Читать книгу The Last Playboy: The High Life of Porfirio Rubirosa - Shawn Levy - Страница 9

It was, by all objective standards, easy street.

In a house facing the sea in Ciudad Trujillo, the newlyweds lived in true splendor. Both had multiple servants; in addition to a valet and a masseuse, Porfirio employed a sparring partner—Kid GoGo, from back in his San Lázaro boxing promotion days—with whom he exercised daily in a ring he’d had erected in a spare room.

But the shadow of Trujillo obscured their horizon, and they were unable ever to forget the source of their good fortune. Flor recalled that their presence was required every day for lunch in the presidential mansion—“plain fare, rice and beans, no drinks, no cigarettes, no small talk: it was a bit like two slaves dining with the master.”

Along with all the gifts, Porfirio was given real work to do. Having decided against dispatching the couple to London, Trujillo appointed his son-in-law undersecretary to the president in April 1933, and then, the following July, undersecretary of foreign relations. In that post, Porfirio took charge of some genuinely sensitive responsibilities, such as communicating with Gerardo Machado y Morales, the Cuban president who’d been exiled to the United States after a coup in August; several rounds of correspondence between the two, with Porfirio gently dissuading the elder man from attempting to enlist Trujillo’s help in regaining his position, would survive. When foreign dignitaries came to the capital, Flor and Porfirio, the stylish, French-speaking face of the modern Dominican Republic, were trotted out to meet the visitors. A Haitian newspaper columnist was so charmed that he praised them as the “best-dressed, best-educated, most popular couple in town”; Trujillo, cross at having failed to be mentioned himself in a similar light, found in these compliments a slight, which he avenged by adopting a calculated iciness toward the couple.

There was phony work as well. In May 1933, Porfirio, who had never taken a course in business and had never had a bank account in his own name, was named president of the Compañía de Seguros San Rafael, an insurance firm established by Trujillo—like the other leading companies in virtually every field of Dominican commerce—as a false front for his private monopolization of the nation’s economy. The entire Trujillo family—the president’s many brothers and sisters, countless nieces and nephews and cousins—would be enriched through the years via such schemes. And not only blood relatives but in-laws and the relations of in-laws; Flor said of Porfirio’s kin, who’d so scorned the sight of him in his uniform barely a year earlier, “His family didn’t much cotton to Trujillo, but after the wedding they suddenly got big positions in the government.”

A lot of Dominican men would have been satisfied with this routine: the sinecures, the luxurious home, the servants, the prestige, the $50,000 bank account (controlled by Trujillo and in Flor’s name, but still). Not Porfirio. He was living within easy walking distance of his old haunts, the bars and brothels and clubs where he’d idled before he joined the army. He settled into a double life, half the time an obedient son-in-law, half a notorious rake participating in marathon drinking-and-whoring bouts: parrandas. When news of this behavior filtered back home, as it inevitably would, there were dustups with Flor. At least once Porfirio went so far as to hit her; she ran off to the palace, interrupting a meeting to tell her father of her husband’s violence; summoned by Trujillo, Porfirio mollified him by declaring that he’d struck her for failing to respect him under his own roof, a provocation with which any true tíguere would sympathize.

Even as he forgave that trespass, Trujillo harbored little warmth for his son-in-law. “I think that at bottom he never forgave me for marrying his daughter,” Porfirio surmised. “That his daughter could love someone other than him seemed impossible to him.” The president’s withering remoteness, coupled with Porfirio’s own restless inability to settle into the life of a bureaucrat, impelled him to ask for reinstatement to the Army, where he’d so enjoyed the life of vigor and male camaraderie. Trujillo consented, posting him at the rank of captain, assigning him no specific duties, and doing little to couch his disgust at Porfirio’s apparent contentment with his new station.

The source of the president’s contempt was, in Porfirio’s view, obvious: Little Ramfis had been commissioned as a senior officer in the Army the previous year; as Porfirio put it, “What sort of son-in-law would be content to be captain when [Trujillo’s] own five-year-old son was already a colonel?” (A letter from Robert L. Ripley’s “Believe It or Not” offices in New York would arrive on Trujillo’s desk in February 1936, seeking confirmation of Ramfis’s position in the Army and asking whether he wore full uniform and collected the appropriate salary for his rank. By that time, the young soldier had been seen beside his father at several official functions wearing elaborate military uniforms and partaking of champagne toasts.)

But Porfirio endured the Benefactor’s scorn because he simply wanted to be his own man. Without responsibilities as a soldier, he could look for private opportunities around the city. “I had very little to do,” he recalled, “and I wanted to learn about business.” But, as he should have known from his brief stint at the insurance company, nobody did business in Ciudad Trujillo without doing business with Trujillo. And it was a uniquely bold and crafty businessman indeed who could make a success at that.

