The Mastermind

by David Unger

  Guillermo glances around. He has never been as conscious of nature as he is this morning. It’s as if he has awakened to a newly created world, one that dazzles him with its beauty and serenity. He hears birds chirping, yes, birds chirping, and feels the sun warm his face. Where has he been these past weeks? Has he lived with his head deep in the ground? Even when he had gone riding to get into shape and shake off his drunkenness, it was on a mission to expiate pain, fatigue, booze, and frustration, rather than to enjoy the beauty of a sunset ride. Nature had once been important to him.

  Maryam’s death crippled him. He lost the desire to engage with anyone. With himself. He knows that he has become a worse father than his own was to him. He demonstrated more sympathy for the elephant La Mocosita than he has for his own flesh and blood.

  It isn’t the solitude that destroyed him. What he can’t survive is this taste of ashes, the refuse of something that had at one time nourished him but had now decayed. Music, art, meals, all taste burnt, flaking, putrid.

  Rotting, now that’s a better word for what he tastes. Everything has putrefied to the point of rotting. Rot and mold.

  Guillermo is crying so hard now that he can barely see the road on which he pedals. He squeezes the brakes with his hands, puts his legs down, and stands still momentarily before wiping away his tears on his sleeves.

  He stays there on the side of the road, his thoughts racing. When Maryam told Samir she wanted to leave him, he laughed at her. In fact, he told her he would never accept her wish to dissolve their marriage. The only hope for Guillermo and Maryam would have been for Ibrahim to intervene on their behalf. But given his stern morality, they would have had to emphasize the allegedly platonic nature of their romance, built up over the weeks of dining and conversing together with each other, and with him. They could not have admitted the carnality of their relationship, the unquenchable thirst. In this way Ibrahim might have allowed a relationship to develop between them, for he was dedicated to the happiness of his daughter.

  Guillermo wipes his eyes on his shirt again. Why had Maryam been killed? What did she have to do with the filth of this world, the drugs, the corruption, the venality? The thought of her burning up, that sweet aromatic flesh, repels him. She did not deserve to die like that.

  Guillermo glances down at his watch. It is after eight and he is still not at the appointed spot. He’s no longer sure he wants to die, but he needs to put an end to his despondency.

  He remounts his bike and pedals slowly. It hurts him to consider that no one will mourn his death. There will be something unfortunate about his death, but nothing tragic.

  Facing a steep incline, Guillermo forces his legs to churn harder. His muscles, nearly atrophied by so much booze and apathy, strain at the task. His legs begin shaking, threatening to cramp, but he simply puts a steadier foot to the pedal.

  The agreed upon spot is one hundred meters away, on a grassy ridge at the edge of a pine forest. Across from it sits one of those oversized houses, wedding cake–shaped, with a V etched just below the intercom. It is a hideous house owned by Boris Santiago, the millionaire narco chief.

  Guillermo is supposed to dismount his bike at the crest and wait for the assassin to approach by car. It is to be a simple undertaking—a man rides his bike on a Sunday morning, quite innocently, possibly before going to church services. He gets winded from the climb and dismounts his bike to rest for a minute or two before going on.

  Guillermo switches to a higher gear and continues up the hill, wondering what he will do when he sees the car approaching. Maybe he will crap his pants—how indecent a way to leave this world—or try to run away into the woods and get shot in the back.

  Or will he simply meet his fate by awaiting the bullet, with his mouth open as if to accept the Host of Hosts? Will one bullet be enough, or will he lay there squirming, with his brain oozing out of his skull like blood sausage from the pork skin, waiting, begging for the second bullet, or the third, the shot that will deliver him from the suffering his life has become?

  What if the second shot never comes? What if he is condemned to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair, dumb and blind, blowing on tubes to make the wheelchair move, attached to a tank of oxygen?

  Oh please, Lord, not that!

  Halfway up the hill, a jackrabbit appears below the hedges of a house on the right. When it reaches the curb, it pauses ever so briefly, twirls a floppy ear, then bounds across the road as if its legs were on pogo sticks, and disappears into the forest.

  Guillermo glances toward the sky—there’s an oddly rectangular, dark cloud resembling a chalk eraser. He wishes it weren’t there. He wants to die under a spotless blue sky, as under a coffin’s dark blue velvet casing. Is that too much to ask for?

