The Hungry Blade

by Lawrence Dudley

  A man walked by, then a pair of women wrapped in shawls—it was starting to get cool and fresh. No one saw him. It was dark now and the chickens were asleep.

  About half an hour later a large truck came up the street, slowed, hunting for the address, then stopped. One man got out and knocked. A light went on. There was nodding and agreement at the door. A man came out to watch. The moving crew opened the truck and began setting the cases on the sidewalk. Then with nary a glance around they began whisking the cases inside the compound.

  Hawkins stood, trying to see over the wall, but the tree was too far out on the opposite side of the street. All he could see was a solid mass of broken glass bottles cemented all along the top of the parapet. He looked back at the wall behind him. It, too, was lined with long shards of broken glass, pointing upward, ready to impale him or any other intruder. Not going to be sneaking over these walls, Hawkins thought. No way of telling who’s inside, either. Damn.

  It took forty minutes to unload the truck and move the cases inside. The first man who came out returned and signed a clipboard, then the truck charged up and left. Hawkins waited about five minutes, then he surrendered the tree to the chickens.

  -23-

  When he awoke Hawkins found a small note had been slipped under his door. It had a phone number and a time: 9:10 a.m. That was prearranged. Public phone booth to public phone booth, untraceable, move them regularly, no room phones where the desk clerk, or the police, or who knew who, could listen in. The phones in the booths had numbers on them, they were easy to call.

  At 9:10 precisely he sat in a booth off the Imperial lobby, dropped some pesos in the slot and dialed. It rang once. Lilly’s lightly accented but unmistakable voice came over the line.

  “Mr. Hawkins?”

  “Everyone calls me Roy. Or Hawkins.”

  Hawkins was still waking up, hadn’t had his morning cup. But Lilly was flying, high and bright, talking incredibly, almost inaudibly fast.

  “Ah, Hawkins! There you are! Hello again! It’s me, Lilly Billedoux! Reporting in! To you! I have my machine set up! Ready to go!”

  “Ah … yes. And where would you be?”

  “At the Reforma. Or, you mean right now? In a booth. In the lobby. At the Reforma.”

  “Lilly, slow down, my god—”

  “Oh. Oh! Oh! Oh! Am I talking fast? I’m sorry. I’m talking fast. I haven’t been to bed in two days, I think? They told me to drive straight through. So I got some Benzedrine inhalers. Asthmatics use them. To open the bronchial passages.”

  “Yes, I know, pilots sometimes use them to stay awake on long flights. I gather you broke the tube open and swallowed the little paper strip?”

  “Yes. In Mexico. Twice. I got in late last night, set everything up, cleaned the room again. Ha ha! Isn’t it funny I did that? These things are great, like twenty cups of the best coffee!”

  “How did it go? Other than not sleeping?”

  “I bought a car! Never bought a car before.”

  He chuckled. “You’re one up on me. I only expropriate them. What did you get?”

  “Ford V-8. With an automatic. Not such a big selection on the border.”

  “Nice. Then what?”

  “Drove down the road at dawn, counted off the miles, turned into a field, crossed a dry riverbed, got back on the main highway. First hour or two I was scared to death I was going to get caught.”

  “Then?”

  “Bored to death. It’s a long ways!”

  “It’s not Denmark, to be sure.”

  “Late in the day, maybe eight o’clock, broke open the first inhaler. Swallowed that little strip. That was quite a kick! Zing! Drove all night I did!”

  “I better get my report to you before that stuff wears off.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re going to go beddy-bye when it does. Don’t make a habit of those things, you’re not going to like the comedown.”

  “Oh. I see. Of course. I have my pad, fire away.”

  Hawkins quickly began dictating the report: The trip to Veracruz. Eckhardt and Falkenberg were their real names. The unloading, them tipping the Royal Navy men. She interrupted with a brilliant high giggle, suddenly slam-shifting back and forth between French and English.

  “Ah, mon dieu, c’est hysterique! Le funniest thing.”

  Then he added killing Perez. There was a huge sucking gasp.

  “What! You killed a man?”

  “Um. Sure. Had it coming, you know? Bastard tried to double-cross us.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “Not the first time, won’t be the last, if I’m lucky.”

  “How could that be lucky?”

  “They didn’t kill me first.”

  “Oh. Sorry. Oui oui.”

  “Take a deep breath, Lilly.”

  “Righto. Encore pardon. I’m new to all this.”

  “Don’t apologize, it’s fine.”

  He finished up with Falkenberg’s odd worry about the progress of the air battle over England. That finally slowed her down.

  “Whoa. That is peculiar.”

  “Yes. One last thing. Have W immediately send a telegram via Western Union telling me to check with Trotsky, my address at the Hotel Imperial. Better go! Let me know when you wake up.”

  “Talk to you later!”

  “Ah, it’ll be tomorrow, or probably the day after, if you’re lucky.”

  “Right. Tomorrow. Or the day after.”

