See You Later, Alligator

by William F. Buckley

  Raúl said he did not know about the difficulties attendant on these matters, that he had always thought of Thomas Mann as a thoroughly progressive writer, to which she snorted that a progressive writer was defined as someone Stalin happened to approve of on that particular day, and Thomas Mann had said or written something a year ago that had got him proscribed in Soviet Russia. Raúl smiled and said that perhaps the Trotskyists were spreading some of these rumors. At which Katia had got thoroughly impatient, and for a full hour she berated Raúl with the intellectual difficulties of conducting higher studies in a Soviet university. All this without, however, condemning the communist system. Had she done this she would have prompted Raúl, however ruefully, to put an end to the discussion, because he did not engage hospitably in schismatic talk. It was all in the day’s work to contend polemically with fascists and liberals, but with fellow communists he felt a theological bond, the bond that made so very conspicuous and outrageous the heresies of Trotsky.

  They agreed to let the matter of Thomas Mann rest, and Raúl again offered her a cigarette which again she declined for herself, but this time she requested one for her roommate. She deposited it carefully within the neat folds of a handkerchief in her tan woolen purse.

  Raúl noticed her heavy Slavic features, and the warmth and intelligence of her face. She expressed now a curiosity about developments in Spain and, lighting his own cigarette, Raúl Carrera told her about the awful chaos in his own country, while she listened. He felt she wanted to make more pointed comments than the conventional ones she used. But she did not again slip into overdrive, and before long Raúl’s words felt desiccated in his mouth. There was a moment’s silence, neither of them spoke; then Katia said that she would have to go now as she had a long subway ride ahead of her. Raúl said that was true also of him, but he would be grateful for her address, as he would like to endeavor to send her some books by Thomas Mann. At which she had abruptly risen and hissed that it was all very well for foreigners to undertake to send forbidden books into the Soviet Union, but it was not safe for Soviet citizens to receive those books, could he not understand that simple point?

  Raúl Carrera apologized. And he thanked her for being so kind. They shook hands at the eastbound station.

  “I am going the other way,” Katia said and half smiled, tucking the wool collar of her sweater about her neck. “Goodbye, Raúl.”

  Carrera received rigorous training by the KGB. Special attention was given to the need to weed out of potentially influential positions in the republican government and army those who might have ties to the Anarcho-Syndicalists or—especially—to the Trotskyists. Already Raúl had had training in physical defense, and a Catalan physical education instructor sympathetic to the Electrical Workers Union strike in 1927 had given him training in karate. Considerable time in Moscow was given over to the study of foreign languages, in particular English, in which Carrera became fluent. Heavy attention was given to ideological orthodoxy, and this of course was made difficult with the frequent changes ordered by Stalin. The shifts had sometimes to do with the party line—there were changes in emphasis on industrial development and agricultural development. But mostly the changes seemed to center on men who had been heroes of the young Soviet Republic but were now demonstrated to have been traitors, men like Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin. Carrera had taught himself to accept the word of higher authorities in these matters and when it became known that the word had come down from Stalin himself in the matter of prosecuting the principal betrayers, Carrera accepted the verdict dutifully if sadly. Carrera was saddened by diluted loyalties, even as he had been saddened by Concho, at Altamira.

  He was back in Barcelona just after the great uprising there, the so-called civil war within a civil war that resulted, finally, in ejecting the Anarcho-Syndicalists from the republican government. Carrera’s mission was now specific. He was to provide information to his superior, Colonel Glukansk, on the activities of the Trotskyists and their party, the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (or P.O.U.M.), with the view to getting as many of their leaders as possible liquidated, on the grounds of putative treason. Colonel Glukansk was not given to disquisitive talk, and told Carrera it was simple: the republican government of Spain would succeed or not against the fascist forces depending on whether the Social Democrats acquiesced in the leadership being given by the Communists. But the Communists could not make common cause with the Trotskyists, who served only to undermine the philosophical integrity of the movement.

