The Mastermind

by David Unger

  The passengers are directed to some high tables and instructed to fill out tourist cards. They are told to line up single file in the center of the room once they have finished filling out the cards.

  Guillermo is the fifth person in line, behind a middle-aged woman whose jewelry jingles whenever she moves her rather impressive behind. She is wearing so much perfume that his nose suddenly twitches and he sneezes. She turns to look back at him.

  “Salud.”

  “Thank you,” he says, sniffling a bit.

  “Why do they insist on demeaning their own citizens?” she whispers to him.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “This doesn’t offend you? If we were on an airplane they would simply usher us through. Is it because we want to save a little bit of money by taking the bus? I don’t know about the others here, but I’m scared of airplanes.” She winks at him knowingly. “And though I could drive my Lexus, I’m afraid of the kidnappers. Communists and kidnappers rule this country.”

  Guillermo nods at her. She must belong to the Salvadoran elite, the fourteen families who have ruled that little crumb of a country for over a hundred years.

  “I know you are a chapin from your passport.”

  Guillermo’s Central American passport indicates his Guatemalan nationality with embossed gold lettering on a blue background.

  She smiles. “You don’t know how lucky you are, Mr. . . .”

  Before he has a chance to answer, a man calls out to her: “Come over here, lady.”

  Guillermo can see the three customs officials sitting at the same table. The first examines the woman’s passport for its validity. The second evaluates the tourist card, matching it to the passport, and asks some mundane questions that have already been answered on the card. The third official sits with an open ink pad and stamps the Salvadoran seal with the date of arrival and waits for the visitor to ink his or her finger onto the card. When he asks the woman for her fingerprint, she goes into a tirade. She yells something about the misfortune of living in a shitty country—not exactly an effective way to charm customs officials.

  When it is Guillermo’s turn, the first officer beckons him with one finger. Guillermo hands him his fake Central American passport. As the agent opens it to the photo and information page, Guillermo realizes that from now on he will be Rafael Ignacio Gallardo, a resident of Los Aposentos, Guatemala—a new man with a new identification number and a totally new identity. The questions are all normal enough: name, address, passport number, place of residency while in El Salvador, length of stay. The agent looks up at him and smiles, handing his passport to the second man, who validates the information on the card against that on the passport. When he reads the address Guillermo has given for where he is staying—the Hotel Princess—he says, “I hope you enjoy the princesses of San Salvador.” He smiles lasciviously and passes the card to the man with the pad, who looks at Guillermo and adds, “We don’t need your fingerprint. You don’t look stupid enough to want to stay in our country illegally,” and waves him through.

  Guillermo feels relieved that he hasn’t had to provide prints, even pleased to be visiting a “shitty country” where his passport, looks, and birthplace give him greater status than the woman before him in line.

  Before getting back on the bus, he takes a leak in a stinky bathroom, then buys a squash blossom, a red bean pupusa, and a large Coke. He wolfs them down as if he hasn’t eaten for years, and then reclines his seat to watch the thick vegetation catapult past him. He hopes that the Coke will ease the migraine behind his eyes, but no such luck.

  He should sleep, but is kept awake by a machine gun of questions running through his mind. He has no idea what he will do in El Salvador, or how he will survive. He only knows that he has died, and he hopes to rise like Lazarus and live again in another land.

  * * *

  When the Pullmantur stops at the Radisson in San Salvador’s San Benito neighborhood, a wealthy enclave of huge walled-in homes, boutiques, and expensive restaurants, Guillermo decides it would be a big mistake to stay in the nearby Hotel Princess. If the police believe he has somehow eluded death and crossed the border into El Salvador, they will most likely look for him in hotels like these. He needs to find simple, safe lodgings in a working-class neighborhood where no one will think of searching for him—where he can grow a mustache or a beard, shave his head, disguise himself. He’s better off finding a room in a cheap pensión or boardinghouse amid the junk dealers, the modest, cavernous stores selling suitcases, shoes, or toasters right on the street.

