One thing I knew—Rubi was an all-right guy in most ways. He wasn’t as cruel or as stupid as the Trujillos. He was just loyal to them. Frankly, I always thought the guy had too many brains and too much class for people who were essentially thugs with fancy titles.
“Are you aware of how the murder of El Jefe came down?” he asked.
“You mean assassination. When you run a country, they call it assassination, don’t they? ‘Murder’ makes it sound like he didn’t have it coming. All I know is that he got pumped full of lead and went down fighting.”
With a strained voice, Rubi said, “It happened at night. El Jefe finished conducting government business in the capital, stopped by his daughter’s house, and then headed out for his estancia at San Cristóbal.”
Mention of the country estate brought back an old memory, the day I kicked the crap out of that swine Ramos, making him pay for my pain.
“El Jefe was on his way to visit his mistress,” he said.
The knot in my stomach twisted tighter, reaching up and choking me. “Why did you call? What do you want?”
Silence. The only sound was the tick of a clock on the fireplace mantel. I had puzzled over the fireplace earlier as I drowned my sorrows in sixty-proof vodka—who the hell needed a fireplace in a place like San Juan? I listened to the silence, unconsciously counting the ticks of the mantel clock.
“Would it interest you to get back the millions you lost when the generalissimo no longer desired your presence in the country?”
“You mean when that old shit fucked me over by stealing my girl and my property? However, I guess that’s just how business is done where you come from. Let’s get down to the bottom line, what’s it gonna cost me to get back what is rightfully mine in the first place?”
More silence. Rubi must have led a sheltered life, or he was used to dealing with guys with a lot more charm and class than I had. I was running a little short on both after being royally fucked over. I tried to control myself, but the bitterness just kept boiling over.
I heard Rubi sigh. I’m sure he wished he was in Paris on a polo field and not taking care of dirty laundry for the new king. During the couple of years I spent in Ciudad Trujillo he hadn’t been around much, but he was always an object of conversation. I heard he had spent every cent he got from the rich women he married. I didn’t know if his loyalty to Ramfis and the now-dead El Jefe was due to love or money.
“Not everything about the investigation into El Jefe’s murder is public knowledge,” he said.
Okay. Ask me if I care. He seemed to be having trouble getting down to the bottom line.
“Under … questioning … certain facts were revealed that have been kept from the public because the matter is still under investigation. Especially certain matters about coconspirators.”
“Rubi, you haven’t called to give me a lecture on Dominican Republic police methods, most of which were probably learned from the Spanish Inquisition. Why don’t you just tell me how much ransoming my property will be so I can see if I can raise the money?”
He went on, smoothly, every bit the gentleman he was. “One of the pieces of evidence that has not been made public is that El Jefe took the road to San Cristóbal late that night he was ambushed because he received an urgent call from his mistress.”
Urgent call from his mistress. Out on the road late at night. Ambushed.
I froze. Somewhere in the alcoholic haze bred in my brain by too much Moskovskaya, an alarm bell started going off.
Rubi went on, his words smooth and oily. “You understand, my friend, the assassins were informed of the time El Jefe would be on that road.” His voice dropped down to a whisper. “Someone made sure that El Jefe would be on the road so he could be murdered.”
I stayed quiet. My mind was processing information. I was beginning to get the big picture. Tense breathing was my listening response.
“Under … questioning … we found out who arranged with the assassins to put El Jefe on the road that night.”
I pulled the phone away from my ear. There were so many thoughts, so many feelings erupting in me, I was ready to burst. If I’d been in the same room with Rubi, I’d have gone after him and beat the truth from him.
“Have you ever heard of the Butterflies?” Rubi asked with a silken voice. The man could grease race cars with his charm.
I could understand why the richest women in the world paid for his company. It had nothing to do with the size of his cock; it was his golden tongue that hypnotized them, that made them open their purses and their cunts for him. I could actually see it coming, see the punch through the alcoholic haze, but I was too mortified to duck.