  Late on the hot September afternoon of the following day, a hastily mobilized tribunal whose members were dominated by Colonel Glukansk heard the case against Juanito Lorca, cousin of the poet. The prosecutor, parading up and down the abandoned cow barn on the hillside near Valencia as though it were the supreme courthouse of Spain, inveighed against Lorca, charging that he had been seen at the post office staring at the fascist poster offering a reward for the capture or execution of Captain Diego Brujo, the heroic republican guerrilla fighter who in the previous six months had ambushed a half-dozen fascist columns, capturing a trainload of arms and ammunition.

  The very next day, emerging from the house of his betrothed where he slept when in Valencia, Brujo was shot by a pistolero who had fired from a speeding car. An accomplice in the front seat next to the driver had snapped a photograph, thus obtaining evidence of Brujo’s assassination, obviously needed to collect the fascist reward. The prosecutor then triumphantly produced a deaf-mute who had been walking the street at the critical moment. The prosecutor sat him down on a bale of hay that served as a witness stand and wrote out on a pad of paper, “Point to the man you saw taking the picture last Monday when Captain Brujo was shot.” The deaf-mute, wearing coat and tie and sweating, pointed to where Lorca was standing, handcuffed. The prosecutor rested his case.

  Lorca gave as his defense that indeed he had been at the post office on the day in question—but so had he been in the post office every day of the week, since occasionally a letter from his sister and mother in the south reached him. And yes he had seen the poster, but then he habitually looked at all the posters in the post office; indeed it was from a poster that he had first learned that his cousin, García Lorca, had been shot by the fascists. Far from wanting to kill Captain Brujo, he had great admiration for him, and on the fatal morning was at the other side of town, sound asleep, as he had had watch duty from midnight until four in the morning. Moreover, he owned no camera, had never used a camera, and did not even know how to operate a camera. The major asked sneeringly if he had any witnesses to his story, and Lorca replied that he slept alone. The major and the two captains rose and went to the corner of the barn where they smoked cigarettes for fifteen minutes. They returned to their makeshift seats behind the old door that had been propped up as a table and pronounced Juan Lorca guilty of treason and murder, and sentenced him to death. The two guards who watched over the prisoner knew what to do, walking Lorca back to the end of the barn where the hay was stacked. Lorca demanded to see the regimental commander and began to shout out charges of political persecution. The major told the three riflemen who had stood guard outside to get on with it. The guards refastened Lorca’s manacles through the thick wire that bound a hay bale together. The major, putting aside his judicial robes and donning executive dress, gave out the order to fire. After which he walked forward, discharged the ritual pistol shot at the head of the corpse lying on the floor, and walked back to his companions.

  “Really, Ramírez,” he said to the prosecutor, “can’t you come up with something better than a deaf-mute?”

  Ramirez, smoking his cigarette, shrugged his shoulders. “It is a question of supply and demand,” he said. “The demand is very heavy these days.”

  He offered Carrera a cigarette, but Carrera declined it. He would report now to Colonel Glukansk that there was one less Trotskyist in the Republican army.

  In due course it was all over; General Franco took Madrid and Raúl Carrera, reporting for the last time
to Colonel Glukansk at the railroad station in Bilbao, was given an address in Paris. “There you will be equipped for your next mission.” Which proved to be to look after not Trotskyists, but Trotsky.

  Now, twenty-one years later in Mexico City, Raúl Carrera, though now he was Cecilio Velasco, drove slowly up Calle Morelos, as far as the corner of Calle Paris, where he had stopped that night, inasmuch as they would walk softly the last three blocks to Trotsky’s villa, there to give assistance to the executioner—Carrera preferred this word to assassin—Mercader, who had infiltrated the household. They would wait until they saw the light in the room on the first floor turn on and then off again. That meant that in exactly five minutes Mercader would walk out of his door down the hallway, thrust himself into Trotsky’s study, and swing down the weapon designed to drive holes into mountain rock. Human skulls, to the mountain climber’s ice hammer, are as apples to a nail. In exactly five minutes—Carrera held the stopwatch, and he could hear the heartbeat of Julio on his right and Texco on his left—they would create the disturbance that, if all went according to plan, would distract Trotsky’s guards and provide the assassin with the opportunity, the deed done, to slip away.

