The Mastermind

by David Unger

  He’s surprised, however, by the lack of curiosity of both the police and the press. It seems to him that they accept everything as it is, at face value. Why not investigate further? There might be a connection between the murder and the disappearance, he conjectures, as if he were a detective assigned to the case. Why did it take Perdomo and Paredes so many days to report his disappearance, and why did they contradict one another?

  But then Guillermo thinks he understands: there’s nothing to be gained by connecting the two events. In truth, keeping the investigations separate will in effect contribute to a confusion ideal in preventing both crimes from being solved. Better to move on to investigate or report the next gruesome crime, since every day five to ten Guatemalans are reported missing. Vaporized. Disappeared. Departed. And every week a dozen new bodies appear, with slit throats or chests decorated with bullet holes in the shape of a clover.

  Guillermo had assumed that, because he is a lawyer—a respected member of Guatemala’s upper crust—his vanishing would awaken further scrutiny and outrage. He’s not just a pordiosero.

  And there are facts worth noting that the reporter skipped. Guillermo was recently separated, his law practice was going south, and the murders of two of his closest friends, father and daughter, remain unsolved. Wouldn’t any of those pieces of information be enough to draw interest in his absence? Maybe it all hinges on the words apparent disappearance. In Guatemala, a country of speculators and myopics, the word apparent has great significance: nothing conjectured is ever really worthy of investigation, until corpses are unearthed.

  Indeed, why would the police start a manhunt for a wealthy lawyer, a womanizer, a divorcé? For all anyone knows, Guillermo Rosensweig decided it was time for a change in his life, bought a fake passport, and is living happily in Palermo or Malta, drinking wine and sunning himself, going fishing for sea bass every couple of days, or practicing yoga in Ambergris Caye.

  * * *

  Guillermo keeps a low profile in the days that follow. He eats out in inconspicuous greasy places near his pensión, like a simple bookkeeper or unemployed accountant, with no apparent—there’s that word again—expectations that his life will ever change. He takes long walks in the mornings through the many parks in downtown San Salvador, peruses newspapers, and dips deeper into The Grapes of Wrath. Once he even walks down the crowded Salvadoran streets to the rather large Parque Cuscatlán a good kilometer away from his pensión. It is almost a forest in the city, the vegetation so thick that, though it starts raining, Guillermo stays dry under a canopy of trees. He realizes that San Salvador is really a tropical city.

  He has many observations that contradict his expectations of what living in El Salvador would be like. Despite all the reports in Guatemala about the dangers of gangs and a left-wing government incapable of maintaining law and order, Guillermo is never assaulted or even bothered. Of course, he makes sure to be back in his room every evening by eight o’clock. He finds the Salvadoran people to be open and helpful, not the beguiling traitors Guatemalans think them to be.

  Guillermo’s life starts changing in so many ways. Where before he owned dozens of expensive slacks, shirts, and sweaters, for work and pleasure, he now buys simple, functional clothes appropriate for the heat and humidity. Dacron instead of gabardine and wool, cotton in place of silk. It is tactical not to stand out in the largely working-class neighborhood where he lives, but his purchases also suggest his new preferences. He is glad to be downsizing.

  He buys light colorful guayaberas and multiple packages of Fruit of the Loom underwear and socks from vendors on Plaza Barrios. He is starting to drink less, and is losing weight—the two pairs of pants he traveled with are already too big on him. He buys three meters of light poplin and takes the material to a tailor on the second floor of a building on Avenida España to make him four pairs of pants. He purchases new brown and black shoes from the store across from his pensión. They cost twelve dollars each and are imported from Brazil.

  He wants to be totally inconspicuous: a thin middle-aged man working quietly, staying below the radar, seeking a job as an accountant or bookkeeper in a small business in downtown San Salvador. A man with no family and little ambition, pleased to be alive and enjoy his next meal. He wants to blend in and be ordinary—as common as his father Günter was.

