The Last Thing He Wanted

by Joan Didion

  “You have the Delta through Salt Lake,” I heard Treat Morrison prompt when the conversation showed signs of lagging.

  “Actually I prefer the American through Dallas,” the seatmate said, confidence restored in the intrinsic interest of his subject.

  “The American out of Newark.”

  “Out of Newark, sure, except Newark has the short runways, so when the weather goes, scratch Newark.”

  During the ride in from La Guardia I had asked Treat Morrison how he happened to have the Delta through Salt Lake at his fingertips.

  “He’d already mentioned it,” Treat Morrison said. “Before we were off the ground at National. He took it last week and hit some pretty hairy turbulence over the Wasatch Range. I listen. That’s my business. Listening. That’s the difference between me and the Harvard guys. The Harvard guys don’t listen.”

  I had heard before about “the Harvard guys,” also about “the guys who know how not to rattle their teacups” and “the guys with the killer serves and not too much else.” This was a vein in Treat Morrison that would surface only when exhaustion or a drink or two had lowered his guard, and remained the only visible suggestion of whatever it had meant to him to come out of the West and confront the established world.

  This was another area he was not inclined to explore.

  “What the hell, the last I heard this was still one country,” was what he said when I tried to pursue it. “Unless you people in the media have new information to the contrary.”

  He regarded me in truculent silence for a full thirty seconds, then seemed to remember that truculent silence was not his most productive tack.

  “Here’s the deal,” he said. “There are two kinds of people who end up in the State Department. And believe me, I am by no means talking about where somebody came from, I’m talking about what kind of person he is.”

  He hesitated.

  A quick glance to assess my reaction, then the amendment: “And of course I mean what kind of person he is or she is. Male, female, space alien, whatever. I don’t want to read some PC crap about myself in the goddamn New York Times. Okay. State. Two kinds of individuals end up there. There’s the kind of individual who goes from post to post getting the place cards right and sending out the reminder cards on time. And there’s the other kind. I’m one of the other kind.”

  I asked what kind that was.

  “Crisis junkies,” he said. “I’m in this for the buzz, take it or leave it.”

  This was Treat Morrison when his performance went off. When it was on he was flawless, talking as attentively as he listened, rendering opinions, offering advice, even volunteering surprisingly candid analyses of his own modus operandi. “There’s a trick to inserting yourself in a certain kind of situation,” he said when I once remarked on his ability to move from end game to end game without becoming inconveniently identified with any of them. “You can’t go all the way with it. You have to go back and write the report or whatever, give the briefings, then move on. You go in, you pull their irons out of the fire, you get a free period, maybe six months, no more, during which you’re allowed to lecture everybody who isn’t up to speed on this one little problem on the frivolity of whatever other damn thing they’ve been doing. After that you move past it. You know who the unreported casualties of Vietnam were? Reporters and policy guys who didn’t move past it.”

  That was another difference between Treat Morrison and Elena.

  Elena inserted herself in a certain kind of situation and went all the way with it.

  Elena failed to move past it.

  Which is why, by the time Treat Morrison arrived on the scene, Elena had already been caught in the pipeline, swept into the conduits.

  Into the game.

  Into the plot.

  Into the setup.

  Into whatever you wanted to call it.

  Four

  1

  One of the many questions that several teams of congressional investigators and Rand Corporation analysts would eventually fail to resolve was why, by the time Treat Morrison arrived on the island, almost six weeks after she had learned from the Miami Herald that her father was dead and more than a month after she had learned from the FBI that the passport she was using had a trick built into it, Elena McMahon was still there.

  She could have left.

  Just gone to the airport and gotten on a plane (there were still scheduled flights, not as many as there had been but the airport was open) and left the place.

  She would have known since the initial FBI interview that the passport with the trick built into it would not be valid for reentry into the United States, but that in itself might well have seemed an argument to get off this island, go somewhere else, go anywhere else.

  She had some cash, there were places she could have gone.

  Just look at a map: unnumbered other islands there in the palest-blue shallows of the Caribbean, careless islands with careless immigration controls, islands with no designated role in what was going on down there.

  Islands on which nothing either overt or covert was under way, islands on which the U.S. Department of State had not yet had occasion to place repeated travel advisories, islands on which the resident U.S. government officials had not yet found it necessary to send out their own dependents and nonessential personnel.

  Islands on which the ranking American diplomatic officer was not said to be targeted for assassination.

  Entire archipelagoes of neutral havens where an American woman of a certain appearance could have got off the plane and checked into a promising resort hotel (a promising resort hotel would be defined as one in which there were no Special Forces in the lobby, no armored unmarked vans at the main entrance) and ordered a cold drink and dialed a familiar number in Century City or Malibu and let Wynn Janklow and the concierge work out the logistics of reentry into her previous life.

  Just think about it: this was not a woman who on the evidence had ever lacked the resources to just get on a plane and leave.

  So why hadn’t she.

