But dominating the city weren’t the glories of the colonial past, but the contingencies of the present—and the pivotal contingency was Generalissímo Rafael Trujillo, “El Jefe,” the Chief. He was omnipresent, more important than God, almost as visible as the weather. No issue of a daily newspaper was complete without his picture. No hour went by on a radio station without some mention of the Great Benefactor. His picture along with phrases like “Trujillo and God” and “the Benefactor” adorned walls of buildings—with Trujillo’s name usually in first place. Songs were sung about him. The Twenty-third Psalm was revised for schoolchildren to begin, “Trujillo is my shepherd.…”
A less obvious but ever more dramatic evidence of his domination of the city and country were the black Volkswagen vans of the SIM, the Military Intelligence Service. The secret police, an internal and external spy organization, helped Trujillo maintain a reign of terror against dissenters, not a few of whom ended up as shark bait after the SIM paid a midnight visit to their houses.
It was truly the city of Trujillo. What was most strange to Luz was the basis of the dictator’s support—it came from the bottom. It was the poorest, most underprivileged, most socially, politically and economically oppressed people where the dictator found the core of his support. The wealthy gave alliance only because they wanted to protect their assets and lives. The middle-class kept quiet because they were in a comfort zone that they wanted left undisturbed. But it was the lower classes where the shouts for the dictator were loudest and the most real. Perhaps in having nothing material, they found something to be proud of in the reflected glory of El Jefe. And in his vast wealth, most of which was obtained from corrupt government practices.
Can people have so little in body and soul that they fill themselves with the glory of a tyrant? Luz wondered. Perhaps that was why so many people sought God—to fill the voids within themselves.
Luz left the taxi at a corner of the park and slowly walked toward El Conde street. She saw no one she knew. When she was certain she wasn’t being followed, she went up El Conde two blocks and turned onto a narrow side street, little more than an alley. At the back of the alley she entered a small store that specialized in clocks and watches.
A man working on a clock spoke without looking up from his work as she entered. “Señorita.”
“Manuel.”
She went by him and through a curtained doorway, down a narrow, dark hallway crowded with shelves jammed with merchandise. Out a back door, she walked quickly across a small cobblestone courtyard with a stone bird bath in the center. On the other side of the courtyard she paused at a wooden door and knocked. A man’s voice told her to come in.
She entered the living room of a small apartment. The room was dimly lit from a single lamp next to a stuffed chair. Books were everywhere, books on all subjects, some on political theory that would not find favor with the present administration. A man with gray in his beard got up from the chair as she came in.
She went into his arms and broke into tears.
“Las Mariposas son muertas,” she sobbed.
The Butterflies are dead.
37
The Big Man from Chicago, Sam Giancana, was in town and I was baby-sitting him. I met him at the airport and put him in the back of the limo with me and Vincent. This was the same Vincent who tried to get me to buy a Havana casino at better than fire-sale terms—as Castro’s guerilla army was entering the city limits. He knew all about casinos. I knew nothing. He had contacts in the States with men willing to invest in casino operations that involved beaucoup payoffs to local officals and risky political situations—and I had the contacts with the crème de la crème of Dominican Republic politics.
It wasn’t a marriage made in heaven, but at the bank. I got 10 percent tax free of the casino’s bottom line and all it cost me was a lot of black-slapping b.s., a few bribes, and another piece of my soul—the latter according to Luz, who saw my talents in a different light than I did. She accused me not only of dealing with American gangsters but said I was beginning to talk and think like one.
Personally, I didn’t care what she said about me as long as she put up with me. I still found love as the deepest, most unfathomable mystery of life. God, UFOs and the Sphinx were not as difficult to fathom as why a person like me loved someone like her. “Opposites attract” may have been the result of our being together, but it didn’t explain how we got there. Part of it was just plain sexual chemistry. When we went to bed, our passions melded us and we became one, not just physically, but with our hearts beating together.
* * *
Sam G. was a mob boss from Chicago. He had “interests” in clubs along the Las Vegas Strip and in “roadhouses” in Arkansas and Mississippi. I also heard that besides his gambling investments, he collected revenues from prostitution and protection rackets.
In other words, he was a gangster, American style.
He was one of the investors in Club Paradise, the casino-hotel project we put together on the beach a few minutes from Ciudad Trujillo.
I don’t think that Luz really ever understood or appreciated exactly what it took to walk a line between gangsters who would kill you for cheating—real or imagined—and local police and government officials who would occasionally spit on the slate and wipe it clean, like Castro was doing in Cuba. And spilling a lot of blood along the way. There was book-smart and street-smart, but these mob guys had the intellect of jungle predators.
Vincent offered Sam G. a cigar.
“The best in the world now that Havana’s gone Commie,” he told Sam. “They ain’t hand-rolled, you know, Nick has them rolled between the thighs of virgins.”
“You’re shitting me.”
I assured Sam G. that it was the gospel, wondering to myself how men who made millions of dollars and ran big business enterprises could be so damn stupid. “We’re reproducing the same fine cigars here in the Dominican Republic that they have in Cuba.” It was a lie, but what the hell did he know about growing tobacco?