Félix Benítez Rexach wore his hair to his shoulders, wasn’t too particular about washing or combing it, and habitually topped it with battered straw hats. His clothes weren’t much more presentable: He could show up at official functions in torn and muddy outfits as if oblivious entirely to protocol. He looked for all the world like a hobo, but it was a calculated guise. He was actually a millionaire engineer willing to stand up to gangsters and governments to see his business interests come to fruition. Born in Puerto Rico, he traveled widely and grew especially fond of France, where he owned homes in Paris and on the Riviera. There was suspicious talk about his sexuality, but he had two wives, the second being the onetime Parisian flower girl Gaby Montbre, who had a sort-of musical career as La Môme Moineau (literally, “the bratty sparrow”), a chanteuse in the vein of Edith Piaf. There was suspicious talk as well about his engineering credentials, but he had built himself a yacht from his own design (his wife would become more famous for being photographed by French magazines on its decks in sailing clothes than for her singing), and he had successfully overseen the creation of deep-water harbors in Puerto Rico, where he had additional interests in the resort hotel business.

Benítez Rexach showed up in Ciudad Trujillo in 1934 when Trujillo’s government announced plans to enlarge the harbor at the mouth of the Ozama River; until then, the largest ships arriving in the capital had to anchor a short distance out at sea and have their passengers and cargo ferried ashore. The project would require the use of a massive shipboard dredge—and whoever successfully completed the job could hope on doing further business with Trujillo at other ports around the country.

Benítez Rexach read all the implications of the situation, including the nepotistic nature of Dominican political and business affairs, and he sought a pry hole that would get him into the president’s good graces. He found one in Trujillo’s tomcatting son-in-law. He dangled his wife as bait in front of Porfirio, cynically affording him ample opportunity to sample her favors. (Flor knew about the affair and so, she claimed, did the whole city, including her father.) To tie the knot tighter, Benítez Rexach suggested a business partnership: If Porfirio acquired a dredge, and Benítez Rexach knew of one available in New Orleans, then the engineer would rent it for the duration of the job; they drew up an agreement.

For Benítez Rexach, it was politics: cozen the son-in-law to get to the real power. But for Porfirio and Flor, it was a lifeline—and a gamble. “Neither of us had much business sense,” Flor recalled. She and her husband “were alike in so many ways, neither of us really good-looking, both mixed-up Dominicans, in love with the high life, hungry for what money could buy, but unable to earn an honest living on our own.” Success in the harbor project, however, would mean autonomy from Trujillo’s money and influence. The risk was worth it.

The first obstacle would be getting the capital necessary to buy the dredge. Flor’s father still controlled the $50,000 dowry; would he be willing to open the purse for the project? Willing wasn’t exactly the word. “I don’t have much faith in second-hand machinery or in this investment,” the president told his daughter even as he agreed to her request. Rubi sent an emissary, cash in hand, to buy the dredge, a vessel called the Tenth of February, and bring it back to Ciudad Trujillo.

While he was risking his fortune and good name, such as they were, in this scheme, Porfirio was also upholding his share of the bargain he’d struck with Benítez Rexach, establishing a connection between the engineer and Trujillo. Eventually, the two men so bonded that an intermediary was unnecessary; Benítez Rexach sufficiently impressed Trujillo, in fact, that he was routinely forgiven the effrontery of strolling into the immaculate palace in his grubbiest condition and eventually enjoyed brief appointments from the president in the diplomatic service in France and Puerto Rico.

With these two in cahoots, it was only a matter of time before Porfirio was frozen out. The blindside was delivered with an assassin’s cunning. By the time the Tenth of February was in Ciudad Trujillo and ready to dig, Benítez Rexach had acquired a brand-new dredge of his own for the job and had convinced Trujillo of the superiority of his vessel to Porfirio’s. But Porfirio had the engineer’s signed promise to use his equipment, and he demanded that it at least be tested. In the coming weeks, Benítez Rexach submitted the Tenth of February to trials but sabotaged them at every turn: He claimed that the dredge wouldn’t function properly in the tropical weather; he insisted that it first be tried in the most ill-suited portion of the harbor; he whispered to Trujillo that its gas-powered engine might ignite and blow up the whole port.

Porfirio, suffering one of his father-in-law’s periodic silent treatments, couldn’t get a hearing. He could see that he was being shut out of the operation, and he was realistic enough to wish only to recoup the lease money he’d been promised so as to repay Trujillo for the dredge. Even that much Benítez Rexach refused, and so Porfirio took decisive action. In his full captain’s uniform, complete with sidearms, he rode a launch out to the work site in the harbor and accosted the engineer. “I leapt at him, grabbed him by the collar and shook him like a carpet,” Porfirio remembered. “‘Thief! If you continue waging war against me and don’t pay me right now what you owe me, I will destroy you!’ He was terrified. He collapsed. He promised everything I wanted.”

