The Mastermind

by David Unger

  “Excuse me, Mr. Lewis, but I don’t think you can compare Hitler—”

  Lewis cut him off. “It’s not an easy problem to solve. The natives have nothing, or next to nothing, and the Reds offer them the sky. But the wise ones know darn well they either work for us at our wages or they starve—and you know what, Berkow? They’re right! Sure, we can try to help out—a school here, a hospital there—but what good will it do them? Most people only think with their stomachs or their peckers, and a couple of blows to the head help them understand.” He paused for a second. “I’ve shocked you, Sammy boy. Maybe you’ve got more liberal ideas?”

  Before Samuel could answer, Lewis scanned the dining room and brought his face closer. “When I came down here, I was like you. Keep a man’s belly full, his house stocked, give him an even break, and most likely he’ll turn out good. That lasted about a day. Things are different down here—it’s a completely different ball game. I’ve studied the situation. Got it down to a science. I’ve come to believe that a little ache in the belly helps a man work best—a little tug in the guts makes him beg for the next meal. Here, there are no free rides. You have to make sure that your enemy has no idea what you’re planning next.”

  Lewis snagged a piece of cold fish from Samuel’s plate. He held it in front of his nose and shook it like a lure. “Just this,” he began with a whisper, “just this, and a man will actually kill for you.” He held the dripping chunk for another second before gulping it down.

  Samuel shifted in his seat. The world this man was describing seemed like a nightmare. He should’ve stayed in Panama, gotten used to the terrain and the customs, he thought. Better yet, maybe he should have stayed in Europe, rigged his way on a boat to London or Amsterdam. “Life’s very different here,” he said, not so sure of his own words. “I see that, Mr. Lewis—Alf. I appreciate your advice.”

  “That’s nothing but the voice of experience. It takes time to adjust to the way things are done here. But I can tell you, Berkow, that the faster you do, the less trouble you’ll have later on. You’ve got to roll with the punches. You know: when in Rome, do as the Romans. If you don’t mind me saying, take off that coat for starters. Put on something a bit more casual. Dressed like that, you’re begging to be clipped by some scum.”

  Lewis stretched back against the wall and yawned. “I’m damned tired. Some booze?”

  “I’ll take a cup of coffee, if you have it,” Samuel replied, taking off his tie and putting it on his lap.

  Lewis winked at him. “That’s much better, Sammy.” He rang the bell on the table and the servant who had brought them the stew reappeared.

  “Lincoln Douglas, a coffee for the gentleman, you hear?” he said to the boy in Spanish.

  “Sí, señor,” the boy answered, turning to leave.

  “Hey, not so fast!”

  The boy bunched his shoulders.

  “How many times do I have to tell you not to overcook the fish?”

  “Pero, Señor Lewis—”

  “Shut up!” Lewis growled. “How I hate your damn whining. How long did you cook it?”

  “Like you say. Twenty minutes.”

  “Well, the fish was rubbery and the broth had no taste.”

  The boy sputtered a few apologies, but Lewis turned his head away. He pushed the plates to the edge of the table—the boy had to hurry to keep them from falling on the floor—and then waved a hand in the air as if shooing flies. “Take these away, now!”

  The boy stacked the plates without raising his eyes. As soon as he was beyond earshot, Lewis smiled triumphantly. “I’m getting so good at this.” He pulled out a fat stump of a cigar and matches from a drawer in the table. “Say, you want some bourbon? Got a case of Kentucky last week.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Suit yourself.” Lewis fumbled trying to get a stick out of the matchbox. He lit his cigar and took three quick puffs. He then bent down and pulled a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a glass out of the cabinet behind him. He poured himself a large drink and smiled happily.

