The Hungry Blade

by Lawrence Dudley

  “Mr. President, I’m curious. I am told Manuel Camacho is more conservative than you—that’s why you’re rushing these reforms. Why did you endorse him if that’s the case?”

  “Exactly the point, Mr. Hawkins! The way to dig the Revolution’s reforms in for eternity is to maneuver a conservative into defending them as part of the established order. With the army reformed also, the Revolution is now safe. We will never go back. Besides, he’s not that conservative. People say that because he’s a man of faith, and yes, he’ll make peace with the Church. But that is part of the same project, protecting the Revolution, giving them a stake in it, too.”

  “I see. Of course! In my line of work, I think from one week to the next. You are thinking in terms of years.”

  “Centuries.”

  “Right. Centuries. Thank you.”

  “We are in your debt. And I assume you are quitting our country now?”

  Hawkins laughed.

  “Very shortly.” Cárdenas rose and shook Hawkins’s hand.

  “You are an uncommonly decent man, Mr. Hawkins. You will always be welcome as a guest.”

  “Perhaps I was inspired.”

  “I remember our conversation. Go fight for great things.”

  “Yes, for Britain, but for freedom and democracy, too.”

  “That is as it should be. That way you will truly win.”

  As Hawkins left he looked back. Cárdenas was studying the macuahuitl, a pensive expression on his face, a touch of resignation. He picked up the Dictaphone and began a memo.

  “To the Conde de la Altavista—”

  Yes, Hawkins thought. The most honest politician in the world.

  -94-

  Late in the afternoon the sky over Coyoacán was as blue and deep as sapphire. I’ll miss that incredible high sky, this city, Hawkins thought. He turned into the alleyway eyeing Riley’s garage studio partway down. I’ll miss the art, too, he thought. When he reached it he found a pile of mangled, corrugated tin stacked on the street. The roof had been repaired, pushed back up in place, new pieces replacing the ones he and Eckhardt had holed. The big door on the street was closed. He was about to rap on the side door when he noticed artful letters painted next to it on the white stucco: H—at Casa Azul.

  A few minutes later he was knocking at Kahlo’s door. The maid opened it.

  “Juanita, buenas tardes. Senorita Echevarria?”

  “Señor Hawkins. Por favor.” She gestured inside and handed him a note on a side table.

  He quickly opened it, not sure what to expect.

  Hawkins. I am sorry I will not see you. I have not properly thanked you. But Frida has asked me to go to San Francisco with her to see a new doctor. She will also introduce me to gallery owners. I know you will understand how important that is to me. I forgive you. I know you cannot help with that. The large box is for you. Be safe, Mr. Spy. Perhaps you will come this way again.

  With my love,

  Riley

  PS And thank you again for the suit. I will wear it north.

  He finished reading. At least we part well, he thought. No hard feelings. It is at once too bad and for the best.

  Juanita pointed at a large package sealed in canvas.

  “Para usted.”

  -95-

  Hawkins unlocked the door and rushed to the window, opening it, the Manhattan air stale and hot in his short-term rental on Tenth Street.

  So, back “home,” he thought. I suppose everyone needs a base, a place you return to, regardless of how little time you actually spend there. And yet, it doesn’t seem very homelike. But I can change that.

  After a two-day train trip from Mexico City he’d spent the afternoon being debriefed by W at British Security Coordination’s office in Rockefeller Center. He’d been very worried going in. But it went well, ending with the usual icy martini. Their own mortifying realization of how badly they’d misjudged Corrialles chilled any complaints. And at the end of the debrief W casually revealed a final tidbit, so to speak. He leaned back, put his feet up on the desk, drink in hand, then added, “By the way, Roy, when it reached the PM’s office for the final go-ahead, it seems he agreed with you.”

  “’Bout what?”

  “Churchill repudiated the whole notion of backing a coup: No distracting the Americans was his word! And a reminder, Empire we may be, we are still in the business of defending everyone’s freedom.” Good to know, even if it was too late to matter, Hawkins thought.

  Hawkins went back into the hall and brought his bags into the apartment, then several paintings. The fakes Parke-Bernet sent back were stacked in W’s office. W told him to help himself. He did. He began arranging them around the walls, then hung up the macuahuitl Eckhardt had made. He’d carefully washed off the blood, but it still had a line of brownish red stain. Riley’s vase went on the tabletop by the obsidian knife.

