The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa [34]
“The first probably isn’t true, I don’t remember doing it. The second is only half true. They weren’t cadavers, Excellency. Bones and skulls washed up to the surface by the rain. To earn a few pesos. Now they say that as head of the SIM, I’m returning the bones.”
“And what about you being a faggot?”
The colonel didn’t become upset this time either. His voice maintained a clinical indifference.
“I’ve never gone in for that, Excellency. I’ve never gone to bed with a man.”
“Okay, enough bullshit,” he cut him off, becoming serious. “Don’t touch the bishops, for now. We’ll see how things develop. If they can be punished, we’ll do it. For the moment, just keep an eye on them. Go on with the war of nerves. Don’t let them sleep or eat in peace. Maybe they’ll decide to leave on their own.”
Would the two bishops get their way and be as smug as that black bastard Betancourt? Again he felt his anger rise. That rat in Caracas had gotten the OAS to sanction the Dominican Republic and pressured the member countries to break off relations and apply economic pressures that were strangling the nation. Each day, each hour, they were damaging what had been a brilliant economy. And Betancourt was still alive, the standard-bearer of freedom, displaying his burned hands on television, proud of having survived a stupid attempt that never should have been left to those assholes in the Venezuelan military. Next time the SIM would run everything. In his technical, impersonal way, Abbes explained the new operation that would culminate in the powerful explosion, set off by remote control, of a device purchased for a king’s ransom in Czechoslovakia and stored now at the Dominican consulate in Haiti. It would be easy to take it from there to Caracas at the opportune moment.
Ever since 1958, when he decided to promote him to the position he now held, the Benefactor had met every day with the colonel, in this office, at Mahogany House, wherever he might be, and always at this time of day. Like the Generalissimo, Johnny Abbes never took a vacation. Trujillo first heard about him from General Espaillat. The former head of the Intelligence Service had surprised him with a precise, detailed report on Dominican exiles in Mexico City: what they were doing, what they were plotting, where they lived, where they met, who was helping them, which diplomats they visited.
“How many people do you have in Mexico to be so well informed about those bastards?”
“All the information comes from one person, Excellency.” Razor gestured with professional satisfaction. “He’s very young. Johnny Abbes García. Perhaps you’ve met his father, a half-German gringo who came here to work for the electric company and married a Dominican. The boy was a sports reporter and something of a poet. I began to use him as an informant on people in radio and the press, and at the Gómez Pharmacy gatherings that the intellectuals attend. He did so well I sent him to Mexico City on a phony scholarship. And now, as you can see, he’s gained the confidence of the entire exile community. He gets on well with everybody. I don’t know how he does it, Excellency, but in Mexico he even got close to Lombardo Toledano, the leftist union leader. Imagine, the ugly broad he married was secretary to that Red.”
Poor Razor! By talking so enthusiastically, he began to lose the directorship of the Intelligence Service that he had trained for at West Point.
“Bring him here, give him a job where I can watch him,” Trujillo ordered.
That was how the awkward, unprepossessing figure with the perpetually darting eyes had appeared in the corridors of the National Palace. He occupied a low-level position in the Office of Information. Trujillo studied him at a distance. From the time he had been very young, in San Cristóbal, he had followed those intuitions which, after a simple glance, a brief chat, a mere allusion, made him certain a person could be useful to him. That was how he chose many of his collaborators, and he hadn’t done too badly. For several weeks Johnny Abbes García worked in an obscure office, under