The historian says to the reader, “Sir or Madam: We don’t know exactly what happened behind those closed doors, so neither you nor I should even ask.” The novelist says “Dear Reader, I know that you have human questions about all this, so I’ve used my imagination and my art to give you a story with all the intimate details that you desire, 90% true and 10% likely.” 

Of the three impostors, Juan Pujol Garcíahas been treated most kindly by history, largely because his story belongs to military history, and he did manage to get himself — after some maneuvering — on the correct side of World War II, which is to say, on the winning side.

Unlike Trotsky and Mercader, Iván is not a historical figure but a fictional creation: a composite, no doubt, of several of Padura’s friends and acquaintances, an amalgam of his generation. The Trotsky and Mercader threads, more than two-thirds of the novel, are based as much as possible on facts established by historical evidence. Iván’s tale, on the other hand, is not historical fiction as such, although of course it takes place in an historical context — in this case, in Cuba from the 1970s to the early years of the new century.