David Unger - The Mastermind

“I am telling you that there has been some kind of serious, very serious, mistake here—” Guillermo is grasping at straws, but at this moment he doesn’t know that. He only feels something like the weight of a bulletproof vest pressing heavily against his chest, making him tired and clumsy.

“If you come with me I will show you the car, or what’s left of it. Perhaps you will have something more to add when you see it.”

Guillermo follows the policeman into his car, saying angrily “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I really don’t.”

“Be calm, Don Guillermo.”

He gets into the front passenger seat of the police car, which is filthy, full of paper cups, brown towels, empty plastic bags, three sets of sunglasses, garbage bags, balled-up cellophane. He pushes the side lever back so he has more leg room in the car.

All of a sudden he starts getting nervous. Why has he just gotten into a cop car? This is a dangerous situation. They may be kidnapping him. “Where are we going?”

“To the crime scene.”

“Bring me back to the factory!” Guillermo screams, afraid he is being abducted.

The policeman points to the rising smoke blocks away. “That’s where it happened. We are almost there.”

Within a minute they are there, in the middle of an abandoned construction site with gravelly streets. On the side of the road is a blue tow truck with its engine running, starting to lower an enormous metal plate. In the middle of the street lies the burnt carcass of a black Mercedes with a piece of twisted metal — one of the doors? — next to it. The plate is about to scoop up the remains.

The car is surrounded by five or six men in ill-fitting suits. There are more clumps of metal on a sea of sticky, multicolored oil. There’s the faint but unmistakable smell of charred flesh and bones. He sees no bodily remains.

Guillermo pushes himself out of the police car and goes over to look more closely at the car, whose front half, up to the backseat, resembles a brittle charcoal briquette. As soon as he looks at the trunk door he knows it is Maryam’s car because he sees the shreds of a green blanket on the asphalt; Maryam sometimes put it on her father when he felt cold. He crosses to the driver’s side and sees the blown-out door and window, the dashboard turned to pulverized ash and burnt rubber, a blackened iron cross dangling from the roof: the remains of the mirror. On the wired vestiges of the front bucket seats he sees piles of charred mineral compounds, like the simple white residues of old bones.

The passengers have been cremated, largely vaporized.

And then it finally hits Guillermo that Maryam and Ibrahim have ceased to exist. If they are there, they are the small mound of charred white splinters covering the seats.

Guillermo tries to get closer to the car. He sees the passenger door held to the chassis by one little hinge. He touches the door and notices that the metal handle is still hot. One of the detectives stops him.

“This is a crime scene, sir. You cannot touch the evidence.”

“Evidence? What kind of evidence do you need? I mean, don’t you see what’s happened? The passengers have been vaporized. They’re gone. My Maryam is dead!” he hears himself saying, shocked at his own words, seeing an image of her in her tennis outfit with the little pink balls on the heels of her sneakers; and then her voluptuous body stretched out on the Stofella bed. Guillermo tries a second time to touch the handle, open the door maybe, but the hinge has soldered it in place.

“My darling is dead. She’s dead. Oh my God, my love is dead.”

The detective grabs Guillermo by the waist and tries pulling him away. He signals to the policeman who brought him to the scene for help. The cop tosses his oversized cap into his car and scampers over. Both of them pull the grieving lawyer away and sit him down on a curb in front of the half-constructed buildings. The policeman explains to the detective why he brought Guillermo over, that he had just driven to the factory. He adds in a sly whisper that obviously he is the lover of Ibrahim Khalil’s daughter, since the husband has already been there and has left to make the funeral arrangements.

“But he knows nothing,” Guillermo hears.

Filled with thick cumulonimbus clouds that funnel up, the sky has darkened but nobody really notices or cares. It starts to rain, a soft, steady, and enduring patter that douses the burnt cinders and creates new chemical reactions releasing vinegary clouds of smoke into the air. The whole area seems lifeless, like a battlefield filled with stinky corpses.

Guillermo buries his face in his crossed arms and feels the policeman’s hand on his shoulder. He again sees Maryam lying naked on her stomach in the bed at the Stofella, her head resting against her folded arms, her ample breasts, the flatness of her feet, the broad curve of her ankles, her toes hanging over the bed and wiggling, the tattoo of a smiling red bat above the dimple on her left butt cheek. He can hear her slightly husky voice talking to him as he stands by her feet, ready to massage or lick her toes, with their green nail polish. In a dreamlike trance, she is telling him that he can do anything he wants to her body; hurt her even, hurt her more than a bit. She likes pain, as long as he stops when she asks him to stop. She wants to hurt but only a little, perhaps enough to know she is alive, not dreaming, not in a state of unfeeling. Hair pulled back, hard bites on the neck.

“What am I going to do now?” Guillermo says aloud. His nose is no longer dripping, he suspects. He can’t be sure because the rain is splattering his face and his suit is damp. He feels he will never again be sure of anything in his life, now that Maryam is dead.

“You have nothing to do here, Mr. Rosensweig. You should go home. We may want to interview you later this afternoon or evening since you obviously knew the victims well.”

“There must be something I can do,” says Guillermo, wondering if he can help shovel the cinders on the seats into separate urns. He has always believed there are things to be done, that nothing in life is final, save for the death of his parents. “What am I going to do at home, alone?” He thinks of his children and Rosa Esther in Mexico City enjoying their lives. He feels nothing. The memory of them stirs no feeling in him.

“Samir Mounier was just here,” the detective repeats. “He’s the husband. The next of kin. He identified the car, since there are no bodies to speak of. Maybe he could use your help.”

“Fucking Samir,” Guillermo cries. “How do you know he isn’t the one behind all this?”

The detective smiles. Nothing is more absurd. The grieving husband is so decrepit he could hardly pick up a broomstick.

The policeman starts talking: “You’re a man in mourning, Don Guillermo. You will do what grieving men do. Be a man, a decent man, and go home.”

Guillermo turns to look at him without his cap. He notices more clearly that he has a pointed head and, yes, cabbage ears. Then he glances at the detective, who may as well have been talking to him in Urdu or Tagalog.

“But I don’t want to go home. Isn’t there anything I can do?”

“You are going to let the husband handle the details. And like a good lover, you are going to cry. And then you are going to cry some more. And when you are done mourning the death of your lover, you are going to join with us and get the bastards responsible for this crime.”

The words la petite mort come to Guillermo’s mind. This is anything but la petite mort , something he will never again experience with Maryam. This, he realizes, is the real thing. Pure and simple murder.

And cry he does, realizing that one of Guatemala’s most common mistakes has happened to him. Through a crazy turn of events, his love Maryam Khalil has been killed when the target had to be her father.