“Three sisters,” I said. “Las Mariposas. Part of the underground to overthrow El Jefe.”
“There were four Butterflies.”
47
My mind was racing. Fuck your mother! Luz had lured the old bastard out onto the highway so he could be killed. She was part of the underground freedom movement.
My hand shook so bad I supported the phone with both hands. I cleared my throat and spoke calmly, clearly, without emotion, smothering the volcanic eruptions surging from my stomach.
“What do you want?” I asked.
The mantel clock ticked so loud, the noise banged between my ears like the clash of cymbals.
When he finally spoke, I listened carefully to his answer to my question, took down his callback number and hung up. I stood up and took the bottle of vodka and dropped it into the trash can under the room’s vanity. From now on, I would need a clear head.
I gathered my thoughts and all the feelings tearing me apart, out onto the balcony. As I leaned against the railing, I looked at San Juan Bay and the rusty-blotched ghost of El Morro, the sixteenth-century castle that once protected the city. Chalk up another Caribbean similarity for Puerto Rico—Havana had an El Morro bay fortress, too.
From the manager of the hotel I found out how the town got its name—Puerto Rico, Spanish for Rich Port, was once the name of the town and San Juan was the name of the island. But over the years the names got switched. The Dominican Republic claimed they had the bones of Columbus and Puerto Rico had its claim to historical discoverers—Ponce de Leon was buried somewhere around here, when he died in Cuba after he took a Seminole arrow in Florida and missed finding the Fountain of Youth.
My volcanic emotions had become a tornado of feelings and thoughts swirling and clashing in my head. A month ago, I had been picked up by the feet and shook upside down until my pockets were empty and my emotions scrambled, staggering ever since then. Now I was on the roller coaster again, hanging on for dear life with both hands, as it barreled down a track that looked more like the side of a cliff than a slope.
Rubi never did get around to expressly stating the reason for his call, but it wasn’t hard for me to figure out. There were three possibilities—one, he called to shoot the breeze, letting me know Luz had left me for Trujillo to help rid the country of a tyrant; two, he called in the hopes that I would help Luz; or lastly, in the hopes I would lead them to her.
Anything was possible, but the most likely reason—the one I’d put my money on—was the last one. Rubi wasn’t a bad guy, but getting down to that bottom line I always liked to reach, he was in bed with the Trujillo’s. Hell, in a lot of ways, he had been more of a favorite son to the old man than Ramfis.
No, this was no altruistic call from Rubi, no matter how he felt personally about Luz and El Jefe. I had no doubt Johnny Mena was listening in on the call, or at the very least had arranged it. The motive was clear—Luz was a loose end for the new administration. They had to find her and punish her or they would invite a million others to join the anti-Trujillo cause. It was good that her family was out of the country. Johnny Mena would handle the punishment of the conspirators about the same way Batista, Stalin and Hitler had let their secret police interrogate suspects—not only torture and kill the actual participants, but arrest and imprison their families so the next group o
f anti-Trujillo conspirators would know that they were betting more than their own lives.
I didn’t have to analyze my feelings about Luz. I felt pain for her, and fear, mortal fear. If the SIM got ahold of her …
I didn’t want to think about it, but I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t chase out of my head an image of the three Mirabal sisters having their bones broken, three young women who were brutalized before being strangled.
Could men do these horrible things? I asked myself. But the answer was obvious—they were all around us. No despot ever had trouble finding thugs to do their dirty work. They don’t do it for the money—I’m sure the animals who beat and strangled the sisters didn’t get rich from it, any more than their spiritual brothers who murdered babies in Nazi death camps did. Mostly they do it because they enjoy it. Wrapping their fingers around a woman’s neck, or breaking bones with clubs or bare hands, must be a blood lust instilled in some human genes from the days when we were savage apes.