  His legs feel sore as he nears the top. Boris Santiago’s McMansion now comes into full view, taking up the whole crest of the hill. Looking up, Guillermo sees a glass-encased hexagonal cupola at the top—it must be the playroom for the children, or where the ex-lieutenant and his buddies drink bottles of Zacapa 23 and snort samples of the cocaine they fly from Colombia to the Péten fields to the United States.

  Immediately Guillermo realizes his mind is exaggerating things—on several occasions he has seen children staring down from the cupola to the road as he cycled by. It is a four-story house, and he can well imagine that from the third-floor windows someone could see the Izalco volcano in San Salvador miles to the southeast, or Lake Amatitlán a stone’s throw to the south. He expects one can see the volcanoes of Fuego and Pacaya belching their endless plumes of gray-black smoke from any of the windows in the house.

  As he reaches the plateau he notices that there is no one in the cupola now; the whole family of the mutilator-turned-cartel-chief must still be sleeping, or vacationing in Disneyland.

  Guillermo takes a deep breath, filling his lungs with cold, clean air, and slows. To be alive is glorious, he thinks, with tears welling up in his eyes again. If there were a guard in the guardhouse protecting the McMansion, he might have gone up to him to confess his desire not to die, but strangely no one is there.

  Just past the house there is another incline, so steep that no houses have been built there yet. Guillermo is supposed to wait at the notch on top, at the edge of the curb, in front of a young eucalyptus tree that was planted four or five weeks earlier on a grassy spot. There is no way to miss it.

  He reaches the top of the knoll, stops, and dismounts his bicycle. His heart skips a beat when he sees another bike and what might be a backpack lying on the grass immediately in front of the spindly eucalyptus. What could this be? A large rodent? A sack of oranges? A small dead mountain lion?

  Guillermo is confused. He rubs his face to make sure this is not a mirage. He pinches his nose to test if he is still alive. His mouth gasps for air.

  As he approaches the backpack, he sees the soles of a pair of sneakers and realizes that a man is lying there. A Diamondback Sorrento mountain bike lies behind him. Why would a cyclist be sleeping at the side of this road?

  Guillermo inches closer. He sees a muscular back in a white, hooded pullover riding above what look like shiny blue boxing shorts. The man has a shapely ass, that’s what Guillermo notices, and hairless legs. The back of the man’s head is bald. Though the sleeper appears to be short, he has a thick neck. A bull’s neck.

  Guillermo puts his bike down and goes over to shake the man awake, to ask him to move along and find his own spot to recline. How dare he take a snooze at the spot of Guillermo’s presumed encounter with death?

  He nudges the man gently from the rear, rocking him back and forth a few times, but there is no reaction. He shoots a quick kick to the small of the back. Nothing.

  Guillermo sits down next to the man, as if to have a chat with him. It is a cool morning, but up on the hill the sun is shining powerfully and Guillermo begins to sweat. The truth is beginning to dawn on him. He gets on his knees, careful not to dirty his beige pants, and begins to turn the man over with his glo
ved hands. The body rolls over lightly, and Guillermo lets out a loud gasp and feels a chill in his back.

  This is definitely a dead man, not a sleeper. He can’t recognize the face because the nose has been completely blown off, and there are bloody craters for eyes. The whole visage is a disheveled mess of blood and cartilage, rubberized, like a ghoulish Halloween mask.

  Guillermo vomits on the grass before he can close his mouth.

  Oh my God, he thinks, as he wipes his maw with his left arm. Is this man me? He is confused from the previous night’s hangover, from the weeks of binge drinking and indulging. Everything is muddled.

  He holds his breath, frozen, as if blue smoke were issuing from a gun he’s unable to shake loose from his hand. He hears no sounds except the pecking of a woodpecker—rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat—somewhere behind him, and a mourning dove in the distance cooing stupidly.

  Guillermo sits next to a corpse that could be him but isn’t. Miguel Paredes’s cousin’s assassin—whoever it was—has killed the wrong man!

  How strange.

