It was 5 o'clock in the afternoon of Aug. 20, 1940. Leon Trotsky finished his tea and strolled through a door of his house into a grass-grown, flower-strewn patio. He wandered about, pausing now & then to enjoy that most bourgeois of bourgeois things: a garden, not for food, but for pleasure. Geraniums were sprouting from pots, roses bursting in bloom, chickens cackling in coops, rabbits copulating in warrens, birds twittering with sunset nervousness in trees that overhung the 20-foot garden wall. The trees cast flickering shadows across the patio. The sky over Mexico City was sharp, clear blue, with puffy clouds in the distance.
Trotsky savored these things with special relish. All his life he had lived in a shadowy world of conspiracy and revolution. But now the great revolutionary's life had become singularly peaceful. His following had dwindled to a handful of devoted, inconsequential disciples. His written work was esteemed less for its revolutionary content than for its masterly prose.
At 60 Leon Trotsky was a successful author with an adoring wife, a house in the suburbs and enough money to live in smug comfort. A lifetime devoted to the destruction of the middle class had made him one of its members.
But he could not quite believe it. A revolutionary smell clung to him like the faint, unmistakable odor of the cell and the cellar. It showed in his quack-doctor's beard and stump-speaker's hair, in his thin, restless hands and his flashing, nearsighted eyes; in his quick, alert, high-shouldered walk as he strolled about his garden. It persisted in his plotter's habits of thought, which made him the most potent critic of the regime he broke with and always a latent threat to it. The fate that all revolutionaries fear had pursued him wherever he went, from Turkestan to Mexico. His son and most of his kin had mysteriously died during the years of his exile. Only three months ago he had barely escaped assassination (TIME, June 3). Mexico City was full of men & women whom he knew to be Stalinist agents. Nevertheless his life, at the moment, was peaceful.
The Visitor. Frank Jackson, who came to see him at 5:30 that afternoon, was not, he thought, one of these agents. Though Frank Jackson was suspected in Mexico City of being a shady character known as Leon Jacome, as Leon Haikys, as Jacques Mornard van den Dreschd and sometimes simply as el tipo Judio Frances (the French-Jewish type), Trotsky knew him as an admiring young disciple who contributed generously to the Fourth International. Six months before, Jackson had been brought to him by a Manhattan social worker named Silvia Ageloff, whose sister was once Trotsky's secretary. Jackson, a tall, dark, bespectacled young man, was a Yugoslav by birth, had entered Mexico on a Canadian passport, spoke English with a Brooklyn accent (erl for oil and oil for earl). The police and armed secretaries who guarded Trotsky day & night let him in without question.