Muchacha, I think he should have stabbed
What the hell do you mean?
I’m just saying, you talk about him a whole lot.
Then stop talking about him. Tina glanced down at a pretend watch. Five seconds. It must be a record.
She tried to keep him out of her mouth but it was hopeless. Her forearm ached at the oddest of moments and she could feel his hangdog eyes on her everywhere.
The next Friday was a big day at the restaurant; the local chapter of the Dominican Party was having an event and the staff busted their ass from early to late. Beli, who loved the bustle, showed some of her magis for hard work, and even Jose had to come out of the office to help cook. Jose awarded the head of the chapter with a bottle of what he claimed was ‘Chinese rum’ but which in fact was Johnnie Walker with the label scraped off. The higher echelons enjoyed their chow fun immensely but their campo underlings poked at the noodles miserably and asked over and over if there was any arroz con habichuelas, of which of course there was none. All in all the event was a success, you never would have guessed there was a dirty war going on, but when the last of the drunks was shuffled onto his feet and ushered into a cab, Beli, feeling not the least bit tired, asked Tina: Can we go back?
Where?
To El Hollywood.
But we have to change—
Don’t worry, I brought everything.
And before you know it she was standing over his table.
One of his dinner companions said: Hey, Dionisio, isn’t that the girl que te dio una pela last week? The bailer nodded glumly. His buddy looked her up and down. I hope for your sake she’s not back for a rematch. I don’t think you’ll survive.
What are you waiting for, the bailer asked. The bell?
Dance with me. Now it was her turn to grab him and drag him onto the pista.
He might have been a dense slab of tuxedo and thew, but he moved like an enchantment. You came looking for me, didn’t you?
Yes, she said, and only then did she know.
I’m glad you didn’t lie. I don’t like liars. He put his finger under her chin. What’s your name? She tore her head away. My name is Hypatia Belicia Cabral. No, he said with the gravity of an old-school pimp. Your name is Beautiful.
THE GANGSTER WE’RE ALL LOOKING FOR
How much Beli knew about the Gangster we will never know. She claims that he only told her he was a businessman. Of course I believed him. How was I supposed to know different?
Well, he certainly was a businessman, but he was also a flunky for the Trujillato, and not a minor one. Don’t misunderstand: our boy wasn’t no ring wraith, but he wasn’t no orc either.
Due partially to Beli’s silence on the matter and other folks’ lingering unease when it comes to talking about the regime, info on the Gangster is fragmented; I’ll give you what I’ve managed to unearth and the rest will have to wait for the day the paginas en blanco finally speak.
The Gangster was born in Samana at the dawn of the twenties, the fourth son of a milkman, a bawling, worm-infested brat no one thought would amount to na’, an opinion his parents endorsed by turning him out of the house when he was seven. But folks always underestimate what the promise of a lifetime of starvation, powerlessness, and humiliation can provoke in a young person’s character. By the time the Gangster was twelve this scrawny, unremarkable boy had shown a resourcefulness and fearlessness beyond his years. His claims that the Failed Cattle Thief had ‘inspired’ him brought him to the attention of the Secret Police, and before you could say SIM-salabim our boy was infiltrating unions and fingering sindicatos left and right. At age fourteen he killed his first ‘comunista,’ a favor for the appalling Felix Bernardinov and apparently the hit was so spectacular, so fucking
? Felix Wenceslao Bernardino, raised in La Romana, one of Trujillo’s most sinister agents, his Witchking of Angmar. Was consul in Cuba when the exiled Dominican labor organizer Mauricio Baez was mysteriously murdered on the streets of Havana. Felix was also rumored to have had a hand in the failed assassination of Dominican exile leader Angel Morales (the assassins burst in on his secretary shaving, mistook the lathered man for Morales, and shot him to pieces). In addition, Felix and his sister, Minerva Bernardino (first woman in the world to be an ambassador before the United Nations), were both in New York City when Jesus de Galindez mysteriously disappeared on his way home at the Columbus Circle subway station. Talk about
From that point on, the sky was the limit for our young villain. Over the next decade he traveled back and forth to Cuba, dabbled in forgery, theft, extortion, and money laundering—all for the Everlasting Glory of the Trujillato. It was even rumored, never substantiated, that our Gangster was the hammer-man who slew Mauricio Baez in Havana in 1950. Who can know? It seems a possibility; by then he’d acquired deep contacts in the Havana underworld and clearly had no compunction about slaying motherfuckers. Hard evidence, though, is scarce. That he was a favorite of Johnny Abbes and of Porfirio Rubirosa there can be no denying. He had a special passport from the Palacio, and the rank of major in some branch of the Secret Police.
Skilled our Gangster became in many a perfidy, but where our man truly excelled, where he smashed records and grabbed gold, was in the flesh trade. Then, like now, Santo Domingo was to popola what Switzerland was to chocolate. And there was something about the binding, selling, and degradation of women that brought out the best in the Gangster; he had an instinct for it, a talent—call him the Caracaracol of Culo. By the time he was twenty-two he was operating his own string of brothels in and around the capital, owned houses and cars in three countries. Never stinted the Jefe on anything, be it money, praise, or a prime cut of culo from Colombia, and so loyal was he to the regime that he once slew a man at a bar simply for pronouncing El Jefe’s mother’s name wrong. Now here’s a man, El Jefe was rumored to have said, who is
The Gangster’s devotion did not go unrewarded. By the mid-forties the Gangster was no longer simply a well-paid operator; he was becoming an alguien—in photos he appears in the company of the regime’s three witchkings: Johnny Abbes, Joaquin Balaguer, and Felix Bernardino—and while none exists of him and El Jefe, that they broke bread and talked shit cannot be doubted. For it was the Great Eye himself who granted the Gangster authority over a number of the Trujillo-family’s concessions in Venezuela and Cuba, and under his draconian administration the so-called bang-for-the-buck ratio of Dominican sexworkers trebled. In the forties the Gangster was in his prime; he traveled the entire length of the Americas, from Rosario to Nueva York, in pimpdaddy style, staying at the best hotels, banging the hottest broads (never lost his sureno taste for the morenas, though), dining in four-star restaurants, confabbing with arch-criminals the world over.
An inexhaustible opportunist, he spun deals everywhere he went. Suitcases of dollars accompanied him back and forth from the capital. Life was not always pleasant. Plenty of acts of violence, plenty of beat-downs and knifings. He himself survived any number of gank-attempts, and after each shoot-out, after each drive-by, he always combed his hair and straightened his tie, a dandy’s reflex. He was a true gangster, gully to the bone, lived the life all those phony rap acts can only rhyme about.
It was also in this period that his long dalliance with Cuba was formalized. The Gangster might have harbored love for Venezuela and its many long-legged mulatas, and burned for the tall, icy beauties of Argentina, and swooned over Mexico’s incomparable brunettes, but it was Cuba that clove his heart, that felt to him like home. If he spent six months out of twelve in Havana I’d call that a conservative estimate, and in honor of his predilections the Secret Police’s code name for him was MAX GOMEZ. So often did he travel to Havana that it was more a case of inevitability than bad luck that on New Year’s Eve 1958, the night that Fulgencio Batista saco pies out of Havana and the whole of Latin America changed, the Gangster was actually partying with Johnny Abbes in Havana, sucking
