Sam offered her a hand to help her. She accepted it out of courtesy, not need. She stepped up into the carriage, and she caught Sam eyeing her legs for half a second.
Okay, a carriage ride in Central Park. She had never done this. For a moment, a wave of sadness was upon her. It was a beautiful day. Joggers and strollers filled the park. She missed Robert.
Sam waited till the carriage entered the park. Then, “So,” Sam said, “I assume you’re a practicing Christian like Mr. Collins. That’s all he hires.”
“Then that would also make you one, right?” she said.
He sniffed. “ ‘Kill a Commie for Christ,’ and all that? I’ll buy that part of it.”
“That’s not exactly my direction,” she said.
“Oh yeah? Are there some other directions I should know about?”
“I could list a few. Eradicating AIDS. Hunger. Poverty.”
“Whatever,” Sam muttered. “Look. You look like a smart girl,” Sam said. “So before you get going on a lot of squishy soft do-good stuff, let me give you the template for American foreign policy in this hemisphere.” When it came to charm school, Sam was a proud dropout. “You know anything about Rafael Trujillo?” he asked.
“I know he was the dictator in la República Dominicana for, what, thirty years?”
In the background, the clop of the horse’s hooves kept beat with Sam’s voice.
“Thirty-one,” Sam said. “Lemme get you the quick backstory. In 1930 General Trujillo placed himself on the ballot for president and then used goon squads to terrorize the voters. When the elections were held, ninety-nine percent voted for Trujillo. Viva la democracia, huh? The thugs had done their job.”
Sam pulled a cigar from his inside jacket pocket. Romeo y Julieta. A fine Cuban, of all things. “You don’t mind if Sam smokes, do you?” he asked.
“I don’t care if Sam burns.”
“Good answer,” he snorted. “No one else does, either.”
Sam produced a Dunhill lighter and threw up a flame worthy of the Olympic torch. He lit his cigar as the horse turned north on the east side of the park.
“So late in 1930,” Sam continued, “Santo Domingo got knocked flat as a tortilla by a hurricane. Trujillo suspended the constitution to speed along the cleanup. Any unidentified bodies were cremated. So Trujillo decided that what his island needed was even more unidentified bodies, as long as he could decide who they would be. This coincides with the vanishing of several political enemies. Get it?”
“Got it,” she said.
“When Santo Domingo was rebuilt, it was also renamed. Ciudad Trujillo. Trujillo City. Can you imagine that? From there, Trujillo received support from Washington for three decades. His methods for suppressing dissent were torture and mass murder. Know what FDR said? He said, ‘Trujillo is an SOB, but at least he’s our SOB.’ ” Sam laughed. “I always liked that,” he said.
Behind the glasses, behind the cigar smoke, Sam was enjoying this. The clop of the horse’s hooves patterned nicely on the walkway. At this hour on a weekday, the park was closed to motor vehicles.
“Flash forward to the 1950s and ’60s” Sam said. “The press was controlled, so was the judiciary, so were the unions. Trujillo personally took over some state monopolies. Salt, insurance, milk, beef, tobacco, the lottery, newspapers, and he had a big chunk of the sugar industry. The only thing he didn’t have was bananas and tobacco, and that’s because the US companies had those. By 1958 he was personally worth about $500,000,000. Then when it started to look like Castro would take over Cuba, the US began to worry that Trujillo might inspire a similar revolution. So the CIA began plotting Trujillo’s assassination in 1958.”
“Which was before Castro took over Cuba,” she said.
“Correct,” Sam said. “And not a coincidence.”
“CIA agents made contact with once-loyal Trujillistas who were plotting an assassination. They were wealthy Dominicans who had personal grudges or who had family who had suffered. The CIA supplied several carbine rifles for the hit on Trujillo, and they promised US support for the new regime once the dictator was dead.”
They stopped at an intersection. Sam relit his cigar.
“You’ve heard of the Monroe Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Good Neighbor Policy?” Sam said. “I got to laugh at all that crap. Know what we used to call the John F. Kennedy Doctrine?”
The light changed. They continued.
“JFK once told the CIA, referring to the Dominican Republic, ‘There are three possibilities… a decent democratic regime, a continuation of the Trujillo regime, or a Castro regime. We ought to aim at the first, but we really can’t renounce the second until we are sure that we can avoid the third.’ How’s that for situational ethics?”
She nodded. “Not bad. How’s the cigar?”
“It’s good. You want one? I know ladies smoke them these days.” “Not this lady.”
“Ever tried cigars?”
“Yes. I don’t mind if a man smokes a good one, but I don’t care for them, myself.”
“I think a lady with a petit corona is kinda sexy. Let me buy you one.”
“Finish your story, Sam, okay?”
“Okay, well, Trujillo got whacked in May 1961 on a deserted patch of highway. A sniper picked off his driver from a thousand meters away, the car crashed and gunmen came out of the bushes with handguns to finish him off. The coup didn’t have traction, though. The assassins were rounded up along with their families and friends. Some committed suicide. The rest were taken to Trujillo’s hacienda. They were tied to trees, shot, cut up, and fed to sharks at a nearby beach. Eventually the US Atlantic Fleet arrived in Santo Domingo’s harbor to try to keep the lid from blowing off the place.
“The 1962 elections brought a physician and writer named Juan Bosch to power. Bosch was anti-Communist, but hey, he was a reformer, which is a damned fool thing to be in Latin America ’cause you’re gonna get hit by one side or the other. Anyway, Bosch was dedicated to land reform, low-rent housing, and public works projects. He was deposed by a CIA-backed coup after seven months. When a popular countercoup tried to restore Bosch to power in 1965, the US Marines paid a visit.”
Sam moved toward conclusion and his point.
“It’s all about oil, money, international relations, and corruption in South America, same as Eastern Europe, Middle East, you name it. It’s very simple, we put them in, and we take them out. From Trujillo to Saddam Hussein.”
“You’re not telling me anything new, Sam.”
The carriage had arrived at the East Seventy-second Street Plaza. Alex was ready to depart.
“No. I’m not,” he said. “But here’s what you have to remember in Latin America. The US screws around with the politics, but the alternative is ten times worse. The world works at the behest of the banks and corporations, and policy is enforced at the point of the gun. Because of that, you and I can walk free and are privileged to pay six bucks a gallon for gas. If it ever works the other way, it means the Islamo-fascists have defeated us, and they’d rape a nice-looking educated girl like you or hide you in a burka or burn you at the stake. So think of it as the binary system for world politics. You have two choices. Where would you rather live today? Cuba or the Dominican?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. “That’s your poli sci lesson, and that’s why Chávez’s options are clear. He can be a world outlaw, or we’ll take him out.”
He let his lesson settle.
“When are you leaving for Caracas?” Sam asked.
“I haven’t even decided if I’m going,” Alex answered.
“Of course you have,” Sam said. “I’ll make sure you have a weapon and a contact when you get there. Be sure to go to the doctor and get some antimalaria meds. If the heat, the gators, and the snakes don’t kill you, malaria might.” He eyed her as she stepped down from the carriage. “That’s a nice skirt, by the way. I like it. Looks good on you. You got the legs for it.”