Orientation: And Other Stories

Somoza’s Dream

He is scuttling through the dark. His bare foot steps into something cold and slick. His leg shoots forward. He skids. The ground beneath him is suddenly gone. Synapses fire, nerve bundles twitch, and he is falling. Muscles spasm in myoclonic response. His legs jitter under the sheets. Dinorah, lying next to him, crabs away. Then an alarm, sharp and jangly. He stirs, and his tumble ceases. He reaches for the clock, kills it. Through eye slits, a vast room takes shape in the chocolate dark. Drapes as thick as hides cover ceiling-high windows. Morning light bleeds in. He snorts, hawks, swallows. He awakes, knows now where he is. His room. This world. Today: Wednesday, September 17, 1980.

The Presidente-in-Exile rises.

In the bathroom, post-shower, post-shave. He steps on the spring scale. The needle flutters shyly below one seventy-five. Not bad. He gives his belly a small-caliber-gunshot slap. “Not bad at all,” he says.

In the dressing room, his fingers glide through a kelp of neckties, fondling the Zegnas, stroking a yellow jacquard. He snaps it out, runs it through his collar. He speed-dials Bettinger, puts him on speakerphone, confirms their appointment while finishing up the knot — nine sharp, Van Damm’s office at the Banco Alemán. “The fix is in, Tacho,” Bettinger says. He pads to the shoe closet, selects a pair of burgundy loafers, Russia calf Henleys. “The bitch is prone,” Bettinger purrs. “Knees up and ready for fucking.” He drops the shoes to the carpet, kicks them parallel, steps daintily into them. He slips the heels with an ivory-handled shoehorn. Bettinger is prattling on. The Presidente-in-Exile secures his cuff links. He moves to the dressing-room window, looks down into the courtyard two stories below, dingy and penumbral in pre-morning light. He can make out the white Mercedes parked under the eaves of a tree, a palsy of branches like crone’s hands poised above the vehicle. His eyes adjust, and he can now see the pink turds of sticky blossoms splattered on the roof and windshield. Bettinger is detailing financial arrangements — float risks and laundry fees and yield guarantees. He smarms and panders on speakerphone like an obscene caller. The Presidente-in-Exile cuts him off and speed-dials Gallardo. He can hear the phone ringing below, in the quarters over the carriage house. He slips a titanium clip over the tie’s face, secures a matching tie bar under the knot. When Gallardo picks up, he tells his driver to stop parking under that fucking tree and to get that shit cleaned off the car now.

In the bedroom, he gives his suit coat a dervish whirl and slips into it. He approaches the bed, leans down. He kisses Dinorah goodbye, reminds her about lunch. She burrows away, deep into the bedding. Body heat purls off her. She sleeps like a dead man. It is a thing about her he admires.

In the kitchen, the Presidente-in-Exile’s egg is boiling. It ticks in a pot of water on the range. Cook cuts a small grapefruit in two. She Saran-wraps one half for the fridge, washes the other, and pats it dry. A timer goes ding. She reaches into the boiling water with her fingers, plucks out the egg, holds it under the cold tap for five seconds, then seats it in its special cup. Cook is a tiny woman, a Guaraní Indian of indeterminate age with jet-black hair, the hard palms of a tenant farmer, and skin as dark and smooth as burnished jatoba wood. She lays out breakfast on a tray — soft-boiled egg, grapefruit, two pink packets of Sweet’N Low, two tablespoons of cottage cheese on a Ry-Krisp, six ounces of orange juice. Also, the London Financial Times. Also, three aspirin; he was out and about late last night. An egg spoon, a grapefruit knife, a cloth napkin. Almost ready. Cook positions a single locust-wood toothpick on a tiny copper salver. She then leans over the grapefruit, purses her lips, and releases a modest pearl of spit onto its glistening surface. Breakfast is served.

On the west patio, the Presidente-in-Exile prowls through the newspaper. The sun has just broken the ridge high above the villa. It is light and already warm. “Buen desayuno, patrón,” Cook murmurs as she places the tray before him. He rattles his paper. He does not speak to Cook, who came with the villa. She retreats, returns to the kitchen to prepare luncheon. Guests are expected today — that Italian, Bettinger, and some others from the bank. No breakfast for the mistress. A late sleeper, Dinorah has yet to see the sun rise in Paraguay.

The Presidente-in-Exile repasts. He snaps a page of El Diario. There’s been nothing about him lately, thank Christ. Since his arrival fourteen months ago, the Asunción dailies have cut him no slack. Every indiscretion is rooted out and blown out of proportion — shopping sprees, drunken romps, shoving matches with cops and maître d’s, public squabbles with Dinorah. The trivia of his life as a private citizen is made public, laid out to be probed and pawed at. They went through his garbage once, and the guards caught them red-handed, knocked them around a bit, and that was reported — brutal suppression of the press or some such bullshit. Last year the service main in the street burst, leaving him without water for days. He called Stroessner in a fury to complain, to simply get it taken care of. The papers reported that he called the president of Paraguay to fix his plumbing. They hate him here. They think him arrogant and crass. They think he “sullies the dignity of the Republic.” Sullies! That’s what the papers have said! And Stroessner is no fan, either; otherwise he wouldn’t let them write that shit. But Stroessner has extended his protection. And Stroessner has been well paid. But they do hate him here.

Well, fuck them. He hates them, too.