  He has not brought a single suit. He gets off the Pullmantur with only his bulging knapsack and walks down 89th Avenida Norte to the Paseo General Escalón. Here he takes a mostly empty public bus toward the cathedral on Plaza Barrios, where Archbishop Romero was gunned down, and to the north end of Calle Rubén Darío.

  The cathedral looks out onto its own crowded square. It is Sunday and there are hourly church services until five.

  It’s tough for him to navigate the 2a Calle Poniente with so many people, though he is happy to be where he is. It’s scorchingly hot, but what the hell. He’s alive.

  He stops at a corner kiosk. “I’m looking for a decent place to stay,” he says nervously to the street vendor.

  The man behind the counter has a grizzly face, eyes that have seen enough horror—the butchery of a civil war—that nothing surprises him. He sizes up Guillermo in a flash.

  “Don’t look south near the Mercado—the maras have taken over most of the buildings, whole blocks. You wouldn’t survive more than a minute there, with all the stick-ups and robberies. There are a few good places a couple of blocks from here, near the Plaza Morazán and Calle Arce. Look for the rental signs in store windows. There’s the Pensión Cuscatlán on Calle Delgado. I’ve been told it’s safe.”

  Guillermo thanks the vendor and walks up Avenida Cuscatlán, plowing through the crowds on the narrow sidewalks. Before looking for any rental signs, he decides to first check out the pensión on Delgado.

  The building, which also houses a number of jewelry stores, has two armed guards on twenty-four-hour duty. He takes the elevator, with room for just two passengers, to the top floor. It reminds Guillermo of the place he stayed in decades ago on the Paseo del Prado in Madrid.

  Pensión Cuscatlán is a modest place on the top floor. It has six rooms with private bathrooms, says the proprietor, a woman who is wider than she is tall. She barely looks at him as she escorts him down a dark hallway.

  “This is the only vacancy.”

  He’s shown a dark room with bulky antique furniture facing an inner courtyard. He presses down on the bed; the mattress seems new.

  “You get fresh sheets once a week. Friday. That’s when we clean.” He sees a large white towel on the bed. It is actually fluffy.

  The room is simple, clean. The bathroom is big, but not particularly modern, and has a broken window that lets in the hot, sour air from an airshaft. While he is looking around, the landlady goes to the window and turns on a small air conditioner that runs surprisingly quietly.

  “What’s the rent?” he asks.

  “Twelve dollars a day or sixty a week. This includes breakfast between eight and nine and electricity.”

  “I’ll take it. By the week.” He’s surprised to realize how accommodating he has become, how quickly he’s adapting to a new reality. A day earlier he wouldn’t have even stepped foot in a room like this, but now it’s about to become his home.

  “Is that all your luggage?” she asks, lifting a paw toward his backpack.

  “For now,” he answers. “Next week I’ll have the rest of my clothes shipped to me.”

  She nods as if she’s heard this story before and gives him the key. “You can pay me for the first week. I don’t allow visitors in your room.”

  “I understand,” he says, handing her sixty dollars. He asks where he can get something to eat. She suggests going to any of the sidewalk comedores lining the streets of Plaza H
ula Hula.

  “The food is good, the dishes clean. You won’t get sick. Try the sopa de res or panes de pollo.”

  * * *

  The restaurants run down the south side of Plaza Hula Hula and have tables on the sidewalk. They are so crowded on a Sunday after Mass that there’s hardly a place to sit. San Salvador is broiling. He finds a comedor that has somewhat cool air blowing out from the inside and orders the sopa de res with bolillos.

  It is a hearty soup and Guillermo is satisfied. He goes to a used bookstore on Delgado and buys a Spanish translation of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, a book he has meant to read for years. He also buys a bottle of rum at a convenience store next door.

  He goes back to his room, starts reading, and falls asleep by eight o’clock. He sleeps twelve hours without waking up, but he has many disturbing dreams. In one he is visiting a zoo and all the animals are running free, trying to claw him.