  Samuel felt he was coming down with malaria or cholera or some other such disease. He felt alternately hot and cold. As he began standing up, he felt weak-kneed. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to turn in—”

  Lewis’s beefy arm stopped Samuel. He started humming “Camptown Races” and shook his hand with the cigar as he sang, “Doodah, doodah.” After each puff, he would pour himself another glass. But after four shots of bourbon, his tongue—tired of galloping—paused.

  “You know, Berkow, sometimes I miss home. Pittsburgh. Even those stinking, belching smokestacks. I think of going back, getting resettled. The comfy life—a nice wife to keep me warm, the coffee-and-slippers routine. There are days I wouldn’t mind it at all … Did you ever marry, Sammy?”

  “Yes, many years ago,” Samuel answered. And just then he saw Lena in his mind’s eye, putting on a chinchilla coat over her beaded dress with the low back. It was her favorite party dress.

  “Didn’t last long, eh?”

  “No,” Samuel confessed. The wound was still raw.

  “Figured as much. I was also married,” he slurred.

  “Were you?”

  “Bet you don’t believe it.”

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Yep. Lasted nearly ten years. No children, though we often talked about it, Esther and me. A train at a railroad crossing … hit her. Wham-o!”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Samuel said with real feeling. “It must have been a terrible blow to you.”

  Long seconds ticked by. Lewis had his eyes closed and nodded. Samuel’s nose itched, but he refused to scratch it. Dishes clattered in the kitchen. He wished he were anyplace but here.

  When Lewis reopened his eyes, they swam in their sockets, without life preservers. “You believe everything I say, don’t you, Berkow?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You can’t believe everything you hear,” Lewis sang out, raising his glass to the air. “Well, it’s all a goddamn lie, this horseshit about the railroad crossing. I never get around to telling the truth. But you, Berkow, I feel I can trust.”

  “Thank you.” Samuel sensed that Lewis was toying with him.

  “Don’t thank me, Sammy. It’s just that now I know things about you—and this kind of has you in my pocket.”

  Samuel didn’t know what to say. He wondered what Lewis meant. The part about being Jewish?

  Lewis went on talking. “You see, buddy, back in Pittsburgh I worked in a foundry casting railroad ties. Hard and dangerous work, and hotter than hell, I can tell you that. Well, one of these chain slings was carrying a steel tie when all of a sudden the tie slipped and landed across my chest. I had a concussion, broke seven ribs and had second-degree burns across my titties. It’s a miracle I wasn’t crushed—six weeks in the hospital, but I survived. Esther and my best friend Red visited me most every night. I’d say that they brought me back to life. I was grateful to them. But by the end of my stay, I felt something strange was going on. There was too much staring between them, and then this knowing kind of look like they had just gotten discovered with their hands stuck in the cookie jar …”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “They had been screwing around behind my back!” Lewis roared, shaking his glass in Samuel’s face. “Do you understand that, my little Kraut?” Before Samuel could say a word, Lewis had resumed his account. “Well, the day I was to leave the hospital, they were supposed to pick me up together and drive me home. I still needed a wheelchair and Red offered to carry me to the car. I was waiting in my room, clean, dressed, and shaven, but the bastards never came.”

  “They left you?”

  “You can imagine how I felt. Sometimes a man’s got to forget certain things, but I couldn’t do it. I can’t do it. I keep hearing their voices bolstering me up, encouraging me to walk around with the crutches—it just gnaws on me. So the hospital drove me to my empty house, and I had to put up with all these smiling neighb
ors helping me—they all knew what had happened. They dressed my wounds, did the shopping, cooked for me as if they were the Lord’s apostles … Is this boring you, Berkow? If it is, I’ll just shut my trap!”

  “No, please go on.” Perhaps a show of sympathy was all he wanted.

