David Unger - The Mastermind

Maryam’s death crippled him. He lost the desire to engage with anyone. With himself. He knows that he has become a worse father than his own was to him. He demonstrated more sympathy for the elephant La Mocosita than he has for his own flesh and blood.

It isn’t the solitude that destroyed him. What he can’t survive is this taste of ashes, the refuse of something that had at one time nourished him but had now decayed. Music, art, meals, all taste burnt, flaking, putrid.

Rotting , now that’s a better word for what he tastes. Everything has putrefied to the point of rotting. Rot and mold.

Guillermo is crying so hard now that he can barely see the road on which he pedals. He squeezes the brakes with his hands, puts his legs down, and stands still momentarily before wiping away his tears on his sleeves.

He stays there on the side of the road, his thoughts racing. When Maryam told Samir she wanted to leave him, he laughed at her. In fact, he told her he would never accept her wish to dissolve their marriage. The only hope for Guillermo and Maryam would have been for Ibrahim to intervene on their behalf. But given his stern morality, they would have had to emphasize the allegedly platonic nature of their romance, built up over the weeks of dining and conversing together with each other, and with him. They could not have admitted the carnality of their relationship, the unquenchable thirst. In this way Ibrahim might have allowed a relationship to develop between them, for he was dedicated to the happiness of his daughter.

Guillermo wipes his eyes on his shirt again. Why had Maryam been killed? What did she have to do with the filth of this world, the drugs, the corruption, the venality? The thought of her burning up, that sweet aromatic flesh, repels him. She did not deserve to die like that.

Guillermo glances down at his watch. It is after eight and he is still not at the appointed spot. He’s no longer sure he wants to die, but he needs to put an end to his despondency.

He remounts his bike and pedals slowly. It hurts him to consider that no one will mourn his death. There will be something unfortunate about his death, but nothing tragic.

Facing a steep incline, Guillermo forces his legs to churn harder. His muscles, nearly atrophied by so much booze and apathy, strain at the task. His legs begin shaking, threatening to cramp, but he simply puts a steadier foot to the pedal.

The agreed upon spot is one hundred meters away, on a grassy ridge at the edge of a pine forest. Across from it sits one of those oversized houses, wedding cake — shaped, with a V etched just below the intercom. It is a hideous house owned by Boris Santiago, the millionaire narco chief.

Guillermo is supposed to dismount his bike at the crest and wait for the assassin to approach by car. It is to be a simple undertaking — a man rides his bike on a Sunday morning, quite innocently, possibly before going to church services. He gets winded from the climb and dismounts his bike to rest for a minute or two before going on.

Guillermo switches to a higher gear and continues up the hill, wondering what he will do when he sees the car approaching. Maybe he will crap his pants — how indecent a way to leave this world — or try to run away into the woods and get shot in the back.

Or will he simply meet his fate by awaiting the bullet, with his mouth open as if to accept the Host of Hosts? Will one bullet be enough, or will he lay there squirming, with his brain oozing out of his skull like blood sausage from the pork skin, waiting, begging for the second bullet, or the third, the shot that will deliver him from the suffering his life has become?

What if the second shot never comes? What if he is condemned to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair, dumb and blind, blowing on tubes to make the wheelchair move, attached to a tank of oxygen?

Oh please, Lord, not that!

Halfway up the hill, a jackrabbit appears below the hedges of a house on the right. When it reaches the curb, it pauses ever so briefly, twirls a floppy ear, then bounds across the road as if its legs were on pogo sticks, and disappears into the forest.

Guillermo glances toward the sky — there’s an oddly rectangular, dark cloud resembling a chalk eraser. He wishes it weren’t there. He wants to die under a spotless blue sky, as under a coffin’s dark blue velvet casing. Is that too much to ask for?

His legs feel sore as he nears the top. Boris Santiago’s McMansion now comes into full view, taking up the whole crest of the hill. Looking up, Guillermo sees a glass-encased hexagonal cupola at the top — it must be the playroom for the children, or where the ex-lieutenant and his buddies drink bottles of Zacapa 23 and snort samples of the cocaine they fly from Colombia to the Péten fields to the United States.

Immediately Guillermo realizes his mind is exaggerating things — on several occasions he has seen children staring down from the cupola to the road as he cycled by. It is a four-story house, and he can well imagine that from the third-floor windows someone could see the Izalco volcano in San Salvador miles to the southeast, or Lake Amatitlán a stone’s throw to the south. He expects one can see the volcanoes of Fuego and Pacaya belching their endless plumes of gray-black smoke from any of the windows in the house.

As he reaches the plateau he notices that there is no one in the cupola now; the whole family of the mutilator-turned-cartel-chief must still be sleeping, or vacationing in Disneyland.

Guillermo takes a deep breath, filling his lungs with cold, clean air, and slows. To be alive is glorious, he thinks, with tears welling up in his eyes again. If there were a guard in the guardhouse protecting the McMansion, he might have gone up to him to confess his desire not to die, but strangely no one is there.

Just past the house there is another incline, so steep that no houses have been built there yet. Guillermo is supposed to wait at the notch on top, at the edge of the curb, in front of a young eucalyptus tree that was planted four or five weeks earlier on a grassy spot. There is no way to miss it.

He reaches the top of the knoll, stops, and dismounts his bicycle. His heart skips a beat when he sees another bike and what might be a backpack lying on the grass immediately in front of the spindly eucalyptus. What could this be? A large rodent? A sack of oranges? A small dead mountain lion?

Guillermo is confused. He rubs his face to make sure this is not a mirage. He pinches his nose to test if he is still alive. His mouth gasps for air.

As he approaches the backpack, he sees the soles of a pair of sneakers and realizes that a man is lying there. A Diamondback Sorrento mountain bike lies behind him. Why would a cyclist be sleeping at the side of this road?

Guillermo inches closer. He sees a muscular back in a white, hooded pullover riding above what look like shiny blue boxing shorts. The man has a shapely ass, that’s what Guillermo notices, and hairless legs. The back of the man’s head is bald. Though the sleeper appears to be short, he has a thick neck. A bull’s neck.

Guillermo puts his bike down and goes over to shake the man awake, to ask him to move along and find his own spot to recline. How dare he take a snooze at the spot of Guillermo’s presumed encounter with death?

He nudges the man gently from the rear, rocking him back and forth a few times, but there is no reaction. He shoots a quick kick to the small of the back. Nothing.

Guillermo sits down next to the man, as if to have a chat with him. It is a cool morning, but up on the hill the sun is shining powerfully and Guillermo begins to sweat. The truth is beginning to dawn on him. He gets on his knees, careful not to dirty his beige pants, and begins to turn the man over with his gloved hands. The body rolls over lightly, and Guillermo lets out a loud gasp and feels a chill in his back.