  He stopped, made himself a gin and tonic and sat down, contemplating it all. It’s rather appropriate, he thought. My job—my calling—requires deception, fake identities. My new art collection is an exercise in deception too. And they were, in fact, very nice decorations.

  That left Riley’s box. He cut away the protective cardboard and cloth with Eckhardt’s knife. Inside were the mask and Riley’s canvas. One mask was a skull, the mask of death. Another, a woman—Riley. Another, clearly him. He lifted the painting up, moving some others, putting it in a central place of honor. He went and got a drink, then sat down to contemplate it.

  It was a modernist Mexican work in the muralist style, heavily influenced by Rivera, but personal, like Kahlo. Similar to Riley’s self-portrait, there were several images of Hawkins superimposed on each other: him as a ghost—was that as a spy? A specter? Another holding the very painting he was holding, cleverly mirroring itself—the connoisseur? Yet another as a … what was it? One of the conquistadors? No, that wasn’t it, a knight in armor, shining, perhaps, but the armor was bluish-black and he was holding a raised Hi-Power in hand. Towering behind that, a large man in a guayabera with a sombrero masking his face, a machete raised in a militant fist, ready to strike in a swirling motion. A revolutionary, after all. It was a vibrant, dazzling image, bursting with color, life, and energy.

  Yes, he thought, Riley intuitively saw me as a man between many worlds, a man with many faces. Then he noticed something he’d missed, an inscription on a banner winding through the figures: gracias, señor espía.

  The End

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The closing days of President Lázaro Cárdenas’s administration and the Mexican Revolution as described in this story are factual, including one of the most astonishing episodes of the twentieth century, the mass movement of ordinary Mexicans voluntarily handing in wedding rings and other valuables to finance Mexico’s oil nationalization. Nazi espionage and subversion in the hemisphere are also based on fact.

  Few in the United States have heard of him, but Cárdenas is the forgotten great man of the twentieth century, truly equal in stature and impact to Roosevelt, Churchill and de Gaulle. As president of Mexico it was Cárdenas who started the revolution of the Third World when he nationalized Mexico’s oil industry and railroads in 1938. Cárdenas saw it was possible for a nation to be an independent country and still be just as exploited as any colony.

  Highly innovative in nationalizing oil and creating Pemex—Mexico’s national petroleum company—Cárdenas laid down a template that dozens of other nations followed after WWII, showing the way for generations of peaceful change and development. Cárdenas redistributed 180,000 square kilometers of land to poor, landless campesinos, built roads, secularized and expanded the schools, promoted labor unions and the rights of the indigenous peoples, and abolished the death penalty. Thanks to his sponsorship, Mexico’s arts and culture blossomed as never before.

  As a measure of how far ahead of his time he was, in 1940, Mexico ins
tituted a drug-reform program that moved addiction out of the criminal justice system, creating a network of clinics that provided drugs under medical supervision to addicts. It was a brilliant success. Crime and violence fell, police and official corruption were foiled and drug dealers and their gangs all but vanished. So what happened? Under pressure from US Drug Administration Chief Henry Anslinger, American pharmaceutical companies cut off the supply of drugs, forcing Mexico to retreat. (There were some forms of imperialism beyond Cárdenas’s reach.)

  When Hawkins encounters this revolution and its leader, he refuses to be a destroyer and finds himself forever changed by the vitality of that people’s revolution, to which the world still owes so much.

  The Nazis exploiting looted artworks is also based on fact. After the German occupation of the Continent the Nazi leadership began what can best be described as an industrial program to strip conquered countries of their art treasures and ship them back to Germany. These seizures initially focused on Jewish collections but quickly branched out into a wild free-for-all of looting. In Paris the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume was taken over by the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce of the Nazi Party and used as a central storage and processing depot for tens of thousands of looted artworks, much of which wound up in the hands of top Nazi leaders like Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, who between 1940 and 1942 made twenty trips to Paris alone to select artworks for his collection. The first shipment of looted works from the Jeu de Paume was large enough to fill thirty boxcars. Undesirable artworks, i.e. modern art, were often sold abroad to finance the Nazi war effort. Looted artworks went all over the world and many have not been recovered to this day.

  The US and Royal Army’s extraordinary effort to retrieve these works and return them to their rightful owners was featured in the 2014 film The Monuments Men. Europe’s treasures were safe in the hands of the Allied Monuments, Fine Art and Archives unit, and they certainly would’ve been safe in the hands of Lázaro Cárdenas, whom Leon Trotsky rightfully described as the most honest politician in the world.