The Mastermind

by David Unger

  On one Sunday, Guillermo smiles and shakes his head when he reads that the president has named his old buddy Miguel Paredes a special advisor on economic affairs. He has also been tapped to replace Ibrahim Khalil as the president’s envoy on the Banurbano board. This turn of events makes Guillermo laugh aloud—what a skillful chameleon Miguel is.

  He wonders if he had been Paredes’s pawn all along. Now the facilitator can freely funnel money to pet projects where his participation is hidden by governmental sanction and layers of deceit. Was his intention to force the resignation of the president only a ruse?

  Prensa Libre shows Miguel Paredes and the president holding hands in the air like best friends, astronauts launched together into space, survivors of a rocket explosion after having parachuted successfully back to earth. Has Miguel replaced the First Lady as the presidential confidante now that she is divorcing him?

  All this teaches Guillermo that he has made many serious mistakes. His love life has been an utter disaster. There were mistakes of judgment he has to own up to: he was dismissive of his father and his father’s hope to have him take over La Candelaria; he was jealous of those classmates who had the means to go to colleges abroad; he was duplicitous with both his wife and his children; he was obsessed with finding a cursed, manipulative hand behind everything he did not fully comprehend. His understanding of evil has been simpleminded, and he has never seen the whole picture of anything, choosing to totter from crisis to crisis or success to success without ever considering his actions, not even his own sexual desires.

  Guatemala is a hopeless disaster, a country sinking deeper and deeper into its own lies and denials. The newspapers are reporting it day after day. With thousands of citizens involved in the drug trade, Guatemala has become a bazaar of graft and payoffs, piled as high as a basket of dates. His expressions of outrage and his tendency to mistrust all governmental agencies failed to change anything. He had come to believe that even loyal friends, excepting Ibrahim, were involved in plots to destroy the country he loved.

  Now he knows that his own bile, his unwillingness to believe or trust in colleagues, has also contributed to his country’s malaise. Like Candide, Guillermo believes he should “cultivate his own garden” in this life. This would be the best of all possible worlds, since so many powers-that-be work day and night to control how things develop. He is no match for them. No honest people are a match for them.

  Living in San Salvador, he is learning that he can simply apply his skills to advise and counsel others without investing his own ego in anything. He can apply his own capabilities and draw pleasure in his own accomplishments, like helping an entrepreneur open a legitimate business. There is no need to act courageously, to see himself as purer than others, to feel outrage when things don’t go his way. He wants to live and to let live instead of trying to create a world in his own image.

  And the odd thing is that years earlier the mere thought of being in El Salvador would have made him feel imprisoned, since his freedom of movement would have been restricted. Instead he feels freer in exile than he ever did in his life of relative freedom in Guatemala. This gives Guillermo a kind of peace of mind that he hasn’t experienced since he lived across the street from the Symposium restaurant in New York. He is now controlled by the simple desire to do what he knows he has to do: work, listen, and advise. And endure his present condition with something like gratitude.

  The fact that he has given up drinking, except for the occasional Suprema, has helped clear his mind for the first time in twenty years. The clouds have dissipated and he can finally see the occasional ray of sunlight.

  And there is something else: he actually likes San Salvador, even more than Guatemala City. It hurts him to say it but it’s true. While Guatemala prides itself on being the beautiful queen of Central America, its smugness is a bit dated, like that of an English dowager. While many Guatemalans will admit that civil society has temporarily gone awry in their homeland, they will also say it’s a gorgeous place and that it’s only a matter of time before their country assumes its rightful place as a Latin American leader.

  El Salvador, on the other hand, is a crazy, chaotic country, much too violent and polluted to have any such pretensions. Santana wrote a song called “Blues for Salvador” in 1987. It is a tragic, five-minute electric-guitar riff with absolutely no lyrics. The country lacks Guatemala City’s broad boulevards and faux French look, and its glorious, eternal-spring climate. But its citizens are humble, and real. Everyone is trying to survive the best they can with no airs of entitlement. Salvadorans are open, humorous, self-deprecating. The civil war they have endured has affected them each personally, with bombardments, killings in their own backyards, the horrific raining down of bombs and explosives, the extensive loss of life. No one has survived unscathed.

