chapter fifteen

let’s bring the mountain to mohammed

One late Tuesday afternoon, as Maryam is playing solitaire on the dining room table and wondering how long her stalemate with her husband will last, Samir comes home early from work. He shuffles over to her and announces that his niece Verónica Handal will be coming to visit from Tegucigalpa, Honduras that very night and will be spending a few days with them.

“Don’t I have a say in the matter?” she says, looking up from her cards.

“It is through my kindness that you are still living in my apartment. Someone else would have thrown you out a long time ago for your indiscretions.”

“You don’t need to throw me out. When I leave, it will be voluntarily.”

Samir nods at her disparagingly. He is wearing a three-piece herringbone suit with an open white shirt. “I have told you I will not be made the laughing stock of the Lebanese community. You will go when I tell you to go. In the meantime, as you have observed, you are free to come and go as you wish . . . But Verónica is my only niece and is taking care of my brother and his wife in a nursing home. My home is her home. I can invite her here whenever I want without consulting you.”

Maryam has always disliked Verónica. She is some ten years older than her, in her early fifties, and has never married. Since both her parents developed dementia, she has acted as the world’s only true, suffering martyr for having sacrificed her happiness in order to care for them. In reality, she’s never had a life of happiness to sacrifice. She is severe in her tastes, dowdy in her dress, and enjoys criticizing anyone who has an ounce of spunk or defiance. Her features are exceedingly big: her ears, her lips, and certainly her breasts, which hang like huge, shapeless eggplants that no man would want to touch. But it is not her looks that upset Maryam as much as her lack of sincerity, and her habit of probing into everything as if picking at a scab. The two women have never gotten along, not from the moment they met at her and Samir’s engagement when, at the home of Jorge Serrano Elías—a former president of Guatemala of Lebanese descent—Verónica began criticizing her for her low bodice. Instead of reveling in the moment and feeling beautiful, Maryam spent the evening pulling up her dress to cover her breasts.

Oddly, both women are the same height and have the same hair and eye color. But the similarities end there. Verónica has no light of her own and is a poor reflection of the light of others. If she were to die, Maryam thinks, no one on this earth would miss her. Not her ailing parents, not even Samir.

“And how long is she staying?” Maryam is turning over three cards at a time, having lost track of her game. Four kings are already displayed and she might win.

“Just a few nights.”

“Has she been sent on a mission here by your brother Saleh?”

“You mean my poor demented brother in the nursing home? Your sense of decency has escaped you.”

Maryam is in an awful mood. Her period is two weeks late. She fears she is pregnant. And she is also having cramps that are particularly intense. Is she falling apart?

“You have always detested your niece.”

“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, Maryam. Every day your ideas become stranger and stranger. You know that Saleh and Hamsa are in the same nursing home. They hardly know each other, much less who I am. And certainly they have forgotten who you are. My niece is a godsend.”

“So if Verónica is irreplaceable, why is she coming?”

“I am her only remaining family. I have asked her to come to spend time with me. You might find this difficult to understand, but I am in mourning. I have suffered a death. My marriage has died.”

Once again Maryam decides not to engage him. He is always trying to provoke her, jabbing at her as they move around the shared areas of the apartment like wary boxers in a ring. When they first married, they would often play backgammon at night, and a common tactic of Samir’s was to leave one of his chips vulnerable to see if she would abandon her strategy simply to land on one of his men. After a few losses, she learned to ignore his ploys and play her own game. And she often won.

“I suppose you’ve told her about the trouble between us,” she comments as she continues to flip cards.

Samir takes out the gold watch from his vest pocket and looks at the time. “There’s no trouble between us, Maryam. You’ve simply betrayed the trust of our marriage. But to answer your question: I won’t deny that I’ve told her about your affair. Why keep it a secret? She is as disgusted as I am. What else would you expect?”

“I won’t tolerate her interference.”

“Well then, why don’t you just mind your business and let her come to spend some peaceful time with her admired uncle?”

Maryam almost chokes on the word admired. Samir has such an inflated image of himself, as if he were some kind of brave corsair or fighter pilot, and not the owner of a hardware store in a part of town even buzzards have abandoned. “If she feels anything for you, Samir, it must be hate. She knows that you are mean and despicable, and that you are cheap: you don’t lift a finger to help her parents even though you easily could.”

Samir ignores the comment. “She is coming in on the TACA flight tonight. It would be nice if you were to accompany me to the airport and at least pretend that we are capable of being civil to one another.”

“Will you grant me a divorce if I come?”

“Not on your life.”

