The Mastermind

by David Unger

  “I couldn’t live with blood on our hands.”

  “And neither could I,” Guillermo says. He knows they are simply talking loosely. There is no crime in talking about it, but he realizes he could easily contract someone to murder Samir and be done with him.

  “There’s no hope. What are we waiting for?”

  “What if you and I just eloped to some other country? I have friends in Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica who could help us get set up. And my sister is still living in San Francisco, last I heard.”

  “I couldn’t simply run away with my tail between my legs—not as long as my father is alive. It would literally break his heart if I went off.” She pauses. “And I don’t think you would want to get any farther away from your kids than you are already. Isn’t Mexico far enough away?”

  “It is.” Guillermo gets up and heads to the bathroom.

  When he comes back, Maryam has wrapped a sheet around herself and is sitting on the bed watching television. He glances at the set and sees a boy and a girl crying on the screen. “Watching a soap opera?”

  “Not a soap opera, Guillermo, real life. A woman from Vista Hermosa went shopping to Paiz in her Ford Explorer. When she returned home, she parked for a second to open the gate and a car with tinted windows drew up and two men pounced on her. This was according to the maid, who saw everything from inside the house. They shot the woman dead. The thieves killed her to kidnap her car.”

  “You can’t kidnap a car—”

  “Damn it, Guillermo, you know what I mean. They hijacked her car. She has two teenagers. There they are crying,” she says, pointing to the TV. “The family is ruined. All this over stealing a stupid car!”

  Guillermo sits down beside Maryam and hugs her tightly. All in all, this has not been a good day. Maryam is so upset over her life with Samir that she is feeling desperate, almost hopeless. And then the talk about their future further depresses her. And now this senseless killing.

  “I can’t keep doing this,” Maryam says, bursting into tears. “I won’t do it. I love you, but this is going to kill me. Kill us. We need to find a way to get away from this life—”

  “And take your father and his factory and my law firm with us?”

  “You know I don’t mean that. It’s gotten to the point where it’s no longer safe to take a bus anywhere because you’ll be assaulted, robbed, or raped. Now you can’t even go shopping in your own car without being killed. The other day my maid Lucia was crying because her thirty-year-old nephew had just been killed—sprayed with thirty-two bullets because he refused to join the gang operating in his neighborhood. He was a good boy, attending the university, crossing the street to avoid the Maras until they said to him, You are going to be one of us. He kept walking away till they isolated him below La Plaza Berlin. They filled him with bullets and left him to die. Lucia’s sister Mirta wants to kill herself. He was her only son.”

  Guillermo holds Maryam, though she tries to push him away. He refuses to loosen his grip until she finally stops resisting him.

  “I want to propose something.”

  Maryam reaches over to the night table and grabs a tissue.

  “Please listen to me.”

  She nods like an obedient puppy.

  “From now on, I want you to take your passport and a thousand dollars with you wherever you go, whether to the hairdresser, the gym, the tennis court, or to go shopping. I will do the same. I want both of us to have the documents and the money to leave this piece-of-shit country at the drop of a hat.”

  “You think we need to do this?”

  “Absolutely. We can’t just sit here waiting for our future to happen. Maryam, I don’t know what’s going to happen with Samir. I assume you think I was kidding about killing him—”

  “You better have been kidding,” she says, slapping him hard, quite hard, on the chest.

  “Okay, so it was only a stupid idea,” he says, just to calm her down. “We have to figure out our next step. I don’t want you to spend another year under the same roof with Samir. We have to figure something out,” he repeats. “But one thing I know: we have to be ready to run. Do you understand?”

  “I understand,” Maryam says, grabbing her cup of tea and drinking it down.

  “And we have our plan to meet in La Libertad.”

  “I hope to God we are just spinning our wheels.”

  “Me too. I’m an optimist, but I don’t want to be taken by surprise. We need to have an alternate plan.”