  In Guatemala City, the armed conflict was abstract because it mostly took place in a countryside only the Indians thought to inhabit. Here in San Salvador, the craterous wounds of the conflict are visible and palpable, and this makes the citizens more honest, unwilling to hide behind any sort of delusion or distortion.

  And then there is the weather, the torrid heat, which makes everyone respond fairly directly, not like in Guatemala, where reality is hidden under sweaters, jackets, or layers of cloth. The lava-like heat in San Salvador strikes everything: Guillermo swears that the walls sweat as much as the plants.

  There is a plain, if brutal honesty in El Salvador which Guillermo never encountered in his homeland.

  And so his life is not the life he imagined, but for the first time in a while, he can call this life his own. It is a prescribed picture—office, furnished apartment, mercado, whorehouse, library, greasy comedores, café de olla, and pupusas.

  How long it will last is anybody’s guess.

  chapter twenty-nine

  switching horses midstream

  Miguel Paredes had been eating a croissant and sipping a cappuccino at the Café Barista just below his Fontabella shop when he got a call around nine in the morning announcing, “Goal.” It was as simple as that, and it told Miguel that the mission was accomplished and Guillermo was dead. For the moment there was nothing to do but wait and let the wheels of the press do their work. There would be plenty of time to plan his response to the murder and figure out the right moment to release the tape incriminating the president. He could hardly wait to see the owl-faced leader’s reaction.

  To Miguel, life in Guatemala had become a comedy erroneously portrayed as tragedy. He knew there was no such thing as a perfect crime, but he had been riding on a string of successes that implied that if he applied total vigilance, much could be accomplished. Befriending Guillermo at the funeral had been a brilliant move, allowing him to exploit the man’s vulnerability. Miguel knew that injustice alone would not have been enough to convince Guillermo to join him on his quest. The shock brought on by the deaths of Maryam and Ibrahim, the specter of Samir’s potential role in the murder, and Guillermo’s implacable weakness created the ideal situation to pull off his plan. All the pieces seemed to fit together, and he was right where he needed to be. The only thing required of him was the demonstration of sufficient amounts of sympathy, guile, and money to ensure victory.

  The revelation that something had gone awry in his master plan came while he was in his office at Raoul’s trying to plot the exact moment to release Guillermo’s recording. One of his orejas at the national police texted that things at the murder scene didn’t quite add up: the dead man was shorter and stockier than Rosensweig, and he had a buzz cut, not patches of wavy black hair.

  Miguel immediately called Braulio Perdomo to see where things had been left with his charge. Everything seemed copasetic to Braulio, with no inkling that Guillermo was going to pull out of the scheme at the last minute.

  “Do you want me to go check out Guillermo’s apartment? I have the keys and no one would be suspicious. I could just go there quickly and sniff around.”

  Miguel liked the idea. Maybe
he would find Guillermo there, sprawled out on the living room floor in another of his alcoholic extravaganzas.

  By noon Braulio had reported back. Nothing seemed suspicious or out of place: the apartment reeked of alcohol; there was half-eaten food on a plate on the kitchen counter; Guillermo’s bicycle was gone. Braulio found the man’s passport in the officer drawer and noted that his car was still in the garage, the engine cold.

  But something was not right. By one o’clock Miguel heard from a contact at the morgue that the dead man had a huge tattoo of an apocalyptical horse galloping on his hairless back. With no forensic evidence, the coroner wouldn’t say who the dead man was—he needed to take DNA samples and send them to Miami. He would only say that the victim had been shot by a high-caliber pistol at a short range and had died immediately.

