David Unger - The Mastermind

The cathedral looks out onto its own crowded square. It is Sunday and there are hourly church services until five.

It’s tough for him to navigate the 2a Calle Poniente with so many people, though he is happy to be where he is. It’s scorchingly hot, but what the hell. He’s alive.

He stops at a corner kiosk. “I’m looking for a decent place to stay,” he says nervously to the street vendor.

The man behind the counter has a grizzly face, eyes that have seen enough horror — the butchery of a civil war — that nothing surprises him. He sizes up Guillermo in a flash.

“Don’t look south near the Mercado — the maras have taken over most of the buildings, whole blocks. You wouldn’t survive more than a minute there, with all the stick-ups and robberies. There are a few good places a couple of blocks from here, near the Plaza Morazán and Calle Arce. Look for the rental signs in store windows. There’s the Pensión Cuscatlán on Calle Delgado. I’ve been told it’s safe.”

Guillermo thanks the vendor and walks up Avenida Cuscatlán, plowing through the crowds on the narrow sidewalks. Before looking for any rental signs, he decides to first check out the pensión on Delgado.

The building, which also houses a number of jewelry stores, has two armed guards on twenty-four-hour duty. He takes the elevator, with room for just two passengers, to the top floor. It reminds Guillermo of the place he stayed in decades ago on the Paseo del Prado in Madrid.

Pensión Cuscatlán is a modest place on the top floor. It has six rooms with private bathrooms, says the proprietor, a woman who is wider than she is tall. She barely looks at him as she escorts him down a dark hallway.

“This is the only vacancy.”

He’s shown a dark room with bulky antique furniture facing an inner courtyard. He presses down on the bed; the mattress seems new.

“You get fresh sheets once a week. Friday. That’s when we clean.” He sees a large white towel on the bed. It is actually fluffy.

The room is simple, clean. The bathroom is big, but not particularly modern, and has a broken window that lets in the hot, sour air from an airshaft. While he is looking around, the landlady goes to the window and turns on a small air conditioner that runs surprisingly quietly.

“What’s the rent?” he asks.

“Twelve dollars a day or sixty a week. This includes breakfast between eight and nine and electricity.”

“I’ll take it. By the week.” He’s surprised to realize how accommodating he has become, how quickly he’s adapting to a new reality. A day earlier he wouldn’t have even stepped foot in a room like this, but now it’s about to become his home.

“Is that all your luggage?” she asks, lifting a paw toward his backpack.

“For now,” he answers. “Next week I’ll have the rest of my clothes shipped to me.”

She nods as if she’s heard this story before and gives him the key. “You can pay me for the first week. I don’t allow visitors in your room.”

“I understand,” he says, handing her sixty dollars. He asks where he can get something to eat. She suggests going to any of the sidewalk comedores lining the streets of Plaza Hula Hula.

“The food is good, the dishes clean. You won’t get sick. Try the sopa de res or panes de pollo.”

* * *

The restaurants run down the south side of Plaza Hula Hula and have tables on the sidewalk. They are so crowded on a Sunday after Mass that there’s hardly a place to sit. San Salvador is broiling. He finds a comedor that has somewhat cool air blowing out from the inside and orders the sopa de res with bolillos.

It is a hearty soup and Guillermo is satisfied. He goes to a used bookstore on Delgado and buys a Spanish translation of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath , a book he has meant to read for years. He also buys a bottle of rum at a convenience store next door.

He goes back to his room, starts reading, and falls asleep by eight o’clock. He sleeps twelve hours without waking up, but he has many disturbing dreams. In one he is visiting a zoo and all the animals are running free, trying to claw him.

He has eggs, red beans, and a cheese pupusa for breakfast. The coffee is watery, almost tasteless. Guillermo goes downstairs to look for newspapers and see how his botched suicide has played out. He heads back to the same corner kiosk where he was directed to the pensión and finds a teenage boy, perhaps the owner’s son, manning it. He buys a copy of La Prensa Gráfica . Plastered on the front page is a photograph of the dead bicyclist with a good part of his face blown off. He rolls up the paper, in a sweat, and looks for an empty bench to sit down.

Guillermo’s left leg thumps as he begins to peruse the front-page article. He reads about an as-yet-unidentified cyclist being shot in the exclusive Zone 14. It is assumed by his dress that he lives in the neighborhood. There are interviews with some neighbors who worry that the increase of violence in the city has reached them in their oasis. The article alludes to some controversy between the police and the armed forces regarding who has the jurisdiction to do the forensic analysis and determine the cause of death and the identity of the victim. Does the municipality or the federal government have jurisdiction? Once this has been settled, the identity of the victim can be investigated. The standoff could take days.

Guillermo smiles. The really good news is that his name does not appear anywhere in the newspaper. He assumes that Miguel Paredes’s plan to release the DVD recording has been aborted and he wonders what the facilitator might be thinking. Surely he knows that Guillermo is not the dead man on the crest of the hill, and must be wondering if the assassin botched the killing or if their plan coincided with an entirely different murder. It is a wrench in the machinery, but knowing Miguel he will figure out how to turn this to his advantage.

This fortuitous development has given Guillermo more time to decide what he wants to do. The greater the time between the murder and the start of the investigation, the better for him to develop his new identity. He may be the only person to know that the dead man is Boris Santiago, the ringleader of the Zeta gang in Guatemala and owner of the pink McMansion at the top of the hill. Guillermo wonders why Boris’s family has not stepped forward to claim the body, but then deduces that he probably shipped them to Miami Beach long ago, or they’re hiding out in a hacienda in Zacatecas, Mexico. Whatever the reason, the longer it takes to identify the body, the better.

Guillermo puts the paper down on his lap and lets his mind wander. Clearly there’s no rush within the cartel to file a missing-person’s report given that knowledge of Boris’s death will probably start a civil war among his lieutenants. The narco capo has to have a full staff working in his house, a chauffeur or two, half a dozen bodyguards, but maybe they have been instructed by Capo Number Two to remain silent if he were to ever go missing. Or perhaps Number Two himself is responsible for the assassination.

In any case, criminals like to clean up their own messes with their own brand of justice. Or maybe a fake Boris was killed and the real Boris Santiago is on a secret helicopter mission, care of the Guatemalan military, to the Petén, where he can oversee another shipment of cocaine through Guatemala to the United States. It’s plausible that someone masquerading as Boris has had his face shot off while going for a bike ride. These bullet heads are always conniving and scheming, and they don’t want weak-kneed staff filing a missing-person’s report every time the head honcho disappears to Miami to arrange another shipment or to cavort privately with his dozen whores.