Sam bit off the end of the cigar and spit the piece out the window. “The take in the casino looks bigger than the money in my pocket,” he said. “All’s I got out of it has been pocket change. Why is that?”
There was a not-too-subtle threat underlining the question.
“We’re doing classy additions to the casino, big crystal chandeliers, private spas in suites, that sort of thing,” Vincent said. “The boys from New York have opened one, too, not far from ours, and we have to make sure that everything is a class act to get the Stateside crowds into ours and not theirs. Then, you have to know, the payoffs here are murderous, worse than Havana. Even with that, we’re returning a profit. You see big money when the overruns are finished.”
“Just make sure none of the overruns end up in your pockets. If that happens, despite my own tender feelings for you boys, and I think of you as the brothers I never had, there are guys back in the States who would see to it that you come down with a fatal dose of Bugsy disease.”
“Bugsy disease?” I asked.
“Bugsy Siegel,” Vincent said. “Caught a slug in the eye after the Flamingo in Vegas got too expensive for the investors’ tastes.”
Talk about being stupid, I thought they were talking about something like malaria.
“What’s this shit I heard about some rum you got that gives you a hard-on?” Sam asked.
“Garcia’s Widow, good stuff,” Vincent said. “Nick has it made from a secret formula created by a voodoo queen. You’ll find some in your suite, and we’re having a case sent to your house in Chicago.”
Sam’s eyes narrowed. “You think I slap my own dick up?”
Vincent went pale. “Hell no, Sam, it’s just for laughs. Pass ’em around to the boys back home, they’ll get a kick out of it.”
I leaned back and decided to keep my mouth shut. Sometimes I wondered if Luz wasn’t right—it might be easier to make an honest buck than a dishonest one. But playing on the shadowy side of business was in
my blood. Not the blood my mother and father gave me—that was full of idealistic dedication to the Cult of the Common Man, the original give-a-sucker-a-break mentality. No, this was the corrupt blood I picked up in my years on the streets of Leningrad.
And throw in some of those years in British Honduras, too. It was pretty damn difficult to earn an honest living in the colony. Jack had tried it, although toward the end I was sure he was skimming from the till to buy expensive gifts for his lady friends. It was impossible because the deck was rigged—the businesspeople who got the breaks did so with influence in London. The ones who failed typically were strangled with red tape.
Bottom line, and that’s what it always came down to, you could not do business in the Dominican Republic honestly. I suspected that was true for most of Latin America. The Spanish had laid a solid foundation of mordida, a system where government offices were literally sold to the highest bidder who then got paid by those wanting to do business in the country, where policeman and regulatory officials were so underpaid, they were expected to be on the take in order to feed their families.
Graft and corruption were the name of the game. If you wanted to play, you had to do it by their rules.
We arrived at the hotel-casino and started the Cook’s tour with a drive-by. To save on building costs, the hotel wings were long, narrow, one-story units coming off the casino. The casino itself was cheaply built, but with a lot of fancy trim. Costs were kept down because you didn’t need the quality building structures required in cooler climates, and who the hell knew when the next revolution was coming and we’d be out on our butts? If the revolutions didn’t get you, the hurricanes did. We closed up shop in the hot, rainy hurricane season, and figured that we’d just rebuild if the place got flattened.
We turned around at the end of a hotel wing and were heading back to the casino when we spotted a man painting something on the low white wooden wall at the entryway to the casino driveway. Vincent yelled out the window and the man, a dark-skinned local, took off running.
Julio, the casino manager, met us out front as we stared at the words painted on the wall.
Las Mariposas se asesinaron.
“What is it?” Sam G. asked. “Some religious nut who’s got a hard-on about gambling?”
“It’s about butterflies,” Julio said.
“C’mon, Sam.” Vincent grabbed Sam’s arm. “Let’s get something cold to drink and I’ll show you the best green felt layout in the Caribbean.”
Once they left, I said to Julio, “The sign says the butterflies were murdered. What the hell does that mean? What’s this butterfly stuff?”
He hesitated and looked around as if he was wondering whether the flowers had microphones in them.
“Have you not heard of the three Butterflies?”
“No, why should I?”
He gave me an odd look, as if he questioned my answer, as if I had admitted not having heard about God.
“The Mirabal sisters. They have spoken at the university where Señorita Luz teaches, and have many friends on the faculty there. I didn’t know if they were friends of yours and the señorita.”
I shrugged. “Luz tries to keep her university friends away from me. She thinks I’m ignorant and crude. What’s this about murder?”
“I don’t know anything about murder,” he said, defensively.
“The sign says the butterflies have been murdered.”
“I have heard rumors—”
“Goddamit, Julio, spit it out. What’s going on? This is your boss, not the SIM, asking the questions.”
He spoke in a low tone. “It’s trouble, Nick. The Mirabal sisters and their husbands opposed El Jefe. They called him a tyrant and enslaver of the people. They were the loudest in their criticism. You have to understand, such criticism is not tolerated. He put them and their husbands in prison. The women had been released, but instead of keeping their mouths shut, they have publicly spoken out against El Jefe.”
“He bumped them off?”