He works on his grapefruit, browses the paper. There is a full-page ad with the banner headline DO YOU RECOGNIZE THIS MAN? It offers a reward for information on the whereabouts of Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele. The Presidente-in-Exile snorts, flips the page. Sully my balls! Dignity of the Republic, my ass! Hideout for Nazis, haven for cocaine kings. There is an opinion piece by an undersecretary of the Ministry of the Interior railing against the feral dog population and concluding with an appreciation of the dictator Francia, who in 1840 ordered every dog in Paraguay killed. And there is an item buried in Business Briefs, a report on unanticipated delays with a hydroelectric project down on the Argentine border, involving work stoppages and a cement embargo. Bettinger’s little venture — some kind of deal with the unions that will work to his financial advantage. Leave it to Bettinger: The bitch is prone. The Presidente-in-Exile lets El Diario’s pages spill to the ground. He looks at his watch. He spoons the guts of his egg onto the cottage cheese, picks up the Ry-Krisp, and pushes it all into his mouth. He licks his fingers and wipes them with the napkin. He tosses back the orange juice and smacks his lips. “Ahhh!” He stands up, tucks the Times under his arm; it is air-expressed from São Paolo every morning and delivered to the villa from the airport by taxicab.

He strolls across the patio, then stops short. Something flits into the edge of his vision, and he turns. He spots it, hovering, then alighting upon the ground. He approaches. It is some kind of insect, a big one. Thin, translucent wings spanning half a foot shimmer and iridesce in morning light. Perpendicular to these, a thorax over seven inches long inscribes in the air a slender and delicate arc of the deepest red — the red of arterial blood, of crème de cassis and rubies and the juice of roasted meat. It is a helicopter damselfly, the rarest of the order Odonata in all the world, and far from its range in southwest Brazil. The Presidente-in-Exile would not know this. He bends down, eyes narrowed. “What the fuck,” he mutters, for he has never in his life seen anything like it. He peers intently, seemingly making a study of this rare and exquisite creature — a trembling scarlet wound against the gray slate tiles. He pivots his left foot and moves the thin leather sole of his bespoke shoe centimeters above it. He taps. There is a sound like a burst of static, and the insect is squashed like a bug. The Presidente-in-Exile proceeds across the patio, dragging his foot once to scrape off the gore. He cuts through the west garden, along a flagstone pathway that circles toward the front of the villa. Behind him, the discarded pages of his newspaper trip and tumble across the grounds in a zephyr that has come from nowhere on this still and windless day.

In the courtyard, Gallardo has moved the Mercedes out from under the tree. The Mercedes is an armored vehicle custom-equipped with hardened steel body panels, 1.5-inch-thick windows of polycarbonate ballistic glass, and Kevlar-lined gas tanks. Gallardo has just finished the washing, and the car glistens all dewy in the light. He is struggling with the water hose, trying to coil it without getting his dress shirt dirty. Ten yards away, outside the gate, on Avenida España, a red Datsun blocks the driveway to the villa. Three men loll on the car, smoking cigarettes. They call to Gallardo: “Maricón, chuparosa, marica chingada.” They blow him kisses. They tell him they have hoses for him to handle, if he wishes. These men are the Paraguayan bodyguards assigned by Stroessner to protect the Nation’s Esteemed Guest. Gallardo snaps his wrist, flicks his finger, fires his cigarette butt. It traces an arc through the bars of the gate and lands in a burst of embers on the chest of the biggest guard. Direct hit. Beautiful. The guard leaps off the Datsun, curses, rushes the gate. But what can he do? Gallardo smiles, turns around, and waggles his ass. The guard reaches down and grabs his crotch. A piercing high-pitched whistle disrupts their pas de deux. From the pathway into the gardens, the Presidente-in-Exile is waving his folded paper impatiently: Let’s go. The driver kicks the hose into the bushes, slips into his coat, gets in the Mercedes and starts it up. The bodyguards squeeze into the Datsun and back the car out of the way. The gates glide open. The Mercedes exits. The Datsun follows. The gates close. Overhead, security cameras mounted atop thirty-foot poles turn slowly, taking in the perimeter with a ho-hum weariness.

In the backseat, the Presidente-in-Exile excavates his ear canal with the locust-wood toothpick. Eyes closed, he grunts blissfully. Out his passenger window, a sun-strobed flip-book of Asunción — whitewashed brick walk-ups along tree-lined avenues, nannies pushing prams, chipa vendors pushing carts, barefoot women with towers of folded laundry on their heads, white-suited old men walking tiny old dogs, sanitation workers in yellow coveralls sweeping dirt into the gutters. And everywhere, the guano-crowned statuary of the Republic’s military heroes.

By the time they reach the Plaza of the Chaco War, the señor’s face is buried in the Times and Gallardo has shaken the bodyguards. He’s not supposed to do this. It pisses off the Minister of Security. But Gallardo gets bored, and it’s fun, although too easy now since Stroessner’s monkeys have been downgraded to that piece-of-shit Datsun. And besides, the señor doesn’t care. Gallardo negotiates the traffic circle — an apocalyptic teem of limos and buses and taxicabs, dray trucks and trailer rigs, and the intrepid horse-drawn wagon. On Avenida Mariscal López, he slows the Mercedes for the left onto Calle America, one of the intersections in the city with a traffic signal. The lights are his, and he would have made it but for a turquoise blue Chevy pickup that backs out of a driveway and lurches to a halt in the street. Gallardo hits the brakes. He sighs, gives his horn a toot. The truck that cuts him off is shotgunned with mud, a ferrous earth of unsettling redness. Gallardo remembers his first look at Paraguay, peering out the porthole of the Learjet that brought them here, the Gran Chaco below him, the high desert pan that makes up the western half of this country. Flat and featureless and still, it burned red under the sun. As far as the eye could see, an ocean of blood in its doldrums. It was another world. His world now, he thought.

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 full: 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.

* * *

The Presidente-in-Exile is watching his mistress swim.

