chapter twenty-seven

a bus trip to el salvador (“the savior”)

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.

He walks down Twelfth Avenue by the Geminis 10 Mall and the Mercure Casa Veranda hotel. There are Chiclets and cigarette vendors on the street, an old half-blind Indian woman selling sweet rolls on the avenue, but none of them pay him any notice. It is as if he were gliding invisibly through the Zona Viva.

There is a long line of cars snaking along First Avenue toward the Radisson valet. Breakfasters get out of their cars, receive ticket stubs from the valets, and watch their cars disappear into the basement garage.

Beyond the driveway, the ten a.m. Pullmantur bus to El Salvador drives up. Guillermo hurries toward it. As soon as the driver opens the door, he edges up the steps.

“You have to buy your ticket inside the hotel,” the driver says.

Guillermo gives the driver two hundred quetzales and tells him to keep the change. Before the driver can say a word, he hastens to the back of the bus and nestles himself in, curled into a ball, about to pass out.

When did he last sleep? Two nights ago? He hardly knows.

His eyes simply close on their own.

But his mind is alive and he cannot sleep. He recalls that the Stofella is less than two blocks away. His thoughts turn to Maryam and the various afternoons they cavorted there with total abandonment. He remembers the touch of her body, her full breasts begging to be embraced by his mouth. He starts crying, half asleep, as he recalls her mango-flavored mouth, the perfect fit of their bodies, the hunger with which she would ride him thrust after thrust until she would let out a low, widening scream.

Guillermo remembers reading what García Márquez wrote in The Autumn of the Patriarch, that “el corazón es el tercer cojón.” The heart is the third ball. He was so right. And at this very moment Guillermo’s heart is throbbing. He remembers that someone in Love in the Time of Cholera had said that “el corazón tiene más cuartos que un hotel de putas.” The heart has more chambers than a whorehouse. And he knows this is also true.

He opens his eyes to see the bus driving down Los Próceres, en route to the highway that will take him to El Salvador. Guillermo needs alcohol—his body aches for it. His throat has clenched and he feels a tug that turns his insides out. But there is nothing on the bus to indulge his craving.

Eventually, fatigue takes over, he settles into his seat, and finally sleeps.

He wakes when the bus stops at the Guatemala/El Salvador border an hour later. All fifteen passengers have to disembark and go through immigration in a small, concrete, windowless building surrounded by empty wooden pallets and half a dozen uniformed soldiers lounging on broken chairs under blooming jacarandas. This is a first-class bus, but the procedure is the same: everyone has to bear the insufferable heat which within minutes speckles Guillermo’s cotton shirt with sweat.

The passengers are directed to some high tables and instructed to fill out tourist cards. They are told to line up single file in the center of the room once they have finished filling out the cards.

Guillermo is the fifth person in line, behind a middle-aged woman whose jewelry jingles whenever she moves her rather impressive behind. She is wearing so much perfume that his nose suddenly twitches and he sneezes. She turns to look back at him.

“Salud.”

“Thank you,” he says, sniffling a bit.

“Why do they insist on demeaning their own citizens?” she whispers to him.

“I beg your pardon?”

“This doesn’t offend you? If we were on an airplane they would simply usher us through. Is it because we want to save a little bit of money by taking the bus? I don’t know about the others here, but I’m scared of airplanes.” She winks at him knowingly. “And though I could drive my Lexus, I’m afraid of the kidnappers. Communists and kidnappers rule this country.”

Guillermo nods at her. She must belong to the Salvadoran elite, the fourteen families who have ruled that little crumb of a country for over a hundred years.

“I know you are a chapin from your passport.”

Guillermo’s Central American passport indicates his Guatemalan nationality with embossed gold lettering on a blue background.

She smiles. “You don’t know how lucky you are, Mr. . . .”

Before he has a chance to answer, a man calls out to her: “Come over here, lady.”