  The Rand analysts, I believe because they sensed the possibility of reaching an answer better left on the horizon, allowed this question to remain open, one of several “still vexing areas left to be further explored by future students of this period.” The congressional investigators answered the question like the prosecutors many of them had been, resorting to one of those doubtful scenarios that tend to bypass recognizable human behavior in the rush to prove “motive.” The motive on which the congressional investigators would settle in this instance was “greed”: CAUGHT BY GREED, the pertinent section heading reads in their final report. Elena McMahon, they concluded, had stayed on the island because she still expected someone to walk up and hand her the million dollars she was supposed to have received on delivery of Dick McMahon’s last shipment.

  “Elena McMahon stayed where she was,” to quote this section exactly, “because she apparently feared that if she left she would be cheated out of or would otherwise forfeit the money she believed she was owed, i.e., the payment she claimed was due her father.”

  But that was flat wrong.

  The payment due her father was by then no longer the point.

  The payment due her father had stopped being the point at the instant she read in the Miami Herald that her father had been certified dead at the Clearview Convalescent Lodge in South Kendall on June 30 1984.

  Which happened also to be the date on the passport with the trick built into it.

  My understanding is that Dick McMahon will not be a problem.

  2

  “Stop talking to the goddamn baby-sitter,” her father had said the evening she was about to leave the house in Sweetwater for Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport and the unscheduled flight that would not land in San José, Costa Rica.

  She was trying to tell the nurse about her father’s midnight medication.

  “Ellie. I want you to listen to me.”

  “He won’t swallow i
t but you can mash it up in a little brandy,” she said to the nurse.

  The nurse continued flicking through channels.

  “Don’t let any of those guys talk you into staying over down there,” her father said. “You deliver the goods, you pick up the payment, you get back on the plane, you’re back here tomorrow. That’s my deal.”

  “I thought Cheers was on two,” the nurse said.

  “Get the TV critic out of here and listen to me,” Dick McMahon said.

  She sent the nurse to locate Cheers in the kitchen.

  “That one’s not really a nurse,” Dick McMahon said. “The one in the morning, she’s a nurse, but that one’s a baby-sitter.” He had leaned back in his chair, exhausted. “Ellie. Okay. You deliver the goods, you pick up the payment, you get back on the plane. That’s my deal.” Each time he said this it was as if for the first time. “Don’t let any of those guys mickey-mouse you into staying over, you follow me?”

  She said that she followed him.

  “Anybody gives you any trouble, you just tell them.”

  She waited.

  She could see the network of veins beneath the transparent skin of his eyelids.

  Tell them what, she prompted.

  “Tell them, oh goddamn.” He was rousing himself with difficulty. “Tell them they’re going to have to answer to Max Epperson. Then you call Max. Promise me you’ll call Max.”

  She did not know whether Max Epperson was dead or alive or a hallucination but she promised nonetheless that she would call Max.

  Wherever Max might be.

  “You just tell Max I’m a little under the weather,” Dick McMahon said. “Tell Max I need him to look out for you. Just until I’m a hundred percent again. Just tell him I said that, you understand?”

  She said that she understood.

  Barry Sedlow had told her to be at Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood at midnight sharp.

  She was to wait not in the terminal but at Post J, if she asked at the Butler operations office they would direct her to Post J.

  At Post J there would be a locked gate onto the tarmac.

  She was to wait at Post J.

  Someone would unlock the gate.

  By the time she was ready to leave her father was again asleep in his chair, but when she kissed his forehead he reached for her hand.

  “You don’t remember this but when you had your tonsils out I wouldn’t let you stay in the hospital by yourself,” he said. “I was afraid you’d wake up scared with nobody around. So I slept in a chair in your room.”

  Elena did not remember this.

  All Elena remembered was that when Catherine had appendicitis she herself had slept on a gurney in Catherine’s room at Cedars.

  Her father’s eyes were still closed.

  He did not let go of her hand.

  These were the next-to-last words her father spoke to her:

  “You never even knew that, see. Because you were a winner, you took the whole hospital deal like a winner, you didn’t wake up once.”

  “I did wake up,” she said. “I do remember.”

  She wished she did.

  She hoped Catherine would.

  She held his hand until his breathing was even, then walked to the door.

  “This payday comes in,” he said when she opened the screen door, “for the first time in my life I’ll have something to leave you.”

  “I did wake up,” she repeated. “I knew you were there.”

  By the way.

  I saw your dad.

  He says hi.

  I’m keeping him in the picture.

  In fact I know why Elena McMahon was still on the island.

  Elena McMahon was still on the island because of what she had known since the instant she read in the Miami Herald that her father had been certified dead in South Kendall on the same day the passport with her photograph on it was supposed to have been issued in Miami. What she had known since that instant was this:

  Somebody out there was playing a different game, doing a different deal.

  Not her father’s deal.

  A deal her father had not known about.

  Her father’s role in this deal he had not known about was to have been something more than just assembling the shipments, the shipments that had over the course of the spring refocused his dwindling energy, his flagging interest in staying alive. Her father’s role was to have begun once he arrived on the ground to collect the million-dollar payday.