He reclines in a chaise by the pool. He wears slippers and white linen slacks and a cream guayabera. His legs are crossed at the ankles, slim and pale as a girl’s. Inside the slippers — Bergamo-silk-lined morocco loafers — his feet are bare, powdered and smooth, the heels exfoliated, the nails squared and buffed. He sips a Walker Blue Label on the rocks and pretends to read prospectuses, a batch of them in his lap. Bettinger insists on this, Bettinger always with a hard-on for the windfall scheme, the in-and-out deal, the killing: “They all want you, Tacho.” And they do. They all want his participation. Every cover letter says so: “We would be so pleased with your participation”; “Your participation is anxiously anticipated.” He is in fact meeting tomorrow morning with people who want him, an investors group at the Banco Alemán.

The Presidente-in-Exile yawns. It is near dusk, too dark to read anything. But he pretends, thumbing through a folder while, from the corner of his eye, he watches his mistress swim. She has packed on the pounds since their arrival in Asunción. He has told her: “Where is the woman I fell in love with? Where did this cow come from?” Sometimes he moos at her. It embarrasses him to watch her cross a room, galumphing and tottering to find her center of gravity in stiletto heels. But in the water she is supple and dolphin-sleek and powerful. She laps the pool again and again, in long, languid strokes that slice effortlessly through blue-black water. He marvels at her. He sips his whiskey. Ice cubes shift and clink in his glass. It is humid, late winter in Paraguay — the damp, immersive heat of the barber’s towel, of evenings in jungle encampments and in the kitchens of childhood. On the edge of his vision, lightning bugs shimmer and weave in the twilight. He can hear the distant music and tinny laughter of a TV somewhere, the clatter of parrots in the trees, the puling of a ship’s whistle on the river.

From out of the shadows, a guard steps in, salutes, approaches. And just like that, a spell is broken. He sends a message, a reminder about his engagement tonight. “Yeah, yeah,” the señor snaps. “Go tell Gallardo.” The guard salutes again, retreats.

The Presidente-in-Exile drains his whiskey. He must shower and shave and dress for dinner. But he pauses. In the cañón behind him, beyond the wrought-iron fence, he can hear the dogs scrabbling through thick brush. (Rottweilers, he’s been told. Attack dogs trained not to bark.) Far above, the roar of an airliner approaches, crescendos, recedes. All around, the sudden thrum of bush crickets revving up like evening’s engines. And the bug zappers, cerulean maws afloat in the enfolding dark, and the sputter and snap of their every tiny kill. And the slap of water and the delicious insuck of Dinorah’s breath at the near turn, where the Presidente-in-Exile sits, his slender ankles crossed, shaking up the ice in his empty glass and secretly watching his mistress swim.

* * *

The Presidente-in-Exile is telling a dirty joke.

Two whores come to the handsome young priest for absolution. The priest invites them both into his tiny confessional. Sins are detailed, passions are stirred, and contortions ensue, followed by the sudden appearance of a guileless and comely young nun, and then the village idiot, who is hung like a bull. The Presidente-in-Exile is mucking up the joke, but his audience is a forgiving one: Aurelio and Méme on leave from the counterinsurgency back home; Lucho, in from Rio; and Luís and Humberto and Papa Chepe from Miami — some of the old comandantes down for a visit, in a private dining room at Bolsi, the toniest of Asunción’s downtown restaurants.

The Presidente-in-Exile’s joke careens brakeless down its narrative tracks, the confession stall impossibly stuffed with one character after another — concupiscent anarchy, a Marx Brothers porn flick. The comandantes bark and roar with laughter. They are tossing back carafes of wine, pounding the table and each other’s backs. They are big men, and the cozy private room is a crush of humped backs and meaty forearms and big, ruddy faces. In the world of the joke, the alcalde’s virgin daughter has just entered the confessional. Papa Chepe runs out of the room and returns dragging the maître d’hôtel, a regal gray-haired woman in her fifties. The archbishop has now arrived for a surprise inspection, and Méme rushes into the kitchen, rousts a busboy, a Guaraní Indian who speaks no Spanish. Papa Chepe kisses the maître d’ on the mouth and pushes her to the carpet. Méme shoves the busboy on top of her. The restaurant proprietor, accompanied by three male diners, enters to attempt a rescue of the maître d’. Papa Chepe pulls a pistol and puts the muzzle in the proprietor’s mouth. The proprietor pisses his pants. Exit male diners. A vengeful pimp has arrived at the church and approaches the ruckus in the confessional, whereupon the proprietor is thrown to the carpet and compelled to gyrate at gunpoint against the busboy. Then the police arrive. Aurelio snatches Papa Chepe’s gun and submerges it in a tureen of bori-bori. The police are nervous. Their captain approaches the Guest of Honor warily. But the Guest of Honor is in a good mood. He laughs and cajoles. He peels bills off a wrist-thick wad and moves through the cadre of cops, tucking the money into shirt pockets and cap bands. The police officers talk among themselves for a moment, then arrest the proprietor, close the restaurant, and post guards outside.

Lucho raids the bar, returns with bottles of Chivas and Rémy. The men drink, sated and suddenly quiet, pensive. Luís takes a pull and passes the bottle and begins to reminisce about his first skirmish, against coffee farmers in rebel territory. His story, of a green recruit, of a boy compelled by duty to become a man, has the rest of them nodding wistfully, until more stories come — liquor-stoked recollections of the bunkhouse and the whorehouse, chronicles of love and war, and of the lusts of blood both literal and metaphoric. They regale each other with tall tales of jungle work and counterintel, and with anecdotes from the interrogation arts — stories of baseball bats and needle-nosed pliers and toilet bowls filled with excrement, stories of the light socket and the copper wire, of the salt and the wound, of the flesh and the spirit. Nostalgia like an emetic disgorges from them one dewy reminiscence after another until they are left weeping and hoarse, and Papa Chepe totters off the floor and caroms into the arms of the Presidente-in-Exile and tearfully kisses him on the lips. “Maricones!” Luís shouts. They all laugh. The Presidente-in-Exile stands up and speaks haltingly. He stammers something about family and comradeship, and discipline and duty, about his father and his legacy, and justice and reckoning and getting fucked in the ass by history. It goes around and around and then goes nowhere at all, and although it makes little sense, it is heartfelt. And so his men are moved. They cheer and curse and roil around their Presidente. They hoist him upon their shoulders and carry him about, and as they pass him across the threshold into the main dining floor, they whack his head on the lintel. Blood laces down his face and into his eyes, where it stings and mingles with his tears. For the Presidente-in-Exile is crying — a happy man, wobbly and unsteady upon the shoulders of his men, struggling for balance with one outstretched arm, and with the hand of the other pressed to his chest, attending to the barreling pulse of a damaged, brimming heart.