But as soon as Porfirio left, Benítez Rexach raced to tell Trujillo that he would have to quit working on the harbor improvements for fear that Porfirio would kill him. Trujillo offered reassurance: “Four officers of my guard will accompany you and let Captain Rubirosa know what it will cost him if he touches one hair on your head.” The operation continued without further hindrance while the Tenth of February sat unused and worthless. As a Dominican businessman—indeed, as a Dominican man—Porfirio was toast.

It would be hard to imagine a worse fall: from golden aide-de-camp to anointed heir to broke, disgraced nonperson in less than three years. With whatever money they could scrounge, Porfirio and Flor decided to leave the country and look for less dreary prospects in the United States. In the winter of 1934–35, they moved to New York City. Trujillo, perhaps to let them tumble further into his debt, let them go.

This was, in most ways, madness. In Ciudad Trujillo, even on the outs with the Benefactor, they had connections, prestige, resources. In New York, for which they didn’t even have the proper winter clothing, they were broke, they didn’t speak the language, and they were anonymous refugees living in a cheap Broadway hotel and, later, in Greenwich Village, where at least one associate would later remember Porfirio working, briefly, as a waiter.

“It was a nightmare,” Flor remembered. Her husband, as he had back home, “disappeared to play poker with Cuban gangster types while I waited in that dingy hotel room, watching the Broadway signs blink on and off.”

There was no money: “When he won, we ate; when he lost, we starved.”

And he had other interests: “He would come home at 6 a.m., his pockets stuffed with matchbooks scribbled with the phone numbers of women.”

They fought: “Angry, brutal, he shoved and hit me when we argued.”

It was utterly foolish to think of New York as a going prospect. They could count on no help from the consulate, which obviously answered to her father. There was a Dominican presence in the Latin American community in the north of Manhattan, but most of that contingent was made up of people who had fled Trujillo and were actively plotting his replacement—again, a dead end. The only significant contact they had was a mixture of comedy and menace: three cousins of Porfirio’s, sons of Don Pedro’s sister, who had been raised in the city since boyhood and had spent most of their grown years engaged in petty crime and worse. “When I saw ‘West Side Story’ I was reminded of them,” Flor recalled. “Good-for-nothings who had never worked.”

Among them was Luis de la Fuente Rubirosa, aka Chichi, who had been in trouble with the law since boyhood. In 1925, he had been arrested for burglary and sentenced to a spell at the New York Reformatory for Boys. In 1932, he was tried for assault and robbery and acquitted. He was short, maybe five-foot-six, with jug ears and a pinched face and sharp cheekbones, a wiry, dangerous little creep, plain and simple, with nothing to offer his cousin and his wife in the way of truly promising possibilities.

New York was coming to seem even more disastrous than Ciudad Trujillo. And then the most unexpected lifeline appeared: a telegram from the Benefactor announcing that Porfirio had been elected—elected!—to the national congress and that both he and Flor were required back home. Unable to explain what was happening, they were equally unable to resist.

Trujillo’s congress was a dog-and-pony show that fooled no one. The deputies were required upon taking office to submit signed and undated letters of resignation so that the president could remove them at any time for any cause; it wasn’t unusual for a man to return from lunch to attend the afternoon session only to find out that he had, without knowing it, quit his post during the recess. And when they did sit, the legislators were utterly impotent. “In every session,” Porfirio remembered, “the President read aloud a proposed law and we adopted it with a show of hands. There was never any question of discussing it.”

A nation conditioned by centuries of rebellion and despotism wasn’t especially outraged by this pantomime of a government. And Trujillo was modernizing the Dominican Republic in a way that no previous tyrant had: paying off its staggering national debt to the United States, paving roads, building an electrical grid, and so forth. Soon after he took power, the island suffered a devastating hurricane that virtually bowled it back to the Stone Age; the speed of repairs and, indeed, improvements under Trujillo’s firm hand made him a hero in the eyes of his countrymen.

As a result, Trujillo had no shortage of stooges who could fill the seats of this cardboard congress, so it wasn’t at all clear to Porfirio why he was so urgently needed. But in April 1935, he was called in to see the president—who suddenly seemed very happy to see his son-in-law—and given a delicate assignment. When he got home, he told Flor that he would be going back to New York the next day on official business.

On April 16, Porfirio disembarked from the S.S. Camao in New York and checked into the St. Moritz Hotel on Central Park South. Along with his personal effects, he had a suitcase containing $7,000 in cash.^* A few days later, he toted that suitcase to the Dominican consulate on Fifth Avenue, where he met with a small group that included his cousin Chichi. On April 27, he left for Miami; from there he sailed for San Pedro de Macorís, his spare suitcase filled this time with new dresses and other gifts for Flor.