I ordered up a pot of coffee and a batch of eggs and spicy sausages. I was suddenly hungry. While I waited for room service, I shaved and showered, something I hadn’t been doing on a regular basis since I hit Puerto Rico and wallowed in self-pity and recriminations.
After I hogged down the food, I sat with my feet up on the banister and watched the boats in the harbor. Mena had put me on a plane for San Juan for little more reason than it had been the next flight out, but it had turned out to be advantageous for me in terms of what I knew how to do. Like other areas of the Caribbean, sugar and rum were king in the islands.
For the past several weeks, I had been telling myself to check out business opportunities in the territory, but other than getting my rum brand licensed, I had hardly left the hotel to do anything.
“I know why you called,” I spoke aloud, lost in my thoughts about Rubi.
“Are you talking to me?”
The response came from the balcony to my left. Sam Denver, a middle-aged American, and a Puerto Rican woman too young and cheap-looking to be his wife, were having breakfast. I’d bumped into the guy around the hotel. Denver was an ex–U.S. Navy submarine officer who had picked up a decommissioned training sub and brought it to the Caribbean in the hopes of making it a tourist attraction. He had talked my ear off one night in the hotel bar about how people would pay to take a dive in a real sub.
“Sorry, I was thinking out loud.”
“By the way, did you give any thought to my proposition?” he asked.
His proposition involved my investing in his tour sub, fronting the money he needed to get the operation going. I couldn’t picture why anyone would want to go under the beautiful, exotic Caribbean sea in a steel coffin. I’d take a ride on a glass bottom boat any day over being trapped in a sub.
He had served in World War II in the Pacific and knew the name of the ship, tonnage, captain, and casualty count of every Jap ship his sub sank. His only regret about the Korean War was that the North Koreans had so little navy to sink. He was so enthused and gung-ho, if a war didn’t happen soon, he would probably start one.
I shook my head. “Sorry, but investing in a submarine sounds like a hole in the water to throw money in. I’ll stick to liquids you drink rather than float in. With all the revolutions going on in this part of the world, maybe you can rent it out to combatants instead of tourists.”
He didn’t find the idea amusing. He went back to his breakfast and puta without dignifying my comment with a response.
I stared back out at the bay, running the phone call through my mind. Rubi said they were sure Luz had not gotten out of the country, that she had left the San Cristóbal estate soon after getting a call that Trujillo had been gunned down, but from what they learned from the conspirator who was “questioned,” her plan and that of the others was to go into hiding rather than risk getting caught at the airport.
They wanted to spook out Luz. They assumed I knew something, maybe even thought I had been in on it with her. But they were still fishing because they didn’t know where I stood—or what I knew. It was a good bet that if they questioned me, the man she lived with for a couple years, they might at least get some idea of her thinking, where she might be hiding.
There was nothing wrong with their line of reasoning. I knew of at least one place where she might hide.
Rubi had intimated that I would be rewarded with a return of my assets if I cooperated. In other words, tell them where Luz was hiding, turn her over to their thugs, or at least cooperate in trying to flush her out, and I would get well again financially.
There were two things wrong with that scenario.
The first was that the Trujillo gang were completely untrustworthy. If Johnny Mena got his hands on me, I was sure he’d “question” me the same way Spanish Inquisitors did with people accused of religious heresy. They would take me apart and not put the pieces back together.
The second was that they misjudged my feelings about Luz. I felt Rubi was a sensitive-enough guy when it came to romance to catch the fact I was crazy about her. But to the rest of them, women were merely sex objects to be used and discarded.
Now that I knew the truth behind Luz’s relationship with Trujillo, I had one overriding, almost overwhelming desire to save her from Ramfis and his SIM thugs. I loved her. I loved her when we were together. I loved her even when she betrayed me. Her saving grace was that she did it all for a good cause. Yeah, it was a great cause. I lost almost everything I’d worked for.