* * *

Two men meet at a newsstand in the lobby of the Hotel Méridien in Dakar. They greet each other effusively, hugging and kissing and clasping hands. “T’as l’air super bien, mon ami!” “Non, non, c’est toi qui a l’air bien!” They step outside, walk arm in arm. The plaza they cross hums and bustles on this clear and balmy late afternoon. City workers in white coveralls crawl all over a gigantic bronze statue of Lady Liberty astride a stallion in full gallop. They are festooning her with ribbons and garlands of green and yellow and red. Bunting streams from the spear she holds aloft. In the distance, the pock of fireworks. The city of Dakar anticipates a celebration — Senegal’s Independence Day. April 4, 1980.

The two men order Nescafés at a makeshift bistro. In their brief stroll from the hotel — down a narrow street off the boulevard and into an arterial maze of dark alleys — the neighborhood has shifted from upscale to dicey. Alone, the men are much less effusive. In low and perfunctory tones, arrangements are made, and money changes hands — a fat manila envelope tucked into the folds of Le Soleil, pushed across the table.

Six weeks later, a freighter under Bahamian flag sails west from the Port of Dakar into the Atlantic, bound for Colombia and laden with phosphate ore, peanuts, cotton, millet, salted fish. Among its unregistered cargo: raw heroin, duffel bags of marijuana, and a small but heavy wooden crate labeled TRACTOR PARTS, containing sixteen Chinese B-50 rocket grenades, four Soviet RPG-7 launchers, and four boxes of percussion caps.

By mid-August, the crate sits unclaimed in a warehouse in Bogotá. One moonless evening two Lincoln Continentals filled with men arrive. Money changes hands — currency stacked, plastic-wrapped, and duct-taped into two tidy bricks. The crate is cracked open. Three launchers and twelve rockets are removed and transferred to the trunks of the vehicles. The rest is repackaged into a smaller crate, labeled HOSPITAL SUPPLIES. Some ancillary business is then transacted — two of the men are shot in the head, dismembered, and sealed into steel drums filled with used motor oil.

A week later, the crate is loaded onto a van and driven to a municipal airport in Quito, where it is relabeled TOOL & DIE and flown to Sucre. At the port of entry, a tightly rubber-banded wad of bills the size of a shotgun cartridge is slipped into the palm of a customs official. The crate is released and transferred onto a steam packet heading down the mighty, muddy Río Pilcomayo. It arrives in Asunción by the end of the month, in the last cool days of August, when the rains have subsided and the city has been washed clean for the last time. The crate is opened by three men and two women in the basement of a rented house on the corner of Avenida España and Calle America. It has been securely sealed, and with no pry bar they all struggle to get the box open, working methodically, quietly, so as not to alert the neighbors. They use screwdrivers and claw hammers, a fire poker, and the blade edge of a shovel. They lift out the rockets and the launcher and the percussion caps. They hug and kiss. They stash their booty in a crawl space behind the furnace and go upstairs and toast each other with cans of Bud and Coca-Cola. They drink to truth and beauty, to Marx and Darío, to justice and the death of tyrants. They put the hi-fi on low, mambo to Pérez Prado, slow dance to Iglesias. A bottle of rum has been pulled out, and Osvaldo plays bartender, pours drinks all around. He mixes a stiff one for Analisa. He will make the move on her tonight. She is three months pregnant, by Ramón, their compa just over the border in Argentina. But what the hell. She is incandescent tonight, flirtatious and shy, and Osvaldo is charming and clever. And these are auspicious times.

* * *

The Presidente-in-Exile is taking a leak.

It’s a good one, the kind you remember for the rest of your life — a bladder dump, one of those butt-puckering gushers that makes the eyes flutter and elicits a rapturous “Ahhh!” The night is cool, and steam rises where he misses the wall he’s aiming for. Where he doesn’t miss, the cataract lays black washes onto the sand-colored stone. He chokes off, downshifts to intermittent trickles. He leans forward and settles his cheek onto the nubby granite wall, murmurs sweetly into the stone, “Fuck you.” Over and over, like a lover’s entreaty: “Fuck you fuck you fuck you…”

Gallardo waits a few yards away, beyond the hedgerow, pacing next to the Mercedes, which is parked at the curb on this quiet street. The entrance to the compound is on the main boulevard, up on Avenida Mariscal López. A twenty-foot-high stone wall topped with iron pikes runs along the length of the street. Gallardo paces, smoking a cigarette. He has just gotten the Presidente-in-Exile from Bolsi. No matter what, he was told, get me out of there before midnight. And they were heading home, until the señor directed him here. Gallardo hates this detour. It is embarrassing for him, having to explain to whoever may come upon them. For the most part, the guards here don’t seem to mind, which puzzles him. But what if they come across a guard who does, some greenhorn coming at him with guns blazing? This is not how he wants to die, on lookout while his boss pees on U.S. property.