  -24-

  Hawkins walked around the corner of the Avenida Viena craning his neck up. Crude red-brick pillboxes with narrow gun slits had been erected on the corners of the gray-green plastered walls and balusters. There were, presumably, armed guards in them, although in the bright sun it was impossible to tell. The towers were obviously needed. Fairly fresh bullet holes pockmarked the walls and the bricked-up windows. He pounded on the gray steel door of the garage, the only apparent entrance. A man holding a pistol suspiciously looked out. Hawkins handed him his fake New York business card.

  “I wonder if it would be possible to talk to Mr. Trotsky.”

  “’Bout what?”

  “Art in the Soviet Union.” The man looked at the card, stared at him.

  “Wait,” and slammed the door. About five minutes later he returned with another man, both with revolvers pointed at his chest and gestured for Hawkins to step forward, quickly and thoroughly frisking him, including the inside of his hat. Hawkins assumed that would happen—he’d left his Hi-Power in the hidden compartment in his luggage.

  “He’s very busy, don’t presume on his time,” the guard said, although what Trotsky had to do these days that was so important seemed rather vague. Hawkins followed the guard through a nice walled garden, up a low set of stairs, through a baroque-style door and into the house, the other man close behind, holding his gun in his pocket. They turned a corner, past a kitchen, a small, plain dining room and around to Trotsky’s study. He was waiting at a table covered with books and papers.

  The place seemed a rather seedy setting for a man who once was one of the triumvirate ruling the largest country on earth, second in command of the Bolshevik Revolution, and created and led the world’s biggest army to total victory in a civil war. Cheap furniture, cracked plaster walls, wood floors painted bloodred, like the decks of ships of the line in the age of sail. Was that supposed to be the color of revolution? And to think he was going to lead a new rebellion against Stalin from here. Sad.

  Trotsky glanced at his card again and rose to offer his hand, speaking a heavily accented English, but well.

  “Art in the service of revolution has long interested me. In the Middle Ages the Christian myth employed monumental art in the service of the Church, investing powerful meaning in stone and glass. In so doing they created a new man, the Christian man, from the pagan. We must do the same
to create a new Soviet man from the capitalist one. What about art in the Soviet Union do you want to know?”

  “Was modern art part of that project? Was it needed or wanted?”

  “Specify, please.”

  “Abstract painters, the impressionists, the cubi—”

  “Of course not. That art is evidence of the crack-up of a decadent and declining bourgeoisie. Why are you asking about those kinds of works?”

  That was distressingly like the things the Nazis said, Hawkins thought.

  “The Bolshevik Revolution confiscated the imperial estates along with the houses and possessions of many wealthy people. There were, presumably, works from the last forty or fifty years or so of, this, well, decadent art you are referring to. My employer has received some mysterious offers of artworks that seem to be transiting here. Some of them also seem to have been on ships that have transited Soviet ports. We’re wondering where they actually came from, if they could be from these confiscated properties, or from somewhere else in Europe.”

  “Nothing was brought into Russia after the last world war started. I am doubtful there was anything more recent. What do you care if the Soviet state is selling them? The state had the right to seize them in the name of the Revolution, and if it is selling them, it has the right to do so, too.”

  “I suppose, but our problem is that many of the original owners fled abroad. We are worried these people could sue us to get them back.”

  “I see. Yes, yes, of course, the international bourgeoisie will close ranks to protect its own and its privileges.”

  “Are you aware of any current sales by the Soviet Union? Anything you can tell us?”

  Trotsky leaned over the table, curiously studying Hawkins for a quick second.

  “Who are you actually working for?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The British SIS?”

  “What? No!”

  “Moscow would have no interest in asking such questions. If these things came from there, they would know. So, too, Berlin, Rome. They would know, also. France, Holland are now occupied. The Americans have turned in on their isolation. That leaves London.”

  Good lord, Hawkins thought. He suddenly began to wonder about the man with the gun behind him.

  “No. I’ll confess, I am a sort of investigator. My employers have an interest in this question.” Hawkins took the telegram from his pocket and handed it to Trotsky. It had taken only an hour and a half for Lilly to send the report and the request and for them to respond, incidentally confirming she got the transmission out before she crashed. Trotsky read it in a glance.

  “Sent this morning. From New York. Very impressive.” Trotsky leaned back, smiled indulgently and adjusted his little round glasses. “Of course, I agree the artworks probably could not originate from Soviet sources. But there are many strange things going on in the world today.”

  “Stalin helping Hitler?”

  “Stalin and the bureaucracy will do anything to hold on to power and prevent the creation of a workers’ state, including helping Hitler. But that doesn’t matter, it will backfire.”

  “How so?”

  “Hitler will eventually attack the Soviet Union.” He said it with a smile.

  “You act like that’s a good thing.”

  “From the wreckage will come a world revolution and the final realization of a true socialism.”

  The Great War killed twenty million, Hawkins thought. How many would another? Trotsky was discussing death and suffering on an unimaginable scale as calmly as the virtues of various laundry detergents. Hawkins thought back to his father, gassed in the trenches of Flanders, his eventual decline, the final months gasping in an oxygen tent when the hydrochloric acid formed from the chlorine gas he’d inhaled rotted his lungs out. The circle of pain and suffering from that one death alone. Multiplied by millions. Imagine it—no, you can’t imagine it, he thought. Impossible. My god. This man is stark raving mad, Hawkins realized with an almost neck-snapping start.