The strange thing about it, I was lucky Trujillo had his boys give me the bum’s rush out of the country. If I’d been allowed to stay around, I’d be in the SIM’s hands already.
I glanced over at Denver, the germ of an idea growing in my head. If my hunch was right about where Luz was hiding, he might be able to help me.
Did I know for sure? Had we been that close, so connected emotionally, that I could accurately second-guess her? I hadn’t second-guessed her before, but now I was certain that I was the only hope that she had. They were going after the assassination crew with a vengeance. It wasn’t a very big country, it wouldn’t take long to find her.
Right now, as I looked out at San Juan Bay, I couldn’t help but wonder what she was doing, what she was thinking.
48
Luz stayed in the water, keeping all but her head submerged as she hung onto a rock in the surf, hiding from a government helicopter. She had walked down to the beach for a swim to cool off from the oppressive heat when she first heard and then spotted the helicopter. It was a few days short of July and the Dominican Republic was unseasonably hot, even for what was considered the warm season.
She had kept hidden, clutching onto rocks, as the helicopter flew overhead and along the coast. She didn’t know if the helicopter was looking for her. Had they found out she was in the area? She’d been there for nearly a month now, ever since the night Generalissimo Trujillo was killed and the plot to assassinate him began to unravel. But it didn’t make sense that they would just send out planes and helicopters to look for her at random. If, and when, they found out where she was, they’d descend on her like the hounds of hell fueled by demonic fury and bloodlust. To play it safe, she had to keep out of sight.
She wasn’t staying on the beach. The cottage she was hiding out at was on a plateau a mile from the beach. The region was along the north coast of the country, in the area between Puerto Plata and Monti Cristi. This part of the coast was the country’s unspoiled, barely developed region, a place of natural beauty lined by mostly deserted beaches. A dirt road ended two miles from the cottage, making the rest of the way available only by Shank’s mare unless you had the wings of an angel.
Not many miles from the cottage was the ruins of La Isabella, the first settlement built by Columbus in the New World. It was the scene of suffering, tragedies and disappointments as the exploring Spaniards fought the indigenous Carib Indios and suffered setbacks in their lust for gold.
Luz had walked the ruins during earlier visits to the area, r
eflecting on a tale that the ruins were haunted. There were only a few visible stones left of this town that had for a brief time been the capital of the New World, and it was rarely visited except by hunters or fishermen. The legend said that terrible cries were heard by those who came near the deserted ruins on nights of the full moon, and that a headless caballero, with a cloak and sword, rode through the town. She had seen neither when she camped amidst the ruins, but she had spoken to a hunter earlier that day and carefully recorded his description of the headless caballero so she could relate the story to her literature class at the university where she taught.
Rather than the horror story, she preferred a romantic fable about the ruins, a tale that a wandering Spanish picaro-adventurer, Miguel Diaz, fell in love with Cathalina, a queen of the southern coast of Hispaniola, and that because of the lady’s love, Columbus and his men were invited to build a new city in her territory. That city became Santo Domingo, which was now known as Ciudad Trujillo.
* * *
Between the cottage and the beach were fields of abandoned banana trees. Her aunt had cultivated the bananas, but it was not a profitable enterprise. The area was remote, the transportation costly, the labor too expensive, and although for a time there were huts for workers, she could not keep year-round workers. When Luz inherited the property after her aunt’s death, she had been forced to let the trees revert to their natural state. People came from a village several miles away and picked the fruit for nothing and all she asked in return was that they not damage the trees.
There were no close neighbors, and she knew no one at the village well enough to call or be called by name. She had intentionally kept it like that. The house had been her secret place from the time she inherited it when she was eighteen. She often came here to study for final exams during college but never invited anyone else. There was something about having a place that no one else on earth knew about, where no one could bother her. The house was simply furnished in crude wood furniture that would attract no thief, and she kept linens and kitchenware in a secret compartment under the floor for the same reason.
The Betrayers Page 26