HE HAD SLEPT IN THE OFFICES of the SIM, the Military Intelligence Service, a well-guarded building in Ciudad Trujillo on the corner of Avenida México and Calle 30 de Marzo, because he was afraid they’d kill him at his home. Some of the SIM administration had fled, but the bodyguards, informers, inspectors, and collaborators he was closest to hadn’t known what to do or where to go. For now, at least, the regime could count on them.
But him—who could he count on? He didn’t know, and that was what tormented him and kept him up at night, despite the Nembutal he took each day before bed. Since El Jefe’s murder on May 30, 1961, his life had fallen into a pit of anguish and uncertainty. The day before, General Ramfis Trujillo had gotten word to him through intermediaries that there was no point in trying to get an appointment, because he would never agree to meet with him. But almost simultaneously, Joaquín Balaguer, president of the republic, had requested his presence in his office at the National Palace at ten the next morning. What was in store for him?
At 6:00 a.m., he got up from the cot he kept next to his desk, showered, dressed, and went for a coffee in the canteen, where the waiters and the few guests greeted him with questions in their eyes: What was happening in the Dominican Republic? What was coming now that El Jefe had been assassinated? He didn’t know, either. Since that catastrophe, he’d thought of only one thing: finding the assassins. But that was done. Only two of the people who had ambushed El Jefe on the road leaving Ciudad Trujillo toward San Cristóbal were still in hiding: Luis Amiama Tió and Antonio Imbert. People were on their trail, they’d both be caught soon, and they’d wind up with their comrades in prison or in their graves. The one certain thing, he thought, was that Ramfis would make them pay dearly for their crime. According to everything he’d heard, he was enraged, almost insane after his father’s death. The night after his arrival from Paris on a plane rented from Air France, he had taken the senior cadets from the Military Academy to La Cuarentena Prison and ordered each of them to choose one of the communists incarcerated there and execute them personally with a bullet to the head. Why was he refusing to see him? He knew Trujillo’s oldest son had never liked him. Why? Jealousy, maybe, because El Jefe had always shown more affection for him than for his own children. It pleased Abbes García to think that Trujillo might have loved him more than Ramfis or Radhamés.
After a meager breakfast, he returned to his office, where the day’s newspapers waited for him on his desk. He didn’t read them, he just paged through them, stopping now and then at certain headlines. They didn’t have much to say about the Dominican Republic’s future, just that the U.S.A. and, obviously, Betancourt, Figueres, Muñoz Marín and untold other Latin American leaders were demanding democracy return to the country before lifting the embargo. No, they didn’t know much: the press, like everyone, was confused, frightened, blind, unaware of what awaited the Dominican people after those bastards had slain their supreme leader, their figurehead, the Generalísimo who had turned that backward republic into what was in 1961, a solid, prosperous country, with the finest army in all the Caribbean. Ingrates! Dogs! Bastards! Sons of bitches! At least Ramfis would make them pay dearly for their crime—very dearly indeed.
At nine thirty, he put on his tie, his hat, and his dark glasses—he was in civilian garb, not his uniform—and walked outside. A chauffeured car was waiting for him by the door, on the corner of Avenida México and Calle 30 de Marzo, in accordance with instructions he had given the night before. While the car drove through the packed streets of Ciudad Trujillo (Would they change the name of the capital now that the Generalísimo had died? Most likely yes.) toward the National Palace, he thought it had been wise of him to send his new wife, Zita, to Mexico. An opportune decision. She should wait there until things cleared up.
They recognized him at the National Palace, but they still made him pass through the humiliating ritual of opening his briefcase, riffling through his papers, even patting down his jacket and pants. What a change! Before, when he’d gone to the palace, the guards were all adulatory smiles and no one had ever searched him.
In the waiting room of the office of Dr. Joaquín Balaguer (a puppet president until the day of the assassination who now thought his authority was bona fide), they humiliated him again, making him wait an hour before the head of state would receive him.
The president, normally a well-mannered man, didn’t stand up to greet him, and when Abbes García walked over to his desk, he extended him a cold hand and murmured an almost inaudible hello. He finished looking through some documents, then rose, gesturing curtly for Abbes to take a seat in one of a row of armchairs. He was a short, simply dressed man with gray hair, his eyes almost hidden behind the thick lenses of his glasses. But Abbes García knew perfectly well that his benign appearance concealed sharp wits and extraordinary ambition.
“How are things, Mr. President?” he finally asked, trying to break the nervous silence.