  Who is this guy? Part of him wants to figure that out, but then he snaps out of his stupor. He has to get out of there quickly, before the army or the police show up and accuse him of murder. He isn’t sure if he’s more afraid of being arrested as the accused murderer and dumped into the penitentiary with drug addicts, pimps, and gang members, or being sought out by Miguel Paredes’s henchmen for failing to orchestrate his own murder successfully.

  Something has been botched. Has another cyclist passed by the appointed spot at just the right time and been killed by mistake by the hired assassin? This seems like the most obvious answer. Guillermo looks down at his watch. It is eight fifteen. He has arrived fifteen minutes late. So what? Assassins aren’t taught to distinguish between cyclists: all Guillermo knows is that the bullet meant for him has blown off half the face of someone completely innocent.

  Then it clicks. He thinks he knows the dead man. From the shape of the body, he believes it’s the narco capo Boris Santiago.

  Guillermo starts to cry into his hands, saying aloud, “Oh dear Maryam, how much I love you—and miss you.” He realizes that he has been minutes away from joining her in heaven.

  Through a fortuitous, incomprehensible case of mistaken identity, Guillermo is still alive!

  He takes a deep breath. What’s he to do?

  Birds are chattering loudly, as if relaying the news of the murder to their avian brethren. Guillermo cocks his ear to listen for sirens, but he only hears more sounds of nature. Apparently, no one has heard the gunshots. Otherwise, this area would be overrun with medics and chontes.

  Guillermo pats down the body to find some ID to confirm his suspicion. But the poor schlep is only wearing shorts, a white pullover, and a pair of sneakers worth several hundred dollars.

  Guillermo places his Pinarello next to the corpse, then takes the other bike without thinking. The seat needs to be raised, but he has no time to look for pliers and tinker with it. He hates abandoning the Pinarello, but he has no choice. The Diamondback is actually a nicer bike anyway.

  He backtracks across the plateau and coasts downhill, passing several blocks of houses on the way to his apartment building. He hears a few dogs bark, but no one comes out. He takes the dirt path back to the trash door and finds the door still propped open, thank God. He crosses the garage and takes the elevator straight up to his apartment. No one sees him.

  Adrenaline is directing his movements.

  He goes into the bathroom and takes a short, hot shower. Afterward, he puts on a pair of jeans, a short-sleeve shirt, and a light jacket.

  His mind is racing but focused. He has to move quickly if there’s any hope that he can extricate himself from this mess of a situation.

  He has to get out of there. Now.

  chapter twenty-seven

  a bus trip to el salvador (“the savior”)

  Life is full of opportunities. The difference between the follower and the maker of his own destiny is that the former is willing to accept his fate while the latter forges it. Guillermo feels he has reached a summit and sees his future clearly. He has the opportunity to escape the tawdry conspiracy he has helped to weave and to be free.

  He has to leave town at once. Get the fuck out of Guatemala City.

  As he prepares to flee his apartment, both his cell phones start ringing: the personal one that recorded all the threatening phone calls and the disposable cell he had only shared with Miguel, Rosa Esther, and his secretary.

  Guillermo realizes he has to discard both phones and disappear. When they stop ringing, he shuts them both, takes out the SIM cards, and dumps them in the garbage disposal under running water. He flips on the switch. The grinding metal makes a horrible noise at first but within seconds there is a quiet whirring, as if he were grinding walnuts in a blender.

  He hurries to his closet and retrieves a shoe box from the top shelf. It contains a forged passport he bought years ago for four hundred quetzales, just in case, and five thousand quetzales in twenties and fifties, just in case. The only way to survive in Guatemala is to plan for just in case.

  And there are many just-in-case situations, as he and Maryam once discussed.

  He checks the top drawer of his desk to make sure his legitimate passport is there and, leaving it visible, takes the fake one and the cash with him. He fills the backpack with other essentials—several shirts, a spare pair of pants, socks, underwear, a toothbrush, deodorant, a comb. He does all this in a flash. The last thing he puts in the bag is Ibrahim Khalil’s folder—one day it will be of use. He grabs Boris’s Sorrento and quietly leaves his apartment. His heart is beating hard in his chest, thumping to get out.

  In the basement, he adjusts his backpack so that it is firm against his shoulders and flat against his back. He takes a deep breath. It’s time to go.

