chapter sixteen

a pile of ashes

One thing that can’t be disputed about Guatemala is that mistakes—very serious ones—are always happening. It is almost like a national epidemic, a defining characteristic, a part of the genetic makeup of the population whether you are Indian, Latino, or Caucasian. The wrong people are kidnapped, the wrong people are killed—there is an ineptitude that is endemic to the country. This extends to even the smallest of matters, like the purchase of fruits or vegetables.

For example, you go to a hardware store and order a fixture for your stove but get something more suited to your refrigerator. You order a Jaguar XJL—illegally, of course, to avoid import taxes—and receive an XKL instead. There is nothing you can do to rectify the mistake unless you want to return the purchase and risk being arrested.

You can have an invoice stating what you have ordered—say a table lamp with a green shade—but in the end you have to pay for what you get: a pole lamp with yellow plastic jackets. Even if it isn’t exactly what you wanted, you are better off simply zippering your lips and keeping what you have, which is almost what you purchased. Not quite.

This is just the way it is.

* * *

Guillermo is in a meeting with Favio Altalef, a client who is hoping to establish a consulting firm to help existing factories conform to the new environmental laws regulating the release of fossil fuels into the atmosphere. Favio is an engineer with the ambition to run his own company. He knows a lot about converting waste to harmless gases, but knows nothing about setting up a legitimate business. He is hoping Guillermo can facilitate his firm’s articles of incorporation, and get the necessary federal and municipal licenses so he can begin advising others. Guillermo informs him that in addition to his standard hourly fee, he will require a deposit of two hundred thousand quetzales in order to smooth the progress of what he calls “the wheels of government.”

Favio knows that he isn’t being hustled. Bribery is part of the price of doing business. He has gone to Guillermo because his reputation among the Guatemalan business community is impeccable. Favio knows he is in good hands and not about to be led down a financial rabbit hole.

Thirty minutes into the meeting, Guillermo’s secretary Luisa rushes into his office and calls him into the hall. She says, “Don Guillermo, we just received a call that Ibrahim Khalil has been in a serious car accident about a kilometer from his factory near Roosevelt Hospital.”

Guillermo tenses up; his nose starts dripping. He pulls out a handkerchief and wipes it; his right eye is beginning to spasm.

“Was anyone else in the car?” He is afraid to mention Maryam’s name to Luisa, though she has put calls through to her in the past.

“That’s all the man said. He sounded official. I am so sorry, Don Guillermo.”

He has no time to figure out who “the man” is. There is always a secretive “man” in Guatemala who somehow becomes the messenger of bad news.

He asks Luisa to tell Favio to leave all the documents on his desk and have him reschedule the appointment for later in the week. He walks over to the receptionist’s desk and calls Maryam from the office phone. The line rings six times before it goes to voice mail and he hears her sweet voice asking the caller to leave a name and number. “I will return your call as soon as I can.”

He finds this strange. Maryam is never more than a few feet from her cell phone unless she is showering, which she wouldn’t be at two o’clock in the afternoon. He pulls his BlackBerry out and calls her phone again; this time it goes straight to voice mail.

This is even stranger: first six rings, then none. Why would she turn her phone off? Something is up.

He wipes his nose on his coat sleeve and calls Maryam’s apartment. Hiba says that the madam is not at home. She is gruff and uninformative, as usual.

When he persists, she says, “If you want more information, talk to her husband,” and hangs up.

Guillermo calls Ibrahim’s apartment and his maid Fernanda picks up, all in a huff. After he identifies himself, she says that it is now two o’clock, lunch is getting cold, and neither Ibrahim nor his daughter have arrived, or called to say they would be late. More matter-of-factly, she adds that she has just received a call from the police, asking for Ibrahim. She told them what she just told Guillermo.

“How do you know the call was really from the police?” he asks, agitated.

“Because the caller identified himself as Sergeant Enrique Palacios.”

“Sergeant Enrique Palacios my ass,” says Guillermo, hanging up. He is losing his cool. Rage is taking over his chest.

He leaves the office and drives his car straight to Ibrahim’s factory, weaving in and out of traffic, pushing down on his horn as he goes. He zooms around the Plaza del Obelisco and heads west. In two minutes he is passing by the huge IGGS center on the south side of Calzada Roosevelt. He passes the Trébol entrance leading to Roosevelt Hospital and goes down Ninth Avenue toward the factory on 12th Street. As he approaches the guardhouse, he sees at least five police cars parked there, with lights spinning and intermittent sirens sounding. He sees more than a dozen policemen talking, laughing, kicking at the pebbles under their feet. It all seems oddly festive, as if the president of the republic has come to pay his respects to one of Guatemala’s leading industrialists, or to bestow upon him an international business prize.