Gallardo sucks on his cigarette, drags deeply. Up ahead, a figure appears from around the corner, backlit by streetlights from Mariscal López. Gallardo watches the figure see him, see the car, watches the guard draw his M16 and move briskly toward him. He drops his butt and with his arms outstretched walks slowly toward the advancing guard, putting distance between him and the Mercedes. “Está bien, está bien,” he calls out. “Is okay.” Although he still holds his arms wide, hands in plain view, Gallardo relaxes a bit. He recognizes this marine, this negro americano.

“Is okay.” When he hears the voice, gets a better look at the car, the marine guard stands down. It’s that tin-pot dictator, pissing in the bushes. He sighs, shoulders his weapon, greets the driver. “How you doing?” He takes a cigarette from behind his left ear, where he’d tucked it for this little break. “Is good, is good,” the driver responds. The marine lights up, and the driver makes the international hand gestures for bumming a smoke. The marine gives him one, watches him slip it into a shirt pocket. “For later,” the driver tells him. Both men hear a sharp metallic rapping. They turn to see the dictator finish pounding on the roof of the car and climb into the backseat. The driver rolls his eyes, smiles sheepishly.

The marine can’t believe this shit is allowed. But the orders have been handed down, some unofficial understanding between nations: Let this fuck-wad piss on the United States Embassy. “Vaya con Dios,” the marine tells the driver. The driver returns the blessing, then says, “Yankee go home!” The marine laughs. He finishes his cigarette. He watches the Mercedes pull out and make a three-point turn and drive past him, back toward Avenida López. In the backseat, the ex-dictator is in shadow, but his head swivels as the vehicle moves past the embassy guard, who sends off our Presidente-in-Exile with the smartest salute he can muster and the precisely mouthed words: “Fuck you, too.”

* * *

Standing in front of a hand mirror hung by a nail on the wall, Cook claws baby oil into her long black hair. She pulls and separates, creating three thick, lustrous cords. She plaits them tightly together, interweaving a long strip of bright orange muslin. She lays the braid over her left breast. No, the right one. Yes, better. She slips on a pair of soft black flats that she has spit polished with the inside hem of her skirt. She owns two pairs of shoes — sneakers for work, and these. Although cook’s ankles are thick and sturdy, her feet splayed and rough-hewn, these shoes somehow render them fine-boned and delicate. She puts a peppermint leaf into her mouth and crushes it. She slips her bag over her shoulder. She exits her apartment — a single room, tiny and spare and very clean — and leaves the villa grounds via the rear service gate. She waves to the guard in the guard booth. He waves back. She strolls a half mile down the road, to the mercado. There is a coffee bar there, open late. She sits at the counter and orders a café con leche and a biscotti. She pulls a fotonovela out of her bag. It is entitled Por un beso, and relates the adventures of a beautiful, innocent village girl in big, bad Mexico City. Because she cannot read Spanish, she gets most of the story line from the actions depicted in the drawings. Cook gleans that the heroine in the picture panels seems to triumph, that she thwarts Lothario, and maintains Virtue, and gets a promotion at her office job. As she reads, she looks up from the paperback often, until — finally — her young friend Osvaldo pops in. He approaches her at the counter and smiles. “Mba’éichapa nde pyhare, Ynez.” Cook smiles back.

Cook’s name is Ynez.

She has been with the villa for decades — sent to her great-aunt when she was a child, and trained by her, taking over her duties when the woman died. The owner of the villa is a Guaraní, and he has insisted that whoever leases his property must also take the cook and the two Guaraní gardeners and the old kennel master. Her whole life has been with the villa. Her mother is dead, her father is old and blind and alone. She visits him once a year up in the Gran Chaco, in a desolate village that the young have abandoned. She sends him money each month. He is grateful. “You are an ugly girl,” he tells her, running his chitinous palms gently over her face. “But you are a saintly girl.” And she has always believed this to be so. Until Osvaldo, who gave her a second look one day. And whom she has run into in this coffee bar two nights a week for the past month and a half. And whose motives have always been transparent to her.

She doesn’t care. Osvaldo is young and handsome, all toothy smiles and barrel-chested swagger. He is much too young to be flirting with such as her. But he does. She can see him looking for her when he enters, can see him light up and put on that smile and that swagger as he comes to her. Other women glance up at him, and they watch him come to her! He is not old and dull like the kennel master, whom she sleeps with occasionally — a kind man, but so diffident, and dull. Osvaldo is brash, voluble. He raises his voice, then brings it down to a growl. He flings his hands and arms about as he talks. His Guaraní is really quite good for a non-native, with the trace of an accent — Argentine, most likely. He is charming. He is loud and flashy, and asks too many questions. And then there is that wig — lopsided and shiny, and a shade of brown not found in nature, a wig that shouts WIG! to everyone. He is so obvious. She worries for him.

Osvaldo orders a tereré, with two straws. He sips, asks about her book, about the story it tells. He pushes the drink toward her and asks about her day with the patrón.

All her life she has kept her head down and worked hard, knowing or caring very little about the tenants of the villa: the Germans who stayed for more than a decade, quiet and monastic in their habits, until they left quite hurriedly one night; the university professors from Canada, hippie types who spoke Guaraní and insisted on eating only native cuisine; the Colombian, of whom she was very afraid and who lasted only a few months before Stroessner sent soldiers to put him on a plane out of the country.

And then the patrón. Since his arrival he was always going on about how awful Asunción was — a backwater infested with bugs and Indians, with shitty food and crooked cops and not one decent nightclub. She did not understand why a rich man who could live anywhere chose to live in a place he hated. Until Osvaldo explained to her that he had no choice. And in this way she learned about the patrón—his infamy, his fall, and his exile.

She takes a deep draw from Osvaldo’s tereré. It is ice-cold, as is the custom. It hurts going down. She tells him about her day with the patrón, tells him about the luncheon she’s expected to prepare tomorrow, after his return from a 9:00 a.m. meeting at the Banco Alemán downtown. She gives it all to him so he does not have to fish for the details. It is her gift to him.