  Cecilio Velasco, after staring at the site, the place where he had helped carry out a spectacular mandate of Josef Stalin, drove back toward the flower market off Chapultepec and then, slowly, past the huge Soviet Embassy. It was now even more massive than when he had known it, had worked in it, during those five years after arriving from Spain. That building—he had parked his car and sat down at the coffeehouse diagonally away from it—had housed his superior, Colonel Igor Ochek. It had also housed the ambassador, Dmitri Oumansky. And Mariya.

  He had never liked Colonel Ochek. It wasn’t so much that he was ruthless—Colonel Glukansk had got him used to that: a job was a job. There was something extraclinical about Ochek’s ruthlessness. Operating in a foreign country not engaged in civil war, the colonel had to proceed more carefully than his counterparts in Spain. Besides, the problem of a Trotskyist party standing directly in the way of the Communists during a military operation wasn’t there to dominate his attention.

  There were, accordingly, far fewer direct victims—or, better, fewer objects of Colonel Ochek’s mission. There was occasionally a matter of discipline within the embassy itself. It was the largest embassy Stalin maintained, during the war years, in Latin America, and it was the headquarters for communist operations throughout the hemisphere, excluding the United States.

  Mexico itself was extremely hospitable to the Soviets. General Cárdenas was still president. Cárdenas was a communist-populist at heart—he had endeared himself to the socialist world the year before by expropriating American oil holdings. Mexico was the very special haven for refugees from Spain, and a great many of these were Party. The heaviest concentration of Spanish communists stayed in Mexico City; indeed the heaviest concentration of everything in Mexico was in Mexico City. Ambassador Oumansky was responsible for maintaining discipline among the migrant population of communists and this job, of course, fell most directly on the shoulders of Colonel Ochek.

  So that there was nothing like the quotidian executions back in Spain. The foremost objective, during that first year, had been of course to monitor Trotsky’s activities. Then there was the abortive expedition, led by the artist David Siqueiros, that had failed to kill Trotsky. Ochek had erupted with rage over such an enterprise’s having been undertaken other than under his direct supervision. The cable received from the Kremlin did not disguise the primogenital fury of Stalin. True, Stalin had had to bear the brunt of the international democratic uproar over an attempted assassination carried out by acknowledged communists who were presumably acting on instructions from communist superiors. To face all this—and then to fail! Trotsky, it seemed, had simply hurled himself under his bed. His bed! Safe under his bed against a machine gun! Colonel Ochek’s fleshy face writhed in pain.

  Trotsky had been the first preoccupation of Igor Ochek. But Raúl Carrera noticed that, in exacting discipline here and there, unlike Glukansk, who had been matter-of-factly concerned with discipline, Ochek took manifest delight in enforcing discipline. Utterly routine requests from subordinates were gleefully rejected. Carrera remembered the day in May when María Socorro had asked permission to take three days off to attend her brother’s wedding in Monterrey. Ochek said no. Not, Carrera knew, because he feared that María Socorro, in Monterrey for a few days in festive circumstances, might indiscreetly divulge what slight knowledge she might have had about the extent of the activities of the Soviet Embassy; and not because for three working days she was irreplaceable—there were several secretaries to share her clerical burden. Ochek simply liked to say no. And liked especially to say no when he could experience the distress he had caused.

  The pain was not always psychological deprivation. There was young Valerian, the day he was brought in drunk by the police. Inside the embassy he was searched. Ten thousand pesos were found in his coat pocket.

  Where had Valerian, whose salary was 250 pesos per month, got hold of ten thousand pesos?

  Valerian, brought down now to the cellar quarters of the embassy, was interrogated directly by Ochek. He had answered lamely, persistently, that he had won the money at the state lottery and gone out to celebrate.

  Where had he purchased the ticket?

  From a street vendor outside the embassy.

  What was the ticket number?

  He did not remember.

  Where did he go to cash the ticket?

  To the central office, right by Bellas Artes.

  Who had witnessed his cashing the ticket? No one besides the cashier herself.