The following day, a Sunday, a group of Dominican dissidents met in Manhattan to discuss their plans for unseating Trujillo. Among them was Dr. Angel Morales, the most recognized Dominican statesman in the world. In the years before Trujillo’s assumption of power, Morales had served his country as minister of the interior, minister of foreign affairs, minister to Italy, minister to France (he was once Don Pedro Rubirosa’s boss), and minister to the United States. In the mid-1920s, he had been elected vice president of the League of Nations. In 1930, he had run in the rigged election that gave Trujillo the presidency; when he lost, he fled to New York for his life and was declared a traitor; all his property in the Dominican Republic was confiscated by the new government.

As an alternative to Trujillo, Morales had supporters not only in the Dominican exile community but in the U.S. government and among private parties in North America who sought to foster change in the island nation. But he so feared Trujillo’s ruthlessness and reach that he lived in New York like a hunted man. He shared a Manhattan rooming house flat with Sergio Bencosme, a general’s son who had served Trujillo’s rivals as a congressional deputy and minister of defense. The two lived on the proceeds from a small coffee importing business. And they tiptoed around the city in mortal trepidation: Morales was said to be hesitant to eat anywhere save at his landlady’s table for fear of being poisoned or attacked.

His fears were justified that Sunday night. When the dissident meeting broke up, Morales, in a rare feeling of well-being, went to dine out with friends. Bencosme returned to their apartment on the seventh floor of a Washington Heights walk-up and a supper cooked by Mrs. Carmen Higgs, their thirty-year-old Latina landlady.

At about 8 P.M., there was a knock at the door. Mrs. Higgs, who shared her lodgers’ fears, asked who was there.

“Open this door,” came the harsh reply.

She cracked the door to have a look, and a short, wiry man in a brown suit and brown hat pushed in past her, brandishing a .45 caliber pistol. Mrs. Higgs screamed and leapt back into the kitchen; fearing a robbery, she removed her engagement ring and wedding band and tossed them into a coffeepot that was percolating on the stove. The gunman looked into the kitchen and then moved down the hall, first into the living room and then into an adjoining bedroom.

Bencosme, shaving for dinner, his face covered in lather, heard the commotion, came toward the front door, and peered into the living room. Finding it empty, he went on to the kitchen to see what the screaming was about. From the rear of the apartment came a shout—“Die, Morales!”—and two shots struck Bencosme in the back; the bullets passed through his body and lodged in a bureau. The gunman ran through the hall—over the body and past Mrs. Higgs—and down the six flights of stairs into the street. Bencosme, staggering and in agony, made his way to the apartment of a neighbor who had a telephone and rang for help.

When police and ambulance drivers arrived, they couldn’t at first make out what happened. Mrs. Higgs was so frightened that she couldn’t bring forth any English and insisted that she’d been robbed until a detective found her jewelry brewing with the coffee. Bencosme, barely conscious by the time he was taken off to Knickerbocker Hospital, muttered that he was a political refugee. Only when Morales returned home at midnight to find the chaotic scene did a reasonable theory of the case emerge: Somebody had tried to kill him and had mistakenly shot Bencosme.

On Monday, forty known Trujillo supporters from among Manhattan’s Dominican community were rounded up and questioned by detectives of the so-called alien squad at the West 152nd Street station, but no arrests were made. On Tuesday morning, Bencosme succumbed to his wounds and died in the hospital, leaving behind a widow and two children in Ciudad Trujillo. Finally, Mrs. Higgs sat in a station house and looked at mug shots of Dominicans with histories of criminal violence. She looked at a 1932 booking photo and declared that the man pictured in it was the killer.

It was, of course, Chichi de la Fuente Rubirosa.

After going before a grand jury to present the known facts of the case, many of which derived from Morales’s own contacts and investigation, the New York County District Attorney’s Office filed an indictment in absentia for murder against Chichi on February 18, 1936. According to the charges, “Captain Porfirio Rubirosa” had been in New York immediately prior to the shooting and Chichi was, nearly a year after the shooting, living in Ciudad Trujillo as a lieutenant in the Dominican army despite his total lack of military training. Chichi’s extradition was sought through the State Department, but little hope was held out that the accused killer would be sent back to New York.

Back in Ciudad Trujillo, Flor knew nothing about the events in New York—the murder wasn’t exactly front-page news in the state-controlled local papers—but like everyone else in the culture of gossip that was coming to thrive under Trujillo, she heard things. She was only mildly surprised, therefore, to answer a knock at her door on a night when her husband and father were out of town to find Chichi standing there begging for help.

“I had to leave the States,” he explained. “They are pursuing me.”

