David Unger - The Mastermind

“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 the 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.

“Where are you going?” Ibrahim asks uneasily, leaning forward.

“You are making me very nervous, uncle,” Verónica says, shifting into a higher gear, which makes the car hiccup. She takes her foot off the clutch and the car stalls once again.