Guillermo can see the three customs officials sitting at the same table. The first examines the woman’s passport for its validity. The second evaluates the tourist card, matching it to the passport, and asks some mundane questions that have already been answered on the card. The third official sits with an open ink pad and stamps the Salvadoran seal with the date of arrival and waits for the visitor to ink his or her finger onto the card. When he asks the woman for her fingerprint, she goes into a tirade. She yells something about the misfortune of living in a shitty country—not exactly an effective way to charm customs officials.

When it is Guillermo’s turn, the first officer beckons him with one finger. Guillermo hands him his fake Central American passport. As the agent opens it to the photo and information page, Guillermo realizes that from now on he will be Rafael Ignacio Gallardo, a resident of Los Aposentos, Guatemala—a new man with a new identification number and a totally new identity. The questions are all normal enough: name, address, passport number, place of residency while in El Salvador, length of stay. The agent looks up at him and smiles, handing his passport to the second man, who validates the information on the card against that on the passport. When he reads the address Guillermo has given for where he is staying—the Hotel Princess—he says, “I hope you enjoy the princesses of San Salvador.” He smiles lasciviously and passes the card to the man with the pad, who looks at Guillermo and adds, “We don’t need your fingerprint. You don’t look stupid enough to want to stay in our country illegally,” and waves him through.

Guillermo feels relieved that he hasn’t had to provide prints, even pleased to be visiting a “shitty country” where his passport, looks, and birthplace give him greater status than the woman before him in line.

Before getting back on the bus, he takes a leak in a stinky bathroom, then buys a squash blossom, a red bean pupusa, and a large Coke. He wolfs them down as if he hasn’t eaten for years, and then reclines his seat to watch the thick vegetation catapult past him. He hopes that the Coke will ease the migraine behind his eyes, but no such luck.

He should sleep, but is kept awake by a machine gun of questions running through his mind. He has no idea what he will do in El Salvador, or how he will survive. He only knows that he has died, and he hopes to rise like Lazarus and live again in another land.

* * *

When the Pullmantur stops at the Radisson in San Salvador’s San Benito neighborhood, a wealthy enclave of huge walled-in homes, boutiques, and expensive restaurants, Guillermo decides it would be a big mistake to stay in the nearby Hotel Princess. If the police believe he has somehow eluded death and crossed the border into El Salvador, they will most likely look for him in hotels like these. He needs to find simple, safe lodgings in a working-class neighborhood where no one will think of searching for him—where he can grow a mustache or a beard, shave his head, disguise himself. He’s better off finding a room in a cheap pensión or boardinghouse amid the junk dealers, the modest, cavernous stores selling suitcases, shoes, or toasters right on the street.

He has not brought a single suit. He gets off the Pullmantur with only his bulging knapsack and walks down 89th Avenida Norte to the Paseo General Escalón. Here he takes a mostly empty public bus toward the cathedral on Plaza Barrios, where Archbishop Romero was gunned down, and to the north end of Calle Rubén Darío.

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.

So the reporter can only conclude that a poor fucker going out for a Sunday bike ride has been killed: a typically vicious crime in Guatebalas that will produce no guilty party for now and forever more.

* * *

On Tuesday morning Guillermo buys La Prensa Gráfica again and sits down on another park bench, this time across from the cathedral. The front-page headline shows the same picture from Monday, but it’s half the size as the day before. The caption reads, “Sospechado narco-traficante mexicano asesinado en frente de su casa” (“Suspected Mexican Drug Dealer Murdered in Front of His House”). Below the headline, the boldfaced type declares that the dead cyclist is, in fact, Boris Santiago, the alleged leader of the Guatemalan Zetas cartel. He was shot from less than twenty feet with five or six bullets from a Beretta 92, blowing the features off his face. The article speculates that Santiago has been killed by a rival gang rather than by unhappy members of his own mob. The reporter goes on to posit that Santiago may have been killed by a secret paramilitary force within the Guatemalan army fed up with the Mexican domination of the drug trade.