  Miguel had never seen Guillermo without a shirt, but he doubted he would have a tattoo like that. Miguel grew troubled: he had been too complacent, too confident. He contacted his plants at Aurora Airport and asked them to make inquiries into the departure of Guillermo Rosensweig or someone fitting his physical description. He had underestimated Guillermo’s guile, and now suspected he had purchased a fake passport and would try to escape.

  Miguel contacted his orejas at the central bus station, but no one reported seeing a man fitting Guillermo’s description. He had some of his men make discreet enquiries in the downtown hotels and those in Zone 9 and 10, in case Guillermo had decided to hole up for a few days. By sundown Sunday, no one had seen hide or hair of Guillermo.

  He had vanished into thin air.

  On Monday morning, he had Braulio contact Guillermo’s secretary and discovered that he had furloughed her several weeks back. She mentioned that she still had keys to his office and as far as she knew, Guillermo hadn’t moved his files out yet. Did he want her to check it out?

  Braulio thought on his feet and said. “No, no. I must have misunderstood when he asked me to pick him up early this morning. I’m sure he’s okay. Wait for further instructions.”

  When it was revealed that the drug lord Boris Santiago was the murder victim, and when it also become known that Guillermo was missing, Miguel was surprised that no one suspected any connection between them. Oddly, Boris’s family made no effort to claim his body, and though Guillermo had vanished, neither his wife nor his children seemed very concerned.

  Miguel realized he had to move fast on two fronts if his master plan were to succeed: first he had to patch things up with the president, and second, scour the earth for traces of Guillermo. The former he would deal with personally, with all the finesse and force he could muster, and the latter would be handled by his henchmen.

  Through intermediaries, Miguel let the president know that he was tired of opposing his government and would be willing to join his economic team and take Ibrahim Khalil’s place on the Banurbano board. He would do so with the utmost respect for the presidency and with the sole interest of serving with honesty, discretion, and loyalty. Miguel, the inventor of actionable intelligence, had had a long career in government serving as advisor to many of the military officers who found themselves promoted to the presidency.

  The president agreed instantly, happy to have one less adversary throwing darts at him and his wife.

  * * *

  With his appointment to the president’s administration behind him, Miguel can turn his focus to finding and killing Guillermo. But no one knows where he’s gone. He sends Braulio to San Salvador and Edgar Rocio to Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula in Honduras, but after a week of investigating, they both return with no leads, no sightings. He fans immigration agents across all the land crossings in and out of Guatemala with pictures of Guillermo and a 10,000-quetzales bounty for information leading to his whereabouts.

  A month passes with not even one piece of credible evidence or actionable information to go on. Miguel is frustrated that this time he cannot find the needle in the haystack, which has never been a problem for him before. He realizes that Guillermo could be anywhere—on an island in the Caribbean, in Mexico City, in Miami, or even in New York or San Francisco. A family man, a lawyer of Guillermo’s standing and stature, doesn’t just disappear, especially after living in Guatemala for the better part of his nearly fifty years, but that’s exactly what has happened.

  Miguel Paredes decides he needs to rely on his patience and sit tight: at some point Guillermo Rosensweig will attempt to come back into the country, out of nostalgia or necessity, and that’s when he will be nabbed.

  And eliminated.

  chapter thirty

  freedom’s just another word

  Maryam and Ibrahim had been killed on May 5 and Guillermo had plotted his own death several weeks later, in early June. In December, before the arrival of Christmas, Guillermo begins feeling despondent again, and lonely. He remembers the jovial Noche Buena dinners; the kids getting up early on Christmas Day to open their gifts as if the Rosensweig family were living in the United States; the numerous vacations they would take—always from the twenty-eighth of December to the seventh of January—somewhere in the Guatemalan Highlands. There were trips to Antigua and Panajachel, but also journeys up the Rio Dulce to the Castillo de San Felipe and Lago de Izabal, and beach trips to Likín, in which Guillermo actually recovered his role as the head of a lovely family. It didn’t matter that their bonds would dissipate after two days back in Guatemala City, the laughter of the kids and the distraction of booze made lovers of Guillermo and Rosa Esther, albeit in a somewhat forced and dyspeptic manner.

