The Betrayers

by Harold Robbins

  These men were not the idealistic Cubans who battled Batista for Castro and then fought Castro for liberty, or who had died on the beaches trying to unseat the despotic Trujillo regime. There was no idealism in their ranks, merely ambition. They wanted to kill Trujillo for personal gain.

  And they had strange bedfellows on their side—the United States and the Catholic Church.

  It was nighttime, shortly after ten o’clock when Salvador and his cohorts got word that Trujillo had left the city to go to his San Cristóbal estate for a rendezvous with his mistress, his driver taking him along a route that ran along the shore of the sea. It was not a well-traveled route at night, which is why the assassins had chosen it as the best place to ambush the dictator.

  They knew only two men would be in El Jefe’s 1957 Chevolet—El Jefe and his driver. Both men would be armed with handguns and machine guns. Trujillo was a very capable marksman.

  The idea that a small group of military officers, businessmen and government officials would attempt what larger radical groups had failed at added sweat to Salvador’s wet fears.

  Salvador knew that some of Trujillo’s bravado was based simply on longevity—he had been around so long, he was thought of as invincible—and thought of himself the same way. Like most of the people in the country, Salvador was under the age of forty. That put him in with the majority of the people in the country who either were very young or not yet born when Trujillo started his reign thirty-one years earlier. To them, Trujillo was more omnipresent and omniscient than God.

  Much of the time during those several decades of rule, he had provided economic progress and stability to the country. As things started going to hell politically and economically in the 1950s, two special-interest groups still supported him—the Catholic Church and the United States. As it was put to him by President Kennedy, Trujillo was a bastard, but at least he was our bastard.

  By the end of the 50s decade, at a time when Cuba was falling to the Red Menace, the Dominican Republic’s economy took a dive. Radicals started raising their revolutionary heads, and Trujillo began to lose the support of his main allies, the Americans and the Church.

  Six months after Cuba fell to Castro on June 14, 1959, with help from Castro, Dominican Republic exiles invaded the country but were stopped on the beaches by Trujillo’s forces. Those who survived the murderous machine-gun fire during the beach landing were taken to a military base where they were questioned under torture and then killed.

  Frightened that Trujillo’s brutal, anachronistic brand of despotism was creating the alchemy for another radical Red revolution, Castro-style, the Americans decided that it was time for a change.

  The harbinger of political change, American CIA style, circa 1960s, was assassination.

  It was with the CIA’s implicit consent that Salvador and his cohorts took three cars out on the San Cristóbal road on a warm May night and waited for a light blue Chevy to come along.

  Salvador was deep in thought when a conspirator in the backseat suddenly yelled, “It’s him!”

  The blue Chevrolet shot by, picking up speed as it left the city behind.

  The car Salvador was riding in pulled onto the road and accelerated. Salvador said a prayer and wiped his wet palms on his pants. The shotgun he held—appropriately, he had insisted upon bringing his own shotgun rather than use a military rifle—felt slippery in his grip.

  Once they were behind El Jefe’s car on a straightaway, they flashed their brights to signal the two cars waiting ahead.

  As their car pulled alongside the Chevy, Salvador pulled the trigger of the shotgun only to realize, to his horror, that in his anxiety he had been popping shells in and out of the chamber and that there was no shell ready to be fired. A burst of gunfire exploded from the man in the back seat. The back window of the Chevy disintegrated as the burst hit. The Chevy went off to the side of the road as Salvador pumped a shell into the shotgun’s chamber. More fire came from the rear-seat assassin as Salvador finally let loose with the shotgun.

  El Jefe’s Chevy had stopped. Trujillo was firing from the backseat and his driver out the front driver’s window by the time Salvador and his companions got out of their car. The fire-fight continued between the two sets of weapons, momentarily a standoff, then the second vehicle of assassins arrived and four more men joined the fight.

  Generalissimo Trujillo, Benefactor of the Republic, a man of iron nerve and grande cohunes, bleeding from a wound received in the first volley that came through the rear window of his Chevy, stepped out from the back of his car and fired from the hip.

  He went down, hit again and again, his body jerking as the bullets hit him.

  The king was dead.

  One of the stories that would be told and retold about the battle, is that after the first volley, Trujillo’s driver had yelled that he was turning the car around to go back to the city because they were outnumbered and that the generalissimo told him not to turn around—that they would stand and fight.

  He was mucho hombre.

  And one hell of a bastard.

  PARADISE LOST

  FREEDOM

  “We prefer to do things comfortably.”

  “But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.”

  “In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”

  “All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”

  “Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what might happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.”

  There was a long silence.

  “I claim them all,” said the Savage at last.

  ALDOUS HUXLEY, BRAVE NEW WORLD

  46

  San Juan, Puerto Rico

  I was in my suite at the Bay Club Hotel when I got the telephone call.

  I still had my feet in the Caribbean. Other than my state of mind and finances, Puerto Rico wasn’t a hell of a lot different from the Dominican Republic or Cuba. It was in the same neighborhood, across the Mona Strait, about fifty miles east of the Dominican Republic. The people had the same type of mixed Spanish and African heritage, they spoke Spanish, had an “old town” historic district along the waterfront—hell, the island was even discovered by Christopher Columbus. Added to the list was the fact that the island was cursed by that same unholy trinity of sugar, rum and tobacco.