There’s a second, shorter article on the bottom of the front page. It states that the Guatemalan military has been tasked by the president with carrying out the investigation and reporting its findings to him and the Congress. An anonymous congressman claims that an elite squad within the army might be behind the assassination—Israeli Mossad style—but wouldn’t claim credit for the killing in a hundred years. “Everyone is free to speculate,” says the congressman, who refuses to give his name, knowing that Boris’s killer will never face justice and he himself could be killed for his speculation. “We may never know what happened. After all, 97 percent of the murders in Guatemala go unsolved.”

Guillermo sits back against the park bench. He’s surprised that his planned suicide has brought about such unexpected results. There’s no mention of him anywhere in the newspaper, certainly nothing about the release of the DVD. He realizes that Miguel will not release the recording now that Boris has been murdered and Guillermo has gone missing. For all he knows, Miguel might be thinking he has been kidnapped by the same assassin who killed the drug dealer, or that he had a bout of nerves and simply decided not to go through with it. Unless he resurfaces or is discovered, Miguel will most likely say nothing publicly, and will put all his resources into finding him.

Guillermo has to lay low to escape detection. For the first time in weeks, he feels true relief—the sensation that he is not required to do anything for anyone. He’s not despondent, he is not angry, he’s no longer consumed by the deaths of Ibrahim and Maryam. The rage has turned into a loss that is quiet, private, and constant—one that is part of him and colors his changing view of the world. He feels fortunate to have been given the opportunity to vanish into thin air. The only regret he feels is over his children and what they might think when they fail to hear from him, and eventually get the news that he cannot be found, or is presumed dead.

* * *

For the next three mornings Guillermo follows the same ritual of eating breakfast in the pensión at eight thirty and then going down to a park bench to read La Prensa Gráfica. He turns the pages each day expecting some new revelation about Boris Santiago’s murder. Each succeeding edition of the newspaper has an article about the murder, shorter than the last, full of conjectures about who might have wanted the drug kingpin dead. And then on Friday there appears a larger “weekend” article claiming that an autopsy has shown the dealer was killed by the second shot to the face, and that fingerprints and dental records have certified the victim’s identity beyond a doubt. As he is about to close the paper, he finds on the next-to-last page, in a section of Central American news briefs, a headline that mentions his name. His hands start shaking as he reads, “Guillermo Rosensweig, Guatemalan Lawyer, Missing.”

Guillermo reads on. Braulio Perdomo, his bodyguard and chauffeur, has reported him “disappeared” going on the third day, when in fact he has been gone now for five. This report is confirmed by his secretary Luisa Ortega, though Guillermo had furloughed her two weeks ago. The article says that his ex-wife Rosa Esther has no comment about his disappearance, but is concerned for his safety. The unnamed reporter claims there’s no evidence of foul play because no ransom note has appeared. Perdomo testified that his boss was not depressed, so the police won’t presume that he disappeared on his own. Miguel Paredes, a friend, contradicts the chauffeur—Miguel’s own employee—by claiming that Rosensweig was still despondent over the brutal deaths of his client Ibrahim Khalil and his daughter Maryam Mounier outside Khalil’s factory near Calzada Roosevelt the month before. The reporter mentions that the lawyer’s valid passport was in his top drawer, implying he hasn’t run away. The article ends with a police request that if anyone has any information regarding Guillermo Rosensweig’s whereabouts, to please contact them immediately.

Guillermo stares out across the square to the cathedral. The morning sun is hot, making his face sweat. He is surprised by these developments, the fact that no one wants to presume anything. It’s odd that no one has noticed that the missing lawyer and dead drug dealer live in the same community, blocks apart. The fact that both disappearances happened at about the same time has not been mentioned. He wonders if he should call Rosa Esther and tell her that he’s alive to calm the children, but he immediately nixes the idea: the less she knows, the better for him. Her telephone might be tapped. He also cannot rely on her silence, and he needs time to plan his next move, whatever it might be.