Guillermo leaves his car outside the gate and jogs up to them.

“What’s going on here?”

One of the policemen takes a few steps toward him. “And you are?”

“Guillermo Rosensweig. I am Ibrahim Khalil’s lawyer,” he says, struggling to pull out a business card from his coat pocket. He notices that his nose is still running, but now he doesn’t care what he looks like. “I received a phone call telling me that my client has been in an accident. I would like to talk to him right away.”

The policeman’s cap is too large and falls over his coppery forehead. He has to keep pushing the rim up in order to see, but since his hair is greasy it slides back down. His ears stick out like unruly cabbage leaves. He tilts his cap up again and examines the card. “I don’t think you will be able to do that, Don Guillermo . . .”

“And why is that?”

“Mr. Khalil is dead.”

“What?” Guillermo screams, confused.

“And I am afraid to say that so is his daughter.”

Guillermo runs his right hand through his thinning hair. His scalp is sweating and begins to itch. He scratches his neck so hard he draws blood. He is totally lost, about to lose the capacity to breathe. The spinning lights and noise further disorient him.

“He’s dead? Ibrahim Khalil is dead?”

“So is his daughter,” the policeman answers.

“If this is your idea of a joke, I don’t find it funny.”

“It’s no joke, Don Guillermo. Samir Mounier, the husband of the deceased woman, has just confirmed that the car that blew up belonged to his wife. She and her father—apparently—were in the car and driving home together. They burned to a crisp, like a pan francés,” he adds, as if he has been waiting all his life to say something as foolish as this.

“Samir Mounier is a joke of a man. He knows nothing. And why isn’t he here now?”

“He has gone off to make arrangements for the funerals.”

It’s all happening too fast. The phone call to the office. His inability to get through to Maryam. His call to Hiba, then to Fernanda. The zigging and zagging to the office and the factory. His mind is fizzling.

“I am telling you that there has been some kind of serious, very serious, mistake here—” Guillermo is grasping at straws, but at this moment he doesn’t know that. He only feels something like the weight of a bulletproof vest pressing heavily against his chest, making him tired and clumsy.

“If you come with me I will show you the car, or what’s left of it. Perhaps you will have something more to add when you see it.”

Guillermo follows the policeman into his car, saying angrily “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I really don’t.”

“Be calm, Don Guillermo.”

He gets into the front passenger seat of the police car, which is filthy, full of paper cups, brown towels, empty plastic bags, three sets of sunglasses, garbage bags, balled-up cellophane. He pushes the side lever back so he has more leg room in the car.

All of a sudden he starts getting nervous. Why has he just gotten into a cop car? This is a dangerous situation. They may be kidnapping him. “Where are we going?”

“To the crime scene.”

“Bring me back to the factory!” Guillermo screams, afraid he is being abducted.

The policeman points to the rising smoke blocks away. “That’s where it happened. We are almost there.”

Within a minute they are there, in the middle of an abandoned construction site with gravelly streets. On the side of the road is a blue tow truck with its engine running, starting to lower an enormous metal plate. In the middle of the street lies the burnt carcass of a black Mercedes with a piece of twisted metal—one of the doors?—next to it. The plate is about to scoop up the remains.

The car is surrounded by five or six men in ill-fitting suits. There are more clumps of metal on a sea of sticky, multicolored oil. There’s the faint but unmistakable smell of charred flesh and bones. He sees no bodily remains.

Guillermo pushes himself out of the police car and goes over to look more closely at the car, whose front half, up to the backseat, resembles a brittle charcoal briquette. As soon as he looks at the trunk door he knows it is Maryam’s car because he sees the shreds of a green blanket on the asphalt; Maryam sometimes put it on her father when he felt cold. He crosses to the driver’s side and sees the blown-out door and window, the dashboard turned to pulverized ash and burnt rubber, a blackened iron cross dangling from the roof: the remains of the mirror. On the wired vestiges of the front bucket seats he sees piles of charred mineral compounds, like the simple white residues of old bones.

The passengers have been cremated, largely vaporized.

And then it finally hits Guillermo that Maryam and Ibrahim have ceased to exist. If they are there, they are the small mound of charred white splinters covering the seats.