  Lewis’s face was beet red. He grabbed the bourbon by the neck and stuck the bottle into his throat. “I swore if I ever saw hide or hair of either of them, I’d kill ’em. Pow, pow, pow, right between their fucking lying eyes …”

  “A couple of years passed and I never saw them again.” Lewis raised his shoulders with a sign of indifference. “I heard nothing. Or rather I heard nothing that was louder than something … But then one day, they got cocky and sent a Christmas card to one of my neighbors. The postmark said they were living in Canton, Ohio, the stupid fucks. So I checked out the tax rolls and street directories and phone books, and I found the address of the place where they lived—with a baby girl. That January, I took a leisurely drive across state lines. I parked outside their perfect little home and waited. I waited a long time, till one morning when Red came out of the house, I just blew a ton of lead into him. Must’ve been three or four shots. Kapow, kapow, kapow, kapow!

  “Esther knew who had done it, but she wasn’t about to say anything to the cops. Red was a bootlegger and a numbers man on the side, and that’s where the coppers’ investigation stopped. I’m not ashamed of what I did, Berkow, I would do it again. No shame what-so-ever!”

  “So they never suspected you?”

  Lewis chuckled. “Did you think I’d just stay there and wait for them to come looking for me? Hell no, I got the hell out of there, made it all the way down to Honduras before I stopped for breath … I don’t know why I’m telling you this, Berkow. Maybe because you’re a Jewish Kraut and you don’t know who the fuck you are and you’re scared as all get out to be here. You wouldn’t breathe a fucking word of this to anyone, would you?”

  Samuel shook his head.

  “There you go,” Lewis said, folding his arms on the table and squeezing his eyes. “Sometimes I think of their little girl who had nothing to do with this betrayal, but then I see Esther. I can’t say I still loved her back then, but the bitch really deserved it. Do you still love your wife, Berkow?”

  Samuel grew rigid. “I often think of her—if that’s what you mean.”

  “But do you still love her? I mean after all these years?”

  “Maybe I do.” There was so much he still couldn’t admit to himself about Lena.

  “Yep,” Lewis nodded, “that’s what makes it worse.”

  End of Excerpt

  More about

  The Price of Escape

  by David Unger

  Three days in the life of Samuel Berkow, a German Jew escaping Nazi Germany by boat to Guatemala in 1938.

  “Evoking both Kafka and Conrad, Unger’s character study of a broken man in a culture broken by a ravenous corporation makes compelling reading.” —Booklist

  “Unger does a great job with fish-out-of-water situations, as [protagonist] Samuel’s travails—sometimes Kafkaesque, sometimes Laurel and Hardy—nicely pit his timidity against his growing desperation.” —Publishers Weekly

  “David Unger’s tale utterly seduces with its mix of the exotic and the familiar.” —Toronto Star

  “Unger’s rendering of human contradiction is masterful, for in the space of Samuel’s four days of awe, Unger reveals life’s slippery terms of engagement in all their complexity with a clarity that still contains compassion . . . We can be grateful for the message of this wondrous book: despite our fears, even the least heroic among us can find the will to go forward.” —Literature and Arts of the Americas

  “David Unger spins a fascinating tale of weird redemption in The Price of Escape, leading us on a tense journey from 1938 Nazi Germany all the way to Guatemala. The sinister United Fruit Company casts a giant shadow over this vividly rendered landscape, devouring everyone and everything in its path. Unger has created a compelling protagonist in the flawed and anguished Samuel Berkow, a man on the run from his own demons and the terrible forces of history.” —Jessica Hagedorn, author of Dream Jungle

  “The Price of Escape is a supremely well-crafted emotional and historical tale of a lonely Jewish man’s flight from Nazi Germany to Guatemala, a supposed tropical paradise that is also cursed, and where he must carve out a new life.” —Francisco Goldman, author of The Art of Political Murder

  “The Price of Escape is a fresh, provocative, and deeply moving historical novel that explores the fate of a young Jewish man who narrowly escapes Nazi Germany, only to find himself ensnared in the squalid underbelly of a Guatemalan port town. In the unusually compelling character of Samuel Berkow, author David Unger has authentically captured the profound sense of displacement—physical, emotional and spiritual—that all of the dispossessed must face.” —T Cooper, author of Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes and The Beaufort Diaries