She watches his eyes shift, sees them sharpen and glimmer for a moment as he takes in what she has just told him. And then he is Osvaldo again, brash and gay, slapping his palms on the counter, changing the subject. He tells her about a fender bender in front of his kiosk that morning, about the drivers who got out of their respective cars to confront each other. They were veterans of the Chaco War, old men in their seventies, wearing identical medals on their dark wool suits. They stumbled as they took swings at each other and missed, until — exhausted in the midday heat — they collapsed, and Osvaldo had to call an ambulance to haul them away. She loves how he regales in the telling of the incident, whether it happened or not. She is rapt, and hopes that her attention on him will keep him with her a bit longer. But she has given him what he’s wanted. He glances at his watch, slaps his forehead. He remembers an urgent bit of business he must attend to, an errand for a cousin. And then, all showy and clownish, he brings Ynez’s left hand to his mouth. She watches him kiss it. She feels suddenly bereft, lost. The floor beneath her seems to shift and sag. He bids her good night. “Jajoecha peve, Ynez.”

Until we meet again.

And then he is gone.

The evening is clear and cool. The markets and shops have closed, and the cafés are putting up their chairs. The boulevard teems with late-night strollers slowly heading home. Cook joins them. Her route back to the villa is a riot of plumeria in full bloom. The air is glutted with fragrance. Sagging branches overhang sidewalks everywhere. Spatulate petals reach down fat and heavy into her face. She swats them away.

She waves to the guard in the guard booth. He waves back. Inside her apartment, she drops her bag and kicks off her shoes. She stares at a piece of honey cake wrapped in wax paper on the nightstand. She picks it up and goes outside. She walks to the iron fence that borders the cañón and kneels down. She squeezes the honey cake between her hands and waits. The kennel master has told her not to risk this, has warned her that his children are unpredictable, that they can be capricious and willful.

Soon the dogs come, pounding through brush, slamming into the fence, taking the cake from her. There is the snuffling of the dogs and the sound of their tongues on her, and then another noise, somebody speaking to her. She turns around. It is the patrón, barking at her in English. He stands there in his stocking feet, with his belt undone and a chicken leg in his hand. Here is the man who tossed handcuffed prisoners out of airplanes over the Pacific Ocean, the man who invented this innovation for disappearing dissidents. Here he stands, shouting about who knows what, wagging a chicken leg at her. She watches a trickle of blood thread down his forehead. An omen, she thinks. She gazes at him. She feels nothing. She will perhaps feel nothing for a long time. Except maybe for these dogs. She turns to them now, watches their fat pink tongues flicking out of the bushes between the iron pickets, rasping at her fingers and palms and doing a thorough job of cleaning her hands.

* * *

At dusk, the dogs are loosed. The sun dips below the ridge behind the villa, a photosensor engages an electric switch, and the kennel gate swings open. The two rottweilers set off separately, bounding over root and tree-fall and crashing through sedge and bramble until they join each other in a defile that cuts to the top of the ridge. They piss along the perimeter of the cañón fence, metal chain-link topped with boas of razor wire. They gallop back and forth along the ridge — lunging, tongue-lolling lopes. Paladino, the younger, harries Cerbero, nipping and snarling at him, always testing the older dog. They settle down and linger here in the waning light, splay-legged and slit-eyed and content, their massive skulls bobbing, their damp noses twitching at the verdant rankness of Asunción — acrid smoke from distant forest fires; musks of sewage and slag from the river, and eddies of sweet decay from landfills; ooze of meat from the slaughterhouse district; the complex admixtures of blossoms and bleach, baked bread and dog shit, mown grass and motor oil. And always, intermingled, the slick and slippery undertow of the collective human scent. Only when it is full-on dark — when the sun has dissolved like a tablet into the Pilcomayo, draining the colors from dusk — only then do they descend from the highest point of the property. Until first light, when they know to return to the kennel before the gates swing shut, the dogs have the run of this cañón. For the next eight or so hours they are free to romp and ramble and hunt and kill.

Guinea pigs are abundant year-round, as are lizards and toads. In summer, animals foraging for food and water come out of the jungle and down from the highlands. They breach the fence, attracted to the mulch of fallen fruit beneath the lime and papaya trees. Armadillos, capybaras, anacondas, a feral cat or two. Once, a tapir, far from its range, a two-hundred-pound calf that broke through and in a panic could not find its way out. It took them all night to chase it down. And once, there was a man, the greasy stink of him coming at them in torrents — the hot scent of prey like a desperate itching in the middle of the brain.

Once a week the master comes. He sweeps out the kennel, refreshes their bedding and their water trough. He brushes each of them, massages their hindquarters. Always Cerbero first. Paladino — patient — waits his turn. The master looks into their ears, checks their teeth, tends the occasional wound. He examines their droppings. He runs them through their commands. Sit! Stay! Catch! Hold! Tear! Finish! Good boy! When they are done, he kisses each of them. He is not afraid. The dogs know this. The scent of the master is neither of predator nor prey, of friend nor foe. He is simply the master. Before he leaves, he reaches into a waxed bag and throws a slab of round steak before each of them. The dogs watch him, mouths shut, eyes steady. On his command, they fall on the meat. They take food from no other.

But there is one other they are drawn to. She is redolent of blood, and deep in the fissures of canine memory lies a trace of what the tang of her blood once meant. (For Cerbero and Paladino are neutered males, and while the madness of the rut is absent, the absence is always present in them — dogs know their balls have been cut off.) It is this trace — the faint and fleeting residues of estrus and the mount — that brings them running. But they take food from her because it is the scent of the master that prevails. He whelms her, and she is steeped in him, and but for that, they would not come to her and gift her with their gentle mouthings. But for that, they would instead do all they could to clamp down on her hands and pull her in chunks through the cañón fence.