  He has eggs, red beans, and a cheese pupusa for breakfast. The coffee is watery, almost tasteless. Guillermo goes downstairs to look for newspapers and see how his botched suicide has played out. He heads back to the same corner kiosk where he was directed to the pensión and finds a teenage boy, perhaps the owner’s son, manning it. He buys a copy of La Prensa Gráfica. Plastered on the front page is a photograph of the dead bicyclist with a good part of his face blown off. He rolls up the paper, in a sweat, and looks for an empty bench to sit down.

  Guillermo’s left leg thumps as he begins to peruse the front-page article. He reads about an as-yet-unidentified cyclist being shot in the exclusive Zone 14. It is assumed by his dress that he lives in the neighborhood. There are interviews with some neighbors who worry that the increase of violence in the city has reached them in their oasis. The article alludes to some controversy between the police and the armed forces regarding who has the jurisdiction to do the forensic analysis and determine the cause of death and the identity of the victim. Does the municipality or the federal government have jurisdiction? Once this has been settled, the identity of the victim can be investigated. The standoff could take days.

  Guillermo smiles. The really good news is that his name does not appear anywhere in the newspaper. He assumes that Miguel Paredes’s plan to release the DVD recording has been aborted and he wonders what the facilitator might be thinking. Surely he knows that Guillermo is not the dead man on the crest of the hill, and must be wondering if the assassin botched the killing or if their plan coincided with an entirely different murder. It is a wrench in the machinery, but knowing Miguel he will figure out how to turn this to his advantage.

  This fortuitous development has given Guillermo more time to decide what he wants to do. The greater the time between the murder and the start of the investigation, the better for him to develop his new identity. He may be the only person to know that the dead man is Boris Santiago, the ringleader of the Zeta gang in Guatemala and owner of the pink McMansion at the top of the hill. Guillermo wonders why Boris’s family has not stepped forward to claim the body, but then deduces that he probably shipped them to Miami Beach long ago, or they’re hiding out in a hacienda in Zacatecas, Mexico. Whatever the reason, the longer it takes to identify the body, the better.

  Guillermo puts the paper down on his lap and lets his mind wander. Clearly there’s no rush within the cartel to file a missing-person’s report given that knowledge of Boris’s death will probably start a civil war among his lieutenants. The narco capo has to have a full staff working in his house, a chauffeur or two, half a dozen bodyguards, but maybe they have been instructed by Capo Number Two to remain silent if he were to ever go missing. Or perhaps Number Two himself is responsible for the assassination.

  In any case, criminals like to clean up their own messes with their own brand of justice. Or maybe a fake Boris was killed and the real Boris Santiago is on a secret helicopter mission, care of the Guatemalan military, to the Petén, where he can oversee another shipment of cocaine through Guatemala to the United States. It’s plausible that someone masquerading as Boris has had his face shot off while going for a bike ride. These bullet heads are always conniving and scheming, and they don’t want weak-kneed staff filing a missing-person’s report every time the head honcho disappears to Miami to arrange another shipment or to cavort privately with his dozen whores.

  So the reporter can only conclude that a poor fucker going out for a Sunday bike ride has been killed: a typically vicious crime in Guatebalas that will produce no guilty party for now and forever more.

  * * *

  On Tuesday morning Guillermo buys La Prensa Gráfica again and sits down on another park bench, this time across from the cathedral. The front-page headline shows the same picture from Monday, but it’s half the size as the day before. The caption reads, “Sospechado narco-traficante mexicano asesinado en frente de su casa” (“Suspected Mexican Drug Dealer Murdered in Front of His House”). Below the headline, the boldfaced type declares that the dead cyclist is, in fact, Boris Santiago, the alleged leader of the Guatemalan Zetas cartel. He was shot from less than twenty feet with five or six bullets from a Beretta 92, blowing the features off his face. The article speculates that Santiago has been killed by a rival gang rather than by unhappy members of his own mob. The reporter goes on to posit that Santiago may have been killed by a secret paramilitary force within the Guatemalan army fed up with the Mexican domination of the drug trade.