  Had he told anyone in the embassy about his good luck?

  No, he had kept it quiet—but he intended to give a big party for his associates. Had intended to give a big party for his associates.

  Ochek had him taken to what they called the library—“We conduct research there,” Ochek, his thick glasses especially prominent when he leered and his eyes narrowed, had chuckled to Carrera when he first came to work. After viewing Valerian’s condition when he was carried out, Carrera was grateful that he had never had any business to transact in the library. And then suddenly, unexpectedly, because he long had been accustomed to the style of Bolshevik justice, he had asked himself a question the resonance of which would become haunting. He asked: But was Valerian guilty? Maybe it was exactly as he said it was—he had bought a winning ticket on the national lottery.

  Merely to frame in his mind the question Was Valerian guilty? was an invitation to conjugate retrospectively the phrase: Was Valerian guilty? Was … A. “guilty”? Was B. “guilty”? Yes, all those men were indeed guilty, guilty of Trotskyism. Oh how much better off the world would be—he had finally put his doubts serviceably to one side—when Trotsky was no longer there to poison the wells.

  A month later Mariya was brought in to take the place of Valerian, whose broken body was sent back to Moscow on “suspicion of treasonable relations with foreigners.”

  Valerian was a cryptographer, but within the KGB there are levels of cryptography and Valerian had handled only the routine work. He had sat for eight hours every day behind a large machine, the protruding center of which berthed a typewriter keyboard of sorts. A large collection of newspapers and periodicals from all over Latin America went through a kind of intelligence assembly line. Four KGB officials would mark those columns or articles they thought would be of interest to KGB–Moscow. Before the arrival of Colonel Ochek it was thought perfectly safe merely to clip and photograph these oddments and send them off in the weekly diplomatic pouch on the military transport plane that ambled up from Buenos Aires to Santiago to Lima, Bogotá, Mexico, Havana, Bermuda, Terceira, Lisbon, Stockholm, and Moscow, carrying diplomatic personnel and mail. Colonel Ochek had ruled that all such matter had henceforward to be encrypted. The material, because it was not of urgent security value, could then proceed as before to go forward to Moscow not
by radio code but in the pouch, in those bizarre and theoretically inscrutable taped sequences into which the machine converted Russian.

  So that Mariya’s job was first to translate the Spanish material into Russian, and then to encrypt it. She was a graduate of the KGB academy, trained in Spanish, English, and cryptography. She had been orphaned during one of the early purges in the thirties and brought up by an older sister who—Raúl would learn all this—resented her younger sister’s superior looks. Mariya had attempted to be dutiful and behave inconspicuously, and had worked for eight years, after leaving the academy in Moscow, under the supervision of her sister, who occupied a supervisory position in the KGB. Glinka was her name, and Glinka apparently desired above all things that Mariya should have no social life whatever. And so Mariya worked during the day, and then went home to the apartment where the two sisters lived, and did the housework. Thus it had been until suddenly a Spanish-speaking cryptographer was needed in Mexico.

  Mariya was overweight, but Raúl found her very attractive; and already, after only a few months, she seemed to be slimming down—as though the nervous tension caused by her sister’s surveillance, now removed, freed her to find distraction other than in food.

  Raúl took to sharing his lunch hour with Mariya and they practiced languages together, her English, his Russian. They went one night to the movies at the Cine Chapultepec and saw a rerun of Gone With the Wind and were quite dazzled by it. They went then to take a late dinner at the Hotel Géneve, right by the American Embassy, and Mariya drank some wine while Raúl had rum and cigarettes. She spoke of her sister, and of the academy. He spoke of Spain, and of his year in Moscow.

  Six months later he asked Mariya if she would marry “an older man—I am forty-four, but I am healthy, and I know how to look after … somebody”—he found it hard to use the words modestly, so he went into French, the least secure of Mariya’s languages—“somebody … que j’aime.” She looked at him with a face Raúl had never seen before. What he saw was something he adored. She told him she would marry him tonight if he asked her, that she never wanted to be away from him, not ever. That night they walked in Chapultepec until dawn.