  Hawkins also sensed an overwhelming feeling, one he tamped down like all his other reactions: he intensely disliked this little man, his inhumanity in the purported interest of a purely abstract humanity, his intellectual pretentiousness—Christian myth, indeed—the crumbs on his lapels, the garlic on his breath, the arrogant manner. But if Trotsky knew something, he needed him. And after that unsettling exchange, there was certainly no doubting his genius.

  “If you say so. In the meanwhile—why are these things coming here? Could the Soviet government—Stalin—be doing Hitler a favor, moving art objects stolen in Occupied Europe past the British blockade into neutral countries?”

  “That is a dangerous matter, if it is true.” He stared hard at Hawkins. “Why is the question.” Another pause, then ponderously, “What would Stalin demand in return? Hmm. He has no interest in the goodwill of others. This expands the picture here greatly. Very serious. As you may imagine I have a considerable interest in helping you, whoever you’re working for.”

  “The Alpert Gallery—”

  “You may have noticed my guards and the towers on my house. Stalin has tried to kill me several times. The last was only a few months ago, his agents machine-gunned the building. You may have noticed the bullet holes in the walls. He thinks the death of a man will mean the death of the Revolution. He is wrong—it is inevitable. Nonetheless, I do not calmly accept my own destruction. I also have an interest in what is going on, who is involved, and I will try and find out more. I will make inquiries. Come back in a day or two. In the meanwhile, if these things are coming here, there are members of the artistic community, real Communists, that is, the anti-Fascist vanguard, who may see something here or be able to find out.” Trotsky began writing a short note, “A truly revolutionary art is still emerging, but they are making great progress here in Mexico,” then wrote a pair of names and addresses on the back and handed it to Hawkins. “Start here. Madame Kahlo and Mr. Rivera are good friends of mine, with many contacts. I owe my asylum here to Mr. Rivera. He intervened with President Cárdenas on my behalf. The president is not a true revolutionary, but he is the most honest politician in the world. Go down Viena to Allende, around the corner to Londres. The blue house, you can’t miss it.”

  -25-

  Trotsky was right, the blazing azure building, which wrapped around a long corner, was impossible to miss. No brick guard towers, either, and surely no guns. Hawkins had walked over, his head having adjusted to the altitude, reflecting on what a brilliant day it was, the sky a perfect cerulean blue. The eye seemed to penetrate deeper into the air at this high altitude, the sun somehow more direct and near, intensifying the lush greenery all around, an early morning shower washing the pavements and air. The Valle de México had the most amazingly weirdly wonderfully perfect climate. Because cooling high altitude and tropical location balanced each other off, temperatures never varied much from season to season. Winters dry, summers it rained. Evenings cool and refreshing. In this clear morning, it was a heady feeling.

  Hawkins rang a bell at the gate, tipped his hat to the maid and handed her the letter. She took it and gestured for him to wait, quickly returning. She led him through a house filled with Mexican folk art to a ground floor studio. A beautiful but severe-looking woman was sitting in front of a large easel next to a table littered with paint and brushes, wearing a loose white dress embroidered across the top with roses, her hair in braids. She was reading the note again, a big smear of paint on the paper. She looked up.

  “What a wonderful place for an artist,” Hawkins said.

  “Yes?”

  “I walked over thinking how incredible the light is here. It must be the altitude.”

  “Yes.” She looked out. “An artist must have light. It’s good today, but not always.”

  Hawkins properly introduced himself and she gently took his hand between her fingers.

 
“This is such a shocking message from my friend Leon. I truly love him and I will do anything to help. Every artist would be horrified to think their work has been stolen from those who love it. And by the Fascists! These are modern works?”

  “Yes. What the Nazis regard as decadent works. They’d like to erase them but they’re worth too much money, at least at the moment, to discard.”

  “By who?”

  “Braque, Picasso, Matisse, Chagall—”

  “Pablo! You are sure?”

  “Yes. I’m absolutely certain of it. You know him?”

  “Of course I know him. He became a good friend at my exhibition in Paris. This is terrible. He will be enraged. He has such a temper. He is a passionate man.”

  “I’m sure. These works may be here now, and in the hands of a German named Wilhelm Aust. He lives in San Ángel.”

  “I will ask Papa. If there is an Aust here, he will know him. Papa was born in Germany. He knows all the German people. It’s not so large a community.”

  “He’s from Germany?” Concern was obviously in his voice.

  “You must not worry, he is part Jewish. He is no friend to the Nazis! Unfortunately, there are too many. Papa is the finest photographer in Mexico. All the people go to him, especially the Germans.” She pointed at a portrait of herself on the wall. “That is his work.”

  Hawkins stepped over to look, a clear and serene image of her taken from below silhouetted against the sky and clouds.

  “That is wonderful. He is very good.”

  “Thank you. Wait here.” She got a cane and swung on it into the hallway, grunting and crying softly in pain, holding her stomach in. Hawkins noticed a withered leg and a bandaged foot. Polio, probably. He could hear her distant voice, then a knock of her cane.