  Guillermo pedals slowly in low gear up the garage ramp toward the gatehouse. When he gets close to the garita one hundred meters away, he sees that the guard, thankfully, has his head inside a car window and is checking the driver’s identification papers. It is barely nine thirty a.m.

  Guillermo knows it is too risky to cycle by. Someone will notice him. He needs to remain invisible. What to do?

  To his right, Guillermo sees a footpath running into the woods, one of the many used by squatters before the shanty town on the hill had been cleared for development. It is still used by servants who work in the private houses, a quicker beeline to the main road, with access to the public buses on Los Próceres.

  The path, tamped down and smooth, is a shortcut to 18th Street and Seventeenth Avenue. When he rides out of it, he sees several buses, a truck, and a smattering of cars going the other way, toward Vista Hermosa. He decides to avoid Los Próceres, where someone might see him, and takes a series of small streets through Zone 10 toward the Zona Viva.

  Guatemala City is sleeping in, slumbering through the pleasant eucalyptus aroma around him. On a typical Sunday, when Rosa Esther and the children were still around, he would go riding toward the Obelisco and turn down Reforma Boulevard, which was closed to car traffic from six a.m. to six p.m.

  But this is not a typical Sunday. He turns down Fourth Avenue and rides north toward the Radisson Hotel, where the first-class buses leave for San Salvador every other hour. When he reaches 12th Street, he gets off his bicycle and walks alongside the Fontabella Mall, where Miguel Paredes has his faux men’s shop. He notices a wooded lot next to the Hotel Otelito, facing the plaza. Using his Swiss Army knife, he pries off the little license plate and leaves the bicycle leaning against a tree. It will be stolen in a heartbeat.

  He walks down Twelfth Avenue by the Geminis 10 Mall and the Mercure Casa Veranda hotel. There are Chiclets and cigarette vendors on the street, an old half-blind Indian woman selling sweet rolls on the avenue, but none of them pay him any notice. It is as if he were gliding invisibly through the Zona Viva.

  There is a long line of cars snaking along First Avenue toward the Ra
disson valet. Breakfasters get out of their cars, receive ticket stubs from the valets, and watch their cars disappear into the basement garage.

  Beyond the driveway, the ten a.m. Pullmantur bus to El Salvador drives up. Guillermo hurries toward it. As soon as the driver opens the door, he edges up the steps.

  “You have to buy your ticket inside the hotel,” the driver says.

  Guillermo gives the driver two hundred quetzales and tells him to keep the change. Before the driver can say a word, he hastens to the back of the bus and nestles himself in, curled into a ball, about to pass out.

  When did he last sleep? Two nights ago? He hardly knows.

  His eyes simply close on their own.

  But his mind is alive and he cannot sleep. He recalls that the Stofella is less than two blocks away. His thoughts turn to Maryam and the various afternoons they cavorted there with total abandonment. He remembers the touch of her body, her full breasts begging to be embraced by his mouth. He starts crying, half asleep, as he recalls her mango-flavored mouth, the perfect fit of their bodies, the hunger with which she would ride him thrust after thrust until she would let out a low, widening scream.

  Guillermo remembers reading what García Márquez wrote in The Autumn of the Patriarch, that “el corazón es el tercer cojón.” The heart is the third ball. He was so right. And at this very moment Guillermo’s heart is throbbing. He remembers that someone in Love in the Time of Cholera had said that “el corazón tiene más cuartos que un hotel de putas.” The heart has more chambers than a whorehouse. And he knows this is also true.

  He opens his eyes to see the bus driving down Los Próceres, en route to the highway that will take him to El Salvador. Guillermo needs alcohol—his body aches for it. His throat has clenched and he feels a tug that turns his insides out. But there is nothing on the bus to indulge his craving.

  Eventually, fatigue takes over, he settles into his seat, and finally sleeps.

  He wakes when the bus stops at the Guatemala/El Salvador border an hour later. All fifteen passengers have to disembark and go through immigration in a small, concrete, windowless building surrounded by empty wooden pallets and half a dozen uniformed soldiers lounging on broken chairs under blooming jacarandas. This is a first-class bus, but the procedure is the same: everyone has to bear the insufferable heat which within minutes speckles Guillermo’s cotton shirt with sweat.