He’s surprised, however, by the lack of curiosity of both the police and the press. It seems to him that they accept everything as it is, at face value. Why not investigate further? There might be a connection between the murder and the disappearance, he conjectures, as if he were a detective assigned to the case. Why did it take Perdomo and Paredes so many days to report his disappearance, and why did they contradict one another?

But then Guillermo thinks he understands: there’s nothing to be gained by connecting the two events. In truth, keeping the investigations separate will in effect contribute to a confusion ideal in preventing both crimes from being solved. Better to move on to investigate or report the next gruesome crime, since every day five to ten Guatemalans are reported missing. Vaporized. Disappeared. Departed. And every week a dozen new bodies appear, with slit throats or chests decorated with bullet holes in the shape of a clover.

Guillermo had assumed that, because he is a lawyer—a respected member of Guatemala’s upper crust—his vanishing would awaken further scrutiny and outrage. He’s not just a pordiosero.

And there are facts worth noting that the reporter skipped. Guillermo was recently separated, his law practice was going south, and the murders of two of his closest friends, father and daughter, remain unsolved. Wouldn’t any of those pieces of information be enough to draw interest in his absence? Maybe it all hinges on the words apparent disappearance. In Guatemala, a country of speculators and myopics, the word apparent has great significance: nothing conjectured is ever really worthy of investigation, until corpses are unearthed.

Indeed, why would the police start a manhunt for a wealthy lawyer, a womanizer, a divorcé? For all anyone knows, Guillermo Rosensweig decided it was time for a change in his life, bought a fake passport, and is living happily in Palermo or Malta, drinking wine and sunning himself, going fishing for sea bass every couple of days, or practicing yoga in Ambergris Caye.

* * *

Guillermo keeps a low profile in the days that follow. He eats out in inconspicuous greasy places near his pensión, like a simple bookkeeper or unemployed accountant, with no apparent—there’s that word again—expectations that his life will ever change. He takes long walks in the mornings through the many parks in downtown San Salvador, peruses newspapers, and dips deeper into The Grapes of Wrath. Once he even walks down the crowded Salvadoran streets to the rather large Parque Cuscatlán a good kilometer away from his pensión. It is almost a forest in the city, the vegetation so thick that, though it starts raining, Guillermo stays dry under a canopy of trees. He realizes that San Salvador is really a tropical city.

He has many observations that contradict his expectations of what living in El Salvador would be like. Despite all the reports in Guatemala about the dangers of gangs and a left-wing government incapable of maintaining law and order, Guillermo is never assaulted or even bothered. Of course, he makes sure to be back in his room every evening by eight o’clock. He finds the Salvadoran people to be open and helpful, not the beguiling traitors Guatemalans think them to be.

Guillermo’s life starts changing in so many ways. Where before he owned dozens of expensive slacks, shirts, and sweaters, for work and pleasure, he now buys simple, functional clothes appropriate for the heat and humidity. Dacron instead of gabardine and wool, cotton in place of silk. It is tactical not to stand out in the largely working-class neighborhood where he lives, but his purchases also suggest his new preferences. He is glad to be downsizing.

He buys light colorful guayaberas and multiple packages of Fruit of the Loom underwear and socks from vendors on Plaza Barrios. He is starting to drink less, and is losing weight—the two pairs of pants he traveled with are already too big on him. He buys three meters of light poplin and takes the material to a tailor on the second floor of a building on Avenida España to make him four pairs of pants. He purchases new brown and black shoes from the store across from his pensión. They cost twelve dollars each and are imported from Brazil.

He wants to be totally inconspicuous: a thin middle-aged man working quietly, staying below the radar, seeking a job as an accountant or bookkeeper in a small business in downtown San Salvador. A man with no family and little ambition, pleased to be alive and enjoy his next meal. He wants to blend in and be ordinary—as common as his father Günter was.