  As he says this he sees that the television station is showing a clip of the woman in Vista Hermosa as she’s gunned down. Apparently it was filmed on a phone by a teenager living across the street.

  Guillermo is scared for himself, and more than a bit scared for Maryam.

  Something has to change.

  chapter fifteen

  let’s bring the mountain to mohammed

  One late Tuesday afternoon, as Maryam is playing solitaire on the dining room table and wondering how long her stalemate with her husband will last, Samir comes home early from work. He shuffles over to her and announces that his niece Verónica Handal will be coming to visit from Tegucigalpa, Honduras that very night and will be spending a few days with them.

  “Don’t I have a say in the matter?” she says, looking up from her cards.

  “It is through my kindness that you are still living in my apartment. Someone else would have thrown you out a long time ago for your indiscretions.”

  “You don’t need to throw me out. When I leave, it will be voluntarily.”

  Samir nods at her disparagingly. He is wearing a three-piece herringbone suit with an open white shirt. “I have told you I will not be made the laughing stock of the Lebanese community. You will go when I tell you to go. In the meantime, as you have observed, you are free to come and go as you wish . . . But Verónica is my only niece and is taking care of my brother and his wife in a nursing home. My home is her home. I can invite her here whenever I want without consulting you.”

  Maryam has always disliked Verónica. She is some ten years older than her, in her early fifties, and has never married. Since both her parents developed dementia, she has acted as the world’s only true, suffering martyr for having sacrificed her happiness in order to care for them. In reality, she’s never had a life of happiness to sacrifice. She is severe in her tastes, dowdy in her dress, and enjoys criticizing anyone who has an ounce of spunk or defiance. Her features are exceedingly big: her ears, her lips, and certainly her breasts, which hang like huge, shapeless eggplants that no man would want to touch. But it is not her looks that upset Maryam as much as her lack of sincerity, and her habit of probing into everything as if picking at a scab. The two women have never gotten along, not from the moment they met at her and Samir’s engagement when, at the home of Jorge Serrano Elías—a former president of Guatemala of Lebanese descent—Verónica began criticizing her for her low bodice. Instead of reveling in the moment and feeling beautiful, Maryam spent the evening pulling up her dress to cover her breasts.

  Oddly, both women are the same height and have the same hair and eye color. But the similarities end there. Verónica has no light of her own and is a poor reflection of the light of others. If she were to die, Maryam thinks, no one on this earth would miss her. Not her ailing parents, not even Samir.

  “And how long is she staying?” Maryam is turning over three cards at a time, having lost track of her game. Four kings are already displayed and she might win.

  “Just a few nights.”

  “Has she been sent on a mission here by your brother Saleh?”

  “You mean my poor demented brother in the nursing home? Your sense of decency has escaped you.”

  Maryam is in an awful mood. Her period is two weeks late. She fears she is pregnant. And she is also having cramps that are particularly intense. Is she falling apart?

  “You have always detested your niece.”

  “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, Mar
yam. Every day your ideas become stranger and stranger. You know that Saleh and Hamsa are in the same nursing home. They hardly know each other, much less who I am. And certainly they have forgotten who you are. My niece is a godsend.”

  “So if Verónica is irreplaceable, why is she coming?”

  “I am her only remaining family. I have asked her to come to spend time with me. You might find this difficult to understand, but I am in mourning. I have suffered a death. My marriage has died.”

  Once again Maryam decides not to engage him. He is always trying to provoke her, jabbing at her as they move around the shared areas of the apartment like wary boxers in a ring. When they first married, they would often play backgammon at night, and a common tactic of Samir’s was to leave one of his chips vulnerable to see if she would abandon her strategy simply to land on one of his men. After a few losses, she learned to ignore his ploys and play her own game. And she often won.

  “I suppose you’ve told her about the trouble between us,” she comments as she continues to flip cards.

