David Unger - The Mastermind

She grinds against his finger, helping him find a more pleasurable spot deep inside of her. When he feels her lips on the side of his face, he lifts his forearm to free her.

Her legs are open wide now, willing him to enter. She pulls down his underwear harshly, bruising his testicles, and with both hands pulls out his finger. He crushes his penis inside her and she arches back. She pulls his buttocks in steady strokes, leaving his hands free to caress her breasts. He pinches her nipples, hard.

Without warning, she lets out a long scream and gulps for air. She has not waited for him. He keeps pressing into her, and she digs her nails into his back as if insisting that he not stop.

When he is about to come, she wriggles an arm under him, grabs his penis, and jerks it out. His semen falls onto the sheets. He’s still feeling it bubbling out of him when she turns over and clutches the pillow on the far side of the bed. Her body is shaking with the aftershocks of her orgasm. She might be crying.

“Rosa Esther, are you okay?”

“Don’t even talk to me,” she answers bitterly, evidently angry at having given in to her pleasure.

* * *

Guillermo is the first to wake up the next morning. He sees Rosa Esther sleeping peacefully with her head on the pillow, her hair spread out behind her.

Guillermo feels sick, like the character from Nausea who one day looks at a tree and only wants to vomit. Instead of feeling pleasure or satisfaction when he awakes, he feels abundant terror. He imagines he will live like this forever, having occasional, meaningless sex with her and finding pleasure with other women. There is a point of accommodation in marriage that is satisfying, almost expected; there is comfort in repetition: the Sunday excursion to a social club and the two o’clock meal; the shrimp cocktails, the baked potatoes, the guacamol, and the cuts of puyaso; the drive home to their bunker-like apartment after playing tennis or softball with the children, who are aligned with her.

He looks at her, this alien who doesn’t stir. He hears a woodpecker pecking. He thinks he can survive this marriage. The two of them can live comfortably inside a tent of indifference.

* * *

The rest of the weekend passes by unremarkably. Guillermo and Rosa Esther are civil to one another, both in their own bubbles. He realizes he should never assume that his experiences can be shared with another person. Not with Rosa Esther anyway. They may share pleasures and delights, even physical ones, but they will do so occupying parallel planes in a three-dimensional universe.

She will continue to share his bed, but makes it clear without using words that she is not interested in making love to him. If this seems like punishment, she expects him to bear it dutifully, and to remain faithful according to the terms of their marriage contract even though he has broken it more than once.

This is all implied, not discussed.

* * *

As Guillermo is putting the suitcases in the car for the drive home and Rosa Esther waits in the lobby, he remembers the time he found Chichi in the bathroom of her apartment and they attacked one another, Jim Morrison and the Doors in the background. Her mouth smelled of too many cigarettes and bad wine, but he loved the feel of her stiff nipples against his cotton shirt. Had she been masturbating on the toilet seat awaiting him? As soon as he entered, she had come to him.

When he came he had looked into her face, and he could tell that she was happy, probably having experienced something she had not had in the years of being married to Marcelo. The scream of the butterfly . Like Rosa Esther, the night before.

But now he remembers what had happened next. Someone knocked on the door and Chichi quickly pulled herself away, took off her clothes, climbed into the shower, and closed the black curtain. Guillermo zipped up his pants and opened the door as she turned on the water. “Thank God it’s you. I really have to pee,” Rosa Esther had said to him, pushing her way in and sitting on the toilet seat. “Who’s in the shower?” Guillermo had said nothing, and simply left the bathroom.

Had the two women spoken later? Rosa Esther never said anything to him about the incident. But she must have known that he had made love to Chichi, for something had shifted, undeniably changed.

Even before all six friends had herpes.

* * *

Guillermo and Rosa Esther live their lives like two lines that intersect at only one point — the children. She has her girlfriends, her family, and her church. He has his work — which is quite consuming — his club, and the dalliances he manages, or so he believes, to keep hidden from his spouse. He is becoming the typical Guatemalan man, having multiple adventures outside the house, but not even considering the idea of ending his loveless marriage. He is not interested in finding a permanent lover — he enjoys the excitement of speed-coupling.

Until he meets Maryam Khalil.

Guillermo will never forget the moment he first saw her.

It was in February of 2006 that he first met Ibrahim Khalil, a new client. The president of the republic had asked Khalil to serve on the honorary board of the quasi-governmental Banurbano of Guatemala — the same bank where Juancho had worked — to oversee the legitimacy of loans to various private businesses and nongovernmental organizations.

It didn’t take Khalil long to figure out that there were cash credits to companies that weren’t even officially incorporated or registered in Guatemala. These were ghost firms receiving funds to build essential factories in the middle of the Río Dulce or plant sea grass in the mountains north of Zacapa! Half the firms had no street addresses, just PO boxes and articles of incorporation in El Salvador or Honduras. Khalil reached out to Guillermo because he had received threatening phone calls after he made an incendiary statement during a contentious board meeting, claiming that he suspected someone or a group of managers was misappropriating funds.

Pure and simple, Khalil had sniffed out money-laundering swindles. And unlike Juancho, he wasn’t about to keep quiet.

Two days after he brought his discovery to the board meeting, he threatened to contact the supreme court — not the president whom he didn’t trust — to initiate an investigation into the financial shenanigans. This was when the threatening phone calls began. The first call — a female voice telling him he did not understand how Banurbano works, and that he should stop his probing — he simply disregarded. But the second call was a manly voice ending with the threat, “Or you’ll be sorry.”

This was when he contacted Guillermo Rosensweig’s firm.

After two short phone conversations, Ibrahim hires Guillermo not necessarily for protection (there are a dozen firms in Guatemala that offer armed bodyguards and all kinds of effective monitoring equipment), but to help him figure out how to proceed (should he contact the press?) and identify who is threatening him and who are the final recipients of these loans. As a board member Ibrahim has no real fiduciary responsibility, but he takes his work seriously and believes that he has been entrusted to oversee the administration of public funds. He sees his role as essential for maintaining public trust in the Guatemalan government.

During their third phone call, Guillermo tells Ibrahim that he doesn’t think he needs added physical protection for now, but that it would be wise to keep his opinions to himself, especially since there will be another board meeting the following week. After Guillermo hangs up, he realizes he has made a mistake and calls him back to set up a time to meet. Because of his business background, he offers to go over the documents himself at Ibrahim’s office above his textile factory in the industrial zone behind Roosevelt Hospital.