  The place was under American rule, grabbed during a war with Spain about sixty years ago, so it was a bit more peaceful than the Dominican Republic or Cuba, but that observation came with a caveat—Puerto Rican insurgents tried to kill President Truman back in 1950, and in 1954 they opened fire in the U. S. House of Representatives in Washington, D. C., and wounded five congressmen.

  Like I said, it wasn’t much different than the Dominican Republic or Cuba. I just hoped I got out of town before the next revolution.

  It had been almost a month since I’d been taken to the airport in Ciudad Trujillo, carrying my passport, a suit of clothes and the money in my wallet. Since that time, my business interests in the Dominican Republic—my distillery, sugarcane fields, cigar business—had been “sold,” although that really wasn’t the right word for it. “Stolen” at ten cents on the dollar was a more accurate description. And that 10 percent got eaten up by “taxes.”

  The one thing they could not take from me was the Garcia’s Widow brand of rum. They took the distillery, but the rum was still blended from Sarita’s secret formula. The first thing I did when I hit San Juan was license the brand to a major rum distiller. I called Sarita to arrange for the ingredients she had been sending to the Dominican Republic to be shipped here to Puerto Rico instead.

  “I saw it in a dream,” she told me, alluding to what
had come down in Ciudad Trujillo. “Men with black masks came and took you away. I reached for you but your hands were always too far away.”

  I believed her. And even if Johnny Mena’s men didn’t wear actual masks, the masks were there, anyway, a metaphysical extension of their black hearts.

  I lived in mortal fear that some asshole in the Dominican Republic would counterfeit my rum labels and put an inferior product on the market. I had counterfeited labels myself many times, but that was different. And I never sold an inferior product. At least, not completely inferior.

  My one financial regret was that I had not seen the blow coming and had not stashed a big wad outside that rat-hole of a country. I had put all my eggs in one basket. The Trujillo gang made an omelet out of mine—and swallowed it whole.

  At least I had enough survival instinct to get the brand licensed right away. That would keep the legitimate stuff on the shelves so there couldn’t be room for the phony labels, if that’s what was going to come down. But that bit of business savvy stretched the limits of my emotional wire. I did the licensing deal before I sat down and just gave up, too damn traumatized emotionally to face the fact that the woman I loved had pissed on our life together.

  “You worthless wimpy bastard,” I told myself.

  Any man with red blood in his veins would not have let a woman screw him over and take it sitting down—he’d take it lying down, poking his cock into everything that wore a skirt, ramming it in so hard, he’d blow their asses out, make them sorry they were fragile women in a tough world run by men.

  That was the kind of man I always thought I was, the macho type who wouldn’t give a second thought about some bitch that did him in. I’d just go out and fuck everything in sight … only it hadn’t turned out that way. Wimpy bastard that I was, I thought of nothing but Luz from the time they put me on the plane in Ciudad Trujillo. I endlessly ran our relationship over and over in my mind, trying to figure out what I did wrong.

  Goddamn women—they just have no mercy on men. Us poor guys are sweet, lovable, affectionate dopes and they just grind their spike heels into our hearts.

  I called Sarah the moment I hit San Juan to tell her what had happened. She was still my favorite person in the world—next to the woman whose name I wanted to forget. She was back in Merry Ole England, even had a beau, a decent chap who worked for the Underground, the London subway system. But she still couldn’t get over that bastard Jack who had treated her like a doormat.

  “You have to give up the ghost, Sarah,” I told her, full of sage advice. “Jack was a shit, you’re better off without him.”

  “Then I guess you must be better off without Luz,” she said without any pretense of innocence.

  Bitch.

  But I still loved her and knew I deserved her caustic rebuttal. I was the most deserving guy in the world when it came to needed punishment, at least that looked like the reasoning of the gods who were raining bad things down on my head like a plague of frogs.

  “What are your feelings about Luz?” she asked. “No macho stuff, tell me really what you feel.”

  “About the same if she had ripped out my heart and threw it in a vat of acid, about the same if she had whacked off my nuts and fed them to her dog. I have a few more feelings, like I want to kill the bitch and fuck her, but I’m not sure in what order.”

  Poor Sarah. I think she had always thought of me as basically sane, albeit a little criminal, but after our conversation I’m certain she thought I should be committed. My language alone made the poor girl question my mental state. Hell, I could have easily told her what my mental state was—murderous rage fighting with black depression.

  One lesson I learned from Luz walking out on me was one I would never forget—I knew how love quickly could turn to hate. Hell, they were just flip sides of the same coin. Heads I love her, tails I hate her. It was that easy. And it switched to tails since I found out she was balling the old bastard who terrorized millions of people.

  But even with all the hate and rage, I still loved her.

  I had been drowning in an alternating current of loss, self-pity and rage when I got the call.

  “Of course you know, amigo, El Jefe is dead.”

