“You’re not going to believe this,” Mario Vargas Llosa told me in October 2002, “but until three weeks before the voting [in the 1990 race for president of Peru], I had no idea who [Alberto] Fujimori was.”

Our meeting came vividly back to life for me on April 13 when I learned that the author and politician from Peru died at age 89.

The occasion of our meeting was an appearance by the famed Peruvian novelist before a small group at the Folger Theatre in Washington, D.C.  Somehow, my wife had secured tickets for both of us as a birthday present for me. And I not only was able to get Vargas Llosa to sign “The Feast of The Goat” (a gripping tale of Dominican Republican strongman Rafael Trujillo’s final days and, at the time, his most recent book) but to discuss his own unsuccessful foray into politics a dozen years before.

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