* * *

The Presidente-in-Exile is bleeding.

He holds a blood-dappled monogrammed hankie to his head. The cut is above the hairline, a tiny wound, but a real bleeder. He has just gotten home, flung his coat off, kicked off his pee-splashed Berluti mocs. He stands in front of the portable Sony in the kitchen, looking at a documentary — a history of the War of the Triple Alliance. In 1864, Francisco Solano López, third president of the Republic, invaded Brazil, then declared war on Argentina and Uruguay, engaging in a doomed six-year campaign that wiped out two-thirds of the population; by 1870 there were only thirty thousand men left in all of Paraguay. The debacle is rendered in history as a glorious act of national pride and will, and the ten-part documentary about it is aired on state television again and again. Aside from World Cup soccer in the summer and Miss Universe and the Oscars in the spring, television in Paraguay is a tedious déjà vu zone, awash in reruns of Stroessner’s inaugural addresses and cooking shows from Argentina (¡Mundo de bistec! ¡Barbacoa loco!) and American sitcoms (Hogan’s Heroes, Green Acres, Happy Days). And of course, the War of the Triple Fucking Alliance.

The Presidente-in-Exile sighs, flips off the TV. He cocks his head, listens. He drops the bloody hankie on a kitchen counter. He opens the refrigerator, finds a pair of baked chickens, and tugs at a drumstick until it comes off. He pads to the sliding glass door, unlocks and opens it, crosses to the iron fence a few yards away. He rat-a-tats the chicken leg between two pales, and waits. He knows the dogs are trained not to take food. They never come. But tonight he hears them, panting and tumbling down the hill, crashing through undergrowth, then moving past him along the fence perimeter toward the back of the house. Could they be hunting? He has heard that the dogs once killed and ate a man. Gallardo — talking to the gardeners or chatting up Stroessner’s monkeys — has relayed such stories to him. A drug lord tossed an informant to them for vengeance and sport. A Mossad agent prowling for Nazis got trapped in the cañón. Some street kid climbed over the fence on a dare. The stories are varied; they always change, and they all intrigue the Presidente-in-Exile.

He follows the dogs along the gravel walkway that runs the length of the house for thirty yards, toward the back. Where the cook lives. He comes around the corner into a tiny patio area no more than fifteen feet square. A pool of light from Cook’s open apartment door illuminates the soles of her feet, the backs of her calves. She is on her knees, up against the cañón fence. Her back is to him, and her hands are moving in the gaps between the iron pales.

The Presidente-in-Exile is peeved. She is feeding the dogs. “You’re not supposed to do that,” he says to her. He can see their tongues, pink and sudden at her hands in the dark. “Hey!” he says. “What the fuck are you doing?” She turns, and her level gaze confuses him. He looks at the chicken leg in his hand, points it at her. “You stop that now.” But she doesn’t. She seems unfazed, perhaps even bored. There was a time when he could have done anything to her and gotten away with it. There was a time when women were afraid of him. But he sees nothing in this india’s face. It is the face of a woman who wouldn’t care what you did to her. She turns away, back to the dogs.

And as swiftly as it came, his anger is gone, dropping away like a stone off a precipice. He sighs, picks his way back down the gravel path toward the kitchen. He gnaws absently at his drumstick. His eye stings and he wipes at it. Blood. The cut has opened up again. Something in his stomach shifts and plops, and he grimaces. He’ll need a bromo before bed, and the thought of this leaves him somehow disconsolate and vaguely depressed, and only adds to the chain of disappointments in this life of exile.

* * *

The Assassin of the Presidente-in-Exile gets the word. Osvaldo, calling from the magazine kiosk on Avenida España, repeats the go code into the phone: “Blanco, blanco, blanco.” The Assassin of the Presidente-in-Exile loads a rocket into the launcher and sets a percussion cap. He hoists the launcher onto his shoulder and rests the barrel on the lip of the sill. Through the open window he trains the sight on a statue in a sliver of park across the street. He focuses on it — Francisco Solano López, killed at the glorious battle of Cerro Corá in 1870. He can hear Analisa warming up the Chevy pickup in the driveway outside. The engine rumbles precariously. They’ve had trouble with the throttle, and she revs it up. He can see Josias at the curb watching for the Mercedes, his M16 shielded by a topcoat draped over his wrist. He sees Lourdes across the street, minding a baby stroller filled with Browning 9mm pistols and an Ingram MAC-10. He sees Josias wave, hears the truck ease down the length of the driveway, piston-slap rattle receding. Through the sight he watches the Mercedes glide into view. He lifts the barrel of the launcher off the sill and glides with it until the Mercedes is stopped short, blocked by Analisa in the Chevy. He seeks the trigger and finds it and nestles it into the crook of his index finger.

The Assassin of the Presidente-in-Exile inhales. He is suddenly taken with the clarity of the scene before him. What a beautiful morning! Sunshine pours into the street, filling it like a container. The Mercedes sits submerged in radiance, tense and gleaming in honeyed light, as if straining against the very weight of light itself. It shimmers within the crosshatched field of the launcher’s reticle.