  The voice on the other end of the line was Rubi himself, Porfirio Rubirosa, polo player, international-set playboy, expensive gigolo. Last but not least, compadre, baby-sitter or whatever the hell of Ramfis Trujillo, the new dictator of the Dominican Republic.

  “I read the papers.”

  Calling me “amigo” was not Rubi’s style. His voice on the phone revealed a hint of stress. That wouldn’t be an unusual reaction to the fact his former father-in-law and chief benefactor had taken a couple dozen rounds in a violent gunfight.

  When he called, it took me a moment to orientate myself. I’d had a couple drinks, actually maybe even a couple too many, but hell, it was almost noon—at least it would be in a few hours.

  “I am assisting Ramfis,” he said.

  “Long live the new king. The newspapers say you and Ramfis were in Paris when word came that the old bastard had been assassinated. Spending some of the money you and your pal stole from the poor of your country?”

  There was silence on the other end.

  I’m sure Rubi wasn’t used to being spoken to like that. I didn’t care. If he was an “amigo,” where were he and Ramfis when I was getting thrown out of the country and my property stolen because an old man they served lusted after my woman?

  “You better watch your ass, Rubi. Ramfis isn’t like the old man. He doesn’t have the balls to run the country. He’s good for a few good knocks, killing a few people, stealing more money, but he doesn’t have the staying power to be a despot. That takes the sort of murderous lust for power which the old man had. Ramfis has had too many soft landings. You stick around and hold his dick, you’ll end up on the chopping block with him.”

  More silence.

  Yeah, I had a few shots of Moskovskaya, not my counterfeit stuff, but the real stuff before the call came in. I wasn’t a rum drinker. It was pussy booze compared to a good, clean shot of vodka that would knock you on your ass and burn the hair on your soul. Like any good Russian, I took my vodka neat, straight out of the bottle, not even stopping to pour it into a glass, and none of that olive and shake-but-don’t-stir crap, either.

  I never really understood how Russian I was until I began to drown the damage to my soul with vodka.

  I was on a roll with Rubi, the vodka had oiled my tongue, I’d become a velvet-tongued devil, in my own opinion, so I kept it up.

  “If you called to tell me that it’s all a big mistake, that the old bastard didn’t mean to steal my woman, that Johnny Mena and his shithead thugs didn’t mean to steal everything I’d worked so hard for, then hang up and call someone who cares—or buys into the bullshit. You wanna know what I think about your fuckin’ little ankle-biting, chickenshit—”

  “I called you about Luz.”

  It was my turn to shut up.

  I shook my head to clear some of the alcoholic haze. He had used the “L” word, had spoken the unmentionable name. The emotions that had been tying my stomach in knots rose up and grabbed me by the throat and choked me. I wanted to call her. The moment I heard Trujillo had been assassinated, I had thought of little else except her. I had picked up the phone a dozen times and slammed it down, swearing to cut off my own hand if I did pick up the phone and try to dial her. The king was dead. My whore was available again.

  Yeah, since I heard the news, I’d thought about getting together with her again, thought about telling her I loved her, even about luring her into a position where she would be emotionally and financially dependent on me—and then dumping her. I thought about calling her and simply asking, “Why?” Had it been something I did? Was there some way to heal the past?

  Sometimes I fantasized that the phone would ring and I would hear her voice on the other end. What would I say? What would she say? I was certain that I would take her back if she
wanted to come back into my life. And I hated myself for my weakness.

  It all hurt.

  Rubi’s voice came back over the line, a little irritation underlining the edge of stress.

  “As you know, Nick, I am back in the country. And yes, I was in Paris with Ramfis when the sad news came in of the treachery of those who should have kissed the feet of our Benefactor. We flew back together. Now I must assist him in this hour of our country’s need.”

  I almost puked. Someone had to be listening on the other line, probably Johnny Mena. Rubi was loyal to the Trujillos, hell, he married one once, but he wasn’t into kissing feet, not unless the secret police were listening—or the feet belonged to a rich widow.

  The gears in my head began to churn. My first instinct was that Rubi had called to sell me back my own property, probably to raise money for Ramfis, to buy guns for his new government. But he had spoken Luz’s name, so I shut up and listened because it sounded like there were going to be some twists to the game.

  “As you might have read in the newspapers, Ramfis is firmly in the seat of power here in Ciudad Trujillo. And he has been unmerciful to the murderers who shed the blood of El Jefe. They have gotten more justice than they gave our poor Benefactor.” He paused for a moment. “The murderers disclosed their dirty secrets under questioning.”

  Questioning, in Dominican Republic police parlance, meant torture, the kind that makes you pray you die soon.

  I was beginning to wonder if he had dropped Luz’s name just to get my attention and really was calling to make a buy-back deal. My mind was calculating how much I should pay if a deal was put on the table—and where I’d get the money if he offered me a chance to buy back my businesses.

  Was he assuring me that they had the situation under control so I would feel comfortable coming back and doing business in the country?

  Maybe I had the guy wrong, too. Everyone liked him, regardless of his connection with the Trujillos. And we had been friends of a sort, not really close but on a comfortable first-name basis during the couple years I spent in the country. But not close enough for a government insider to call me up just to chat up current events, not unless there was an ulterior motive.