  He knows he can change, he can learn to take pleasure from simple delights. And if he wants sex—after all, he’s a healthy man—there are plenty of whorehouses on 8 Calle Poniente where the microbuses to Comalapa Airport line up.

  Guillermo is becoming a new man, shedding old layers of being, like a lobster discards its carapace once a year. What he cannot change is his desire to understand what has happened. This much he knows: his elaborate and meticulous murder-suicide plot has been foiled by a series of coincidences.

  Had his assassin killed Boris Santiago by mistake? More unbelievably, had Miguel hired an assassin to kill both Guillermo and Santiago to at once bring down the president and take control of the Guatemalan Zetas? The murder of Santiago has led to many new killings among drug dealers according to the newspapers. Obviously there’s a struggle to see who takes control of his business.

  In the meantime, Guillermo would like to think that his old associates, clients, friends, neighbors, his ex-wife (for the sake of their children)—all the people who’d had no role in the plot but who were extensions of his own life—would want to know what happened to him. If nothing else, simply to close the chapter on his worthless life. But nothing of this appears in the press. Despite his assumptions about his own importance, Guillermo is of no more interest than the salesman who gets killed for not giving part of his salary to the local gang.

  Guillermo realizes he cannot spend the rest of his days reading books and newspapers on park benches or watching television in his air-conditioned room. He will, in time, run out of money. He needs a plan.

  He cannot return to Guatemala, now or perhaps ever. It would not be safe. His coconspirators have invested too much time and money trying to overthrow the president and his wife to simply fold their cards and say, Oh well, let the chap go.

  This is why he must assume that Miguel has assigned some of his foot soldiers to find him and have him silenced. Guillermo alive is undoubtedly a risk, especially if Miguel wants to hatch another, more successful plot against the president. Guillermo even wonders if Ibrahim Khalil’s appointment to the Banurbano board was part of the plot that Miguel Paredes had hatched to pressure the president to resign. There is no way to know now, but this possibility underscores the danger that Guillermo would be in should he decide to casually reappear.

  He knows too much. Miguel would be smart to want him dead; he has become a huge liability.

  * * *

  One evening Guillermo lies in bed assessing his options. One idea would be to go to Mexico City and try to be a good father to his children, far away from the dangers of Guatemala. He would have to be willing to truly devote his life to building some kind of relationship with them. His Columbia University degree would help him get permission to be employed in Mexico; he could even volunteer to do legal work for the Guatemalan exile community.

  But he knows this happy reunion would last for no more than a few days, and then Guillermo would begin screwing up again, out of despondency or heartache. He misses Maryam too much to assume he could turn around his life with Rosa Esther. It would be a lost cause from the start. And besides, Mexico City would be one of the first places Miguel would be looking for him.

  Thinking of Maryam, he once again thinks back to the night many months earlier when they had vowed to meet—or try to meet—on May 1 in La Libertad should they ever become separated. It is mid-June and he would have to wait nearly ten months before seeking an imagined reunion in a town named Freedom, in a country called The Savior. How ironic. Perhaps he should go there simply as a way of remembering her.

  How long, Guillermo asks himself, can he live under the radar? He could wait a couple of years and si
mply emerge in El Salvador, convincing the world that he has been living here all along, that he’s happy with his new life. He could willingly come out of the fog like Assata Shakur did in Cuba forty years ago. But even that might be too dangerous. It had been dangerous nearly sixty years earlier when members of Árbenz’s cabinet, having been granted asylum by the Mexican government, had gone happily into exile only to be beaten up by Guatemalan goons collaborating with the Mexican police. Memories are very long, especially for those who feel double-crossed.

  Payback would be Guillermo’s fate no matter how many years have passed. Miguel would make sure of that.

