The truck does not move. Gallardo toots again, and at this moment — seconds before the rocket hits the Mercedes — he apprehends two nearly simultaneous events. The first, he sees: the driver of the truck — a woman, a redhead, maybe — ducking down out of sight. And the second, he hears, even with the armored-glass windows rolled up and the AC turned up fulclass="underline" a brief and powerful susurration in the air, like a sudden wind in the trees or the exhalation of a thousand breaths. It is the last thing the Presidente-in-Exile’s driver hears.
One block west, the red Datsun accelerates out of its turn onto Mariscal López just as a fireball rises up ahead, followed by the concussion waves of the explosion. The driver of the Datsun leans on the horn, punches the gas pedal, cuts through traffic. The man next to him pounds the dashboard. The guards in the car draw their pistols, unlock and crack open the doors. They are screaming and cursing. They curse God. They curse the Minister of Security for replacing their Ford Falcons and Gran Torinos with fucking Datsuns, and curse their own mothers for bringing them into a world of bureaucrats and bean counters. And they are weeping, expelling violent and angry tears for their derailed careers, for that puto Gallardo smeared all over the street up ahead, and for the lost honor of the Glorious Republic of Paraguay.
In the backseat of the Mercedes, the Presidente-in-Exile looks up from his paper.
Gallardo’s arms fly up over his head in a referee’s goal signal of such ferocity that the arms tear off his shoulders. Gallardo’s head disappears. In its place, blood-gout from the neck like a dark, wet rose. Pieces of Gallardo fly up the hole in the roof, through three layers of armored steel flayed back. And the Presidente-in-Exile follows, in a geyser of metal and meat, glass and bone. Up and away.
The Presidente-in-Exile rises.
* * *
His nickname was Tacho. In history he is referred to as Tacho II—“Tacho Dos”—to distinguish him from his father, the previous Presidente. The domestic press used to call him El Tachito, a diminutive that implied an unfavorable comparison. This was back when the press got away with such things, before reporters started disappearing. Until the mid-1970s, officials in the U.S. State Department called him the legitimate president of his country, for he was a vocal critic of Castro’s Cuba and thus a friend to the American people. The expatriate opposition called him bruto, monopolista, America’s Fart-Sniffing Lapdog. His self-bestowed title was jefe supremo, and everyone in his administration referred to him as such. But he allowed the comandantes of la Guardia Nacional to address him as señor jefe, or simply señor, an informality that revealed his soft spot for the glory days, when he was once a comandante among them. He liked to think that this gesture put them at ease. For they were his men, his compadres. They drank and whored with him. But they were never at ease with him. He was volatile and petulant, a man of brittle temperament. If you brought him bad news, you were doomed. He would shove members of his cabinet, slap documents out of their hands. He would throw food at banquets, snap pencils in two, sweep the contents of laden desktops to the floor. It was said he could barely speak Spanish. This was not true; he simply preferred English, calling it his mother tongue. He was schooled in America, in a military academy on Long Island, then at West Point, where he was — by mandate of the Undersecretary of State for Central American Relations — a 4.0 student. He was hazed by the upperclassmen in the name of unit loyalty and cohesion. Very often a line was crossed, and the rituals took on an erotically charged brutality. But he accepted the abuses and humiliations because he believed in the tradition of abuse and humiliation. These men did not care who he was or who his father was. He was simply a puke to them, and initiated as brutally — no more and no less — as the others were. This is what makes you a part of the whole. A puke among pukes, you become a man among men. He took little else from his formal military schooling except this, and a penchant for fancy titles and uniforms, and a love of World War II movies: Patton, The Guns of Navarone, The Great Escape, The Dirty Dozen, Hell in the Pacific. He was a fan of the actor Lee Marvin. He met him once at a Hollywood benefit for earthquake relief and pestered him for an autograph. The actor was drunk and belligerent, but accommodated him, and scrawled on a grimy dinner napkin:
To the President of N______
Piss up a rope, you bastard
Lee Marvin
When his presidency was toppled and he was run out in 1979, he was the majority stockholder of the national air and rail lines. He owned the beef ranches and the meat-processing plants, the timber tracts and the lumber mills. Coffee, cotton, bananas, sugar, tobacco, rice — from field to factory to export, it all belonged to him. Near the end, President Carter had asked him to give some of it back, to return something of his plunder—anything — as a concession to history: “As a personal favor to me, Tacho.” He called the president of the United States a bastard and told him to piss up a rope. His wife was an American citizen living in Miami Beach. When he joined her there and the Carter administration asked him to leave, she stayed. She was the daughter of diplomats, a graduate of Barnard and Columbia, and had always hated his nickname. Tacho! She thought it lowborn and tawdry — a gangster’s moniker. She alone among his intimates addressed him by his Christian name. Soon after their marriage she never addressed him by name at all. Within five years they lived in separate houses; within fifteen, separate countries. Yet they had five children together, who all called him papi. And although he was an absent father, they seemed genuinely fond of him. They were born and schooled in the United States; he joked once that he wanted them to amount to something, that the run of dictators in the family had to end. To hear an utterance such as this, wry and self-effacing, come out of a man like him was an extraordinary and unsettling event, a paradox — like a blossom from a cinder block — whose occurrence only affirmed its own impossibility. For the truth was this: he was a resolutely dull man. When he walked into a room, there was no effect. He looked like a barber or a haberdasher, and so it was standard procedure to announce his entrances to generate the appropriate hubbub and attention. He boasted that he was a hard-ass, a control freak, a micromanager obsessed with the details. He said he wanted to know everything. But when you’d tell him, he’d get bored. At cabinet meetings and security briefings he would gaze out the window at the squirrels in the trees, or release gaping yawns without covering his mouth, or intently go through his coat pockets looking for something. Then, out of sheer impatience, he would cut the meeting short and hastily okay whatever was being discussed — diplomatic policy, military ops, orders of arrest and interrogation. Yet he could spend hours shopping for socks. He could fritter away an afternoon picking out the perfect wallet. He had health concerns. A heart attack at age forty-two scared the bejesus out of him. He was told to drop seventy pounds. He did, and he kept it off. But he bickered constantly with his doctors, fussing over his meds and his course of treatment. He obeyed them, of course. He was too scared not to. He had digestive problems — chronic intestinal gas and acid reflux — which he frequently mistook for an incipient heart attack. He brooded. He was always vaguely preoccupied or in a sulk about something. His children called him Sourpuss, Grumpy Gus, Señor Mopey-Pants. When he was booted from the United States, his mistress of twelve years, a former rental car agent and part-time model named Dinorah Sampson, joined him in the Bahamas. When denied sanctuary there, they were taken in by Paraguay. Dinorah had numerous names for him that ran the gamut of moods: Big Bear, Big Bull, cabrón pínche, cabrón Cocksucker, Lying Cocksucker Dog, My Prince, My Light, My One True Love. And swaying above him in bed, rotating gently against his decorous thrusts — for the heart attack had made him an overcautious lover — she called him bestia. “Mi bestia amor,” she would whisper, leaning down, the warmth of her breath in his ear and the rasp of her cheek on his in the thick hush of the villa around them. Bestia amor, mi corazón feroz. My beast, my beloved. My savage, my heart.