“I’m sorry then, Samir, but you will have to pick her up alone.” Maryam gets up from the table and starts walking to her bedroom.

Samir shuffles over to the table where the cards are and sees that Maryam has beaten the odds. As she exits he says to her: “It seems you’ve won at solitaire. It is a game that is appropriately titled for your situation—a woman all alone, bereft of companionship. Congratulations.”

“Sometimes it happens,” she replies unguardedly.

Before she closes the door, he says loud enough for her to hear, “What I wonder is if you won honestly or had to cheat.”

* * *

Torrential rains begin as the sun goes down. The flight is expected in at eight p.m., but will be delayed. Maryam feels a bit tired and eats a leftover chicken leg with tabouleh for dinner. Once she is sure that Samir has left for the airport, she calls Guillermo.

She recounts her conversation with her husband. Guillermo merely listens. They talk for about twenty minutes and then Maryam cuts the call short to get ready for bed.

At around ten thirty she hears voices. If she were polite, she would get out of bed and put on her robe to greet Verónica. But why should she? She hears them speaking loudly in Arabic, perhaps even arguing. Maryam hears him say, Ibn sharmoota. Her niece says something back, which obviously angers him—she imagines Verónica is telling Samir that Maryam was a whore from the beginning, or that he should do more to care for her parents.

Then she hears the unmistakable sound of a slap in the face.

Verónica screams a saying in Arabic that roughly translates, You have a penis for a nose, a common insult she has heard before. What a family, lacking a corpuscle of decency.

* * *

Ibrahim’s day has begun normal enough. His chauffeur dropped him off at the front door of the textile factory and then went back home to do some household chores. Ibrahim plans to spend the whole day meeting with his employees in groups: the machine operators, the foremen, the sales personnel, the cleaning staff. He wants to make sure they are all content, because in the coming year they will be challenged by the recession in the United States. Orders are also way down, thanks to the ferocious competition from Bengali and Haitian sweat shops. Ibrahim can hardly compete. All he can do is offer quality, timely service at a premium to his customer.

* * *

Maryam rises earlier than usual to avoid confronting both Samir’s probing eyes and her niece’s interrogation at breakfast. She eats a bowl of sliced papaya and melon with homemade yogurt standing at the small kitchen table, then goes to a nine a.m. exercise class at the World Gym on Los Próceres. After exercising, she decides to swim fifty lengths in the pool and take a quick sauna. Exercise is her way of dealing with the tensions at home.

The swimming and the hot sauna weaken Maryam more than usual. Maybe she should have exercised less, given her condition. She drinks several glasses of water and then takes a long cold shower, hoping the change in temperature will refresh her.

The gym isn’t far from home. She needs to go home to change before picking up her father at the factory at twelve thirty for their weekly Wednesday lunch. Ever since she admitted her affair to Samir, Maryam and her father have been going to his apartment for lunch instead of hers. She doesn’t want to risk Samir joining them, for fear he may begin hinting about her affair with Guillermo. Jokes about Maryam’s infidelity would kill her father. It’s very Lebanese to avoid awkward issues, she tells herself—better to hide and pretend to be lighthearted.

The shower has not helped, and Maryam still feels faint from the exercise. She prays that Samir has left for work and that Verónica has gone out for a walk.

No such luck. “You look very pale,” Verónica greets her, and plants a kiss on each of her cheeks. “Come, give me a hug. I hear you have been running around a lot. You shouldn’t put your health in jeopardy. ”

Maryam doesn’t know how to take this. Is Verónica making a reference to her affair or is she actually concerned about her well-being? She hugs her niece a bit stiffly and says, “I’d like to lie down, but I have to go pick up my father and bring him over to his apartment for lunch.”

“Why don’t you take it easy? I can drive him.”

“You wouldn’t know where to go. You have no idea where the factory is or where he lives. Because he has a driver, he stopped paying attention to where he was going long ago. He doesn’t even know his way around the streets of Guatemala.”

“Well then, just have your father’s chauffeur drive him from the factory to his apartment.”

“I should really go.” She does not want to miss seeing her father. She insists on treating him with the same respect and deference as always, if only to prove that nothing has changed despite what Samir may have told him. She wants her father to know she will continue to dote on him, no matter what. It is a Lebanese custom to neither discuss nor feign ignorance of what both parties know. But in truth she feels too lightheaded to drive to the factory, and doesn’t know what to do.

Verónica has read her mind. “Why don’t we go together? You can sit in the passenger seat and give me the directions. If I can drive in Tegucigalpa, with its crazy drivers and steep hills, I can certainly drive here.”