“You must know that better than I, Colonel,” the president said, a quick grin passing like a breath across his face. “They say you’re the best-informed man in the country.”
“I don’t want to waste Your Excellency’s time,” Abbes García said after a moment. “Just tell me what you’ve called me here for. Are you firing me?”
“Hardly,” Balaguer responded, again with that fleeting smile. “Actually I’m offering you a safer and more tranquil post than the one you have now.”
At that moment, an assistant entered the office begging pardon, and said that Mrs. María Martínez de Trujillo, El Jefe’s widow, was on the phone. It was urgent.
“Tell her I’ll call back in a moment,” Dr. Balaguer replied. And when the assistant was gone, he turned to Abbes García, his face now very serious. His voice changed as well. “As you can see, Colonel, I don’t have a free minute for anything. So let’s not waste time. This is a very simple matter. After the assassination, everything in the Dominican Republic has changed. And there’s no reason for me to deceive you. You know perfectly well you’re the most hated man in the country. And abroad, too. Unjustly, you are accused of the worst barbarities. Murder, torture, kidnapping, disappearances, every conceivable and inconceivable horror. You must also know that if we want to salvage any of Trujillo’s many achievements, you cannot form part of our government.”
He stopped talking, waiting for Abbes García’s rejoinder, but since the latter remained mute, he continued:
“I’m offering you a diplomatic post. The Dominican consulate in Japan.”
“In Japan?” Abbes García jumped back in his seat. Then he said sarcastically, “You couldn’t find somewhere farther away?”
“There is no consulate farther from the Dominican Republic,” President Balaguer responded very seriously. “You will leave tomorrow, at midday, passing through Canada. You already have a diplomatic passport ready, and your tickets have been purchased. You will be given both upon leaving this office.”
Abbes García seemed to sink into his seat. His complexion was ashen, and his head felt like a volcano on the verge of erupting. Leave the country? Go to Japan? It took him a few seconds to say anything.
“Does General Ramfis Trujillo know about this decision, Your Excellency?”
“It took a lot for me to convince him, Colonel,” he said in that soft voice, so mellifluous when he gave his speeches. “General Ramfis wanted to put you in prison. He believes you failed at your job. That with someone else at the head of the SIM, the Generalísimo would still be alive. I assure you, I worked very hard to get him to allow you to leave with a diplomatic post. That is my work alone. And you should thank me for it.”
Now he laughed, genuinely, but only for a few seconds.
“May I stay a couple of days, to take care of my things?” Abbes García asked, knowing perfectly well what the answer would be.
“You can’t stay even an hour longer than I’ve told you,” Dr. Balaguer said, stressing each syllable. “General Ramfis could change his mind, take a step backward. I wish you good luck at your new destination, Mr. Abbes García. I was about to say Colonel, I forgot you no longer are one. General Ramfis has expelled you from the army. I suppose you’ve heard that.”
He stood and returned to his desk without offering his hand, sitting down and looking through his papers again as if the other man weren’t there. Abbes García walked toward the door and left without saying goodbye. He felt his legs trembling and thought he might faint, making a ridiculous spectacle. He slowly approached the exit, and in the hallway, an assistant handed him a folder, murmuring that inside was confirmation of his appointment, his diplomatic passport, and his tickets to Tokyo via Canada.
He ordered his driver to take him home, and wasn’t surprised when he saw that the police who had stood guard there two days before were now gone. Desolate, he looked through the closets full of his suits and Zita’s dresses, the ties and underwear, the shoes and socks. Before filling a suitcase with clothes, he emptied his safe of all the currency, Dominican and American, inside. He counted: it added up to two thousand three hundred forty-eight dollars. It would be enough to travel on. Once his luggage was packed, he looked through the desk in his office, and apart from a few bank statements, he burned all the papers, notebooks, and journals inside, with their notes on his work and politics. That took quite some time. Then he got back into the car, which had sat there waiting for him. The chauffeur asked him, “Taking a trip, Colonel?” He responded, “Yeah, for a few days, urgent matters.” He realized he would probably never see that house again, and he wondered if he had forgotten to pack or burn anything important. He went to the Reserve Bank, where he kept two accounts in Dominican pesos. They told him they couldn’t exchange his pesos for dollars, because the uncertainty following the president’s killing had led to fluctuations in the value of the peso and all foreign currency transactions had been suspended. The bank director, who saw him in his office, told him quietly, “If it’s urgent, you can exchange them on the street in Ciudad Colonial, but I don’t recommend it, you’ll end up paying a fortune for dollars. In all this chaos, everyone’s started buying them up, just imagine…”
Abbes García gave up on the idea. If what President Balaguer had said was true, and Ramfis thought his irresponsibility was the cause of El Jefe’s murder, then Trujillo’s older son could change his mind and order him killed whenever he wished. It was better to keep those pesos in his wallet; he could exchange them overseas, if anyone would still pay anything for them …
It was past five in the afternoon when he returned to the Military Intelligence Service. The guards still stood at attention and saluted him at the building’s front door. Was it true that Ramfis had expelled him from the army? In his office, he tore up and burned the documents, notes, and letters related to his government service; all he saved were a few personal papers he stowed in his briefcase. He looked at the walls, now bare except for a portrait of Trujillo, his look severe, his posture resolute, his chest covered in medals. Johnny’s eyes watered.