  One day, nostalgia for his homeland consumes him. He recognizes the immense risk crossing borders implies, but he can’t help himself. He needs to feel the Guatemalan earth beneath his feet.

  He wants to go to Valle Nuevo because it would allow him to test out his fake passport for a second time. But there is another reason: Valle Nuevo has a bank and a post office, which will allow him to send Rosa Esther a bank check for four thousand quetzales along with a letter revealing he is still alive. He owes his wife and children that at least, even though he is taking a big risk, given Miguel’s long reach.

  The following day he takes a bus from the Radisson along with twenty other passengers. At the border crossing, the Guatemalan immigration officer barely looks at his passport because he is clearly a member of the upper class and scrutiny is saved for Salvadorans trying to make their way north to the US. On a first-class bus no one would fit that bill. The agents must be so accustomed to having dozens of illegals crossing through the brush that Guillermo does not look the least bit suspicious.

  He spends the night at Las Palmeras, a hideous two-story motel on the Guatemalan side of the border that is no better than a truck stop. The noise in the lobby is overwhelming: tinny ranchera music, loud talking, and the sputtering of drunks from the bar. He asks for a quiet place in back, and as soon as he enters his room of fluorescent lights and chipped furniture he realizes he is ravenous. He is sick of eating pupusas and goes to the motel restaurant where he orders corn and potato tamales with chipilín. He hasn’t eaten real Guatemalan food for months.

  After dinner he goes back to his room to compose a letter in which he tells his wife and children that he is, in fact, alive. For reasons of security, he cannot reveal where he is living and begs them not to share the contents of this letter with anyone should it by chance awaken the interest of his enemies and jeopardize his survival and their security. He tells them how much he loves them and how sorry he is for all the damage he’s caused them. He acknowledges that he has been a poor father, someone who has abdicated all his parental and conjugal responsibilities to pursue his own wayward agenda. And he apologizes for having vanished as he did, in such an abrupt fashion, but explains that he’s not at liberty to tell them what transpired and why he felt it necessary to disappear.

  He wipes away tears as he writes.

  He has no idea whether his children harbor any strong feelings for him anymore, but he promises that one day he will try to earn back their
love, if not their respect. In time, he writes, he will make things right, though he knows he has made this promise before. He has no idea how they are surviving financially, but he begs Rosa Esther not to attempt to claim his money and properties because it might awaken suspicion. He hopes the four thousand will be of some help. He honestly doesn’t know if, with the passage of time, he’ll be able to reclaim his property. He reiterates how much he loves the children and how sorry he is for the mess he’s made.

  As steeped as he is in loneliness, he cannot see that his words of reconciliation are just another illusion. Even so, he avoids claiming he is an altogether different man, and writes that he has learned something from his mistakes, blah blah blah.

  It is sizzling in his room. He puts on the poor excuse for an air conditioner. It rattles like a car about to explode.

  Guillermo collapses onto his bed and falls immediately to sleep on the shitty straw mattress. He wakes up a half hour later and spends the next hour tossing and turning, trying to ignore the rumble of trucks and sound of mariachi music. At one a.m. the border crossing finally closes and the noise, the loud talk, and the flashing of lights finally die down.

  At eight in the morning he eats two fried eggs, black beans with cream, plantains, and delicious blue corn tortillas at the motel restaurant. Then he walks down a noisy, dusty street to the tiny Banco de Guatemala and exchanges four thousand in cash for an official bank check. He takes the check and places it inside the envelope with the letter. At the post office next door he sends the letter special-delivery to Mexico. He knows he is taking a big chance: the letter could be lost or confiscated, the check could be stolen. Even if it weren’t cashed, it would be lost forever. But this is all he can do.