The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa Page B

had surprised him with a precise, detailed report on Dominican exiles in Mexico City: what they were doing, what they were plotting, where they lived, where they met, who was helping them, which diplomats they visited.
    “How many people do you have in Mexico to be so well informed about those bastards?”
    “All the information comes from one person, Excellency.” Razor gestured with professional satisfaction. “He’s very young. Johnny Abbes García. Perhaps you’ve met his father, a half-German gringo who came here to work for the electric company and married a Dominican. The boy was a sports reporter and something of a poet. I began to use him as an informant on people in radio and the press, and at the Gómez Pharmacy gatherings that the intellectuals attend. He did so well I sent him to Mexico City on a phony scholarship. And now, as you can see, he’s gained the confidence of the entire exile community. He gets on well with everybody. I don’t know how he does it, Excellency, but in Mexico he even got close to Lombardo Toledano, the leftist union leader. Imagine, the ugly broad he married was secretary to that Red.”
    Poor Razor! By talking so enthusiastically, he began to lose the directorship of the Intelligence Service that he had trained for at West Point.
    “Bring him here, give him a job where I can watch him,” Trujillo ordered.
    That was how the awkward, unprepossessing figure with the perpetually darting eyes had appeared in the corridors of the National Palace. He occupied a low-level position in the Office of Information. Trujillo studied him at a distance. From the time he had been very young, in San Cristóbal, he had followed those intuitions which, after a simple glance, a brief chat, a mere allusion, made him certain a person could be useful to him. That was how he chose many of his collaborators, and he hadn’t done too badly. For several weeks Johnny Abbes García worked in an obscure office, under the direction of the poet Ramón Emilio Jiménez, along with Dipp Velarde Font, Querol, and Grimaldi, writing supposed letters from readers to “The Public Forum” in the paper El Caribe . Before putting him to the test, he waited for a sign, not knowing exactly what form it would take. It came in the most unexpected way, on the day he saw Johnny Abbes in a Palace corridor conversing with one of his ministers. What did the meticulous, pious, austere Joaquín Balaguer have to talk about with Razor’s informant?
    “Nothing in particular, Excellency,” Balaguer explained when it was time for his ministerial meeting. “I did not know the young man. When I saw him so absorbed in his reading, for he was reading as he walked, my curiosity was piqued. You know how much I love books. I could not have been more astonished. He cannot be in his right mind. Do you know what he was enjoying so much? A book about Chinese tortures, with photographs of those who had been decapitated and skinned alive.”
    That night he sent for him. Abbes seemed so overwhelmed—with joy, fear, or both—by the unexpected honor that he could hardly get the words out when he greeted the Benefactor.
    “You did good work in Mexico,” he said in the sharp, high-pitched voice that, like his gaze, had a paralyzing effect on his interlocutors. “Espaillat told me about it. I think you can take on more serious tasks. Are you interested?”
    “Anything Your Excellency desires.” He stood motionless, his feet together, like a student in front of his teacher.
    “Did you know José Almoina in Mexico? A Galician who came here with the Republican exiles from Spain.”
    “Yes, Excellency. I mean, only by sight. But I did know many people in the group he meets with in the Café Comercio. They call themselves ‘Dominican Spaniards.’”
    “This individual published a book attacking me, A Satrapy in the Caribbean , that was paid for by the Guatemalan government. He used an alias, Gregorio Bustamante. Then, to throw us off the