Maryam concedes. “Let me go to the bathroom first.” Her stomach is hurting. She takes a Midol to ease the pain. It crosses her mind again that she might be pregnant. She and Guillermo have been so careless lately. He never wants to pull out, certainly not the last few times they have made love. He enjoys coming inside of her. And she enjoys it as well.

Maryam gives Verónica the keys and they take the elevator down to the parking lot basement. She sits in the passenger seat and directs Verónica to take the turnoff to Aguilar Batres, just before the Roosevelt Hospital entrance.

On the way there, Maryam suddenly realizes she needs to lie down. She asks Verónica to pull over and gets out of the front seat to lie down in the back. By this time, they are less than a kilometer from the factory.

Because they are arriving a bit late, Ibrahim has come down from his office and is standing talking to Fulgencio, the guard, near the factory parking lot. As soon as he sees Maryam’s car, he stops the idle chatter and begins walking over to the gate to wait for the car at the lot entrance. Due to the tinted windows, he doesn’t see that Samir’s niece is driving until she rolls down the window on the passenger side.

“Hello, uncle,” Verónica says, unlocking the car.

“Well, this is a surprise, Verónica. I had no idea you were in Guatemala. Where’s Maryam?” he asks.

“I’m back here, Papá, lying down. I’m not feeling very well,” she says.

Ibrahim sticks his head through the window and blows her a kiss. Then he opens the door and sits down in the front passenger seat. He adjusts the seat to give Maryam more room in back and talks softly to Verónica so Maryam can get some rest.

Verónica drives in a circle before pulling out of the gated lot. With little sense of direction, she turns right instead of left once she is on the street. She assumes she is going the right way, especially when she sees that there is a car following her—obviously another vehicle going back to the main highway. Ibrahim, lost in thought, doesn’t notice. Maryam is fast asleep

Samir’s niece soon realizes she is lost but is unable to remember how she got to the factory in the first place. All of a sudden she finds herself in a fairly abandoned area near the Ciudad Universitaria, a construction site that has been partially developed and then neglected because funding ran out.

She stops at a stop sign and the car stalls. She starts the car again and drives deeper into the construction area. Ibrahim begins mumbling directions to her, trying to get her back on the Calzada Roosevelt. But now he too is lost.

“Where are you going?” Ibrahim asks uneasily, leaning forward.

“You are making me very nervous, uncle,” Verónica says, shifting into a higher gear, which makes the car hiccup. She takes her foot off the clutch and the car stalls once again.

“Now what have you done?” he snaps, lowering his window, looking around to get his bearings. He is beginning to panic.

Maryam, in the backseat, begins to stir. She is vaguely aware she should be giving directions, but she’s still half asleep.

A gray Nissan pulls up alongside the passenger side as if to offer help. Ibrahim sees its shaded windows and becomes extremely anxious.

“Stupid woman, start the car and drive off!” he yells, slapping the dashboard.

Verónica cannot find the ignition and begins to weep.

Finally she is able to start the car and Ibrahim lets out a sigh of relief. Then she inexplicably begins to lower his window to thank the Nissan for stopping.

“Raise it, you fool. Drive! Drive!” he shouts.

What happens next happens very fast. Ibrahim catches a glimpse of a man racing out of the Nissan from the passenger side. He scrambles around the front of his car and rushes toward where Ibrahim is sitting. He is sweating and waving something wildly in his hand. Ibrahim pushes the button to raise his tinted window with one hand and tries to loosen the seat belt with the other, so he can crouch down.

The gun, a nine-millimeter pistol with a detachable cartridge, is the last thing Ibrahim sees before he hears, PUM! PUM! PUM! PUM! The tinted window, three-quarters raised, immediately shatters. Verónica starts to scream but is cut short by the spray of bullets.

Then the assassin, for good measure, pumps another three shots into Ibrahim’s corpse. The explosion of shots, the shattering of glass, and the screaming all fold together into one spurt of cacophony. Maryam drops her face into the backseat and covers her ears.

A second later there is only a deafening desert silence. Maryam can hear her heart beating loudly in her chest and feels tears leaking out of her eyes and down her cheeks. She is terrified for herself, well aware that a massacre has just taken place.

This silence feels protective so Maryam slowly sits up. Through her own tinted window she sees the shooter walking casually back to the passenger seat of his car. She cranes her head forward, making sure she stays out of his line of vision, and sees that both her father and Verónica are slouched over the dashboard, and that the front windshield, miraculously intact, is splattered with blood.