  Samir takes out the gold watch from his vest pocket and looks at the time. “There’s no trouble between us, Maryam. You’ve simply betrayed the trust of our marriage. But to answer your question: I won’t deny that I’ve told her about your affair. Why keep it a secret? She is as disgusted as I am. What else would you expect?”

  “I won’t tolerate her interference.”

  “Well then, why don’t you just mind your business and let her come to spend some peaceful time with her admired uncle?”

  Maryam almost chokes on the word admired. Samir has such an inflated image of himself, as if he were some kind of brave corsair or fighter pilot, and not the owner of a hardware store in a part of town even buzzards have abandoned. “If she feels anything for you, Samir, it must be hate. She knows that you are mean and despicable, and that you are cheap: you don’t lift a finger to help her parents even though you easily could.”

  Samir ignores the comment. “She is coming in on the TACA flight tonight. It would be nice if you were to accompany me to the airport and at least pretend that we are capable of being civil to one another.”

  “Will you grant me a divorce if I come?”

  “Not on your life.”

  “I’m sorry then, Samir, but you will have to pick her up alone.” Maryam gets up from the table and starts walking to her bedroom.

  Samir shuffles over to the table where the cards are and sees that Maryam has beaten the odds. As she exits he says to her: “It seems you’ve won at solitaire. It is a game that is appropriately titled for your situation—a woman all alone, bereft of companionship. Congratulations.”

  “Sometimes it happens,” she replies unguardedly.

  Before she closes the door, he says loud enough for her to hear, “What I wonder is if you won honestly or had to cheat.”

  * * *

  Torrential rains begin as the sun goes down. The flight is expected in at eight p.m., but will be delayed. Maryam feels a bit tired and eats a leftover chicken leg with tabouleh for dinner. Once she is sure that Samir has left for the airport, she calls Guillermo.

  She recounts her conversation with her husband. Guillermo merely listens. They talk for about twenty minutes and then Maryam cuts the call short to get ready for bed.

  At around ten thirty she hears voices. If she were polite, she would get out of bed and put on her robe to greet Verónica. But why should she? She hears them speaking loudly in Arabic, perhaps even arguing. Maryam hears him say, Ibn sharmoota. Her niece says something back, which obviously angers him—she imagines Verónica is telling Samir that Maryam was a whore from the beginning, or that he should do more to care for her parents.

  Then she hears the unmistakable sound of a slap in the face.

  Verónica screams a saying in Arabic that roughly translates, You have a penis for a nose, a common insult she has heard before. What a family, lacking a corpuscle of decency.

  * * *

  Ibrahim’s day has begun normal enough. His chauffeur dropped him off at the front door of the textile factory and then went back home to do some household chores. Ibrahim plans to spend the whole day meeting with his employees in groups: the machine operators, the foremen, the sales personnel, the cleaning staff. He wants to make sure they are all content, because in the coming year they will be challenged by the recession in the United States. Orders are also way down, thanks to the ferocious competition from Bengali and Haitian sweat shops. Ibrahim can hardly compete. All he can do is offer quality, timely service at a premium to his customer.

  * * *

  Maryam rises earlier than usual to avoid confronting both Samir’s probing eyes and her niece’s interrogation at breakfast. She eats a bowl of sliced papaya and melon with homemade yogurt standing at the small kitchen table, then goes to a nine a.m. exercise class at the World Gym on Los Próceres. After exercising, she decides to swim fifty lengths in the pool and take a quick sauna. Exercise is her way of dealing with the tensions at home.

  The swimming and the hot sauna weaken Maryam more than usual. Maybe she should have exercised less, given her condition. She drinks several glasses of water and then takes a long cold shower, hoping the change in temperature will refresh her.

  The gym isn’t far from home. She needs to go home to change before picking up her father at the factory at twelve thirty for their weekly Wednesday lunch. Ever since she admitted her affair to Samir, Maryam and her father have been going to his apartment for lunch instead of hers. She doesn’t want to risk Samir joining them, for fear he may begin hinting about her affair with Guillermo. Jokes about Maryam’s infidelity would kill her father. It’s very Lebanese to avoid awkward issues, she tells herself—better to hide and pretend to be lighthearted.

