David Unger - The Mastermind

“Meet me at my store in twenty minutes. The Fontabella garage entrance is on 12th Street between Third and Fourth avenues.”

“Can’t I give you a ride?” Guillermo is drunk enough that a little company in the car might help steady his driving.

Miguel shakes his head. “My chauffeur is downstairs waiting for me.”

“How did he know where we were going?”

“I never go anywhere without my driver. See you there,” says Miguel, changing his mind about waiting for the bill. Instead, he simply puts three hundred quetzales on the table.

* * *

Guillermo wobbles over to his car at the 13th Street lot and drives down to Tenth Avenue, where he turns toward the Zona Viva. The traffic is dense, all first- and second-gear driving, until he reaches Villa Olimpica and Mateos Flores National Stadium where he’s finally able to get into third gear. He guns the accelerator and races down the ravine next to the stadium, not letting up until he reaches the blue polytechnic school, the Justo Rufino Barrios statue, and the old Casa Crema on Reforma Boulevard. He loves all these landmarks, still standing, on some level belying the fact that Guatemala City has devolved over the years into chaos.

He turns left on 12th Street in Zone 10 and drives past the Mercure Casa Veranda Hotel, where he once spent a weekend cavorting with Araceli. The parking lot entrance to the Fontabella Mall is a few blocks north. He turns in, drives slowly down the ramp, and finds a parking spot next to a post, which he grazes, lightly scraping the fender of his car. Given his state of inebriation, the dent is small potatoes.

On the way to the elevator, he passes a blue Hyundai and jumps. He remembers seeing one the first time he met Maryam at the Centro Vasco. There must be hundreds of them in Guatemala. But still, why here?

He looks inside the Hyundai, but it’s empty.

Guillermo stumbles into the elevator that will bring him to the mall lobby. From the lobby he takes the escalator to the second floor. Raoul’s is down the corridor from the Sophos Bookstore, as Miguel indicated, in a hidden corner. The display windows show only the finest of clothes, tastefully arranged on lifelike mannequins. The store could be on Coral Gables’ Miracle Mile or even on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. But now it’s totally empty except for the one salesman sitting on a stool facing out from the display counter. He absentmindedly files his nails.

As soon as Guillermo walks in, a bell sounds. The salesman looks up, but doesn’t move. Miguel comes out of a door in back, by the dressing rooms, and signals for Guillermo to join him in his office.

To his surprise, Paredes’s office is all computer screens and file cabinets — no trace of the ledgers or cloth swatches that befit a haberdashery. Instead, it resembles the headquarters, the huge central brain, of an extensive informational spy network. Clearly Raoul’s is a front for some other kind of business.

“Take a seat here,” Miguel gestures to a gray swivel chair facing a huge Mac computer screen.

As soon as Guillermo sits down, Miguel moves the cursor over to a still open video window and clicks play . “Watch now,” he says.

The black-and-white film is very grainy, but despite his drunkenness, Guillermo recognizes the driveway leading up to the guardhouse and the parking lot of Ibrahim’s textile factory. There’s a light-colored car near the top of the screen, which is not moving. There’s no way to read the license plate from this distance. For four or five seconds everything seems frozen, then a man steps out of the parked car and looks down toward the guardhouse through binoculars, though the distance is less than twenty feet. He gets back into the car, and about two minutes later does the same thing, only this time he appears startled and quickly gets back into his car.

Miguel is leaning over Guillermo. “That man’s a lookout. Watch the next part very carefully.”

Guillermo glances up at him, not understanding.

“No, no, don’t take your eyes off the screen!”

Guillermo lowers his eyes back down just in time to see a black Mercedes come into view. He feels a pain in his chest as he recognizes Maryam’s car, and his eyes well up. The car’s moving very slowly, much more slowly than Maryam would normally drive, even in a blurry video. Whenever she picks up her father, she turns the car around by the chain-link fence so she can drive away as soon as he comes down. This time, the car stops about ten feet from the factory and office door, which will force her father to walk over gravel to her. Five seconds later, a man steps into the camera’s view and moves slowly toward the car.

“That’s Ibrahim!” Guillermo shouts incredulously, as if the man was still alive.

“What’s surprising about that?”

“Nothing, really. It’s just strange to see him alive like this, walking toward the car, toward my Maryam.” Guillermo realizes what he has confessed, but he’s beyond censoring his words.

“Look, look , Guillermo. Tell me if you see anything strange.”

Guillermo does not enjoy Miguel’s warm, stale breath on his neck, but he’s totally mesmerized by what’s happening on the computer screen. It’s almost like he is there, witnessing the event in real life, or on reality TV.

Guillermo sees the car inch up a few more feet and stop dead. Instead of getting into the car as Ibrahim normally does, he places his forearms on the door and looks in as the passenger window rolls down. From this angle there is no way to see the driver.

A conversation ensues. How strange. Why doesn’t he just get into the car? Guillermo can only see Ibrahim’s right shoulder. Suddenly he notices what looks like a dark blob moving in the backseat, blocking the light from the back window for a fraction of a second. Either the passenger headrest has been raised or there is someone in the backseat.

“What’s that shadow?”

“Look, Guillermo. Look.”

Ibrahim raises his shoulders, opens the door, and sits down in his usual place. A few seconds go by as he puts on his seat belt, and then the car makes a right-angle turn and drives off slowly, back the way it came. At one point it is no more than ten feet from the car parked on the side of the road. About five seconds after Maryam’s car disappears from the camera’s view, the light-colored car whips around, throwing up a cloud of dust, and follows. For another ten seconds nothing can be seen but the driveway, the same edge of the guardhouse, and the cloud of dust rising from the pebbly ground and disappearing into the air. Then the view is frozen, there is no movement, and the screen turns black.

“You can play it again if you’d like. Move the cursor over the replay button and click.” Miguel shuffles away.

“There was someone tailing Maryam,” says Guillermo. It’s obvious to him that something made Ibrahim hesitate before stepping into the vehicle — perhaps there were three people inside — but for now he says nothing.

Miguel comes up to him with two goblets in his hand. “I think we both need this. Zacapa Añejo rum, twenty-three years old. It’s like drinking a Hennessey XO.”

Guillermo takes his goblet in his trembling hand and swallows it in one gulp. Another man who has been in the office the whole time — Miguel’s driver? — comes over with a bottle in his hand and refills Guillermo’s goblet.

“Just click on the button and the video will play.”

Guillermo watches the video again and discovers nothing new or strange. He keeps wondering if there’s someone else in the backseat, and believes Maryam may not be the driver.

After his third run-through (by this time, Miguel has sat down in another swivel chair beside him), Guillermo pushes back from the table. Miguel asks him if he has seen anything at all that might shed some light on who was in the light-colored car.