David Unger - The Mastermind

This is definitely a dead man, not a sleeper. He can’t recognize the face because the nose has been completely blown off, and there are bloody craters for eyes. The whole visage is a disheveled mess of blood and cartilage, rubberized, like a ghoulish Halloween mask.

Guillermo vomits on the grass before he can close his mouth.

Oh my God , he thinks, as he wipes his maw with his left arm. Is this man me? He is confused from the previous night’s hangover, from the weeks of binge drinking and indulging. Everything is muddled.

He holds his breath, frozen, as if blue smoke were issuing from a gun he’s unable to shake loose from his hand. He hears no sounds except the pecking of a woodpecker— rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat —somewhere behind him, and a mourning dove in the distance cooing stupidly.

Guillermo sits next to a corpse that could be him but isn’t. Miguel Paredes’s cousin’s assassin — whoever it was — has killed the wrong man!

How strange.

Who is this guy? Part of him wants to figure that out, but then he snaps out of his stupor. He has to get out of there quickly, before the army or the police show up and accuse him of murder. He isn’t sure if he’s more afraid of being arrested as the accused murderer and dumped into the penitentiary with drug addicts, pimps, and gang members, or being sought out by Miguel Paredes’s henchmen for failing to orchestrate his own murder successfully.

Something has been botched. Has another cyclist passed by the appointed spot at just the right time and been killed by mistake by the hired assassin? This seems like the most obvious answer. Guillermo looks down at his watch. It is eight fifteen. He has arrived fifteen minutes late. So what? Assassins aren’t taught to distinguish between cyclists: all Guillermo knows is that the bullet meant for him has blown off half the face of someone completely innocent.

Then it clicks. He thinks he knows the dead man. From the shape of the body, he believes it’s the narco capo Boris Santiago.

Guillermo starts to cry into his hands, saying aloud, “Oh dear Maryam, how much I love you — and miss you .” He realizes that he has been minutes away from joining her in heaven.

Through a fortuitous, incomprehensible case of mistaken identity, Guillermo is still alive!

He takes a deep breath. What’s he to do?

Birds are chattering loudly, as if relaying the news of the murder to their avian brethren. Guillermo cocks his ear to listen for sirens, but he only hears more sounds of nature. Apparently, no one has heard the gunshots. Otherwise, this area would be overrun with medics and chontes.

Guillermo pats down the body to find some ID to confirm his suspicion. But the poor schlep is only wearing shorts, a white pullover, and a pair of sneakers worth several hundred dollars.

Guillermo places his Pinarello next to the corpse, then takes the other bike without thinking. The seat needs to be raised, but he has no time to look for pliers and tinker with it. He hates abandoning the Pinarello, but he has no choice. The Diamondback is actually a nicer bike anyway.

He backtracks across the plateau and coasts downhill, passing several blocks of houses on the way to his apartment building. He hears a few dogs bark, but no one comes out. He takes the dirt path back to the trash door and finds the door still propped open, thank God. He crosses the garage and takes the elevator straight up to his apartment. No one sees him.

Adrenaline is directing his movements.

He goes into the bathroom and takes a short, hot shower. Afterward, he puts on a pair of jeans, a short-sleeve shirt, and a light jacket.

His mind is racing but focused. He has to move quickly if there’s any hope that he can extricate himself from this mess of a situation.

He has to get out of there. Now.

Life is full of opportunities. The difference between the follower and the maker of his own destiny is that the former is willing to accept his fate while the latter forges it. Guillermo feels he has reached a summit and sees his future clearly. He has the opportunity to escape the tawdry conspiracy he has helped to weave and to be free.

He has to leave town at once. Get the fuck out of Guatemala City.

As he prepares to flee his apartment, both his cell phones start ringing: the personal one that recorded all the threatening phone calls and the disposable cell he had only shared with Miguel, Rosa Esther, and his secretary.

Guillermo realizes he has to discard both phones and disappear. When they stop ringing, he shuts them both, takes out the SIM cards, and dumps them in the garbage disposal under running water. He flips on the switch. The grinding metal makes a horrible noise at first but within seconds there is a quiet whirring, as if he were grinding walnuts in a blender.

He hurries to his closet and retrieves a shoe box from the top shelf. It contains a forged passport he bought years ago for four hundred quetzales, just in case, and five thousand quetzales in twenties and fifties, just in case. The only way to survive in Guatemala is to plan for just in case .

And there are many just-in-case situations, as he and Maryam once discussed.

He checks the top drawer of his desk to make sure his legitimate passport is there and, leaving it visible, takes the fake one and the cash with him. He fills the backpack with other essentials — several shirts, a spare pair of pants, socks, underwear, a toothbrush, deodorant, a comb. He does all this in a flash. The last thing he puts in the bag is Ibrahim Khalil’s folder — one day it will be of use. He grabs Boris’s Sorrento and quietly leaves his apartment. His heart is beating hard in his chest, thumping to get out.

In the basement, he adjusts his backpack so that it is firm against his shoulders and flat against his back. He takes a deep breath. It’s time to go.

Guillermo pedals slowly in low gear up the garage ramp toward the gatehouse. When he gets close to the garita one hundred meters away, he sees that the guard, thankfully, has his head inside a car window and is checking the driver’s identification papers. It is barely nine thirty a.m.

Guillermo knows it is too risky to cycle by. Someone will notice him. He needs to remain invisible. What to do?

To his right, Guillermo sees a footpath running into the woods, one of the many used by squatters before the shanty town on the hill had been cleared for development. It is still used by servants who work in the private houses, a quicker beeline to the main road, with access to the public buses on Los Próceres.

The path, tamped down and smooth, is a shortcut to 18th Street and Seventeenth Avenue. When he rides out of it, he sees several buses, a truck, and a smattering of cars going the other way, toward Vista Hermosa. He decides to avoid Los Próceres, where someone might see him, and takes a series of small streets through Zone 10 toward the Zona Viva.

Guatemala City is sleeping in, slumbering through the pleasant eucalyptus aroma around him. On a typical Sunday, when Rosa Esther and the children were still around, he would go riding toward the Obelisco and turn down Reforma Boulevard, which was closed to car traffic from six a.m. to six p.m.

But this is not a typical Sunday. He turns down Fourth Avenue and rides north toward the Radisson Hotel, where the first-class buses leave for San Salvador every other hour. When he reaches 12th Street, he gets off his bicycle and walks alongside the Fontabella Mall, where Miguel Paredes has his faux men’s shop. He notices a wooded lot next to the Hotel Otelito, facing the plaza. Using his Swiss Army knife, he pries off the little license plate and leaves the bicycle leaning against a tree. It will be stolen in a heartbeat.