother
and son, they stood in the cold, smoking. Crows cawed in the distance. The
black shawl wrapped around her head suggested a peasant woman in mourning, but
her back was too straight and there was something innately haughty about the
cut of her lips and her prominent cheekbones. She took a deep breath, exhaling
audibly through her nostrils. Her eyes drifted over the holes, pocking the plot
of ground next to the barn, trying to decipher the mysterious rectilinear
pattern, slowly understanding that there had once been an orchard. The soldiers
had cut down the trees for firewood, then come back to dig up the stumps to
burn, too.
He turned
to face her. “So, tell me about my brother.”
“You said
you knew.”
“I said
you were wasting your time if that was why you came. But now that you’re here,
tell me. I want to hear your version.”
Her eyes
moved, appraising him, looking for a way past the anger. He was twenty-two,
aged by the war, fully a man. His cheeks were hollow, his lips chapped and red.
Though dirty and tired, he was handsome with his thick auburn hair. He had her
looks, his olive skin shading into the faintest lavender beneath deep green
eyes.
“Tell
me,” he insisted. “How did they kill him?”
“It was a
disciplinary action. Pablo disobeyed orders. He knew the rules. You don’t leave
bodies in a public place after a political execution. You never leave a body on
the street. What Pablo did was no small
thing.”
“They
could have warned him.”
“They
did. They warned him. He was seeing a woman who belonged to POUM, a suspected
Trotskyist. They told him to break it off, but he refused.”
“That was
Alicia. He was in love with her.”
“He put
himself above the cause.”
“You
didn’t defend him?”
“What
could I do? I wasn’t there. The orders had been given.”
“With all
of your connections, all of the strings you pull, you let your comrades make an
example of Pablo? You let this happen?”
She
laughed, the silent bitter gesture of a laugh. “I didn’t let it happen. You overestimate my power.”
His voice
choked as tears stung his eyes.
“Is it
true they strapped him with dynamite? Is it true they marched him in front of a
tank? Tell me, is it true?”
“Yes.”
“They had
him run down like a dog. They gave him a sporting chance, then crushed him in
the dirt like a miserable cur.”
She
nodded.
“I want
to hear it from you.”
“Please,
Ramón! This is cruel.”
“He was
my brother!”
“He was
my son!”
He looked
away. The wind was blowing; a crow, its black wings ruffling, had landed on the
fence to peck at one of the dead rats.
“The
shame. His. Ours. He had to be shitting his pants with terror. And all of his
comrades watching!”
She met
his eyes, her own blurring with tears. “You have to understand. He was going to
be punished. The decision had been made and I could do nothing. Everyone was
watching me, waiting for me to break. But no, I held my head up. All I could
control was my own behavior. I made the ultimate sacrifice and kept silent. I
proved my loyalty beyond a doubt and now they owe me.”
“What are
you doing here? What do you want?”
She
tossed away the end of her cigarette.
“You know
this is a lost cause.”
“If we
lose to Franco, we’ll be without a country.”
Her chin
lifted, indicating the entrenchments. “Those are Spaniards you’re shooting at
on the opposite side of the valley. They’re like you, no different. They’re
hungry, scratching at their own flea bites, freezing in their own shit. This is
a revolution we should have won. This is archaic, rooting in the mud. You don’t
turn people into revolutionaries by shooting at them. You indoctrinate them. We
would have won had it not been for Trotsky, splitting the left, setting the
people against each other.”
“I know
about Trotsky. You needn’t preach to me.”
“You have
to understand that the fight has moved on; a bigger war is coming.”
He
shuddered, feeling the cold once more. “What do you want from me?”
Her eyes
settled on his. “I have been given an opportunity. I’m leading a mission that
will change the course of history. I am second in command. It’s a great honor
for all women. I’ve come here with an assignment for you.”
“As you
see, I’m engaged in fighting a war.”
“No, you
have to listen to me. This is undercover, intelligence. Our orders come
directly from Stalin.”
“How did
this plum fall into your hands? Is this a reward for your loyalty?”
“Perhaps
in part.”
“Who is
first in command?”
“Colonel
Eitingon. Leonid.”
He
laughed. “Of course, Eitingon! Hasn’t he done enough to us?”
“What do
you mean?”
“He left
you when you were pregnant. I remember your misery.”
“I
behaved like a bourgeois girl. He did what he could. He never left us. He
helped us. He paid for you to go to school.”
“He
abandoned you.”
She
winced, shaking her head. “That isn’t true.”
“That’s
his bastard sitting out there in the car.”
“Leonid
wanted to stay with me.”
“But he
had two wives, two families. Walking out on Papa the way you did, dragging all
of us to France, you ruined our family.”
“I had to
leave Barcelona. I was dying on Calle Ancha, and I didn’t know it.”
“I don’t
trust you.”
“Ramón,
you want to hate me, but we’re alike. You have so much to gain, but you must
face the truth. We have to think beyond Spain.”
“Without
our country we have nothing. We’ll be like the Gypsies, the Jews, wandering
from place to place.”
“That’s
why we have to win the bigger war. Ramón, we have to think ahead. I can take
you out of all this. Tonight in Barcelona, you will have a hot bath and a good
meal. You can see Lena. You’ll sleep in a warm bed, and in France…”
“France?”
“Yes,
Paris. We would leave tomorrow. What I am offering you is something far better
than this, perhaps something glorious.”
“What is
the assignment?”
“I can’t
tell you. Not here. But you will know soon enough. Trust me!”
He shook
his head. “No, I’m sorry. No, never.”
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