pursue, her heart as elusive, as unsettled as it was now? He feared the answer to that. Not that it mattered! The pursuit itself would always stand between them.
She reached out her hand and touched his cheek. She was smiling, but the pain behind her eyes was real. “I don’t understand you English,” she said huskily. “I’m sure there’s somebody fierce and wonderful behind that throw-away calm, I just can’t crack the shell. I want the curtain to go up on the play for a while, so I can laugh, or the pain inside me is going to burst.” And she turned and walked away across the foyer, as graceful as a reed in the wind.
He followed her, knowing irrefutably that they were already on the brink of a betrayal—of each other or themselves. If she won the battle of wits, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young soldiers might pay with their lives. He did not want to think what his victory would cost. The Irish were not kind to those who failed them.
Richard Mason found the streets of Paris surprisingly empty. Though it was late April, just after Easter, when he turned into the narrow Rue Oudry where he knew Trotsky lived, there seemed nothing of spring in the air. A breeze blew old newspapers and pamphlets along the pavement. There was no one sitting in the cafes and too many of the women he had seen were wearing black, even young ones who at any other time would have had a smile and a word for him.
Walking toward his destination he had noticed how many of the street clocks had stopped, and the statue of the Lion de Belfort had dirty straw sticking out of its mouth. All anyone could think of was the news from Verdun.
It was early evening as he approached Trotsky’s home. The Russian journalist worked on an emigre newspaper, scratching out a living, and as always pursuing his dreams for a revolution of social justice, a world where workers overthrew oppression and there was food and warmth for all.
Mason’s hands were sweating, and he found it hard to catch his breath. In the days since he had left London the Peacemaker’s words had beaten in his brain: “Kill him! If he will continue the war, kill him!”
Of course he could not do that tonight! All he had to do now was meet Trotsky again and make some evaluation of the man. But he would not have changed, would he? People like Trotsky never changed! There was a fire in him nothing would quench. He had been sentenced to exile to Siberia, escaped from Russia to Sevres and then Paris. He had been poor to starvation, and a stranger in a foreign land. Still he wrote with the same passion as of old, greater if anything.
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 Jaures, 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 Cafe 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 Jaures, 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 with resignation. “We’ll make peace, of course, as soon as we have a voice at all!”
Mason felt relief well up inside him, but then he wondered if he was being hasty in accepting this answer. “You don’t feel that if you withdrew from the war, the rest of Europe might not support the revolution?” he asked aloud.
“What’s the matter with you?” Trotsky demanded. “With the losses we’re sustaining, we can’t keep fighting. And we’ve got so much to do, to put our country to rights. The last thing we need is more death. It is the ordinary men—the soldiers, the workers—who will bring about the new order. This is an unjust war—proletarian against proletarian. It must come to an end as soon as possible.” He frowned, puzzled by Mason’s apparent stupidity.
Mason leaned across the table. “When?” he asked with more urgency in his voice than he had intended. “You cannot afford to wait until Germany has beaten you, or you will merely exchange the tsar for the kaiser. And if America comes into the war, that will not help you. Then the Allies will win, and that means the tsar again. You will be back where you started, but with God knows how many of your people dead.”
“I know,” Trotsky said with pain marked deep in his face. “It must be soon. But we are persecuted on every side, even here in Paris. Martov is brilliant, but cannot make up his mind on anything. Lenin is in Zurich, and afraid to move. Believe me, I am doing everything I can. If I had not friends here I would be in danger of being driven out of France myself. But never give up hope, my friend, we will overcome in the end, and it is not far—another year, perhaps less.”
“Less,” Mason said quietly. “It needs to be less.” There was a kind of peace inside him, a freedom from a terrible weight that had crushed the breath out of his lungs.
It was not until he had at last taken leave of Trotsky and was walking along the quiet street in the dark that he even considered how many people might be slaughtered, starved, or dispossessed in the peace that Trotsky dreamed of.