Guillermo tries to get closer to the car. He sees the passenger door held to the chassis by one little hinge. He touches the door and notices that the metal handle is still hot. One of the detectives stops him.

“This is a crime scene, sir. You cannot touch the evidence.”

“Evidence? What kind of evidence do you need? I mean, don’t you see what’s happened? The passengers have been vaporized. They’re gone. My Maryam is dead!” he hears himself saying, shocked at his own words, seeing an image of her in her tennis outfit with the little pink balls on the heels of her sneakers; and then her voluptuous body stretched out on the Stofella bed. Guillermo tries a second time to touch the handle, open the door maybe, but the hinge has soldered it in place.

“My darling is dead. She’s dead. Oh my God, my love is dead.”

The detective grabs Guillermo by the waist and tries pulling him away. He signals to the policeman who brought him to the scene for help. The cop tosses his oversized cap into his car and scampers over. Both of them pull the grieving lawyer away and sit him down on a curb in front of the half-constructed buildings. The policeman explains to the detective why he brought Guillermo over, that he had just driven to the factory. He adds in a sly whisper that obviously he is the lover of Ibrahim Khalil’s daughter, since the husband has already been there and has left to make the funeral arrangements.

“But he knows nothing,” Guillermo hears.

Filled with thick cumulonimbus clouds that funnel up, the sky has darkened but nobody really notices or cares. It starts to rain, a soft, steady, and enduring patter that douses the burnt cinders and creates new chemical reactions releasing vinegary clouds of smoke into the air. The whole area seems lifeless, like a battlefield filled with stinky corpses.

Guillermo buries his face in his crossed arms and feels the policeman’s hand on his shoulder. He again sees Maryam lying naked on her stomach in the bed at the Stofella, her head resting against her folded arms, her ample breasts, the flatness of her feet, the broad curve of her ankles, her toes hanging over the bed and wiggling, the tattoo of a smiling red bat above the dimple on her left butt cheek. He can hear her slightly husky voice talking to him as he stands by her feet, ready to massage or lick her toes, with their green nail polish. In a dreamlike trance, she is telling him that he can do anything he wants to her body; hurt her even, hurt her more than a bit. She likes pain, as long as he stops when she asks him to stop. She wants to hurt but only a little, perhaps enough to know she is alive, not dreaming, not in a state of unfeeling. Hair pulled back, hard bites on the neck.

“What am I going to do now?” Guillermo says aloud. His nose is no longer dripping, he suspects. He can’t be sure because the rain is splattering his face and his suit is damp. He feels he will never again be sure of anything in his life, now that Maryam is dead.

“You have nothing to do here, Mr. Rosensweig. You should go home. We may want to interview you later this afternoon or evening since you obviously knew the victims well.”

“There must be something I can do,” says Guillermo, wondering if he can help shovel the cinders on the seats into separate urns. He has always believed there are things to be done, that nothing in life is final, save for the death of his parents. “What am I going to do at home, alone?” He thinks of his children and Rosa Esther in Mexico City enjoying their lives. He feels nothing. The memory of them stirs no feeling in him.

“Samir Mounier was just here,” the detective repeats. “He’s the husband. The next of kin. He identified the car, since there are no bodies to speak of. Maybe he could use your help.”

“Fucking Samir,” Guillermo cries. “How do you know he isn’t the one behind all this?”

The detective smiles. Nothing is more absurd. The grieving husband is so decrepit he could hardly pick up a broomstick.

The policeman starts talking: “You’re a man in mourning, Don Guillermo. You will do what grieving men do. Be a man, a decent man, and go home.”

Guillermo turns to look at him without his cap. He notices more clearly that he has a pointed head and, yes, cabbage ears. Then he glances at the detective, who may as well have been talking to him in Urdu or Tagalog.

“But I don’t want to go home. Isn’t there anything I can do?”

“You are going to let the husband handle the details. And like a good lover, you are going to cry. And then you are going to cry some more. And when you are done mourning the death of your lover, you are going to join with us and get the bastards responsible for this crime.”

The words la petite mort come to Guillermo’s mind. This is anything but la petite mort, something he will never again experience with Maryam. This, he realizes, is the real thing. Pure and simple murder.

And cry he does, realizing that one of Guatemala’s most common mistakes has happened to him. Through a crazy turn of events, his love Maryam Khalil has been killed when the target had to be her father.

Unless, of course, Samir—

It cannot be.

He wouldn’t be such a bastard. Would he?