Aldao wrote Rubi in Paris several times to inquire about the missing items but was repeatedly ignored. He sent a Parisian friend to confront Rubi and, as he later declared, his emissary was rudely rebuffed: “The result of the meeting was completely negative, and he was moreover very discourteous to my friend.” Finally, a few years after the fact, he wrote a letter of formal protest to Emilio A. Morel, the Dominican ambassador to Spain. It wasn’t the first Morel had heard of the case—an anonymous letter had found its way to him a year or so earlier, a note, he recalled as so “crammed with inside information” that he believed its author was “a compatriot of Rubirosa’s, actually a principal in the smuggling plan, who felt he had been double-crossed out of a commission from Kohane and took this method of seeking revenge.” Morel dutifully sent notice of these claims against Rubi to the Secretariat of Foreign Relations in Ciudad Trujillo; not only were his inquiries sloughed off, but he, a noted Dominican poet and onetime leader of Trujillo’s own political party, found himself, by virtue of making them, suddenly in the bad graces of the generalissimo. He left Madrid for New York, where he lived out his years in exile. And Aldao got nothing.
Rubi likely had the jewels—and all of Kohane’s assets as well. His finances seemed to have worked themselves out for the decided better. He had been so skint at the start of the year that he would on occasion feign illness so as to summon friends to his house with restorative meals—the only food he could, apparently, afford. After returning from Madrid, however, he spoke of opening his own nightclub and renewed his habit of forming an impromptu club wherever he went; the genius guitarist Django Reinhardt was soon among the players in his ever-expanding, never-ending, ceaselessly moveable feast. Deauville; Biarritz; the French Riviera; and all through the Parisian night: He was ubiquitous, a star. Old friends who encountered Rubi in Paris—among them Flor de Oro and his brother Cesar, now himself a cog in Trujillo’s diplomatic machine—found him exultant, even though they’d been led to expect he’d be sporting a more destitute aspect.
Perhaps news of his self-made success made it back to the Dominican Republic, perhaps he was vouched for by Virgilio Trujillo, but in the spring of 1939, the most amazing bit of fortune landed in his lap: a phone call from Ciudad Trujillo. “The President, who is beside me,” said the official on the other end, “would like to know if you could see after his wife and son, who will arrive in Paris in a few weeks. You’ll have to find a house of appropriate size, accompany them, show them around.”
“I was so stupefied,” Rubi remembered, “that I couldn’t answer straightaway. At first I wondered what sort of trap it was. I couldn’t see one.”
He hurriedly made arrangements to receive Doña Maria and ten-year-old Ramfis and met their boat in Le Havre, where he was startled to find the president’s third wife a full eight months pregnant. Rubi immediately arranged for her to be taken to a clinic where, in comfort, she gave birth to a daughter, Angelita, on June 10.*
In the weeks before and after the birth, Rubi engaged in a full charm offensive, presenting Doña Maria with gifts of jewelry (booty, no doubt, from the Aldao collection) and seeing that the awkward, friendless, unschooled Ramfis was kept happy; the two rode horses together, and it was likely around this time that they began tinkering at polo. As Rubi recalled, the campaign was a success: “Doña Maria wrote to her husband that I was useful, attentive, charming and courteous. Was it due to the sentiment that accompanies pregnancy? Was it due to the change of nations and distance? Trujillo warmed to me.”
The Benefactor had come to recognize that in Rubi he had a truly unique asset: a young, handsome, worldly, cultivated Dominican of notable suavity and negotiable loyalty. Doña Maria, who had no history with the young man, must have impressed her husband with tales of his social skills and tact. And, as Trujillo was soon to discover himself, no Dominican was as enmeshed in the manners and mores of the great European capitals than his scalawag former son-in-law.
The dictator made a grand official tour of the United States in the early part of the summer and then wrote to France to announce that he would be joining his family there. He had his yacht, the Ramfis, sent ahead to Cannes and then sailed to Le Havre himself aboard the Normandie. Rubi was at the dock to meet him. “In the place of a furious father-in-law and an autocrat exasperated by my impertinence,” he recalled, “I found a friendly and agreeable man.”
Trujillo wanted to see the grand sights of Paris—“the elegant Paris, without beans and rice,” as Rubi remembered. But he was perhaps even more interested in the louche part of the city that his former son-in-law, unique among Dominican expatriates, could show him. “Porfirio,” he pronounced, “do not leave my side. I want you to show me everything. You understand? Everything.” Everything included a trip to the top of the Eiffel Tower, where the generalissimo fell under the spell of a girl selling flowers and postcards (presently he courted and bedded her, Rubi remembered, “because he wanted to seduce the loftiest woman in Paris”—“loftiest,” geddit?). The visit included nights out at Jimmy’s, where the generalissimo, unusually in his cups, declared, “We need a Jimmy’s in Ciudad Trujillo, but much bigger, with four orchestras, gardens and a patio open to the sea.” They moved on to Biarritz, where Trujillo expressed a similar desire to re-create the local hot spots back home. And finally the entire Trujillo party relocated to Cannes and a Mediterranean cruise—all the way to Egypt, they hoped—at the launch of which the dictator whispered to his guide, “Porfirio, I am putting you in charge of this entire voyage.”
But it wasn’t to be. The war that Rubi hadn’t foreseen when he was sitting within a few feet of its architect in a Berlin stadium began in earnest. And although the Dominican Republic was still officially neutral in the boiling European conflict, events in the Old World seemed likely to upset the balance of power in the Caribbean. Trujillo felt he had no choice but to leave Doña Maria and the children in Rubi’s care and sailed home on the Ramfis. By the time he reached Ciudad Trujillo, Rubi had safely sent his family after him.
If Trujillo felt cheated out of his grand tour, Rubi was handsomely rewarded for the part he played in orchestrating it. Back in the dictator’s good graces, he was reinstated at the French and Belgian embassies as a first-class secretary.
It was a truly auspicious time to hold such a position. Trujillo, still stung by the beating his image had taken after the Haitian border massacres, had made a grand show of opening his country to refugees from the Spanish Civil War; it wasn’t a huge influx, but the PR bounce was good. When he became aware of the desire of European Jews to relocate to the Western Hemisphere, he saw an opportunity to ingratiate himself with U.S. interests. Although he reckoned Judaism to be synonymous with communism, he declared that the Dominican Republic would accept one hundred thousand European Jews on its soil and demarcated a territory where they would be allowed to settle: Sosùa, a beachside village on the northern coast; a large parcel of his own land would be given over to the enterprise.
Word that Trujillo was accepting Jewish refugees led to a run on Dominican consulates and embassies in countries not yet controlled by the Nazis. A chancer like Rubi, given access to papers that could liberate anybody he favored, was sitting on a gold mine. He sold visas on a sliding scale, getting as much as $5,000 a head, and never concerned himself with how or even if his customers got out of France, much less all the way to the Dominican Republic. As it happened, Trujillo’s offer was chiefly rhetorical: Fewer than one thousand European Jews made their way to Sosùa, and the projected Caribbean Jerusalem eventually became a resort with a little Jewish history sprinkled in.* But from the vantage of Paris, it didn’t matter: Rubi did a thriving business until the Nazis took the French capital. “He got rich selling visas