David Unger - The Mastermind

Another change: before he sought solace in drink; now he is committed to sobriety. He is down to the occasional beer.

Rather than risk working for someone else, he decides to start a consulting service for individuals or small groups of investors interested in opening firms. His legal background is useful — he’s an expert on business applications, articles of incorporation, legal filings — so it should be a breeze to do lawyerly stuff but charge consultant rates.

He rents a small 200-square-meter, air-conditioned office for three hundred dollars a month in the same building that houses the tailor shop where he had his pants made. He buys secondhand office furniture and an old desktop computer, an ink-jet printer, a scanner, and a small desk copier from the nineties.

At a carpentry shop by the market he has a business sign made: Continental Consulting Services, Rafael Ignacio Gallardo, Proprietor . He also has five hundred business cards printed. And as another act of self-determination, he buys a cell phone under his assumed name.

Guillermo Rosensweig is slowly ceasing to exist.

* * *

There are various decisions Guillermo can help entrepreneurs consider: what kind of business to open given the existing competition; deciding whether to manufacture goods, provide information services, or simply sell retail or wholesale products. Though much of his advice could be considered obvious, potential customers might not know that to establish a business, you should know the profile — age and sex — and the estimated disposable income — individual or corporate — of your potential customers. You also should extrapolate future competitive trends and whether or not you are entering a growing, shrinking, or a mature market. For example, if you are selling smart phones, the market would be growing, but anyone interested in selling sewing machines would be entering a mature market where only product innovation would lead to increased sales, and then only to a few customers.

The financial considerations are huge: Does the entrepreneur have a financial analysis identifying the costs related to starting the business? Additional sources of financing should the new business require it? Personal or family money, bank loans (at what interest rate?), outside investors — and a projection of weekly, monthly, and yearly wages and expenses? A budget spreadsheet with the cost of raw materials, labor, rent, transportation, utilities, administration expenses (payment to the consultant!), cleaning, and unexpected maintenance expenses? Guillermo can help the potential business owner identify the price point for the successful sale of products as well as estimate profits.

The only problematic part of the consulting business is that Guillermo cannot legally execute incorporation in El Salvador, or secure valid licenses, file proper municipal papers, etc. At some point he has to work with a local lawyer to complete the process to avoid awakening any suspicion with his fake passport. Luckily, downtown San Salvador is full of these kinds of lawyers.

Although he is unfamiliar with the laws of El Salvador, he knows from his legal work that documents and licenses are all fairly routine in the Central American Common Market. With a computer and the Internet, he can download any required documents from the government offices.

To publicize his consulting firm, Guillermo prints fifty flyers on colored paper and asks proprietors if he can tape them on the inside of their store windows; he also posts them on bulletin boards along Delgado Street. He drops off flyers with his former landlady and with his tailor as well. He displays them in the restaurants he frequents, on any open wall space.

Soon enough, he begins signing up clients, most of whom decide to pay the hundred-dollar application/consulting fee since they have not done sufficient research to mount a new business on their own. These clients, rather than being resentful or frustrated by Guillermo’s probing questions, are, in fact, grateful to him for his thoroughness and his ability to see the larger picture. In the end he will be saving them hundreds, perhaps thousands of dollars in setting up businesses that otherwise would have been bound to fail.

What Guillermo has to offer is experience and an agile mind.

* * *

He throws himself into his work like never before. It’s as if he has been given a second chance in San Salvador, and like a carpenter working with his hands, he finds his job immensely satisfying. He enjoys problem-solving and motivating his clients by the promise of success. He discovers he has the skill to empower them. And most of all, he is surprised by how little he misses his old life, with the exception of Maryam.

He attempts to make up for his loneliness by going to whorehouses. One in particular, La Providencia, he finds under escort service listings in La Prensa Gráfica . It’s more high-end than those near the marketplace and the cathedral, but in the end he only feels temporarily relieved.

There are days when, while listening to Liszt or Debussy or Delibes on a cheap CD player in his apartment, he feels a lump in his throat. The music saps him at the same time that it humanizes him. He listens to Bill Evans’s “Peace Piece” and Cole Porter’s “So in Love.” He feels that Maryam is with him: I’m yours till I die . He allows himself to imagine that she got away, like him. Maybe she escaped from the carnage realizing that to survive she had to disappear. These thoughts are not the ravings of the Guillermo in Guatemala City. His thinking is clear; this could be possible.

There was no forensic evidence of her death — just a mound of white powder that found its way to an urn in the wall of the church at the Verbena Cemetery. Of course, there was no proof of Ibrahim’s death either, yet he knows that the textile factory owner is dead. It is more of a sixth sense about Maryam — there’s a small chance she is still alive. He remembers the anonymous card he received several months back — could it have been from her?

Maryam was so beautiful that he could imagine a kidnapper or would-be assassin deciding like Clegg, the protagonist in The Collector , to capture her and keep her enslaved instead of killing her.

In darker moments he imagines the explosion has disfigured her, and she has vanished knowing that Guillermo would be sickened by her appearance. Would he still love her with her face grafted over in layers of pink, curling skin? Does one love the body, the heart, or the soul, or a combination of all three?

Why can’t she actually be alive, running some Middle Eastern restaurant in La Libertad? There wouldn’t have been any way for her to contact him during the weeks after the explosion, just to set his mind at ease. But since he too has vanished, without a trace as it were, there’d be no way for her to reach him now. He has done too good a job of erasing his tracks for her to find him. He has entered the ranks of the disappeared.

* * *

Every weekend he goes to the Biblioteca Nacional across from the Catedral Metropolitana on Plaza Barrios and reads through all of the previous week’s daily Guatemalan newspapers — the Diario de Centro América, Siglo 21, El Períodico, Prensa Libre . He looks for any mention of either of their names. He examines each and every page, scans the ads, gossip columns, and wedding announcements as well — he believes he is now an expert in decoding hidden messages.

Of course he finds nothing. Maryam Khalil and Guillermo Rosensweig have both been relegated to the realm of the forgotten. He never imagined his notoriety could allow him to disappear like this, so quickly, without any serious inquiry, like the thousands of massacred Guatemalan Indians dumped in unmarked graves. It sobers him.