Overhead a row of old Hamilton standard propellers hung...Ceiling fans 12 feet across.
They hadn't turned in years,
The tops of the blades wore a coat of dust as thick as moss.
The support pipes hung from the cathedral roof. Some were missing, gnarled amputated stumps.
Priscilla 's torch flitted to the tilework patterns on the walkway.
An optimistic listing of destinations set in squared lettering at their feet: Morrocco, Miami, Moscow, Milan,
Madagasscar, Minnesotta, Mexico City.
How glamerous they must have seemed in their time.
"Have you ever been to Mexico, Mr. Wilkins"?
He asked himself if she could believe the truth...the hot day that he and his team had followed Trotsky's assassins through filthy back streets, finally losing them in a market, where the futility of their mission beat like the rhythm of a mariachi band.
They had promised to protect him, had barely made contact...were arranging the transportation to London.
Trotsky had absolutely refused protection.
He said he had a meeting with an old friend later in the day...didn't want to frighten him with a bunch of strangers.
Soon the mind that held such promise for a noble communist future dripped from the end of a rusty icepick. Trotsky had been dead as soon as he left Moscow.
The taste of failure was still bitter to him.
Noone would never see the letters tattooed on his arm: NKV.
A cover story that would never fade.
Those letters also spelled the end of his career in the service.
An agent could not have identifying marks.
He had been the scapegoat. Someone had to take the fall for losing the greatest window into Stalin's mind that the West had ever opened.
For years he waited. The call of forgiveness never came.
"No, not Mexico City."
They continued down the decaying corridor.
The sound of their footfalls echoed faintly as a dream.