For a while, Chichi lived with his cousin and his wife and sought work around the city; he even put in a spell on the harbor project that had driven Porfirio and Flor to leave home the year before. It wasn’t a promising situation, and Porfirio didn’t exactly relish it, especially as Chichi aggravated matters by hinting broadly around town that he had done Trujillo a great service and deserved to be at least a captain for his efforts.

He might as well have cut his own throat. “One evening,” Flor recalled, “we came home to find him gone. Servants said ‘strangers’ had surrounded the house and taken him away. We never heard from Chichi or saw him again—and my husband would not comment on the affair.” (When a year or so later Flor thought she saw Chichi on the street and pointed the look-alike out to Porfirio, he snapped back, “Don’t mention that name! Those kids were good-for-nothings!”) When the U.S. State Department inquired as to Chichi’s whereabouts, they were told alternately that no such person existed and that the fellow in question had died in a dredging accident in the harbor. But police and prosecutors in New York still wanted to talk to Porfirio—and they would be patient in waiting to do so for decades.

This drama did little to stabilize the marriage of Porfirio and Flor, which continued to be roiled by Trujillo. In the summer of 1935, they found themselves once again in the Benefactor’s confidence. He was suffering from a severe case of urethritis and required surgery. Because of his need to maintain a show of superhuman capacity, he arranged for a French specialist to be brought secretly to perform the operation. The doctor was put up—again, on the QT—at Porfirio and Flor’s home, where he conducted three operations on the president, using only local anesthetic. Trujillo was so weakened by the ordeal that rumors spread as far as Washington, D.C., that he was dying. To put an end to the gossip, he left his makeshift intensive care bed and had himself driven through the capital in a Rolls-Royce for an hour, long enough so that word of his good health would circulate. When he recovered, he returned to his own house without so much as a thank-you for his daughter and son-in-law.

At the time, Flor’s own health was of concern. She had been trying to conceive a child and was told by her physician to seek the advice of a specialist in the United States, where she underwent a surgical procedure designed to address her infertility.^* When she came home hopeful of starting a family, she found her household had been the scene of one of Porfirio’s bacchanalian parrandas: There were women’s earrings in the swimming pool, and one of her servants confided that “all the whores in Santo Domingo have been here.”

She begged her father to help her do something about this nightmare, and he offered a unique solution: In July 1936, he named Porfirio secretary of the Dominican legation in Berlin.

They arrived at the height of preparations for the Nazi Olympics, an event that drew to the city a claque of idle rich scenesters from around the Continent: Porfirio’s crowd exactly. With almost no work assigned to him, he kept up the equestrian skills in the city’s parks, began to take a series of fencing lessons, and, in general, dove into a more luxe version of the life he had lived in Paris as a feckless teen. “Berlin suited me perfectly,” he admitted blithely. “I could ride, go to clubs, drive fast and dance at the afternoon teas at the Eden.”

Needless to say, those afternoon teas involved women—and not Dominican whores, either, but a breed of woman that intimidated Flor. “How could I,” she wondered, “still a provincial girl in her early 20s, unworldly, badly dressed, mousy, compete with these women?” She was particularly anxious about a certain Martha: “Soignée, blazing with diamonds, she was everything I was not.”

But there were other, nameless rivals. There was the time one of Porfirio’s afternoon teas turned into dinner and an overnight stay. He snuck home to the Dominican embassy at dawn, quickly showered and dressed for breakfast, and made his way to his dining room where Flor and the ambassador, among others, awaited him. He sat nonchalantly and then noticed a bouquet of roses in front of his place setting. Attached was a note written in a feminine hand, a paean to a night that had seemed never to end, like midsummer’s eve in Sweden. Whatever cock-and-bull story Porfirio had planned to offer vanished from his head: “My pretty German spoke of the Scandinavian summer. Breakfast proceeded like the middle of the Siberian winter. Since then, I can’t see a bouquet of roses without feeling a bit of a shiver.” But any chastening he felt soon dissolved, as when he had frightened his parents by spending the night out as a boy, and he presently resumed his rambles.

Official duties dotted the high life. Because of their relative worldliness, because they were relatives of the Dominican president, and because the Third Reich was courting Caribbean governments as part of its scheme of global expansion, Porfirio and Flor were granted a number of remarkable privileges. When the Olympics began, they were permitted to sit in Hitler’s box at the main stadium, where they observed the Führer’s caroms between childish glee at each German victory and rock stolidity when another nation’s anthem was played at a medal ceremony. They were feted by Hermann Göring, who took Porfirio aside during the evening and expressed interest in obtaining a particularly handsome Dominican medal. They were invited to the annual party rally in Nuremberg, where they gazed in stupefaction at an orgy of adulation on a scale of which Trujillo, with his own budding cult of personality, could only dream.