He ordered two sandwiches brought to his office, one ham and one cheese, and an ice-cold beer. He ate and drank as he asked himself whether he should call Zita in Mexico to tell her about his trip or whether it was best to do it tomorrow from Canada. He decided on the latter. At the end of his only meal of the day, six of his collaborators appeared in his office—three civilians, one guard, and two soldiers. They were confused and frightened, and Lances Falcón, a small man, an accountant, with a salt-and-pepper mustache and dark glasses, asked him what would happen to them in the name of the rest of the group. They were disconcerted, frightened to death, and knew nothing about the situation. Was it true he was going overseas?
Abbes García listened to them without getting up, and decided to tell them the truth.
“I’m leaving, that’s true. But not of my own free will. Balaguer’s fired me. He’s sending me to a diplomatic post on the other end of the world. All the way to Tokyo. As far as the Military Intelligence Service goes, I don’t know. There’s no way it will disappear, any incoming government will need it to survive, no matter who’s president. Since Balaguer and Ramfis have divided power, with Balaguer taking the civilian side and Ramfis overseeing the military, most likely Ramfis will oversee the SIM. It’s been wonderful working with you all. I thank you for your help. I know how much heroism it takes, and how great the sacrifices you’ve made are. Trujillo appreciated you all and held you in high regard. Now the rats are taking advantage of the instability to come out of their holes and accuse us of terrible crimes. I’m afraid there could be reprisals against you. So if you’re asking me for advice, I say go! Hide. Don’t become sacrificial lambs. Save yourselves.”
He stood up and shook each of their hands. He could see tears in some of the men’s eyes. They left the office more confused, frightened, and anxious than before. Abbes García was certain that all six would go into hiding as soon as they could.
When he was alone, he realized spending the night there was likely imprudent. If Ramfis wanted him arrested or killed, he would send people to find him at SIM. He decided to go to a hotel. He went outside. The car and the chauffeur were still there. He ordered his driver to take him to the Hotel Jaragua. Giving him a three-hundred-peso tip, he shook his hand and wished him luck.
“What should I do with the car, Colonel?” the man asked, chagrined.
Abbes García thought a moment, shrugged, and grunted, “Whatever you want.”
The manager at the Jaragua knew him and didn’t make him sign the guest registry. He gave him a suite, which he paid for in advance in cash, and ordered a car to take him to the airport in the morning. Abbes took a long bubble bath with mineral salts and lay down. Despite his customary pill, it took him a long time to get to sleep. He tried to think of women and the gashes he’d licked, to see if he could get turned on, but it was pointless. As it had every night since the 30th of May, the face of the murdered El Jefe came back into his mind, and he felt chills and unbearable loneliness at the thought that they had peppered Generalísimo Trujillo with bullets, and that he would never see him or hear his voice again. Then there was the terrible injustice, Ramfis accusing him of failing to protect him and therefore being responsible for his death, when for ten years he had lived for El Jefe alone, obedient to his every caprice, bathing himself in blood in the man’s service, liberating him from all enemies at home and abroad, risking his life and his freedom. Those injustices had led to his fate.
He passed a short, distressful, sleepless night. He woke and ordered breakfast before shaving. Once dressed, he took the taxi the manager of the Jaragua had ordered for him. At the airport, there was a mob of journalists, photographers, and cameramen waiting, but he refused to make any statements, and thankfully, he was taken to the dignitaries’ lounge, where he waited for his departure.
