Leon Trotsky's House Museum

This guide to Leon Trotsky's House Museum in Mexico City centers on a short mountaineering ice axe, its handle sawed down to hide under a suit jacket, carried in by a man calling himself Frank Jacson. It follows the months he spent courting the household's trust, driving secretaries and bringing gifts, before he walked into the study on the twentieth of August, 1940, laid a coat over his arm, and asked Trotsky to look over a manuscript. The walls of the house still carry a warning from three months earlier, when gunmen dressed as police had already sprayed the same bedroom with more than two hundred rounds.