Despite such impressive shows, both young Dominicans were shocked by the outright anti-Semitism of the regime. Flor found herself secretly aiding a Jewish girl who had been her schoolmate in France, obtaining visas for her and her husband and seeing to their getting settled in the Dominican Republic and started in the tobacco business. Porfirio was staggered one day as he rode through a park and saw a young man wearing a yellow star and being humiliated by Germans. “Racism never occurred to me,” he reflected. Indeed, he had enjoyed a certain éclat for his Creole heritage, which was evident even though he was fair-skinned enough to pass for Latin as opposed to Negro. “In the Dominican Republic, blacks and whites were equals. At times they mixed. There were social differences, but in the most exclusive places one met people of color. In Paris as well, racial problems didn’t exist.”

But at the same time, neither of them had any inkling of how truly invidious the Reich was or would be. Dazzled, perhaps, by his good fortune to be living with money in a posh European capital, Porfirio reckoned that Hitler’s great shows of force “were no more than a bluff.” In retrospect he would feel some shame at his miscalculation. “I’m not a politician,” he would explain. But he noted, too, that the diplomatic corps of larger and more sophisticated nations were equally gulled by the Führer. If he had been fooled, he wasn’t alone.

Before he could fathom the truth of the Reich, however, he found himself transferred. Flor was so miserable living in Berlin with her rakish husband that she wrote to her father to express her displeasure:

I have learned a little German and seen a lot of the country, and I have admired the great work of Hitler. But nevertheless I’m not happy.… In diplomatic circles, most of the officials are on the left. They don’t invite us to their dances and I don’t have the chance to meet anybody. If it isn’t too much to ask, I’d like you to transfer us to Paris.… There, I’d have occasion to attend many conferences and get to know better the French literature that I like so well. Please let me know if you can comply with this request.

Indeed, he could, but first a royal interlude in London: On May 12, 1937, they represented the Dominican Republic at the coronation of George VI; Porfirio met the monarch in a private audience. Two days later, at the Dominican legation at 21 Avenue de Messine in Paris, the following note arrived from the undersecretary of foreign relations in Ciudad Trujillo:

It pleases me to inform you that the most excellent Señor Presidente of the Republic has seen fit to name Mr. Porfirio Rubirosa as Secretary First Class of this legation in substitute for Gustavo J. Henriquez, who has been designated Secretary First Class in Berlin in substitution for Mr. Porfirio Rubirosa.

This was far more like it.

Paris had changed in the decade since he’d last lived there: The tangos and Dixieland in the nightclubs had been swept away by a wave of Russian music and Gypsy-flavored hot jazz; the chic hot spots were now on the Left Bank of the Seine instead of the Right. But it was intoxicating to be there, to saunter into his old haunts in search of old friends, to pass by the erstwhile family house on Avenue Mac-Mahon, to delight in the new fashions favored by women in both couture and amour. When he stowed away on the Carimare and left France he was a child, as Don Pedro had despairingly declared; now he was a twenty-eight-year-old man with means and liberty.

“As soon as I arrived in Paris,” he remembered without shame, “invitations began pouring in. I was out every night, often alone. My wife objected … she could not keep up with me.”

In large part, his duties at the embassy would be, as in Berlin, ceremonial. He and Flor were presented to the general commissioner of the upcoming Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, and he found himself appointed to a panel of judges who would award prizes to various exhibits. It was a prestigious post. The exposition, a gigantic world’s fair celebrating global modernity, took over the area around the Eiffel Tower and Palais de Trocadero throughout the summer. It was a marvel of aesthetic novelties paraded by nations on the verge of global war: Albert Speer’s soaring German pavilion; Pablo Picasso’s searing Guernica in the Spanish pavilion; a Finnish hall designed by Alvar Aalto; illuminated fountains; exhibitions dedicated to the latest advances in refrigeration and neon light. The Dominican Republic couldn’t compete with those sorts of things, but they did share some exhibit space with other Caribbean nations, showing off native crafts and the work of the latest Dominican artists. Trujillo instigated dozens of letters between Paris and Ciudad Trujillo about the exposition; he was delighted to learn that the French artist and critic Alfred Lebrun “had formed an elevated new idea of the progress achieved by our country,” and he sent the eminent man a box of cigars in gratitude.

The Benefactor lived for this sort of thing, and he kept Porfirio busy with the most bizarre little requests to satisfy better his comprehension of the modern world and his nation’s place in it. He sent to Paris for atlases and diplomatic dictionaries; he hired a Paris-based Caribbean journalist to analyze the possibility of his being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize; he had framed photos of the legation sent to him, and signatures of foreign officials, with whom he also exchanged pens; relishing the opportunity to acquire foreign honors in exchange for those of the Dominican Republic, he ordered miniatures and reproductions of each new award he received. Porfirio served so well as the conduit for all this ephemera that he was promoted to consul in July 1937.