The last photograph that appears of him in biographies, press articles, and history books (though he lived years, maybe many years, longer) was taken that morning as he walked toward the stairs to the plane that would carry him to Canada. He is visible there in civilian clothes, a little thinner, less swollen than in earlier photos, wearing a hat and dark tie and a tailored jacket with one of its three buttons undone, holding a bulky suitcase, his bright white socks confirming the opinion of Generalísimo Trujillo that the head of the SIM hadn’t the least idea what it meant to dress elegantly. His face is contracted into an uncomfortable grimace and his stare is evasive, unsettled, as if he knew he would never return to his country again. It was June 10, 1961, eleven days after the assassination of Trujillo.
He fell asleep not long after the plane took off and awoke in a daze just over an hour outside Toronto. Looking at his tickets to Tokyo, he saw there would be a six-hour layover before the next flight. Would he go directly to Japan? Of course not. He would call his wife in Mexico, his banker in Switzerland, and go personally to be sure his secret account in Geneva was still safe. He closed his eyes and thought about how uncertain life had become since El Jefe’s death. His feelings for Trujillo were affectionate and grateful: El Jefe had trusted him, assigned him the most difficult missions, and Abbes García had always come through. His hands were stained with blood for him, but he’d been happy to do it, he’d loved that superhuman figure. And Trujillo had compensated him handsomely. He remembered his limitless generosity. It was thanks to Trujillo he had those savings in Switzerland—Trujillo himself had authorized the account. Could anyone have found out about it? No, no one but El Jefe, not even Zita, knew it existed. Just Trujillo, and now he was dead. There was no way Ramfis could know. How much did he have there? He couldn’t remember. More than a million dollars anyway. He could get by with that for a good long while.
No sooner had he stepped off the Pan American Airways flight in Toronto than he changed his ticket to Tokyo to another with stopovers in Geneva and Paris, paying more than three thousand dollars in cash to do so. He called Zita, hoping to surprise her, but instead, she surprised him, telling him that morning the press in Mexico had published a photo of him departing from the airport in Ciudad Trujillo for an unknown destination. “They’re sending us to Japan as diplomats,” he said. “To Japan?” she replied with alarm. “What are we going to do there?” He answered: “We won’t stay there for long. The important thing is, we’re alive, and that’s already a lot, given the way things in the Dominican Republic are going.” Zita said nothing more, as always in these kinds of situations: she trusted him and was sure her husband would solve whatever problems arose. She’s a good wife, he thought. Too bad she was so fixated on having children.
He called his banker in Switzerland right afterward, and luckily, he answered the phone himself. Abbes asked him to book him a hotel in Geneva and said he would visit him in his office two days later. When he hung up, he breathed a sigh of relief: his banker, who spoke very pure Spanish, had told him he now had one million, three hundred twenty-seven thousand dollars and fifty-six cents in his account. That meant no one had tried to break into his account: it had sat there, gathering interest in the Swiss citadel. For the first time since El Jefe’s assassination, he was happy.
When he arrived in Geneva twelve hours later, he checked into a room at the same small lakeside hotel where he’d stayed three years earlier when he’d opened the account, which he’d added to regularly since; he filled the tub and took a long bubble bath with mineral salts, just as he had the day before. He felt a physical sense of well-being and tried to imagine his life in the future. He knew perfectly well the consular position in Japan wouldn’t last long. Sooner or later, no matter what happened in the Dominican Republic, people would stop taking his calls. He would go on being the most hated man, and they’d pin all the murders, disappearances, tortures, and jailings on him, the ones he’d been involved in and the ones that were simply made up. So he needed to organize a future in another country, accept the idea of permanent exile. He noticed that he was sobbing. Tears had burst from his eyes and were draining into his mouth and leaving his lips humid and salty. Why was he crying? For El Jefe. There would never be another Trujillo in his lifetime. A man so admirable, so intelligent, astute, and energetic, a man who had, as he told him one day, bagged more than a thousand women, taking them from the front and from behind. A man capable of breaking through any and all obstacles. He had entered his life like an act of providence. It was a miracle that Abbes had written him that letter, asking for funding to go to Mexico to study police science. That had brought him a power he’d never dreamed of. Did they not say that after El Jefe he was the most feared man in the Dominican Republic? Yes, asking for help from Trujillo had been a before and after. Whatever happened, he’d been lucky to enter El Jefe’s employ. What a miserable couple of traitors Balaguer and Ramfis were. Selling out to the Americans while El Jefe’s body was still warm!
His conversation with his banker the next morning calmed him down. His account was still there, still secret, still perfectly protected, even if he couldn’t exchange his Dominican currency: amid so much political instability, the international money markets had stopped accepting Dominican pesos. The banker recommended he leave them in a safe at the bank until things changed. He did so and walked out with a bundle of fifty thousand dollars and twenty thousand French francs to spend in Paris.