  The Price of Escape depicts three days in the life of Samuel Berkow, a German Jew who leaves Nazi Germany by boat in 1938 to Guatemala where his cousin Heinrich awaits his arrival. As the tramp steamer approaches Puerto Barrios, Samuel is full of hope that he will be able to remake his life in the New World. But having spent the better part of the last fifteen years recovering from his injuries in the Great War, navigating between mismatched parents and pining for Lena, the wife who abandoned him, he is ill-equipped to grapple with the malicious, often sadistic, characters that inhabit a hot, seedy port town. From the moment he gets off the boat, Samuel falls victim to them. It’s only when he commits an act he never thought he was capable of that he starts the slow journey to become the man he needs to be.

  Part character study and part riveting narrative, The Price of Escape is its own mix of Kafka, Conrad, and Celine, as Samuel stumbles to get his footing in a hostile setting. But to do that, he must contend with Alfred Lewis, the coarse and unpredictable manager of the United Fruit Company; flying snakes, pet iguanas, and frogs whose saliva causes blindness; the cruel dwarf Mr. Price, whose sole purpose in life seems to be to mock Samuel; and the host of depraved creatures—petty thieves, liars, prostitutes, defrocked priests and anti-Semites—scheming to destroy him.

  The Price of Escape rushes to its dramatic climax when a crime is committed in a Chinese restaurant and readers are left unsure if Samuel will prevail.

  Guatemalan novelist DAVID UNGER was awarded his country’s Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature in 2014, despite writing exclusively in English. He is the author of the novels The Price of Escape and Life in the Damn Tropics. His short stories and essays have appeared in Words Without Borders, Guernica, KGBBarLit, and Playboy Mexico. He has translated fourteen books from Spanish into English. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  The Price of Escape is available in paperback from our website and in bookstores everywhere. The e-book edition is available wherever e-books are sold.

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  Land of Eternal Spring

  I decided to write The Mastermind for two reasons: 1) After publishing four novels treating different aspects of Guatemala’s history, I wanted to write a book that dealt with Guatemala’s contemporary reality; and 2) I was intrigued by the internationally reported 2009 Rosenberg case in which a lawyer makes a recording accusing Guatemala’s president of engineering his murder (see David Grann’s New Yorker story about it), though I was extremely dissatisfied by the popular notion that this event proved that “life is stranger than fiction.”

  To a large extent, Guatemala is a clear example of a failed state. Murder, corruption, femicide, rape, and gang warfare are so rampant that many citizens have lost hope; this in a country with spectacular volcanoes, colonial cities, and first-rate Mayan ruins visited and enjoyed by nearly two million tourists a year. How can these two realities coexist? Is there such a thing as distinct parallel universes?

  The Mastermind is both the love story of Guillermo Rosensweig and Ma
ryam Khalil and an exploration of corruption and impunity in Guatemala. My intention was not to write a captivating thriller, but to reveal the inner mechanism of the corruption that can and does exist in Guatemala and in which there are various, morphing puppet-masters. I wanted readers to identify with the protagonists, but at the same time offer them varied readings and interpretations of what appeared to be happening. But most of all, I wanted to write a good, solid story incorporating unexpected twists, leaving readers more informed about themselves and the social and cultural complexity of a country not that different in many ways from the United States.

  —David Unger

  All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Certain liberties have been taken regarding historical events and characters for the sake of the narrative. All other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination.

  Cover design: Jorge Garnica/La Geometría Secreta, used by permission from Editorial Planeta Mexicana. Cover photo: Stock.Xchng

  Published by Akashic Books

  ©2014 by Salar Abdoh

  Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-61775-442-5

  eISBN-13: 978-1-61775-455-5

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015954058

  First printing

  Akashic Books

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  Website: www.akashicbooks.com

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