But at the same time that he put forward the shiny front of his daughter and son-in-law for Europe’s leaders, Trujillo was revealing his most atrociously dark side back home. He had spent the first years of his rule quelling—through political machination, bribery, and, especially, brute force—all internal opposition. Now he turned his attention to Haiti. It was a natural target for him: The border between the two countries was something of a fiction, having been drawn along no clear geographical or political lines and passing through remote districts whose residents truly might not be able to say which country they lived in or who its ruler was. Moreover, Trujillo, like every Dominican, had been bred with a fear and hatred of Haiti born of centuries of conflict, and he had, like every leader of both nations, harbored dreams of uniting Hispaniola under his hand. At the very least, he wanted clear autonomy over his own portion of the island, and Haiti and its citizens always seemed to be interfering with that prospect. Throughout the early years of Trujillo’s reign, Haitian encroachment on Dominican territory became burdensome in a number of ways: public health, cattle rustling, an increase in churches practicing a mixture of Catholicism and voodoo, Haitian infiltration into the Dominican sugar industry, and so forth. There had been some efforts toward a détente between Trujillo and his Haitian counterpart, Stenio Vincent. But as the grievances were felt chiefly by Dominicans, it was inevitably Trujillo who was the more vexed.

His frustration reached the tipping point in October 1937, when he gave a provocative speech about Dominican sovereignty and national purity. That very night, up and down the border and in the areas farther inland that were easily accessible to Haitian migrants, small cadres of armed men—some from the official military, others no better organized than the makeshift platoons that Don Pedro Rubirosa had once commanded—rounded up all the Haitians they could find and slaughtered them.

It was the most brutal sort of genocide. In a land where virtually everyone was of mixed blood, it was nevertheless assumed that Haitians were generally darker-skinned, meaning that many black Dominicans were swept up in the raids; a crude test of certain Spanish words that French speakers notoriously had trouble pronouncing was instituted. Have a dark enough complexion and say perejil (“parsley”) improperly and you were dead. It went on for several days: mass murder by machete and pistol. By the time it was over, some 15,000 to 20,000 people had been killed.

It took several weeks for word of the massacre to reach the outside world, and when it did, the bloody face of the Trujillo regime first became known globally. In France, the colonial fatherland of Haiti, the events were received with special outrage; Trujillo took out subscriptions to French newspapers to keep track of what they were saying about him. For some time, Trujillo managed to keep the world at bay by explaining the genocide as a spontaneous outburst of his people, who had grown tired of being inundated with and exploited by Haitians. That charade didn’t last long—the United States government, still keenly observing Dominican affairs, was particularly anxious to uncover the truth—and Trujillo finally submitted to mediation and a judgment against his government, which paid $525,000 in damages to Haiti. The reaction of the world to this ghastly event forever altered Trujillo’s political prospects. He had forced his way to the presidency in 1930; he had run unopposed for reelection four years later; but after the Haitian massacre he could never again hold the office, satisfying himself rather with strictly managing Dominican political and economic life through a string of puppet presidents he installed in the National Palace. As a sop, he had himself declared generalissimo, adding an unprecedented fifth star to his epaulets and another title to the encomia by which he demanded to be addressed.

While Trujillo was roiled by grisly events of his own making, his son-in-law prospered in small fashion. In August 1937, as the barbaric Haitian plot was forming, a letter arrived at the Foreign Ministry in Ciudad Trujillo from a stamp collector in Paris: He had seen in the collections of several local dealers whole sheets of uncanceled Dominican stamps and was wondering if he might buy such rarities directly from the source and avoid paying a markup to middlemen. Trujillo immediately wrote to the Parisian embassy notifying the ambassador that somebody in his charge was stealing stamps and selling them on the sly to philatelists around the city. After several weeks, a reply was sent declaring that the dealers had identified their source for this contraband as Porfirio’s brother-in-law, Gilberto Sánchez Lustrino, who had, in the way of things in the Trujillo Era, turned from snobbish disparagement of the Benefactor’s mean roots to groveling obsequy and parasitic dependence. In the coming years, Sánchez Lustrino would paint sycophantic word pictures of the Benefactor’s greatness in prose and verse, and as editor of the ardently proregime newspaper La Nación. In Paris, one of several foreign postings in which he would serve, he had obviously fallen in with Porfirio, whose delicate fingerprints would be invisible on this clever but short-lived enrichment scheme. In any case, no record of punishment for the thefts found its way into the diplomatic archives.