In the French capital, he stayed in a suite at the George V and hired a car and driver that same night to take him to a brothel. He’d never licked a French whore’s gash, and the prospect excited him. The chauffeur took him to a little bar in Pigalle where he could choose a girl, he told him, and take her to one of the little hotels nearby. He did, and he wound up in bed that night with a chick from Algeria who spoke a bit of garbled Spanish and who made him pay double because, in her words, she got paid to blow the horn, not to get eaten, that was something she wasn’t used to. The night didn’t end well: he got an erection quickly, but he couldn’t come. It was the first time it had ever happened to him and he tried to play it down, blaming his failure on the nervous tension he’d felt since El Jefe’s death. Don’t worry, he told himself, you’re not impotent.
The next day, he thought he would go to the Louvre—this was his second visit to Paris, and on the first, he had been to no museums—but when he got into his rented car, he instead asked the driver if he knew of any Rosicrucian temples or monasteries in the city. The man gave him an uncertain look: Rosicrucian? Rosicrucian? He ordered him to take him to that dock on the Seine where the little boats go back and forth and you can see the bridges and monuments of Paris from the water. The ride lasted two hours, and he was able to distract himself a bit. Afterward, he asked the chauffeur to take him to have lunch at the best restaurant he could think of. At a traffic light, he saw a woman’s face that looked familiar. Cucha! Cuchita Antesana! His girlfriend from a million years ago. He told the chauffeur to turn around and pick her up where they’d seen her. He got out and hurried over to the woman who reminded him of his long-lost love. Unbelievably, it was she. She was the same, despite the fifteen years that had passed. Cucha looked at him, surprised, disconcerted, amazed. Johnny! Is that you? In Paris? Cucha had lived there for six months now, and was learning French at the Alliance Française in Boulevard Raspail. Was she free to have lunch? She certainly was. They went to La Coupole on Boulevard Montparnasse. Abbes hadn’t seen her again since back when they were in love, when she had just finished secondary school and he was still a young journalist covering horse races, with an uninspired radio show that paid pennies.
When Cuchita saw him take out his red handkerchief, she asked him if he was still Rosicrucian. “Yeah, or halfway,” he responded as a joke. “You wouldn’t happen to know if there’s a Rosicrucian temple in Paris, would you?” She hadn’t had another companion since the breakup with Johnny. After her parents’ death, she had used the inheritance to spend a year in the United States learning English. And now she would spend another year in France. So what was he doing here after General Trujillo’s death?
“I’ll be spending some time outside the Dominican Republic,” he told her. And he started inventing fairy tales: “I’m going to devote myself to bringing together the governments of the right in Latin America, to get them to work together. So what’s happening in our disgraced country doesn’t happen to them. It’s fallen into the chaos of democracy, it’s selling out to the United States, and sooner or later, that’s going to give the communists the upper hand. They know troubled waters make for good fishing. They’ll end up taking over the Dominican Republic and turning it into a people’s democracy, which is just another term for a Soviet satellite.”
As he spoke, he started to convince himself that these words could be a reality. Why not? Wasn’t every dictator in Latin America threatened with the same fate that had befallen El Jefe? They needed to come together, to be convinced to exchange information, to develop strategies to crush all those democratic conspiracies, which were nothing more than a Trojan horse for the communists. And who was better suited to serve as the link between those governments, to defend them against their enemies, the same men who were now running Guatemala with Washington’s blessing?
By the time he left Cuchita at her hotel in the Latin Quarter, he had convinced himself that he would become what he had been for Trujillo for all the right-wing governments in the Caribbean and Central and South America: a strongman, a motivator, a bridge of solidarity, a lookout.
The rest of the afternoon, while he bought himself clothes, shoes, and ties in the finer shops near La Madeleine and the Champs-Élysées, he ruminated on that future trajectory he had invented to enrapture his girlfriend from his teenage years.
That night, he returned to the same bar in Pigalle, but instead of the Algerian from the night before, he took an African to the hotel. She didn’t put up any objections. Her gash was reddish and rank and it turned him on immediately, and he was satisfied when he ejaculated onto the bed while he licked her. Thank goodness, his dick was still in working order.
Two days later, he was in Tokyo, where Zita had already arrived. At the minuscule embassy, the chargé d’affaires told him they couldn’t give him an office, there wasn’t enough space available. The ministry had informed them that his consulship would be merely formal. Abbes García didn’t ask what exactly formal meant. He already had a clear enough idea.