Angels in the Gloom_ A Novel - Anne Perry [87]
The Peacemaker might not know Trotsky, but Mason did. He knocked on the door. Then he wanted to run, but his feet were like lead and his knees weak. Whatever Trotsky said, Mason could not murder him, although that was what the Peacemaker wanted.
A woman in black passed him, her face masklike in grief. How many loved ones had she lost? Mason had seen the corpses piled in Verdun too deep to count, too many to bury. They would be there until the rats ate them and the earth itself subsided in the rain and mud covered them over. His stomach clenched. Yes, of course, he could kill one Russian exile, if it brought peace even a day nearer.
The door swung open and another woman in black looked at him without interest.
He asked in French if Monsieur Trotsky was at home.
She said that he was, and showed him up to the apartment where Trotsky lived with his wife and two sons.
Trotsky himself opened the door. He was a small man, stocky with a wealth of black curling hair so thick it added inches to his height. Intelligence lit his square face with its full lips and powerful chin, so utterly different from the sparer, more ascetic Lenin. He stared at the tall man on his doorstep in bewilderment, then as Mason spoke, memory and pleasure lit his eyes.
“Mason!” he said incredulously. “Come in! Come in!” He stepped back, making way for Mason to follow him inside the small room. “It’s been an age! How are you?” He waved at a chair and indicated a bottle of Pernod. “Drink?”
Trotsky introduced his wife, who gave a quick smile and excused herself, saying she was just going to put their two young sons to bed. Mason greeted her with circumspection, uncomfortably aware of Trotsky’s other family in St. Petersburg.
Mason then recounted his experiences as a war correspondent, allowing Trotsky to assume that his journalism background had brought him to Paris. However, he was obliged to be economical with the truth, omitting anything to do with the Peacemaker, his recent visit to Ypres, and Judith Reavley. He was acutely conscious of the small room, and its contrasts. All over the table papers were covered with scribbled political arguments. But also scattered around the room were the details of family life: children’s toys, handmade and well used; a piece of mending with the needle still in it, thread hanging; a small bowl with half a dozen leaves and flowers; a plate with a chip on one side; a book with a paper marking the place.
Trotsky was talking about Jean Jaurès, the French socialist who had been murdered just before the outbreak of war.
“He might have stopped all this!” Trotsky said savagely, watching Mason’s face. “I went to the Café Croissant, where he was killed, you know. I thought I might still feel something of him there. I did not agree with him politically, of course, but I admired him. How he could speak! Like a great waterfall, elemental! And yet he could be gentleness itself, endlessly patient in explaining.”
Mason watched him as he went on about Jaurès, and then Martov, the leader of the Mensheviks in Paris, a man of towering intellect but irresolute will. He spoke of a dozen others, his own enthusiasm flooding through it all.
But did he want peace? If he returned to Russia to overthrow the tsar and the whole rotten edifice of oppression surrounding the old government, would he then take Russia out of the war? Or remain with the Allies, for whatever reason, and pursue it to the end through more seas of blood?
It was ludicrous! Mason was sitting in Trotsky’s home talking of a world revolution of social order and justice, all the while having been commissioned to murder him!
But men who had never met each other were crushed in the mud only a few score miles away, killing by the thousands. Surely the only sanity left was to stop it—any way at all?
The conversation had come around to Trotsky’s plans of returning to Russia.
“When you go back to Russia, when you get rid of the tsar, what then?” Mason asked him. “What will you do? What about the war?”
“We can’t help the rest of Europe,” Trotsky said