David Unger - The Mastermind

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.

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, Maryam. 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.”