  So for the moment, Guillermo needs to get a job and stop languishing. After all, he’s a corporate lawyer who speaks two languages, and has a law degree from Columbia University! Even without his actual diploma with him, perhaps he could use his skills to advise others on how to legally establish new businesses. But it would be too risky to open an actual law practice in downtown San Salvador. Miguel would first sniff and then snuff him out.

  chapter twenty-eight

  pupusas and yucca frita

  After two months of staying at the pensión, Guillermo decides it’s time to find his own digs. He rents a small furnished apartment on Calle Rúben Darío across from the Parque Bolívar. The furnishings are not to his liking, but it doesn’t matter. He is far beyond caring whether his mattress is firm or not, if the sofa is covered in soft leather or naugahyde, if he has real art or framed posters on the wall.

  Another change: before he sought solace in drink; now he is committed to sobriety. He is down to the occasional beer.

  Rather than risk working for someone else, he decides to start a consulting service for individuals or small groups of investors interested in opening firms. His legal background is useful—he’s an expert on business applications, articles of incorporation, legal filings—so it should be a breeze to do lawyerly stuff but charge consultant rates.

  He rents a small 200-square-meter, air-conditioned office for three hundred dollars a month in the same building that houses the tailor shop where he had his pants made. He buys secondhand office furniture and an old desktop computer, an ink-jet printer, a scanner, and a small desk copier from the nineties.

  At a carpentry shop by the market he has a business sign made: Continental Consulting Services, Rafael Ignacio Gallardo, Proprietor. He also has five hundred business cards printed. And as another act of self-determination, he buys a cell phone under his assumed name.

  Guillermo Rosensweig is slowly ceasing to exist.

  * * *

  There are various decisions Guillermo can help entrepreneurs consider: what kind of business to open given the existing competition; deciding whether to manufacture goods, provide information services, or simply sell retail or wholesale products. Though much of his advice could be considered obvious, potential customers might not know that to establish a business, you should know the profile—age and sex—and the estimated disposable income—individual or corporate—of your potential customers. You also should extrapolate future competitive trends and whether or not you are entering a growing, shrinking, or a mature market. For example, if you are selling smart phones, the market would be growing, but anyone interested in selling sewing machines would be entering a mature market where only product innovation would lead to increased sales, and then only to a few customers.

  The financial considerations are huge: Does the entrepreneur have a financial analysis identifying the costs related to starting the business? Additional sources of financing should the new business require it? Personal or family money, bank loans (at what interest rate?), outside investors—and a projection of weekly, monthly, and yearly wages and expenses? A budget spreadsheet with the cost of raw materials, labor, rent, transportation, utilities, administration expenses (payment to the consultant!), cleaning, and unexpected maintenance expenses? Guillermo can help the potential business owner identify the price point for the successful sale of products as well as estimate profits.

  The only problematic part of the consulting business is that Guillermo cannot legally execute incorporation in El Salvador, or secure valid licenses, file proper municipal papers, etc. At some point he has to work with a local lawyer to complete the process to avoid awakening any suspicion with his fake passport. Luckily, downtown San Salvador is full of these kinds of lawyers.

  Although he is unfamiliar with the laws of El Salvador, he knows from his legal work that documents and licenses are all fairly routine in the Central American Common Market. With a computer and the Internet, he can download any required documents from the government offices.

  To publicize his consulting firm, Guillermo prints fifty flyers on colored paper and asks proprietors if he can tape them on the inside of their store windows; he also posts them on bulletin boards along Delgado Street. He drops off flyers with his former landlady and with his tailor as well. He displays them in the restaurants he frequents, on any open wall space.

  Soon enough, he begins signing up clients, most of whom decide to pay the hundred-dollar application/consulting fee since they have not done sufficient research to mount a new business on their own. These clients, rather than being resentful or frustrated by Guillermo’s probing questions, are, in fact, grateful to him for his thoroughness and his ability to see the larger picture. In the end he will be saving them hundreds, perhaps thousands of dollars in setting up businesses that otherwise would have been bound to fail.

  What Guillermo has to offer is experience and an agile mind.