He knows he can change, he can learn to take pleasure from simple delights. And if he wants sex—after all, he’s a healthy man—there are plenty of whorehouses on 8 Calle Poniente where the microbuses to Comalapa Airport line up.

Guillermo is becoming a new man, shedding old layers of being, like a lobster discards its carapace once a year. What he cannot change is his desire to understand what has happened. This much he knows: his elaborate and meticulous murder-suicide plot has been foiled by a series of coincidences.

Had his assassin killed Boris Santiago by mistake? More unbelievably, had Miguel hired an assassin to kill both Guillermo and Santiago to at once bring down the president and take control of the Guatemalan Zetas? The murder of Santiago has led to many new killings among drug dealers according to the newspapers. Obviously there’s a struggle to see who takes control of his business.

In the meantime, Guillermo would like to think that his old associates, clients, friends, neighbors, his ex-wife (for the sake of their children)—all the people who’d had no role in the plot but who were extensions of his own life—would want to know what happened to him. If nothing else, simply to close the chapter on his worthless life. But nothing of this appears in the press. Despite his assumptions about his own importance, Guillermo is of no more interest than the salesman who gets killed for not giving part of his salary to the local gang.

Guillermo realizes he cannot spend the rest of his days reading books and newspapers on park benches or watching television in his air-conditioned room. He will, in time, run out of money. He needs a plan.

He cannot return to Guatemala, now or perhaps ever. It would not be safe. His coconspirators have invested too much time and money trying to overthrow the president and his wife to simply fold their cards and say, Oh well, let the chap go.

This is why he must assume that Miguel has assigned some of his foot soldiers to find him and have him silenced. Guillermo alive is undoubtedly a risk, especially if Miguel wants to hatch another, more successful plot against the president. Guillermo even wonders if Ibrahim Khalil’s appointment to the Banurbano board was part of the plot that Miguel Paredes had hatched to pressure the president to resign. There is no way to know now, but this possibility underscores the danger that Guillermo would be in should he decide to casually reappear.

He knows too much. Miguel would be smart to want him dead; he has become a huge liability.

* * *

One evening Guillermo lies in bed assessing his options. One idea would be to go to Mexico City and try to be a good father to his children, far away from the dangers of Guatemala. He would have to be willing to truly devote his life to building some kind of relationship with them. His Columbia University degree would help him get permission to be employed in Mexico; he could even volunteer to do legal work for the Guatemalan exile community.

But he knows this happy reunion would last for no more than a few days, and then Guillermo would begin screwing up again, out of despondency or heartache. He misses Maryam too much to assume he could turn around his life with Rosa Esther. It would be a lost cause from the start. And besides, Mexico City would be one of the first places Miguel would be looking for him.

Thinking of Maryam, he once again thinks back to the night many months earlier when they had vowed to meet—or try to meet—on May 1 in La Libertad should they ever become separated. It is mid-June and he would have to wait nearly ten months before seeking an imagined reunion in a town named Freedom, in a country called The Savior. How ironic. Perhaps he should go there simply as a way of remembering her.

How long, Guillermo asks himself, can he live under the radar? He could wait a couple of years and simply emerge in El Salvador, convincing the world that he has been living here all along, that he’s happy with his new life. He could willingly come out of the fog like Assata Shakur did in Cuba forty years ago. But even that might be too dangerous. It had been dangerous nearly sixty years earlier when members of Árbenz’s cabinet, having been granted asylum by the Mexican government, had gone happily into exile only to be beaten up by Guatemalan goons collaborating with the Mexican police. Memories are very long, especially for those who feel double-crossed.

Payback would be Guillermo’s fate no matter how many years have passed. Miguel would make sure of that.

So for the moment, Guillermo needs to get a job and stop languishing. After all, he’s a corporate lawyer who speaks two languages, and has a law degree from Columbia University! Even without his actual diploma with him, perhaps he could use his skills to advise others on how to legally establish new businesses. But it would be too risky to open an actual law practice in downtown San Salvador. Miguel would first sniff and then snuff him out.