  There’s a second, shorter article on the bottom of the front page. It states that the Guatemalan military has been tasked by the president with carrying out the investigation and reporting its findings to him and the Congress. An anonymous congressman claims that an elite squad within the army might be behind the assassination—Israeli Mossad style—but wouldn’t claim credit for the killing in a hundred years. “Everyone is free to speculate,” says the congressman, who refuses to give his name, knowing that Boris’s killer will never face justice and he himself could be killed for his speculation. “We may never know what happened. After all, 97 percent of the murders in Guatemala go unsolved.”

  Guillermo sits back against the park bench. He’s surprised that his planned suicide has brought about such unexpected results. There’s no mention of him anywhere in the newspaper, certainly nothing about the release of the DVD. He realizes that Miguel will not release the recording now that Boris has been murdered and Guillermo has gone missing. For all he knows, Miguel might be thinking he has been kidnapped by the same assassin who killed the drug dealer, or that he had a bout of nerves and simply decided not to go through with it. Unless he resurfaces or is discovered, Miguel will most likely say nothing publicly, and will put all his resources into finding him.

  Guillermo has to lay low to escape detection. For the first time in weeks, he feels true relief—the sensation that he is not required to do anything for anyone. He’s not despondent, he is not angry, he’s no longer consumed by the deaths of Ibrahim and Maryam. The rage has turned into a loss that is quiet, private, and constant—one that is part of him and colors his changing view of the world. He feels fortunate to have been given the opportunity to vanish into thin air. The only regret he feels is over his children and what they might think when they fail to hear from him, and eventually get the news that he cannot be found, or is presumed dead.

  * * *

  For the next three mornings Guillermo follows the same ritual of eating breakfast in the pensión at eight thirty and then going down to a park bench to read La Prensa Gráfica. He turns the pages each day expecting some new revelation about Boris Santiago’s murder. Each succeeding edition of the newspaper has an article about the murder, shorter than the last, full of conjectures about who might have wanted the drug kingpin dead. And then on Friday there appears a larger “weekend” article claiming that an autopsy has shown the dealer was killed by the second shot to the face, and that fingerprints and dental records have certified the victim’s identity beyond a doubt. As he is about to close the paper, he finds on the next-to-last page, in a section
of Central American news briefs, a headline that mentions his name. His hands start shaking as he reads, “Guillermo Rosensweig, Guatemalan Lawyer, Missing.”

  Guillermo reads on. Braulio Perdomo, his bodyguard and chauffeur, has reported him “disappeared” going on the third day, when in fact he has been gone now for five. This report is confirmed by his secretary Luisa Ortega, though Guillermo had furloughed her two weeks ago. The article says that his ex-wife Rosa Esther has no comment about his disappearance, but is concerned for his safety. The unnamed reporter claims there’s no evidence of foul play because no ransom note has appeared. Perdomo testified that his boss was not depressed, so the police won’t presume that he disappeared on his own. Miguel Paredes, a friend, contradicts the chauffeur—Miguel’s own employee—by claiming that Rosensweig was still despondent over the brutal deaths of his client Ibrahim Khalil and his daughter Maryam Mounier outside Khalil’s factory near Calzada Roosevelt the month before. The reporter mentions that the lawyer’s valid passport was in his top drawer, implying he hasn’t run away. The article ends with a police request that if anyone has any information regarding Guillermo Rosensweig’s whereabouts, to please contact them immediately.

  Guillermo stares out across the square to the cathedral. The morning sun is hot, making his face sweat. He is surprised by these developments, the fact that no one wants to presume anything. It’s odd that no one has noticed that the missing lawyer and dead drug dealer live in the same community, blocks apart. The fact that both disappearances happened at about the same time has not been mentioned. He wonders if he should call Rosa Esther and tell her that he’s alive to calm the children, but he immediately nixes the idea: the less she knows, the better for him. Her telephone might be tapped. He also cannot rely on her silence, and he needs time to plan his next move, whatever it might be.