  * * *

  He throws himself into his work like never before. It’s as if he has been given a second chance in San Salvador, and like a carpenter working with his hands, he finds his job immensely satisfying. He enjoys problem-solving and motivating his clients by the promise of success. He discovers he has the skill to empower them. And most of all, he is surprised by how little he misses his old life, with the exception of Maryam.

  He attempts to make up for his loneliness by going to whorehouses. One in particular, La Providencia, he finds under escort service listings in La Prensa Gráfica. It’s more high-end than those near the marketplace and the cathedral, but in the end he only feels temporarily relieved.

  There are days when, while listening to Liszt or Debussy or Delibes on a cheap CD player in his apartment, he feels a lump in his throat. The music saps him at the same time that it humanizes him. He listens to Bill Evans’s “Peace Piece” and Cole Porter’s “So in Love.” He feels that Maryam is with him: I’m yours till I die. He allows himself to imagine that she got away, like him. Maybe she escaped from the carnage realizing that to survive she had to disappear. These thoughts are not the ravings of the Guillermo in Guatemala City. His thinking is clear; this could be possible.

  There was no forensic evidence of her death—just a mound of white powder that found its way to an urn in the wall of the church at the Verbena Cemetery. Of course, there was no proof of Ibrahim’s death either, yet he knows that the textile factory owner is dead. It is more of a sixth sense about Maryam—there’s a small chance she is still alive. He remembers the anonymous card he received several months back—could it have been from her?

  Maryam was so beautiful that he could imagine a kidnapper or would-be assassin deciding like Clegg, the protagonist in The Collector, to capture her and keep her enslaved instead of killing her.

  In darker moments he imagines the explosion has disfigured her, and she has vanished knowing that Guillermo would be sickened by her appearance. Would he still love her with her face grafted over in layers of pink, curling skin? Does one love the body, the heart, or the soul, or a combination of all three?

  Why can’t she actually be alive, running some Middle Eastern restaurant in La Libertad? There wouldn’t have been any way for her to contact him during the weeks after the explosion, just to set his mind at ease. But since he too has vanished, without a trace as it were, there’d be no way for her to reach him now. He has done too good a jo
b of erasing his tracks for her to find him. He has entered the ranks of the disappeared.

  * * *

  Every weekend he goes to the Biblioteca Nacional across from the Catedral Metropolitana on Plaza Barrios and reads through all of the previous week’s daily Guatemalan newspapers—the Diario de Centro América, Siglo 21, El Períodico, Prensa Libre. He looks for any mention of either of their names. He examines each and every page, scans the ads, gossip columns, and wedding announcements as well—he believes he is now an expert in decoding hidden messages.

  Of course he finds nothing. Maryam Khalil and Guillermo Rosensweig have both been relegated to the realm of the forgotten. He never imagined his notoriety could allow him to disappear like this, so quickly, without any serious inquiry, like the thousands of massacred Guatemalan Indians dumped in unmarked graves. It sobers him.

  Unlike him, the Indians have relatives to mourn them, to seek their bones or their corpses, a vestige to bury, proof that they had lived.

  Reading the Guatemalan papers proves futile, but it does give him the opportunity to follow the political developments in his country. The president and his wife have managed to dodge all the accusations of money laundering by the dozens of Guatemalans who want to force them out. It appears the president will finish his term to keep the US from gaining leverage by manipulating a premature regime change so it can restrict the sale of weapons. In another year there will be new elections, and it looks as if the right wing will win. The president’s wife is going to divorce her husband. She is willing to sacrifice her marriage to run for the presidency.

  Oddly, Guillermo feels no animus toward the president and his wife, as if recording the tape and the bizarre events that followed have cured him of his hatred for them. He is rankled when the Catholic Church expresses its willingness to annul their marriage so she can run for the presidency. There is no more cynical act imaginable, to eliminate a sacred covenant for political expediency. (Guillermo still pays lip service to the sanctity of marriage even though he has betrayed the precepts dozens of times.) More than anger, he pities the president, who clearly does not want the divorce but is incapable of curbing his wife’s single-minded quest for power.