The Assassin of the Presidente-in-Exile exhales. The rocket fires and scoots waggle-tailed toward its target twenty yards away, slips into the armored Mercedes. The Mercedes levitates for an instant and disappears behind coils of black smoke. The Assassin of the Presidente-in-Exile drops the launcher, stands up, peels off his latex gloves. The sofa behind his station at the window smolders from the rocket exhaust. A black circle six feet across is seared into the wall; the paint in it bubbles and pops. He goes out the back door of the house, into the yard. He can hear the ack-ack of semiautomatic fire — Josias and Analisa and Lourdes emptying their weapons into the wreckage. He passes through a gate in the property fence that opens onto an alley, turns right onto Avenida Venezuela, and strolls to a bus stop at the corner. The crowd there is looking past him, gawking upward at a column of smoke rising thickly into the blue. He turns, gawks with them. He recalls something from a book he’d been reading, a history of the North American Indians, and he tries to remember what it was Sioux warriors told each other before going into battle. The bus pulls up, and he stands on line with the other commuters. He jingles the change in his pocket. He can hear the click and pop of pistol fire, benign in the distance. The bodyguards in the Datsun have arrived. He pays the driver, moves into the press of standing passengers, situates himself near the back door. He pats the Browning pistol in his coat pocket and says a prayer for Josias and Analisa and the others — his compas for these past fifteen months.

And then it comes to him, and he smiles for remembering it. Today is a good day to die.

* * *

In the backseat of the Mercedes, the Presidente-in-Exile looks up from his paper.

The newspaper in his hands disappears, goes poof! like a magician’s trick. His hands smoke and glow and burst into flames. The suit he is wearing vaporizes. His eyeballs explode, and his mouth fills with gasoline. The backseat of the Mercedes becomes an arena of transformation, the effulgent white-hot heart of a flame brighter than a hundred suns, a whirlpool of shrapnel and fire taking its passenger apart. Hands — gone! Yet there is the glide of silk on the fingertips. Eyes — no more! Yet before them hang the pale breasts of a first love, a girl from Stony Point, New York, named Amanda. The slide of gasoline on the tongue gives way to the textures of pulque, milky and sweet. There is the smell of Cohibas, of Tres Flores brilliantine. The scrape of a father’s beard against skin, the slap of breakers on a shore like the beating of a giant’s heart. The tug of an erection. Strokes and caresses. A pressing upon the chest like the vise grips of God. Gunfire in the distance. There is running, stumbling. There is falling. Free fall. And amid the onslaught of sensations without stimulus and memories without context, amid the random firing of synapses in a brain poaching inside its own skull, what is revealed and understood of a life in its last instant — as the Presidente-in-Exile looks up from his paper and mutters “Fuck me” when his driver’s head disappears — what is understood is simply this: the transformative power of weaponry and surprise.

* * *

In the back patio of a trattoria three blocks away, an old man sits hunched over the morning paper laid out on the table before him, waiting for his espresso to cool. With his right hand he flips the pages of El Diario. With his left he holds the crown of a gray felt fedora and fans himself with the brim. He turns a page, peers at it. The fedora in his left hand stops moving. His breath catches, stops, begins again. He throws his hat on the page open before him. He looks around with histrionic furtiveness, in the manner of a lonely old man reveling in the melodrama of the moment. He sees mostly other lonely old men. One is tearing up a croissant and feeding the pieces to a tiny yellow dog in his lap. Two others sit staring down at a checkerboard between them.

He nudges the fedora aside, revealing a full-page ad with the headline DO YOU RECOGNIZE THIS MAN? There is a picture, a blowup of a passport photo from some twenty-five years ago, of a glowering, beetle-browed man with black slicked-back hair and a broad, neatly trimmed mustache. The hair is now chalk white, full and untended. The mustache is ragged, and the brows have thinned out. The face is tanned. The glower is gone.

The old man reaches for his demitasse and tosses back the espresso. He shudders, gleefully. He calls to the waiter, orders another, and a crème de cassis as well. The waiter looks him in the face, bows, departs. Nothing. The old man giggles. He ponders a delightful paradox of photo portraiture — the picture in the paper is an accurate likeness of himself a quarter century ago, but so much so that no one will recognize it as him today. Remarkable. “Ausgezeichnet!” he says aloud. He shudders again, claps his hands. His chair gives a sudden leap. He hears a muffled roar, feels movement in the ground beneath his feet. The other old men look past him, upward, and he turns, cranes his neck. Above the apartment building across the street, a column of thick black smoke jeweled with embers boils upward. The waiter arrives, sets the drinks down, stands and gapes with the others, all of them watching the smoke drape across the sky like a closing curtain. The old man squints, sniffs. He can smell diesel fuel, burning oil, the stink of molten rubber. And something else, something distant and familiar. He reaches for his crème de cassis, raises the glass, and carefully brings it to his lips. He pauses. Yes, of course — the smell of burning flesh. He sips the thick, sweet syrup. The liqueur is served neat here, to the brim in a warmed cordial glass, in the style called Martyr’s Blood. And although still atremble with giddiness, the old man spills not a drop as he drinks to whoever has died today.

* * *

Meanwhile, back at the villa, a bony cat rasps its tongue at a congealing smear of mashed bug on the slate tiles of the west patio. A wind from nowhere disturbs the trees and a blossom-fall erupts, sending slant flurries across the grounds. Security cameras tucked high and low throughout the compound click and whir to each other. In the kitchen, Cook slathers chicken parts with mayo, dices tomatoes and onions, and puts water up to boil, going through the motions of preparing a luncheon that will not be served. And upstairs, in the master bedroom, the mistress Dinorah sleeps. Twenty years from now she will serve iced tea to fellow expats on the balcony of her modest condo in Coral Gables. She will regale them with the stories they want to hear, of her life with El Presidente — the palaces and the private jets, the fetes and the galas, stories of jewelry and couture and thousand-dollar bottles of wine, of weekends abroad and late, intimate dinners with movie stars. But she will keep to herself the details of their last shimmering days together, when the ardor of their love seemed to flower even in the ignominy of exile, when they swam and gamboled in lagoons under the stars and made love all night and toasted the dawn with champagne, the both of them — sated and spent — taken truly aback by the remarkable clarity of light at sunrise in Paraguay.

But for now she sleeps, deep and hard, unencumbered by knowledge or memory or dream. She sleeps like a dead man.