Maryam feels the silence building in her ears.

She knows that her father is dead but she is in too much shock to cry. She looks back at the Nissan, which hasn’t moved an inch. It’s as if they’re in the middle of a wasteland. She sees the gunman open the back door and pull out a large plastic container. He tosses the gun into the car.

Maryam lies back down and listens. She hears some odd movements and what sounds like liquid being thrown onto the hood of the car. She knows what is happening, what will happen next, but she doesn’t know what to do. She is certain that if she says a word the man will shoot her as well. Her heart is beating so loudly it makes a thumping noise against the backseat, which she hopes the killer cannot hear.

Then there’s a flicking noise and a huge flash of light over the hood—flames shoot up into the air. She hears the flames crackling, followed in a few seconds by the noise of the Nissan screeching away. The flames begin to engulf the sides of the car.

In one motion Maryam jacks up the handle of the backseat door on the driver’s side, grabs her purse, and rolls out of the car onto the gravelly pavement. The odor of burning gas and paint is nauseating.

She stands up and begins to run to the entrance of one of the abandoned buildings when she hears the car detonate behind her, the body of her father and Verónica still inside.

Once she is safe, she turns around to see an inferno rising ten meters into the air. If she had hesitated even two seconds, she too would have roasted inside her car. She feels a bit of urine running down her legs, her eyes are a burning tear of rage and pain. Her car is a ball of fire.

Maryam is still in too much shock to cry. Someone wanted both her and her father dead. This someone has probably been aware of every single step both of them have taken. What the killers have not planned for is Maryam’s illness and Verónica’s visitation, and now Verónica is dead and she is alive.

At least for the moment.

She opens her purse and sees her passport and the tiny purse with ten hundred-dollar bills, realizing how smart Guillermo’s advice was. She thinks of calling him now, to let him know what has happened and that she is alive, but quickly changes her mind. Guillermo has told her many times that all their phones are tapped. The only way to communicate privately would have been to purchase disposable phones with untraceable numbers but they’ve never taken the time to do that. She turns off her phone, knowing she has to get rid of it.

She is so tired that she slides down the wall of concrete and sits on the ground. She needs to think clearly.

Why would anyone want her dead?

Her father has enemies, this she can understand: his advisory role in Banurbano and his constant, undisguised accusations about governmental corruption; the rumor that her father has purchased textiles from contrabandists importing bolts of cloth illegally into Guatemala without paying duties; the handful of disgruntled employees, lazier than hell, who say they will sue Ibrahim if he makes good on his threat to fire them.

Plenty of people have issues with her father.

But her? What has she done to any of them? She hates no one and no one hates her.

Well, almost no one.

Just Samir, with his cloying smile and vituperative voice.

Would he be brazen enough to kill her and her father because she wants to leave him? In a normal world, such criminality would be beyond anyone’s comprehension. But this is Guatemala, where children prey on their parents and vice versa.

There is so much unknown. So much that can’t be known and perhaps never will.

* * *

Time is passing.

Maryam pushes herself up. She is covered with dust. She brushes herself off as she hurries back toward the street. It is quiet still, save for the smoldering vehicle. The stench of rubber, plastic, and cotton is disgusting.

A huge plume of smoke billows up from the remains of the car into the blue sky, drifting toward the top of Roosevelt Hospital’s highest building and flitting swiftly as if from the end of a pipe into the surrounding hills and mountains.

Maryam begins walking away down a broken sidewalk. After three blocks, she hears sirens approaching and sees two fire trucks and an ambulance racing toward her.

She is tempted to flag them down and wants to tell them that they should just go back, that it’s too late, for the car and for everyone in it—including her beloved father, who has been rendered into a dark, flaky ash; that she is the only survivor. But then Maryam realizes she is in a dangerous predicament. The assumption will be that she is dead. She doesn’t know if she was the actual target or just collateral damage, but she understands that her next step has to be counterintuitive: that is, it must fly in the face of any sort of expectation.

As painful as it might be, she must do something completely unexpected. And what would that be?

Her mind is spinning faster than a roulette wheel, and she is trying to review her options.

Her heart is broken, but she is alive.

All of a sudden she hears the screeching of tires, the opening of doors, and the sound of people running toward her.

She rushes into the construction site. A bullet zings past her ear, then she hears shouting and screaming.

She keeps running through a maze of concrete and wooden beams.

Four or five bullets ring out. Then more sirens and burning rubber.

Maryam drops to the ground, squeezes her eyes tight, and waits for a bullet to pierce her.