  The shower has not helped, and Maryam still feels faint from the exercise. She prays that Samir has left for work and that Verónica has gone out for a walk.

  No such luck. “You look very pale,” Verónica greets her, and plants a kiss on each of her cheeks. “Come, give me a hug. I hear you have been running around a lot. You shouldn’t put your health in jeopardy. ”

  Maryam doesn’t know how to take this. Is Verónica making a reference to her affair or is she actually concerned about her well-being? She hugs her niece a bit stiffly and says, “I’d like to lie down, but I have to go pick up my father and bring him over to his apartment for lunch.”

  “Why don’t you take it easy? I can drive him.”

  “You wouldn’t know where to go. You have no idea where the factory is or where he lives. Because he has a driver, he stopped paying attention to where he was going long ago. He doesn’t even know his way around the streets of Guatemala.”

  “Well then, just have your father’s chauffeur drive him from the factory to his apartment.”

  “I should really go.” She does not want to miss seeing her father. She insists on treating him with the same respect and deference as always, if only to prove that nothing has changed despite what Samir may have told him. She wants her father to know she will continue to dote on him, no matter what. It is a Lebanese custom to neither discuss nor feign ignorance of what both parties know. But in truth she feels too lightheaded to drive to the factory, and doesn’t know what to do.

  Verónica has read her mind. “Why don’t we go together? You can sit in the passenger seat and give me the directions. If I can drive in Tegucigalpa, with its crazy drivers and steep hills, I can certainly drive here.”

  Maryam concedes. “Let me go to the bathroom first.” Her stomach is hurting. She takes a Midol to ease the pain. It crosses her mind again that she might be pregnant. She and Guillermo have been so careless lately. He never wants to pull out, certainly not the last few times they have made love. He enjoys coming inside of her. And she enjoys it as well.

  Maryam gives Verónica the keys and they take the elevator down to the parking lot basement. She sits in the passenger seat and directs Verónica to take the turnoff to Aguilar Batres, just before th
e Roosevelt Hospital entrance.

  On the way there, Maryam suddenly realizes she needs to lie down. She asks Verónica to pull over and gets out of the front seat to lie down in the back. By this time, they are less than a kilometer from the factory.

  Because they are arriving a bit late, Ibrahim has come down from his office and is standing talking to Fulgencio, the guard, near the factory parking lot. As soon as he sees Maryam’s car, he stops the idle chatter and begins walking over to the gate to wait for the car at the lot entrance. Due to the tinted windows, he doesn’t see that Samir’s niece is driving until she rolls down the window on the passenger side.

  “Hello, uncle,” Verónica says, unlocking the car.

  “Well, this is a surprise, Verónica. I had no idea you were in Guatemala. Where’s Maryam?” he asks.

  “I’m back here, Papá, lying down. I’m not feeling very well,” she says.

  Ibrahim sticks his head through the window and blows her a kiss. Then he opens the door and sits down in the front passenger seat. He adjusts the seat to give Maryam more room in back and talks softly to Verónica so Maryam can get some rest.

  Verónica drives in a circle before pulling out of the gated lot. With little sense of direction, she turns right instead of left once she is on the street. She assumes she is going the right way, especially when she sees that there is a car following her—obviously another vehicle going back to the main highway. Ibrahim, lost in thought, doesn’t notice. Maryam is fast asleep

  Samir’s niece soon realizes she is lost but is unable to remember how she got to the factory in the first place. All of a sudden she finds herself in a fairly abandoned area near the Ciudad Universitaria, a construction site that has been partially developed and then neglected because funding ran out.

  She stops at a stop sign and the car stalls. She starts the car again and drives deeper into the construction area. Ibrahim begins mumbling directions to her, trying to get her back on the Calzada Roosevelt. But now he too is lost.