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By Root 1293 0

guns. And he saw himself, at the same time, contemplating (one, two, three days earlier?) the line of countless thousands of Dominicans of all ages, professions, races, and social classes, waiting hours on end, under a merciless sun, to climb the stairs of the Palace and, with hysterical exclamations of grief, with fainting and screaming and offerings to the loas of Voodoo, to pay their final homage to the Chief, the Man, the Benefactor, the Generalissimo, the Father. And in the midst of all that, he was listening to reports from his aides regarding the capture of the engineer Huáscar Tejeda and Salvador Estrella Sadhalá, the end of Antonio de la Maza and General Juan Tomás Díaz in Independencia Park at the corner of Bolívar as they defended themselves with guns, and the almost simultaneous death, a short distance away, of Lieutenant Amador García, who also killed before he could be killed, and the mob’s looting and destruction of the house where his aunt had given him refuge. And he remembered the rumors regarding the mysterious disappearance of his compadre Amiama Tió and Antonio Imbert—Ramfis was offering half a million pesos to anyone with information leading to their capture—and the fall of some two hundred Dominicans, both civilian and military, in Ciudad Trujillo, Santiago, La Vega, San Pedro de Macorís, and half a dozen other places, who had been implicated in the assassination of Trujillo.

All of that was mixed up, but at least it was intelligible. As was the final coherent memory his mind would preserve: how, when the Mass for the Generalissimo lying in state in the San Cristóbal church was over, Petán Trujillo took his arm: “Come with me in my car. Pupo.” In Petán’s Cadillac he knew—it was the last thing he knew with total certainty—that this was his last chance to save himself from what was coming by emptying his submachine gun into the Chief’s brother and into himself, because that ride was not going to end at his house in Gazcue. It ended at San Isidro Air Base, where, Petán lied to him, not bothering to pretend, “there would be a family meeting.” At the entrance to the base, two generals, his brother-in-law Virgilio García Trujillo and the head of the Army General Staff, Tuntin Sánchez, informed him that he was under arrest, accused of complicity with the assassins of the Benefactor and Father of the New Nation. Very pale, avoiding his eyes, they asked for his weapon. Obediently, he handed them the M-1 submachine gun that had not left his side for four days.

They took him to a room with a table, an old typewriter, a pile of blank sheets, and a chair. They asked him to remove his belt and shoes and hand them to a sergeant. He did so, asking no questions. They left him alone, and minutes later Ramfis’s two closest friends, Colonel Luis José (Pechito) León Estévez and Pirulo Sánchez Rubirosa, came in, did not greet him, and told him to write down everything he knew about the conspiracy, giving the full names of the conspirators. General Ramfis—by supreme decree, which the Congress would confirm tonight, President Balaguer had just named him Commander-in-Chief of the Air, Sea, and Land Forces of the Republic—had full knowledge of the plot, thanks to the detainees, all of whom had denounced him.

He sat down at the typewriter and for several hours did what they had ordered. He was a terrible typist; he used only two fingers and made a good number of mistakes that he did not take the time to correct. He told everything, beginning with his first conversation with his compadre Luis Amiama six months earlier, and he named the twenty or so people he knew were implicated, but not Bibín. He explained that for him the decisive factor was the support of the United States for the conspiracy, and that he agreed to preside over the civilian-military junta only when he learned from Juan Tomás that both Consul Henry Dearborn and Consul Jack Bennett, as well as the head of the CIA in Ciudad Trujillo, Lorenzo D. Berry (Wimpy), wanted him to head it. He told only one small lie: that in exchange for his participation, he had demanded