“I don’t know. First word was that the car with the three sisters and a friend went off a cliff and everyone was killed. But people who saw the bodies say that not only were their bones broken, they were strangled, too.”
Julio looked around again. “The three sisters, they had a code name in the underground that worked against El Jefe.”
“Butterflies?”
“Yes, Las Mariposas. Now the Butterflies will fly no more.” Julio’s eyes misted.
I had no inkling about his political feelings. Being a casino manager was a tough job, not one for a sentimentalist.
He caught my thoughts and interpreted them as a weakness on his part.
“Understand, Nick, it is not a political opinion I have. The Generalissimo is said to have done evil things, but the country was in very bad condition when he took over. He did many good things. The Mirabal sisters believe that he is an anachronism, like Batista and the banana republic dictators, that his time has come and gone. You understand, señor, I have no opinion, I am just repeating what they say. But these were three very lovely women. The thought that they might have been—” He broke and walked away.
I got the picture. SIM agents stopped the car at an isolated spot, beat and strangled the women and driver, then put them back into the car and rolled it over a cliff. I didn’t know the people, couldn’t remember if Luz had ever introduced the sisters called Mirabal, but I had instant empathy for them on several levels. The similarity between SIM thugs and the NKVD, what they were now calling KGB in the Soviet Union, the secret police that murdered my father, wasn’t lost on me.
Neither was the fact that if Luz was involved in any underground activities against Trujillo, we could get a midnight visit from the SIM.
The thought of Luz’s lovely little neck being twisted by SIM chief Johnny Mena put a shudder through me.
38
“Did you know the Mirabal sisters?” I asked Luz.
We were in bed, our meeting place. I had tried to call her all afternoon, but she wasn’t at home or at her university office.
“Yes, but I wasn’t close to them.”
“Do you know they’re dead?”
“Yes, I’ve heard.”
She lay back as she spoke. Her eyes were closed, no expression on her face. Her breasts were visible through her flimsy, sheer negligee. I always stared at her in wonderment. How many times had I seen her naked breasts … but the see-through sexy lingerie never failed to arouse my hunger for her. I felt the surge in my loins.
“Is that all you have to say? You’ve heard? These friends of yours were murdered!”
She opened her eyes to give me one of her looks.
“I said I knew them, Nick, not that they were friends. Mostly I knew of them. They were openly opposed to El Jefe, neither a very smart nor very healthy attitude to have in our country. Some say they were killed in an accident, others say the SIM murdered them. There are as many different rumors as there are people spreading them.”
She rolled over to go to sleep, her signal that she wasn’t in the mood tonight. I was always in the mood, but knew better than to push her. I snuggled up to her back and put my arms around her. It wasn’t long before my hard-on started growing and pushing its way into the softness between her naked thighs. She wore no panties beneath her short negligee, so there was nothing to impede its journey.
She leaned back harder against me and used her hand to direct my penis inside her. “Make love to me, Nick,” she said, “I need you inside me.”
I gently stroked her, then moved her into a position where I could massage her breast and her clit. She reared back against me, pushing harder and harder, until she began to shudder and gasp. My own explosion quickly followed.
Afterwards she lay in my arms and breathed softly against my face as she slept.
I lay awake, staring up at the dark ceiling, unable to sleep, because a thought kept nagging me. I didn’t think Luz would lie to me—but there had never been anything between u
s that would cause a need for deception. Yet I wasn’t completely satisfied with her explanation about the Mirabal sisters. It was the way she had brushed off their death as not being that significant. I couldn’t say Luz was a wild-eyed revolutionary. Hell, I was so busy doing my own thing I hardly knew what she did with her time. For sure, she was very knowledgeable and somewhat opinionated in political matters. Like everyone else in the country, apparently except for the Mirabal sisters and their husbands, she mostly kept her views private. I didn’t even know exactly what they were because we just didn’t talk politics. She had plenty of opportunity to harangue about the Generalissimo if she thought he was the monster that so many other people thought he was.
One thing that was certain in this “man’s world,” she was a strong advocate of feminine causes. It was the one subject where I never saw her give quarter, privately or in public.
With the whole town talking about the suspicious deaths of three women, literally feminine heroines who opposed a vicious dictator, why didn’t she have more to say about their deaths?
Maybe I am just getting paranoid. I thought of that night they came for my father.
What would I do if they came for the woman I loved?
It wasn’t a hard question to answer.
I would kill them.
39
Two months after the incident with Sam G. and the death of the mysterious “Butterflies,” I was in the central tobacco growing region of the Dominican Republic checking out a cigar operation that was for sale.
On the auction block were tobacco fields, a drying facility and a small on-site factory for rolling cigars. It was a small but premium-quality operation. The property was owned by a former Deputy Minister for Economic Development. He ran out of patronage with El Jefe when a large public works project in the capital went to hell—a bridge collapsed before the first vehicle went over it. It seems the money that was supposed to go into steel reinforcement went into the pockets of the Deputy Minister and his pals. The fact that Trujillo and his clan got less of a share of the “steel money” added insult to the public-relations fiasco it created for the dictator.
The Betrayers Page 22