  Consider her father: a half-crazy old man who had spent his life dealing merchandise that nobody would admit they wanted dealt, an old man whose interest in who used his merchandise was limited to who could pay for it, an old man whose well-documented impartiality about where his merchandise ended up could allow him to be placed on the wrong side of whatever was going to happen on this island.

  Who would miss him, who would care?

  Who would not believe he had done whatever it was they were going to say he had done?

  An old man in a sick season.

  An old man with no reputation to lose.

  The shipments had just been the cheese in the trap.

  She had sprung the trap and her father was dead and now she was set up to do whatever it was that he was supposed to have done.

  Somebody had her lined up, somebody had her jacked in the headlights.

  Had her in the scope.

  Had her in the crosshairs.

  What she did not know was who.

  And until she knew who, until she located the line of fire, she could not involve Wynn.

  She needed Wynn out of the line of fire.

  She needed Wynn to take care of Catherine.

  3

  The question of why Treat Morrison arrived on the island was another area in which neither Rand nor the congressional investigators did a particularly convincing job, but in this case there would have been daunting structural obstacles, entire layers of bureaucracy dedicated to the principle that self-perpetuation depended on the ability not to elucidate but to obscure. “The cooperation of those individuals and agencies who responded to our numerous requests is appreciated,” the preface to the Rand study noted in this connection. “Although some other individuals and agencies did not acknowledge or respond to our requests, it is to be hoped that future assessments of this incident will benefit from their assistance and clarification.”

  I also knew at the time why Treat Morrison arrived on the island, but it was not an answer calculated to satisfy the Rand analysts.

  Treat Morrison arrived on the island for the buzz.

  The action, the play.

  Treat Morrison arrived on the island because it was one more place where he could insert himself into a certain kind of situation.

  Of course he had a “mission,” a specific charter, and he also had a specific agenda. He always had a specific mission when he inserted himself into this kind of situation, and he also always had a specific agenda. The agenda did not necessarily coincide with the charter, but neither did it, if the insertion was smooth, necessarily conflict. “Certain people in Washington might have certain front-burner interests they want me to address, and that would be my charter,” he once told me to this point, his tone that of someone explaining to a child what goes on at the office. “Typically, however, there might be some other little angle, something they maybe don’t know about or think is back-burner. And I might also try to address that.”

  That would be his agenda.

  Treat Morrison’s charter in this case was to correct or clarify whatever misunderstandings or erroneous impressions might or might not have been left during the recent tour of the region undertaken by a certain senator and his senior foreign policy aide. There had then been a subsequent trip, made by only the senior foreign policy aide, who was twenty-seven years old and whose name was Mark Berquist. Various questions had been raised, by American embassy personnel in the countries involved, having to do with what the senator and Mark Berquist were doing in these countrie
s and with whom they had been meeting and what, during such meetings, had been said or not said. These questions, which of course derived from a general suspicion that the visits may have lent encouragement if not outright support to what were usually called “unauthorized fringe elements,” had languished awhile on the Caribbean and Central American desks and then, once it seemed clear that no answers would be forthcoming, had been strategically leaked out of Tegucigalpa to the ranking American reporters who covered the area.

  “According to well-placed embassy sources,” was the way the New York Times had attributed the questions.

  The Los Angeles Times had added corroboration from “a European diplomat experienced in the region.”

  The Washington Post had relied on “knowledgeable U.S. observers.”

  In the brief flurry that followed, Mark Berquist defined the purpose of his trips as “strictly fact-finding,” “generally focused on business and agricultural matters” but “not in any area of particular interest to you.”

  The senator himself said that he had made the trip only to “encourage participation in what is getting to be in our state a very active and mutually beneficial sister-city program.”

  The call for a hearing died before it got to subcommittee.

  Which might have been the end of it had the visits from the senator and Mark Berquist not been followed, at least in the area on which Alex Brokaw’s embassy reported, by certain incidents, not major but nonetheless troubling, in that they tended to legitimize the “previously reliable source” who had in late June reported the existence of a plot to assassinate Alex Brokaw.

  There had been for example the two steamer trunks apparently abandoned in a windward condominium that had been rented, at the time of Mark Berquist’s second visit, by a young Costa Rican woman who had since disappeared, skipped out on the weekly rent. When the owner returned he found the steamer trunks, which he moved into the hallway to be opened and discarded. The trunks sat in the breezeway for ten or twelve days before the janitor got around to opening them. According to the police report on the incident the contents of the two trunks included twenty Galil semiautomatic assault rifles, two AK-47s, seventeen silencers, three walkie-talkies, three bags of ammunition, assorted explosives and detonators and electronic devices, four bulletproof vests, and two sets of scales. According to the embassy report on the incident the presence of the scales argued for a drug connection and rendered the incident not of immediate concern. The embassy report further concluded that the absent Costa Rican tenant was not an asset of any U.S. agency known to the embassy.