Perhaps Porfirio wasn’t guilty. But more likely his complicity was overlooked by the ambassador himself, the Benefactor’s older brother Virgilio Trujillo Molina, who would fill ambassadorial posts in Europe for decades. Virgilio was always frankly resentful of his younger brother, if for no other reason than the mere notion that he was older and yet less powerful. Dependent on his sibling, like all other Dominicans, for work, money, and even life and limb, he made a habit of cultivating his own cadre of acolytes and, on occasion, hatching his own financial and political intrigues. Virgilio found a sufficiently eager ally in Porfirio, for instance, that he overlooked the younger man’s infidelities against Flor, who was, after all, his niece. And he would continue to maintain friendly relations with Porfirio as the illustrious marriage of 1932 devolved into the domestic shambles of 1937.

Paris, alas, hadn’t, as Flor had hoped, proved an even ground where her familiarity with the surroundings would counterbalance her husband’s shamelessness. The couple had moved from the embassy to a home in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb just beyond the Bois de Boulogne. It should have been heaven. But, “unfortunately,” in Porfirio’s view, they were not alone: “A cousin of Flor’s was with us constantly.” The girl was Ligia Ruiz Trujillo de Berges, the daughter of the Benefactor’s younger sister Japonesa (so nicknamed for the almond shape of her eyes). “When I went to the embassy,” Porfirio recalled, “she didn’t separate from Flor for even a minute; in the evenings, she went out with us. She was in all our conversations, even our arguments, and this is no good for a couple. It’s possible to convince a woman of your good intentions or of the meaninglessness of a little fight; but two!”

Ligia had Flor’s ear and convinced her cousin that the marriage had degenerated irredeemably. She persuaded Flor to return to Ciudad Trujillo to seek her father’s help in corralling Porfirio and perhaps in making him feel sufficiently jealous or guilty or nostalgic that he would change his ways. Flor explained the trip by claiming that her father wanted her back home because of some family crisis (“She lied,” Porfirio declared with misplaced umbrage) and left France. When she arrived back home, she sent word of her true intent. “I feel life between us has become impossible,” he reported her to have said. “I want to see if I can live without you.” Then, he claimed, she visited his mother, Doña Ana, to solicit her help in repairing the marriage. Per Porfirio’s account, Flor sobbed to her mother-in-law, “Ask him to come find me. I love him. I know I’ve always loved him. Ask him to forgive me. Everything can go back to how it was.” Doña Ana, taking pity, relayed as much to her son.

But, he said, he balked. “Everything couldn’t be as it was. Nothing could ever be as it was. It’s true I erred as a husband, but there’s no doubt that I regretted this match. In the lives of men, as in the histories of nations, there are periods of acceleration, and I was living through one. The brake that Flor represented no longer worked. My mother’s letter didn’t move me.”

Naturally, Flor’s account of their separation would be different. The parent at whom she threw herself in her version of events was her own father, who coldly declared that he’d warned her about marrying such a wastrel and tried to mollify her with this consolation: “Don’t worry, you’re the one with money.” As proof, he tossed her a catalog of American luxury cars and told her she could choose one for herself; she picked a fancy Buick and tried to have it sent to Paris as a gift to Porfirio, hoping it would mend the breach; her father put a stop to that plan.

Indeed, not only wouldn’t Trujillo allow a car to be sent to his son-in-law, he wouldn’t allow his daughter to return to him. “I’ll never let you go back to that man,” he announced, and he had his lawyer begin writing up the papers necessary for a divorce.^*

Flor claimed that the shadow of divorce evoked a new passion in her husband: “When I wrote that I wasn’t coming back, he sent letters pleading with me to return, threatening to join the French Foreign Legion if I didn’t.”

But Porfirio had a slightly different recollection of his impending bachelorhood: “Freedom in Paris was never disagreeable. I went out a lot.”

In November 1937, the decree was declared; in January 1938, the couple were officially divorced. Separated from Trujillo’s wrath by an ocean, protected by Virgilio and, perhaps, by his ability to implicate the Benefactor in the Bencosme affair, connected more to Paris than he was to his own homeland, Porfirio stayed put, chary but more or less safe and even eager. Having married the boss’s daughter and returned in luxe fashion to the city of his boyhood ramblings, he was ready to take huge gulps of the world.

^* Figure $100,000 in 2005.

^* The question of who was to blame for the couple’s childlessness would never be answered. Neither ever had children, despite the combined twelve marriages they entered after this first. It was long rumored that Porfirio was rendered sterile by a childhood bout with the mumps, and Flor occasionally hinted that one or both of them had been rendered infertile by a venereal disease Porfirio had contracted in one of his rambles and subsequently shared with her.

^* Just the year before, Trujillo had passed a remarkably progressive divorce law that allowed a marriage that hadn’t produced children after five years to be dissolved by mutual consent of the spouses. It was a means for him to leave Doña Bienvenida, with whom he had no children, and marry María Martínez, the mother of Ramfis. Not long after he pulled off this legislative coup and took his third wife, however, he fathered a child—technically a bastard—with his just-divorced second wife.